> Was the news industry broken by Facebook and Google, or was it broken by the lack of regulation?
I think there's a good case that it was broken by Facebook and Google. Specifically them taking away all the ad revenue that used to go to newspapers. That's what led to traditional media outlets going out of business and/or turning to clickbait to make money.
But was it taking away the ad revenue, or was it the meteoric rise of valuation and ad-dependency in 1990s without investment into alternative income streams, only for widespread internet access to nuke the business model?
News industry sites are chock full of ads of all kinds, when most people agree they don't want to see them, and they also lead the way in tracking and abusing user data.
I certainly think there is something to be said about that. Ad revenue tends to follow people though, and people flocked to the the open platforms, in part because Google, Facebook and so on, build algorithms to game the psychology of us as consumers, in ways that are illegal for traditional news papers to do.
I'm not sure how we're still allowing these giant tech-companies to more or less regulate themselves in the EU. I mean, which public mandate do they have, to remove the elected president of one of the most powerful nations on earth?
I'm not trying to turn this political or pro or anti Trump or even pro or anti ban, by the way. But these companies removed one of the most powerful political figures in the world from the reach of millions provided by their platforms, without asking any form of democratic institution for permission to do so. That just screams for regulation in my eyes.
> in part because Google, Facebook and so on, build algorithms to game the psychology of us as consumers
This might true for Facebook. But Google isn't even a media platform, it's a search engine. It's just that search adverts happen to work better than newspaper adverts because their more targeted to people they're relevant too.
> This might true for Facebook. But Google isn't even a media platform, it's a search engine. It's just that search adverts happen to work better than newspaper adverts because their more targeted to people they're relevant too.
If a Danish news paper profiled their advertising specifically for me because they happened to know how much money I spend on Warhammer figures, they would be breaking our laws.
Even with the GDPR, Google can do the same thing legally.
And google goes beyond just advertising doesn't it? If I google air humidity in my town, because I want to spray prime Warhammer figures, google selects which site it shows me the information from in the google widget thing. Maybe it's not as bad as Facebook, but what happens if you search for the covid-19 vaccine and you're an anti-vaxxer? What data ends up in googles info-boxes then?
I think there's a good case that it was broken by Facebook and Google. Specifically them taking away all the ad revenue that used to go to newspapers. That's what led to traditional media outlets going out of business and/or turning to clickbait to make money.