Social media traffic to top news sites craters
axios.com
axios.com
The snake is eating itself. What is most dangerous about the current situation is now how easy it is to pull the natural strings of the western world order. Democracy. The ballot referendum. How you "vote" with your dollar. All of these things could always have been tightly influenced and controlled, but this was done more or less through an indirect incentive structure that favored existing large investment.
Now, anything is able to use these social media tools to run around existing capital structure and get whatever message out to voters and consumers directly. What captures the consciousness now isn't necessarily a consensus of an economies major investors, but simply whatever is able to abuse the viral phenomenon the best at the time and in the context.
Coupled with the ease of generating high quality propaganda of any shape or form through various publicly released tools, we are in for interesting times, for sure.
If that is true, then there is your problem right there. A firm and stable democracy requires a large group of people with good education, political influence and capital. In other words, bourgeoisie.
The 'major investors' should be this bourgeoisie. They should be with many, to ensure political discussion is actively supported throughout all layers of society. If this group shrinks, and there are fewer people with larger capital and influence, there is no incentive for political discussion, and thus no incentive for a healthy democracy.
The major investors do not want the discussion, as they can easily discuss with the few of them. The proletariat do not want the discussion, cause they either do not have the education, or do not have the capital to organize it.
Then the media is more and more reduced to propaganda and perception management from the 'major investors'.
Democracy is not merely the freedom to vote. It is the open discussion in which everyone can participate and contribute with their knowledge and perspectives.
Even if traffic directly from Twitter wasn't necessarily a big portion of incoming traffic, I feel like Twitter was a place that many people were using to hear about links, which would then get reshared around. People are exposed to a lot less variety now, with many folks dispersed elsewhere and the noise being so high on twitter/x. Our masses of friends are no longer there to help surface the more interesting bits.
Publishers are better prepared now to defend their intellectual property in the AI era having learned from their mistakes of being too heavily reliant on third parties for survival."
https://www.axios.com/2023/10/03/campbell-brown-meta-news-ex...
But either way if there is a vacuum ...
Even sites that had a very good reputation like the BBC have increasingly been dumbing down their content and posting more clickbait in the last few years, and there are plenty of popular news sites (Fox, Daily Mail, etc) that are full of misinformation and trash.
There are several news sites that I used to regularly read (both global and local news) which I've given up on, because the combination of lower quality content, clickbait and terrible UX means that they no longer feel like they're worth reading.
So perhaps they need to consider whether some of this decrease in sharing on social media is down to the decrease in quality of the news sites themselves.
Ahh yeah, before the free speech concerns the quality of information was top notch. Really. It was only because of free speech concerns the bar was dropped. Sums it about right.
Tech giants never provided quality information. Social media platform were always full of disinformation, misinformation.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-op...
Legacy media (tv, newspapers) was also used for propaganda. Social media is only continuation of propaganda of corporate interests, governments, people of power, celebrities.