‘The Internet Is Broken’: @ev Is Trying to Salvage It (Published 2017)

In Internet for the People, leading tech writer Ben Tarnoff offers an answer. The internet is broken, he argues, because it is owned by private firms and run for profit. Google annihilates your privacy and Facebook amplifies right-wing propaganda because it is profitable to do so. But the internet wasn't always like this—it had to be remade for the... See more

That split between the big audience on Facebook and the influential audience on Twitter was instantly obvious to anyone in any newsroom who ever cared to look. Sicha is right to note that Twitter never sent any amount of meaningful traffic to any website — it was Facebook traffic that warped most digital media executives into futile aspirations of ... See more

The internet is still so young that it’s still momentous to see a social network of some scale and lifespan suddenly lose its vitality. The regime change to Elon and his brain trust and the drastic changes they’ve made constitute a natural experiment we don’t see often. Usually, social networks are killed off by something exogenous, usually another... See more