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When Facebook ‘Disrupts’ Journalism, It Degrades Our Democracy
Journalists don’t cover Facebook harshly because it threatens their jobs — they do so because it threatens our republic (and, also, their jobs)
By Eric Levitz
Facebook and Google are loosely regulated, privately owned entities that collectively distribute information to — and collect information about — billions of people on a daily basis. There is no precedent in human history for the kind of power that they enjoy. And both have a known record of exercising that power in deceitful, destructive ways. They have (collectively) conspired to suppress wages for workers in their sector; violated their users’ privacy rights; abetted censorship in authoritarian nations; contributed to a genocide in Myanmar; and aggressively avoided paying taxes to the government that funded the basic research and infrastructure on which their private empires were built.
And a journalist at Axios, Scott Rosenberg, wants them to know that they’re absolutely right.
Facebook and Google execs privately complain about the barrage of critical coverage they face, charging that media companies have a financial incentive to attack them and that media execs are settling scores. They’re right.
