Can Journalism Survive in the Age of Platform Monopolies? Confronting Facebook’s Negative Externalities

As commercial journalism collapses around the world, the platforms’ culpability for defunding news media has attracted increasing scrutiny. Journalism’s sustainability is increasingly threatened by the Facebook and Google duopoly, which devours the lion’s share of digital advertising revenue, at a time when democratic societies desperately need reliable news and information. Thus far, policy measures to rebalance this power relationship have been limited. Moreover, policy debates focused on these issues too often elide the core root of the problem in both diminishing journalism and driving the platforms toward antisocial behavior: namely, unbridled capitalism. With this problem in mind, this essay explores more radical options toward buffering our core news and information systems from corrosive commercial logics.