Catching up on some delayed reading, I learned through a post by Hamish McKenzie, the Co-Founder of Substack, that Twitter and Facebook are both trying to get into the newsletter game. What a shitty situation for all of us. Yes, lets celebrate the two class troublemakers getting all up in our business. I’m sure that won’t get the federal recess monitor’s attention. More importantly, and without the sarcasm, two of the biggest misinformation distributors getting into longform will only fuel the misguided arguments that the solution to the propagation of misinformation on the internet is to curtail the human right of free speech. That’s like saying the only way to cure a tooth ache is to take a hit of cyanide. It’s simply an argument I won’t entertain, especially when the solution is sitting right in front of all of our faces. We’re just not looking at it the right way.
If you follow journalism or tech, you might have seen recent news about link taxes in Australia and France. A link tax is any kind of law that requires a company to pay a for the right to link to a website. Yes, not the content on the website, but the right to link to the website. So, if I were French or Australian every source I’ve written here in this article might cost me money. Luckily, the taxes aren’t targeted at writers. They’re targeted at ad companies like Google and Microsoft and specifically apply to links to news sites in their results. If that doesn’t sound like blatant bullshit to you, I don’t know why you’re reading this article. These taxes get lobbied by mega-conglomerates like News Corp. in Australia to effectively corner the market and capture new revenue by playing the victim card. Never mind the fact that the increased traffic from high SEO generates huge ad revenue and drives conversions to subscriptions. Mainstream news has been playing the victim against companies like Google and Facebook for decades as the ad market has shifted away from the value they’re able to create, and due to the prominence these media companies have in our society, they get to play special favor.
The news has not always been a beacon of truth and should not be considered one today. Throughout American history, our media has played favorites with political ideas. In the late 19th century, William Randolph Hearst, publisher of the New York Journal, and his arch-rival, Joseph Pulitzer, publisher of the New York World sensationalized the news, their paper’s design, and created outlandish, often non-factual smears to dominate the New York market. During the Gold Rush, California was rife with political slander. And just this year Twitter and Facebook censored Hunter Biden’s skeleton in the closet while major parts of the mainstream establishment simply did not report on its credibility until after the election. All this goes to say that you must not trust what you’re told by the establishment, or by any individual without doing your own research. That doesn’t change the fact that millions of American’s take what these companies say at face value, and treat them as saints rather than for-profit enterprises backed into a corner, desperate for scraps of their former glory. It’s this fight of flight response that has generated the propaganda campaign that link taxes are good ideas, and that the media needs to be bailed out for its own business mistakes—to paraphrase an old professor, “when [the media] ignored the internet in the 90s”.
Regulation of any kind will only further prop up and support mega-corporations that would have you believe their death would mean the end of the free press, not like any asshole can create a Substack account or start a blog to report on their hometown. Or that what they produce carries an intrinsic value. Great work is already done by sites like The Information, and even on Substack, The Dispatch covers mainstream news as a fact checker, creating value by summarizing the news of the day without the need to sensationalize it. But what about misinformation? And how do link taxes relate to free speech?
There are tons of intrinsic reasons why misinformation works. Our cognitive biases, priors, and even who we hang out with all play an effect on what information we’re willing to believe. We’ve already established that media companies are not always factual in their writing and are willing to rig the game in their favor to survive. The continued support of these companies and the willingness of firms like Facebook and Twitter to promote and pay these organizations for links they have the right to access and distribute freely shows how much power media companies have.
Remember in 2020 when the Harper’s letter came out? During the middle of the summer a slew of prominent counter-culture writers left their mainstream jobs and moved to more open platforms like Substack. That was a push in the next wave of modern media, and it scares the piss out of the establishment. It’s part of why cancel culture is so prominent. People whose ideas scare the elite are shunned and ridiculed away. But now they exist in a better place, making more than they did at their old jobs. They got a dose of the Streisand Effect. But the attitude and atmosphere the mainstream media created still exits, and sites like Substack are barraged with tactless claims trying to further push these writers to the fringes of society. It’s this culture that, in tandem with dishonest and powerful media companies, has created the perfect toxic environment for “misinformation and offensive content” to thrive and become such a promoted problem, when most of this information can be easily disproved through better media literacy, or isn’t patently offensive. Its simply not aligned to an “acceptable” viewpoint. What then can we do? Continue the trend of dissemination of course.
The more writers emancipated from the constraints big media presses on us, the more that diversity, intellectualism, and small businesses can thrive. It also reduces the ability of these companies to peddle fake information, and for social media sites to direct narratives by making it impossible to categorize all the information being ingested into their service while maintaining the quality of the work. The echo chamber will also break, as forcing users to categorize and seek out sites will force them to be exposed to a wider variety of opinions and give writer a chance to reach outside of their normal audience. Not just the drones who religiously flutter about news sites like tribal sports fans.
It might not be the ultimate solution, but until our society starts to agree with each other again, its an easy way to avoid making some rules we all will regret in the future.