Join us
The Media Today

So long, and thanks for all the fish

August 29, 2024 By Mathew Ingram
 

Sign up for The Media Today, CJR’s daily newsletter.

Before we go any further, I should note that this is my last newsletter for CJR, as I am moving on from my job as the magazine’s chief digital writer. (In case the headline doesn’t make any sense, it comes from a Douglas Adams book, in which he describes how all the dolphins suddenly vanished from the Earth, leaving behind the message: “So long, and thanks for all the fish!”) My byline may show up in CJR again on a freelance basis, but this will be my last piece as a member of staff. As I reflected on the last seven years or so of writing about the intersection of media and technology, I started to think about what (if anything) has changed since my first CJR piece was published, in October 2017—an essay headlined “The 140-character president,” about Donald Trump’s obsession with what was then known as Twitter.

Obviously, some things have changed quite a bit. Trump is no longer president (although he is trying hard to regain that position), and Twitter—now known as X—is owned by Elon Musk, the billionaire who also owns Tesla and SpaceX. Much has been written (by me and just about everyone else) about Musk’s problem-plagued acquisition of the platform, and the changes he has made to it; it is reportedly hemorrhaging money and scrambling for both users and revenue. None of this is particularly new—the old Twitter under cofounders Jack Dorsey and Ev Williams also seemed to be continually scrambling for money and users. The reasons have changed, however: Musk, who maintains that his guiding principle is to enable free speech, has enabled many of the worst kinds of speech, including white supremacy, racism, and misogyny. This has (not surprisingly) led to an exodus of both users and advertisers.

These days, one popular conspiracy theory is that Musk is a Russian stooge who is trying to help Trump get reelected, a theory based in part on rumors about Russian troops in Ukraine using Musk’s Starlink for internet access and whispers that Putin-adjacent sources helped fund the purchase of Twitter. (The evidence for this is circumstantial—at best.) Russia’s involvement in a variety of nefarious projects (or rumors thereof) has been a consistent theme since I started writing for CJR. An early taste of that came in November 2017, when I traveled to Washington and sat in on a series of congressional hearings looking into whether Meta (then known as Facebook), Google, and Twitter had allowed Russia and Russian-aligned agents to use their services as the foundation of a gigantic disinformation campaign. Did this happen? Yes, at least in a limited way. Did it affect the outcome of the 2016 election? Opinion remains divided, but some of the smartest people in the field say no, it likely did not.

A related topic that has resurfaced again and again is whether misinformation and disinformation (Russian or otherwise) is a scourge that should be eradicated—by law if necessary—because it changes people’s behavior, or whether it is just a lot of sound and fury that doesn’t change much of anything. Disinformation experts argue that these kinds of campaigns, including what some like to call “automated propaganda,” do have a deleterious effect, but research shows that even the worst disinformation rarely changes people’s minds in any significant way (although in some cases, it can help reinforce things people already believe that are wrong or untrue). And disinformation remains, to some extent, in the eye of the beholder. Not so long ago, users who suggested that COVID-19 came from a lab might have had their Facebook accounts suspended. Now there are plenty of scientists who believe that this is a valid theory about the disease.

The broader question of whether the internet and social media are a negative influence has also been a consistent theme of my time at CJR. Multiple scientific-sounding articles have argued that cellphone and social media use have caused widespread anxiety, depression, and mental health problems among users, particularly teenage girls. This is a plausible-sounding phenomenon, and yet the majority of the research that has been done to date shows no such correlation—and, in some cases, actually shows that smartphone and social media use is a net positive for teens. I think, in general, that we should be wary of theories that tie complex human relationships to a single cause, whether it’s Instagram use or Russian troll farms engaging in what Facebook likes to refer to as “coordinated inauthentic behavior.”

As for whether the internet and social media are good for anyone at all, that question, too, has been an undercurrent of my work for CJR—and even before that. I confess that when I started writing about the social Web at the Globe and Mail, a daily newspaper in Toronto, in 2004 or so, I was convinced that it had the potential to change the world for the better. (I even cofounded a conference called Mesh that tried to explore all the ways it might do so.) I helped the Globe and Mail set up a Twitter feed and a Facebook account and do live-blogging and open itself up to reader comments; I even started a wiki to crowdsource reader insights about politics. At Gigaom, I wrote about how Twitter and Facebook helped enable the Arab Spring in Egypt, among other phenomena. Networked information seemed to have so much potential.

Sign up for CJR’s daily email

Unfortunately, the next decade or so—including most of my time here—would provide plenty of evidence that social media, like the internet itself, enables all of the good things about people but also all of the bad things. There was Gamergate, which in many ways helped give birth to the alt-right and its obsession with using freedom of speech to harass and abuse people via social media; then there was the rise of QAnon and conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton and a sex-abuse ring. Facebook inadvertently helped to enable what many international observers have described as a genocide in Myanmar. To some extent, social media gave birth to the human chaos engine known as Donald Trump, a man who embodies Steve Bannon’s motto that the best route to informational success is to “flood the zone with shit.” (Unfortunately, this tactic often works on journalists and media outlets that should know better.)

Was I too naive about the positive impact of social media, and too dismissive or unaware of its negative effects? Absolutely. (In my defense, so were Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg.) And yet what can counter these kinds of negative effects but people using those platforms and tools and technologies for good instead of evil? Perhaps that’s part of the reason I haven’t vacated Twitter (or X) despite my misgivings about Musk; if we all abandon these platforms to the bad actors and bots, how does that help? (I should note that I am also there because I enjoy the memes.) Maybe flooding the zone with positive content can counteract the effects of those who are flooding the zone with the other stuff. I’ve also been encouraged by the rise of Threads, Meta’s Twitter clone, and its experiments with the networked “fediverse,” including open-source platforms such as Mastodon and BlueSky, although none of them have really replaced Twitter as of yet.

Another major theme of my time at CJR: Google and Facebook holding themselves out as the saviors of the media multiple times and in multiple ways, something I wrote about at length in a 2018 piece called “The Platform Patrons.” Several years later, the hundreds of millions of dollars that both platforms committed to journalistic efforts—much of which consisted of training in how to use their products, which in turn exacerbated media reliance on those products—has vanished or been spent, leaving many media outlets no further ahead. Meta, in particular, killed the media- and journalism-related projects it once ran (something that I warned about in another piece, “The Facebook Armageddon”) and is now fighting attempts to make it pay for journalism in the US and Canada. The decision on the part of many news outlets and publishers to tie so much of their business to these platforms has truly been the worst kind of Faustian bargain.

All of the topics I’ve mentioned so far, from the challenges of free speech and antitrust to journalism funding and social media moderation, were the subject of some fascinating debates that I conducted for CJR through an online platform called Galley, which we took over in 2018 after we were approached by its creators, Josh Young and Tom McGeveran. Galley was designed to be a better version of Twitter, allowing users to designate certain followers as trusted and then set up a chat open only to these users. We wound up using it for roundtable discussions with experts from the fields of law, science, sociology, and politics—an approach that I used to describe as being like a podcast, but with more typing. Unfortunately, we stopped hosting those discussions for a variety of reasons (funding being one of them), but I still believe that they added real value to those kinds of debates.

I am often asked whether there is anything worth being optimistic about in journalism and media, given the carnage we see all around us in the industry. Whether I am still naive or not remains to be seen, but I am optimistic about small, digital-native publications run by individuals like Ben Thompson (whose newsletter, Stratechery, was the inspiration for the creation of Substack) and Casey Newton (Platformer), or groups of writers like the teams behind 404 Media, Flaming Hydra (and its predecessor, Brick House), and Drop Site, founded recently by former staffers at The Intercept. Hopefully at least some of them will find funding mechanisms that allow them to prosper, instead of relying on venture capital—a phenomenon that has taken down more than one promising media venture, including BuzzFeed News, Mic, and Gigaom. And, while crypto is still mostly a den of iniquity, I continue to think that Civil—a crypto-powered journalism platform that launched in 2018 and flamed out not long afterward—had some good ideas that might have worked if not for the industry’s speculative excesses.

Despite the challenges the media faces—whether it’s social algorithms, declining ad revenue, or AI-driven fakes—I still believe that there has never been a better time to be a journalist. The journalism business may be tanking, but the practice itself has never been more robust. At what other time in history could someone have started writing and within a matter of weeks reached tens or even hundreds of thousands of readers—and be making a living solely from subscriptions? I.F. Stone would have sold his soul for something like that. I am no I.F. Stone by any means, but I would like to thank all of you for reading me over these seven years, and for helping me draw attention to some of the issues that matter. I hope we can stay in touch in other ways. Onward!


Other notable stories:

Has America ever needed a media defender more than now? Help us by joining CJR today.

Mathew Ingram was CJR’s longtime chief digital writer. Previously, he was a senior writer with Fortune magazine. He has written about the intersection between media and technology since the earliest days of the commercial internet. His writing has been published in the Washington Post and the Financial Times as well as by Reuters and Bloomberg.