Facebook and Twitter are killing the open web

Here’s one way to understand the symbiotic relationship between publications and platforms in the digital age. Publications depend on advertising dollars to keep producing content, so they need to hold readers’ attention. Big platforms like Facebook and Twitter already have plenty of attention, but they need vast quantities of content to fill up their newsfeeds. It seems natural, then, that publications have started relying on platforms to drive readership.
But there’s a hitch: This is a really depressing, dystopian way to think about publishers and platforms. It only really makes sense if you view writing as a fungible commodity and view the world exclusively through the lens of late–stage capitalism. The worst thing about Facebook—and Twitter and Snapchat and every other god in the pantheon of platforms—is that they probably do think about publishers this way. And that’s going to smother journalistic independence and the open web.
A while ago, I wrote about adblockers and how they would save us all from a rising tide of clickbait. Not everyone agreed. Indeed, my take on adblocking is rosier than most.
A different, and more popular, take on adblockers is that they—along with web users’ seemingly inexorable shift to mobile—are going to drain publications’ ad revenues, which will in turn make publications even more beholden to platforms.
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