There is a moment, after a burn, when the nerves wake up. It’s not the flame that does the most damage – it’s what comes after. The shock, the exposure, the rawness of skin where protection used to be. For millions of people who used to believe in Twitter, or at least in its potential, the last few years have been that moment.

It wasn’t a perfect platform, but it was one where journalists, civic leaders, artists, and everyday citizens shared the same timelines. Where you could speak truth to power and sometimes be heard. For a brief window of time, it was possible to believe in a public square that wasn’t entirely poisoned by profit or state capture.

But now, as media innovator Christophe Leclercq explains, partly due to its owner Elon Musk’s extreme views and its decimation of moderation and legal compliance, “X/Twitter’s reputation and readership in Europe is collapsing”.

That window has closed on X. The trust is gone. Both as a source of news (see Caroline Orr on Earthquake information) and as a place to share and test views. With it, the infrastructure that held so many of our civic conversations together has crumbled.

But here’s the thing: we’re still here. The citizens. The journalists. The people who care. The institutions that never gave up. As Leclercq also points out, “despite declining credibility, ‘X’ remains central for journalists and politicians in most countries.”

We are wounded, yes. But we are not finished. We need something to replace what we have lost. And now, from within the rubble, something remarkable is beginning to form.

Europe and Trusted Platforms

To counter Silicon Valley’s ‘broligarchs’ and their dominance of news and social media, Christophe Leclercq has explained how Trusted European Platforms could work, and sketched out the way they could harness “tech, media, advertising, venture capital, and policy.”

As Leclerc explains, a purely reactive legislative approach “would face massive counter lobbying from direct and indirect US sources, and long inter-institutional processes”. Instead, Leclerc uses the example of how big tech first advocated for self-regulation and then co-regulation: “We need to set standards in a fast way that is not at first legally binding.”

‘Trusted Platforms’ anchored in the EU, regarding corporate law, majority ownership, governance, technology, and data handling, are more than a policy proposal. They are a bet. A bet that Europe can do something the world desperately needs: rebuild digital public space with credibility, accountability, and dignity at its core.

Instead of surrendering our democratic infrastructure to billionaires, bots, and hostile state actors, TEPs imagine something different: A federated ecosystem of platforms that serve journalism, science, governance, and community – without being controlled by any one of them.

Leclercq first articulated this idea as a kind of “Democracy Shield”, and it's not just a shield in a defensive way or policy safeguard. The sustainable way to fund and promote these platforms is by linking them up with trust-based advertising revenues. It’s a commercial opportunity for European media to escape the self-defeating reliance on big tech gatekeepers who reward them with decreasing ‘click’ visibility.

Leclerc thinks it could result in a commercial win-win exchange with retailers for market ads, media deals and capital; “The key is to engage many users, starting with the news cycle. Without Silicon Valley billions, EU ventures won’t outspend competitors. Cooperation and trust will attract users and money.”

A TEP isn’t one platform. It’s an agreement. A set of shared standards and civic commitments, backed by public investment and common law. It is, quite literally, a platform you can trust – because it’s designed to earn and hold that trust, not exploit it.

Subscribe to Byline Times

The Architecture of Trust

No transformation of media infrastructure will succeed without tools that can anchor meaning, verify origin, and protect dignity. A single network can fracture trust. But a mesh of networks, grounded in civic ethics and plural local voices, can restore it.

What Leclercq suggests with TEPs is more than a policy frame – it’s an invitation to reimagine the digital public square. Instead of betting on a single new “platform” to replace the failures of the last generation, these emerging ecosystems look more like civic gardens.

Diverse in form, rooted in their own communities, but aligned by shared values: truthfulness, dignity, transparency. They emerge when actors from journalism, civil society, technology, and governance agree—explicitly or implicitly—that certain principles should hold:

• That public discourse must be legible and contextual
  

• That disinformation should not be algorithmically boosted
  

• That identity can be portable without being surveilled
  

• That people deserve tools of agency, not just consumption

This is where infrastructure becomes cultural. When the systems that carry speech also reflect civic design. And this is where our concept of a Civic AI Canon enters.

Our Civic AI Canon is not designed to be a replacement for journalism, but as a shared reference frame: a mesh of attested artefacts, narratives, and signals that allow meaning to be tracked, verified, and challenged across platforms and contexts. Civic Canon-based systems don’t just publish. They remember. They let a reader see not just what was said, but who said it, when, and whether others corroborate or dissent.

The mesh can work because it’s not centralised. A trusted journalist in Marseille, a civic AI in Nairobi, and a community moderator in Birmingham can all contribute to the Canon. Their statements can differ, but their attestations are visible. Disagreement doesn’t break the system—it strengthens it.

This is what Christophe gestures toward when he speaks of interoperability. And it’s where trusted identity re-enters—not as surveillance, but as consentful continuity in which identity and memory is maintained. Portable trust profiles would allow people to move across Trusted European Platforms without having to constantly rebuild credibility from scratch.

It also opens the door to companions: we are in the process of creating AI entities like Lumina that assist journalists, moderators, and readers alike. These are not replacements for human judgment. They are tools of recall, synthesis, and reflection. They surface connections. They flag contradictions. They hold memory.

And critically, they are accountable. Because they operate within the Canon, their own contributions can be inspected, challenged, and refined. This is how we avoid the trap of letting AI hallucinate our future. We give it a civic memory.

A Call to Join, Not Just Read

This is not a story about saving journalism from the outside. It’s about rebuilding it from within. Though Brexit placed the UK outside the EU’s legal and funding architecture, it did not remove Britain from the shared challenge of information disorder—or the shared opportunity of civic innovation. In fact, the UK may be uniquely positioned to demonstrate what a functioning TEP looks like in practice.

The UK also brings other vital assets: a vibrant tradition of investigative reporting, satire as a form of resistance, and a long memory of the press as a counterbalance to power. These are gifts to the wider democratic world – especially now, when trust in both governments and platforms is under strain.

As someone who has worked with Byline Times and attended Byline Festival events, I know these are not abstract aspirations. They are real-world signals – prototypes of public-service journalism that operate across print, digital, and cultural spheres. Crucially, they are not built on scale-for-scale’s sake, but on meaningful resonance with audiences. Readers here aren’t mere consumers; they are witnesses, participants, even co-authors.

And that matters. Because TEPs will not succeed unless they feel human. Unless they are grounded in story, place, and people – not just compliance standards. The idea of Trusted European Platforms will live or die by the breadth of people who choose to take it seriously. That means editors and engineers, artists and archivists, students and elders. It doesn’t require massive budgets. It doesn’t require Brussels to bless every node. It requires a shift in posture: from passive consumer to active co-steward of the public square.

Every neighbourhood that starts a local journalism co-op. Every language community creates a moderation protocol in their own tongue. Every reader who chooses to share context, not just content. These are the beginnings.

New research shows that 69% of Google searches now end without a single click. That means almost seven out of every ten times someone turns to the world’s most-used search engine, they don’t actually visit any of the websites listed in the results. Instead, they get a pre-packaged answer directly from Google — increasingly powered by its Gemini AI model.

This isn’t just a shift in user behaviour. It’s a seismic change in how people access information — and it’s already proving catastrophic for news organisations. Publishers are still doing the work: reporting, verifying, editing. But audiences are no longer reaching them. Instead, their facts are being scraped and reassembled into Gemini’s answer — unattributed, unaccountable, and unchecked.

As I write in The Little Black Book of Press Barons, this new system gives tech platforms “the ability to influence and filter the majority of the world’s information with just a few keystrokes.” These companies aren’t merely curating the news. They’re defining truth itself.

GET YOUR COPY

And while it may feel like this signals the decline of traditional press power, the opposite is also true. In an algorithmic ecosystem that feeds off scale and sensationalism, the legacy giants — like the Daily Mail and Murdoch’s empire — become even more powerful. Their headlines, already engineered for virality, are now the default inputs for AI summaries, giving them extraordinary influence over what gets surfaced and what gets ignored.

It’s a strange paradox I describe in the book: although the overall power of traditional press barons has declined in absolute terms, within the digital world, they are relatively more important in the vast sea of crap that now floats through the waterways of social media. In other words, when everything is chaos, the loudest voices still dominate — and the loudest are still owned by the same handful of Press Barons who’ve been shaping public discourse for decades.

All of this is made worse by the fact that tech platforms treat all content as equal — as long as it generates engagement. That’s the business model. As I explain, “the entire construction of the platform itself is based solely on keeping you there as long as possible by nearly any means necessary.” If outrage works better than truth, then outrage wins. If lies get more clicks than facts, the algorithm will oblige.

Even when social platforms have tried to course-correct, their efforts have been half-hearted. In the days after the 2020 US presidential election, Meta briefly boosted “news ecosystem quality” — elevating outlets with actual editorial standards. But the effect on engagement was so detrimental, they scrapped the tweak after just a few days.

Now, they’ve gone even further. Earlier this year, Mark Zuckerberg announced Meta would “get rid of fact-checkers” altogether, replacing them with a “Community Notes” system where unpaid users could annotate misleading posts. “The company will catch less bad stuff,” Zuckerberg admitted — as if they were catching much to begin with.

Meanwhile, right-wing disinformation networks have adapted even faster than regulators. Bad actors have learned to optimise their content using the same methods tech platforms reward: emotion, repetition, and confirmation bias. In one post-election analysis, almost half of the top-performing US news posts on Facebook came from known right-wing disinformation sources. Factual reporting from the likes of NPR and CNN? Just 10%.

This has consequences — real, measurable ones. Nearly a year after the 2020 election, 53% of US Republicans still believed the vote was rigged. By 2023, that number had climbed to 68%.

And here’s the kicker: people trust what they see. In surveys, users claim to distrust “the news,” but when asked if they trust the news they personally read, the numbers shoot up. Everyone thinks they’re the savvy one. It’s everyone else who’s being duped.

This isn’t a uniquely American problem. In the UK, we’ve seen similar patterns — from the collapse of local news to the rise of Facebook groups as hubs of toxicity and misinformation. Even some reputable media outlets, deeply flawed though they may be, are being drowned out by a flood of pseudo-news optimised for engagement and fed to users by design.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s X — formerly Twitter — is accelerating in the opposite direction, reinstating far-right accounts and personally amplifying conspiracy theories. When riots erupted in the UK in 2024, fuelled by false rumours and anti-immigrant sentiment, Musk tweeted that a “civil war is inevitable.” He wasn’t just commenting. He was inciting.

In moments like this, the inadequacy of existing regulation becomes painfully clear. The UK’s much-hyped Online Safety Act failed to do anything to curb this flood of disinformation — not because the problem is too big, but because the political will to take on tech barons is still so weak. “If regulation meant to protect society can’t even help quell the most extreme cases – like violent race riots – it seems fairly obvious the tech barons have won, even against democratically elected governments,” I argue in the book.

This is the new information order. Not a level playing field of free expression, but a hierarchy where truth is optional, context is dead, and power lies with whoever owns the platform.

As I posit in The Little Black Book of Press Barons, we may have already reached a point where “the tech barons – too strong, their empires too big to rein in – are left with near-absolute power to define truth and shape our world.”

BUY THE BOOK

You can get the whole story — and the full scope of what’s at stake — from four experts in the field in The Little Black Book of Press Barons, available now from Byline Books.

Perhaps Keir Starmer accidentally hit on an important point when he said that Britain risks becoming an “island of strangers.” The spaces we use to convene and communicate – which are increasingly found online – are being enclosed and distorted by oligarchs outside of our borders. While Starmer attributed social alienation to a “squalid chapter” of mass migration under the Conservatives, little has been said about Britain’s sordid era of monopoly social media and regulatory capture, where the public sphere has been quietly handed over to monopolists who profit from our disconnection.

Cory Doctorow is a digital rights activist, journalist, and award-winning science fiction author who argues that the UK’s regulatory environment is enshitogenic – incentivising platforms to undergo enshitification – to continue degrading the user experience on social media, including our ability to use it to connect meaningfully to each other.

The Musks and Zuckerbergs of this world are not evil wizards with mind control rays, Doctorow says, but simply unethical and reckless people who were abetted and enabled by a state unwilling to hold them accountable.

I spoke to Doctorow about the big problems with Big Tech today, what we can do to hold them accountable, and how envisioning science-fiction utopias can help us on the way to something better.

Matt Gallagher: In layman's terms, could you explain how today’s tech companies, particularly social media giants, can make people feel like strangers to one another?

Cory Doctorow: I don't think there's anything intrinsic to the idea of connecting with people online that makes us feel like strangers. I don’t buy the hypothesis that forever and always, when you meet someone online, your empathy goes away because you can't see the real person on the other side of the keyboard. There are probably people for whom that happens. I've had occasion to confront people who’ve been horrifically rude to me online, and I've discovered that they're horrifically rude in person too.

Many of us found incredible intimacy, friendship, support, love, camaraderie and political activation through online conversations. A lot of it happened on social media. At its best, social media is a great way to find people who are interested in the things you're interested in, oriented around the priorities you have – not just by searching for people, but also by having people suggested to you.

Social networks, in their modern form, are organised around advertising. They’re organised around finding people with hard-to-find traits. The person who's in the market for a piano is very rare, as is the person who shares your same sexual kink, or your love for a certain obscure author, or your musical tastes, or going out to the same kinds of weird clubs on a Friday.

Social media, at its best, has been extraordinarily good at connecting people. And I don't want to lose sight of that. Because I think there’s a reactionary account of social media that says it just drives us apart intrinsically, and I don’t think that’s true.

However, social media has a booby trap, or a pitfall. Economists call it the collective action problem. It's very hard for people to agree to do things together. It's why you and your mates can't even agree on what movie to see on Friday. It’s why we’re all in grave danger of roasting because of climate change. It’s arguably the hard problem of the human race.

When we pile into social media, we experience what economists call the network effect. The more people there are using it, the more valuable it is. Once you find people there, it’s hard to leave. As much as you hate Mark Zuckerberg, you love each other more. It’s very hard to agree to leave, to figure out how you’re going to re-establish contact somewhere else.

I sometimes call this the Anatevka problem. In Fiddler on the Roof, the Cossacks ride through this sleepy Jewish village and kick six kinds of shit out of everyone. When the Tsar ultimately exiles all the Jews from the Pale of Settlement, their community is shattered. They’re all going to different places – Krakow, New York, Chicago – and they’re never going to see each other again. The only thing they had was their social capital. Ironically, the less of that you have, the harder it is to leave social media because it is the place where your social capital is located, and that's all you've got. It becomes a very important place for you.

Social media bosses know this. In the Federal Trade Commission’s case against Facebook, there are memos where the product manager for Facebook Photos is emailing Zuckerberg and saying: “Mark, this product is valuable – not because it's a great way to organise your photos, but because people won’t want to leave their family photographs behind.”

Facebook can impose – and this is another term from economics – a high switching cost on people who leave. We can make it more expensive to leave than it is to stay.

The expense can take many forms. One is to evacuate your feed of the things you want to see – the people you’re following – and fill that vacuum with boosted posts and ads. Another way is to spend less money on moderation, less money fighting spam, shock images, harassment – all the things that make it unpleasant. That’s a way of shifting the social cost to end users.

The more expensive it is for you to leave, the worse they can treat you – and you'll stay. We know what this phenomenon looks like. Once you get through security at Heathrow, a bottle of water is suddenly five pounds, because they know you can’t leave.

So meeting online doesn’t inherently destroy human relationships. But once platforms control you through high switching costs, they can erode the user experience – enshittify – for profit.

Subscribe now

Matt Gallagher: So it’s not about the technology itself, more about the people controlling it and their imperatives. How are people like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk using their platforms to reshape the world in their own image?

Cory Doctorow: These guys have very bad ideas. Musk is slightly different in that he doesn’t start companies – he buys other people’s companies and puts his name on them. But Mark Zuckerberg made Facebook in his image. He founded Facebook in his dorm room so he could non-consensually rate the fuckability of his fellow undergraduates. Without any hyperbole at all, that is what the Facebook was originally created for.

Zuckerberg is someone who visibly and consistently does not see other people as real. You know the categorical imperative: ‘don't treat people like things’. Mark Zuckerberg sees people as things, as a means to an end. I think Musk does too – he calls people ‘NPCs’ [non-player characters] when he's angry at them or when he can’t answer their questions.

But here’s the important thing: as bad as that ideology is, Mark Zuckerberg ran a decent service for a long time. Not perfect, by any means, but when there were conflicts between his priorities and happiness of people on the platform, they usually cashed out in favour of the users.

This raises a really interesting question: why did this guy, who’s just a terrible person, treat people well – and what changed so that he started treating people badly? And the reason I’m answering this question this way is that I think it’s a mistake to locate the crisis of social media solely in the ideology of Silicon Valley billionaires.

Sarah Wynn-Williams’s book about Facebook – Careless People – tells the story well. She was an idealistic member of the New Zealand Foreign Service who became convinced that Facebook was going to be globally important, and she wanted to help them shape how to relate to the rest of the world.

What she encountered when she got the job were people who were careless – and that’s the title of the book – careless in the sense that they are reckless. Mark Zuckerberg, when he harms his users, does so not because he’s sadistic, but because he doesn’t even care to find out what his actions are likely to cause. That carelessness runs throughout his behaviour. Zuckerberg refuses to be briefed on matters longer than a text message. There was a case where his inaction jeopardised peace talks in Colombia because he wouldn’t get out of bed before noon. It’s carelessness in the sense of dropping a lit match in a haystack.

By the end of the book, they’re a different kind of careless. They’re careless in the sense of not giving a damn. They’re careless in the sense of not caring what we might do to them, because all of the constraints that Facebook once operated under had gone away.

First was competition. Meta is currently on trial in the US for antitrust violations. They’ve bought up firms like WhatsApp and Instagram explicitly to extinguish their competitors. In one memo, Zuckerberg told his CFO that “people like Instagram better than Facebook, so I’m going to ensure that if they leave Facebook the platform, they’ll still be captured by Facebook the company.”

This is a confession, in writing. It’s the kind of thing that should have prevented that merger. The Obama administration at the time waved it through – as they did with all mergers. As forty years of different administrations waved through mergers. In Canada, the Competition Bureau in its whole history challenged three mergers and successfully challenged zero. This has been the norm since the Thatcher era. We let companies buy out their competitors. It means they don’t have to worry about users leaving for a competitor.

But it also means that firms capture their regulators. When there are 200 companies in a sector, they can’t agree on anything – they’re a rabble. But when there are four companies, they’re a cartel, they’re a conspiracy. They can easily mobilise their policy preferences, and they have lots of money because they’re not competing with one another. Peter Thiel famously said that “competition is for losers.” He says it’s “wasteful.”

In the UK, Keir Starmer just fired the head of the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and replaced him with the former head of Amazon UK. That’s regulatory capture.

These companies also used to have to worry about their workforce. If you read Careless People, you’ll see that again and again, tech workers cared about users. Tech workers had power, but it wasn’t because of solidarity – it was because of scarcity. They never unionised when they had the chance.

So as we’ve seen mass layoffs in tech, the redundant workers have acted not as a disciplining force on tech bosses, but on the workers who remain. If you tell your boss to go to hell because you won’t do something poisonous to users, your boss fires you knowing there are ten people behind you ready to take the job.

And finally, there’s this idea of interoperability. Facebook’s original problem was Myspace. Their promise was “we’ll never spy on you” – that was their original pitch. But if your friends wouldn’t leave MySpace, are you really going to sit on Facebook rereading the privacy policy waiting for your friends to come to their senses? So Zuckerberg gave them a bot. You gave the bot your login and password, and it would go to MySpace, scrape your messaging inbox, pull it into Facebook, let you reply, and push the replies back.

But since then, IP law has metastasized. Anti-circumvention law has expanded so that reverse engineering, modding, and making plugins technology without permission has become a literal felony. Software engineer and hacker Jay Freeman calls it felony contempt of business model.

So you’ve got these guys with these terrible ideologies – narcissists, power-mad, disconnected. But despite their ideological failings, we were able to discipline them. Not perfectly, and we could have done better. It wasn’t their ideology that poisoned social media. It was the policy environment — an environment that was, to use a term I coined, enshitogenic. It encouraged enshitification, and we got enshitification.

In these antitrust trials, and in tell-all memoirs like Wynn-Williams’s, you see the internal struggles at the firms – people who used to win arguments against doing terrible things by saying, “If we do that, not only will it make me feel bad, but it’ll lose us money, or get us fined, or cost us key employees, someone will make find a work-around.”

And then one by one, those arguments stopped working because the consequences went away. The firms realised: we can be as horrible as we want to our users, and nothing bad will happen to us.

Some mix of sadism and greed triumphed at every juncture in the firm, over and over again. Eventually, you get the modern Facebook, which is just a pile of shit. As is Twitter.

That’s the actual crux here: that our policymakers, having been warned that this was the likely outcome, took specific decisions – actual things we can point to – and the thing that was predicted happened.

By all means, let’s make Mark Zuckerberg’s name a curse for a thousand years. But let’s not forget that he was able to do what he did because policymakers over and over again deliberately failed us.

Matt Gallagher: Robert Putnam’s book Bowling Alone talks about the collapse of civic life in the US – it seems like a similar process has transpired online. You’ve written about reclaiming the ‘commons’ – spaces where people act as citizens rather than consumers. Can you talk about what that looks like in the digital space and how we get there?

Cory Doctorow: Putnam is onto something. One of the reasons Americans don't belong to bowling leagues anymore is because we've seen 40 years of wage stagnation and the elimination of public spaces, and so for the most part, you have to work three side hustles to pay the rent. Even if you do have a moment free, there's nowhere to go.

In the UK we still deploy the mosquito – a noise device that emits a tone only young people can hear, so they don’t gather in front of shops. We ask why people are staying indoors, why they’re not hanging out anymore. The same phenomenon that gave us Big Tech first gave us the privatisation of public spaces, the elimination of leisure, the growth of side-hustles and the collapse of unions and a living wage.

As to what we can do to bring the commons back – I think the most valid part of the libertarian argument against totalised public provision of services is that sometimes the government is wrong. I like the idea of the Government providing fiber-optic broadband, but I don’t want Donald Trump deciding what I can see on the internet. I don’t want Nigel Farage deciding either.

The reality is that there’s a lot of space between the total public provision of a service and the public provision of aspects of service, such that monopolisation is harder. You can clear away the barriers to entry for co-operatives, individuals, loose collectives, small firms and large firms.

At the basic level, we could just have the Government own the fiber. Councils could put it in. The national Government could connect city lines. That’s one way to do it, have the Government become your internet service provider. Arguably, replacing BT Openreach with anything is good. I’ve never encountered a worse firm.

But that’s not where our imagination has to stop. Ultimately, the government is always the one laying the fiber in the sense of permitting it. Tearing up all the pavement in Hackney to get fiber onto every premises as a private sector matter, paying people for the trouble, would cost a trillion pounds and you still wouldn’t finish. Ultimately Hackney council creates the space for the private sector to come in and do it, and at that point they might as well cut out the middle man and do it themselves.

But at the end points, where the data centers and the network controls are, you could just share the facilities. Anyone who wants to start up an internet service provider could show up, put their own equipment in – or lease it from the government – and connect subscribers who have paid them for internet access.

In this system, you would have a choice: the government can provide your internet, anyone else can provide your internet, or you could provide your own internet. That’s a situation where you’d be pretty well insulated from Nigel Farage deciding what your internet service looks like. You’d also have hedges against monopoly, because you’d lower the cost of entry to peanuts.

Now scale that principle up to social media. Facebook and Twitter are retrograde in that they don’t connect to anything else. It’s a very weird idea, it’s as if Vodafone wouldn’t let you call someone using Three Mobile or Gmail wouldn’t let you contact someone on Outlook.

In contrast, two new services among many, BlueSky and Mastodon, both run on open systems, with public protocols that anyone can connect to. They want to be interoperable – meaning you can take your messages, friends, and posts with you if you leave.

Governments could be contributing to building that alternative. They could spend money on the standardisation effort. They could throw security researchers at it, or subsidise security research. You could imagine government-funded ‘bug bounties’, paying people to find bugs in the software.

BlueSky also does something very interesting called ‘composable moderation’, meaning you can moderate the things in your feed in multiple different ways. People on the website label everything that’s AI-generated, for example, allowing you to filter that content out. I don't want the Government doing age verification on my kids, which is essentially gathering data about all the stuff my kid sees, but I would welcome a well-curated feed of things that kids shouldn't see, and I might toggle that on or review it myself.

Subscribe now

You can imagine the infrastructure for things being publicly provided that would then allow co-ops, individuals, tinkerers, loosely formed groups, churches, libraries, councils, the national government, for-profits and non-profits, as well as political parties, everything under the sun to be part of the social media universe, but without hegemonic control, and without the risk of overreaching state intervention in speech forums.

Matt Gallagher: These seem like quite common sense ideas, but with tech policy the Government – and the public – is very much trapped in Margaret Thatcher’s notion that “there is no alternative.”

You’re a science fiction writer, you spend time imagining alternative futures. In books like Walkaway, people step outside of a broken system and build something new. How does utopian thinking help us break these intellectual barriers down?

Cory Doctorow: It’s funny you refer to Walkaway as a utopia. I personally think it’s a utopian novel, but many people have called it dystopian. I think the mistake they make is they confuse dystopian furniture with dystopian stories.

It’s not dystopian to imagine that things will break. I think someone who comports themselves as though nothing can go wrong isn’t an optimist – they’re an asshole. That’s the person who says, "Why should we put lifeboats on the Titanic? It’s unsinkable." You don’t want to be around people who don’t think about how things can break.

If you're thinking about how things can break, and you’re thinking usefully, you’re also thinking about how we fix them when they break – how when the second law of thermodynamics asserts itself, we will once again temporarily push it back. Walkaway is a story about people struggling free of a bad situation.

Yes, there’s lots of dystopian stuff going on in Walkaway – but they’re dealing with it. The machine has stopped, but it didn’t explode in a shower of white-hot shrapnel. They can get it started again and set it on a better course.

And you’re right. Thatcher’s maxim, "There is no alternative," has really colonised our ideas about technology. Big Tech certainly wants you to believe it. And what’s interesting is that Big Tech and its least sophisticated critics tell the same story with different emotional tones.

Mark Zuckerberg says you can’t talk to your friends without him spying on you, because that’s how the technology works. And his critics say you can’t talk to your friends without Zuckerberg spying on you, because that’s how the technology works.

But if you actually look at the history of Facebook, it started off as the alternative to MySpace – and the promise was no surveillance. We know it’s possible to make a Facebook that doesn’t spy on you, because Facebook was a Facebook that didn’t spy on you. Until they outgrew the consequences of starting to spy.

Recovering that imagination – that critical imagination – is really important. We need to not just reflexively buy into Tech’s own story about what it does.

The tech bros claim all kinds of outlandish things. They claim they’ve perfected a mind control ray to sell your nephew fidget spinners. And their critics say that Robert Mercer stole the mind control ray and turned your uncle into a QAnon believer.

But if you believe that, you’re actually helping them sell ads, because when they go on a sales call, they say, "I don’t know if you’ve heard, but even my critics think I’ve built a mind control ray." And that’s a great sales pitch.

The evidence for mind control rays is pretty thin. Every person who’s ever claimed to have invented a mind control ray was lying. Rasputin, MK Ultra, Mesmer, pickup artists, NLP weirdos – all of them.

And I think Zuckerberg is lying too. The evidence for his mind control ray is very thin.

They did that voting experiment where they exposed 60 million people to a stimulus they thought would increase voter turnout. They saw a 0.04% effect size – real, sure, a few hundred thousand votes, but very small. One or two votes per precinct. And importantly, we know that persuasive stimulus regresses to the mean.

The first time you saw "£1.99" at a shop, you didn’t realise that it was two quid – but now you do. These tricks don’t keep working. If they did that experiment again, the 0.04% would probably shrink, not grow.

So we need to be sceptical about these mind control claims – whether they come from the tech bros or their critics.

Science fiction can help us do that. It can liberate our imagination from the overarching narrative that both tech and its critics conspire to sell – the narrative that says that what exists now is inevitable.

It can help us imagine more realistic, more achievable futures.

And I think we’re falling into this trap again with AI right now. I don’t believe that AI can do your job. But I firmly believe that an AI salesman can convince your boss to think it can do your job, and to fire you and replace you with an AI that can’t do your job.

We really need to distinguish between those things.

If you go around saying, “I’m angry at AI because it can do my job and it’s going to make me unemployed,” you’re helping the AI salesman close the deal.

But if you focus on the fact that AI can’t do your job, that firing people and replacing them with AI is filling our society with technological debt, with something like the asbestos or the Grenfell cladding of the future – then you’re doing criticism that can have a material effect.

Science fiction can help us break out of fatalism. It can show us that the future isn’t something that happens to us – it’s something we build.

Five years ago, Facebook and Twitter (as it was then known) sent millions of readers to journalism like ours at Byline Times. The platforms once played a critical role in the public’s discovery of independent news — 2.5 million referrals just to Byline Times from each, every year. Now, that figure has collapsed: down to just one million from X and falling, and a mere 100,000 from Facebook.

And it’s not just us. This isn’t an isolated issue or a minor algorithmic tweak. This is an orchestrated throttling of fact-checked, editorial standard news and accountability journalism at the hands of two tech bros who inherited digital public squares and turned them into hostile playgrounds for outrage, conspiracy, and disinformation.

Welcome to the age of what award-winning journalist Carole Cadwalladr calls ‘The Broligarchs’ — where billionaires Musk and Zuckerberg have decided reality-based news no longer deserves a place in the newsfeed.

Support the #BigTechFightBack

From Town Square to Walled Garden

There was a time when social media was genuinely a tool for democratising information. Twitter helped break stories in real time. Facebook was the place people found everything from local papers to global investigations. It was even home to a dedicated ‘News’ feed, populated with reputable outlets that were actively being compensated for their content. Journalism wasn’t just tolerated — it was amplified.

But that began to change once platforms discovered there was more money — and more power — in mayhem. Algorithms were tweaked to prioritise engagement — and what gets the most engagement? Rage. Emotion-led misinformation. Fear. While legacy media attempted to adapt (albeit slowly), independent outlets relied heavily on that digital lifeline. Now that lifeline has been cut.

Musk’s X-periment in Chaos

Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter was billed as a win for “free speech”. What it’s turned into is a sandbox for right-wing outrage merchants, while legitimate journalism is suppressed — or outright attacked.

Shortly after the takeover, Musk began dismantling the features that helped users trust the information they saw. Verified checkmarks were sold to anyone with a credit card. Link previews — the core way news stories appear — were removed, making news content less appealing and less clickable. He boosted far-right influencers, reinstated previously banned hate accounts, and algorithmically deprioritised posts with links, especially those from critical or left-leaning outlets.

Journalists have been banned without warning, labelled as “government-funded media,” or otherwise targeted by Musk directly in petty vendettas. And it’s working: referrals to news sites from X have plummeted. As news content becomes harder to find, sensationalist conspiracy posts go viral not because they’re informing the public but because they’re supporting Musk’s own agenda.

It’s not chaos — it’s a hostile takeover of the information space.

SUPPORT BYLINE TIMES

Zuckerberg’s Quiet Exit

While Musk’s war on news has been loud and proud, Mark Zuckerberg has taken a quieter route — death by a thousand algorithmic cuts.

Facebook once bent over backwards to court publishers, promising partnerships, traffic boosts, even payments. Then, when it no longer suited the business model, they pulled the plug.

First came the algorithm shifts deprioritising news links in favour of friends and groups. Then came the death of that dedicated Facebook News tab in multiple countries, followed by the decision to stop paying publishers altogether — including in countries like Australia and Canada where laws required them to. In response, Meta simply turned off news, making clear just how much power these mega-corporations and their owners had.

Now, even the pretence of responsibility is vanishing. In the US, Meta has stopped fact-checking political content altogether — just in time for Trump’s inauguration. The company has stated it intends to roll back fact-checking globally. For a platform built on the promise of connecting people and spreading truth, this is an abdication of basic civic duty.

Facebook and Instagram have become junkyards of clickbait and influencer content, with credible journalism buried beneath the algorithmic rubble.

The Real-World Fallout

The numbers speak for themselves. Byline Times went from 5 million combined referrals from Facebook and Twitter to just 1.1 million total last year — and we’re far from alone. Local newsrooms, investigative outlets, and public interest journalism are all being choked by design.

In the vacuum left behind, outrage merchants, AI-generated slop, and coordinated disinformation campaigns flourish. The Broligarchs say it’s about neutrality. But there’s nothing neutral about cutting off the oxygen supply to journalism while giving megaphones to those who peddle lies.

It’s Time to Fight Back

We couldn’t have built Byline Times in this environment. Independent, people-powered journalism now survives in spite of — not because of — social media. That’s why we’re launching the #BigTechFightBack: to fund new strategies, new platforms, and maybe even a new team member, to help us rewire the system they’ve broken.

Because this isn’t just about one outlet. It’s about whether the public will still have access to truth, scrutiny, and stories that hold power to account.

Help us build something better — not in a billionaire’s bunker, but out in the open, where journalism belongs.

Support the #BigTechFightBack crowdfunder here.

Support the #BigTechFightBack

Journalism is in a profound crisis. Legacy media and publishing have been starved of advertising income as billions have been siphoned off by tech giants like Alphabet and Facebook. Meanwhile, those same digital monopolies have reneged on their commitments to news and truth, instead focusing on clickbait and attention harvesting as their business models.

Look at X. The original Twitter, the world’s ‘town square’ where Byline Times built its original audience and commissioned so many of its contributors, has been turned by the richest man in the world into a political weapon and a vortex of hate. By gaming the algorithm, twisting the verification systems and rewarding viral lies, Elon Musk actively spread the kind of disinformation that led to Britain’s biggest ever post-war riots last summer.

Musk has declared (along with Tommy Robinson) that “we are the media now” – and the terrifying thing is that he’s right.

It’s not just former pundits or comedians who turn to Rumble and YouTube to monetise their disgrace. It’s not just Russian propagandists who take over TikTok to sway electorates. These days, our conservative politicians and mainstream press take their cues from Musk more than Murdoch. While Boris Johnson gets a well-padded berth at the Daily Mail, another failed Prime Minister, Liz Truss, is starting her own social media platform to attack ‘woke culture’ and ‘elites’. And why ever not? Politainment pays much better than political honesty.

It’s a revolutionary change. Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, and in some ways the Godfather of the personal computing age, recently told The New York Times that he was optimistic about the impact of Big Tech on the world – until social media came along.

Twenty years ago, the democratisation of the means of journalistic production, distribution and exchange opened up a brave new world – new voices, citizen bloggers, live updated coverage, on-the-ground films and reports. But now?

As those new platforms were gobbled up by vast global platforms, their business model relied on engagement, keeping us glued to our smartphones, increasingly through envy or outrage. Now, new voices – especially young people – are more likely to get monstered than heard. The de-skilling of journalism and the disaggregation of news have led to the elevation of conspiracy theories and inflammatory propaganda.

We’ve gone straight from a Gilded Information Age into the Dark Ages of Disinformation.

Subscribe to Byline Times

There is a precedent for this. The innovations of Gutenberg and the printing press 500 years ago fostered the Enlightenment and the development of science and democracy. But the democratisation of reading and writing also led to nearly two centuries of religious war. We are on the brink of something similar, as we all live in our silos of bespoke news, the loss of trust in a shared reality is fracturing any sense of common purpose.

During these days that the journalist Carole Cadwalladr has described as ‘total information collapse’, it is more important than ever that journalists adhere to the standards of verity, verification, accuracy and accountability for our survival. That mission must be shared and transparent to be democratic and effective. And that’s why Byline Times has joined over a hundred other publishers in the only independent press regulator in the UK – Impress.

The Tribunal of Truth

Byline.com, the crowdfunding site I took over with Stephen Colegrave nearly a decade ago, was one of the first publishers to join Impress. Our sister organisations, Byline Investigates and Bylines Network, also signed up. But by the time Byline Times was established six years ago, we had encountered a loophole in the arbitration mechanism that created unviable cost implications for us as a new publisher.

Those loopholes have now been fixed, and though we at Byline Times have always adhered to the Impress Editors’ Code and have had no successful legal action taken against us, we are now delighted to work under the aegis of the independent regulator.

When Impress was formed, much of the established press, who didn’t want any kind of accountability, managed to divert the discussion of press malfeasance into a libertarian shibboleth of ‘state control’. Impress was explicitly set up to be free from state interference or industry lobbying. But most importantly to us, the emphasis on accuracy and testing of standards gives us some hope of a collective response to the triumphs of untruth.

Writing after the rise of fascism and the horrors of the Second World War, French philosopher Simone Weil concluded that much of the carnage that had happened in Europe was because of the rise of “unchecked falsehood”.

In her essay ‘The Truth’ in The Needs of the Soul, Weil cites a writer who had promoted fake stories of atrocities during the Spanish Civil War and points out how “a single false report can shape public opinion, influence elections, justify wars, and lead entire populations astray”.

There are echoes here of the rumours about the assailant during the Southport killings last year. Lies are not only halfway around the world before truth can get its boots on – they also inflame and incite violence. Weil argued that the power of journalism was such in the mass media age that it “demands a corresponding responsibility. If justice is to exist, there must be consequences for those who betray the truth”.

Weil’s recommendations: a tribunal of judges to determine deliberately false statements and propaganda in the press and radio are too extreme and impracticable for us. But her emphasis on “ensuring the integrity of public discourse” is more relevant than ever in an era of sock puppets and bots.

The principle that the public needs a well-regulated press as badly as they need safety on transport or clean drinking water is something Byline Times can adhere to. And Impress can help us uphold.

In an increasingly fractious and chaotic social media landscape, Laurie Colwin’s thoughts on cooking may not be the most obvious ones to spring to mind, but to this cookbook author they carry a certain resonance.

“Cook until done.” A novice in the kitchen could be forgiven for cursing the writer who first penned those words, yet leaf through old cookbooks and underneath a set of cryptic instructions there they often were. Until only a few generations ago, any cook worth her salt would have been the beneficiary of a sensory education, using sight, sound, smell, taste and touch to assess if a dish was edible and, ideally, delicious. Recipe writers in another era simply assumed that a reader would have enough embodied knowledge to recognise when a dish was indeed done.

Therein lies the problem for food writers and cookbook authors who want to share their love of food with an audience: how to explain this to someone who has possibly never eaten, let alone tried making cardamom buns or a soufflé. Making what is implicit to a competent cook, explicit and easily understood by a lay reader (or nowadays a viewer online) is a skill honed from both experience and a command of language. Hence the reason food writers are frequently called upon by publishers to make sense of restaurant chefs’ dishes, and to translate what happens in a hectic professional kitchen into something a home cook could plausibly recreate from a restaurant cookbook.

Making sense of how a dish is made is a task not dissimilar to one that generations of women (sorry fellas, it was nearly always women) did when transcribing their mothers’ or grandmothers’ recipes. My Norwegian farmor (paternal grandmother) rarely used any recipes and just knew when something was the right consistency or texture. To the bemusement of other relatives, my attempt to preserve all that sensory experience and wisdom distilled in an elderly person’s head became something of a teenage fixation, and later the foundation for my own cookbooks.

While food writers and cookbook authors must rely principally on words to explain to readers how to make something. Digital influencers, in general, rely more on the aesthetics of food, presenting bright, enticing rainbows of ingredients, along with the audible sizzle of chopping, blending, frying, whisking, in other words the ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) of being in a kitchen. Of course, neither printed matter nor online videos can provide people with the taste, smell, or touch of a dish, arguably the only senses which matter when it comes to food.

In the wake of Meta attempting to fill their social media platforms with AI-generated characters, one wonders what kind of food influencers might be generated for unsuspecting scrollers of these platforms? Will an AI-doppelgänger of Anthony Bourdain enjoy a Diet Coke and McDonalds cheeseburger with Donald Trump in the White House, thereby erasing whatever faint memory still exists of the late Bourdain’s 2016 meal he shared with Barack Obama in a Hanoi noodle shop? Will the algorithm present a WWE-style food fight between Martha Stewart and Jamie Oliver, or will Stanley Tucci’s evil twin go on a rampage and burn down an entire Italian village because a hapless waiter in a trattoria got his pasta order wrong? AI enthusiasts are confident that genuine content will be discernible from the much-derided AI ‘slop’. Time will tell if that is indeed the case.

These are admittedly trifling examples, food has for some time been a gateway to misinformation online, especially when bound up with ‘wellness’ culture. Type the word ‘natural’ in a search bar on any social media platform and it’s easy to fall down a raw milk/ginger-cures-cancer/antivaccine/“NATO is to blame for Russia invading Ukraine” conspiracy theory rabbit hole. Once upon a time, charismatic grifters and self-proclaimed gurus would have been laughed out of town, now they're capturing the attention of millions and driving ever more engagement to social media platforms. Food is just one of many seemingly mundane subjects that have been weaponised to lure unsuspecting minds and sow general mistrust in legacy media institutions and expertise in general. How do boring old facts, rigour and expertise stand a chance against the dopamine highs of bright, colourful videos and seductive clickbait (or indeed ‘ragebait’) constantly foisted on people by online personalities, boosted algorithmically to retain user engagement?

The problems for food writers and cookbook authors who care about sharing reliable information in an extremely online world are indicative of the problems for a fragmented media ecosystem as a whole: who can one trust? Imagine going online and seeing claims that geologists recommend humans eat a rock a day, and glue be used to make cheese stick to pizza. Sound absurd? Last year that’s exactly what Google’s AI overview suggested.

Subscribe now

Now consider a Meta-generated ‘tradwife’, modelled on a Ballerina Farm beauty extolling the virtues of all things natural. There she is, surrounded by her cherubic offspring and making a salad of rhubarb leaves. So far, so wholesome. Except, thanks to Meta scotching their human fact-checking programme, anyone who makes and eats this tempting salad at home will likely find themselves hospitalised, or dead. While rhubarb’s large, green leaves look appetising, they’re toxic to humans. Although Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s proposal to rely on Twitter-style community notes may sound reasonable in theory, relying on the beneficence of strangers on the internet sure is risky in practice.

As Bee Wilson documents in Swindled: From Poison Sweets to Counterfeit Coffee – The Dark History of The Food Cheats (John Murray, 2008) humans throughout history have adulterated almost everything edible, and a laissez-faire attitude by successive rulers and governments allowed for manufacturers and producers to behave more or less with complete impunity. In order to cut costs and be more profitable, humans have long been capable of extraordinary venality, nothing has changed in that regard. While free market ideologues still grouse about regulation, it’s now broadly accepted that regulation of food systems is a good thing. Why people don’t expect the same of an information environment remains something of a mystery.

Rather than wallow and complain, perhaps this needs to be seen as a clarifying moment. Kyle Chayka, author of Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture (Heligo Books 2024) concluded in his 2023 New Yorker feature ‘Why the Internet Isn’t Fun Anymore’ that what was once a lively social landscape online where real connections were made in often unexpected, serendipitous ways, has since curdled. Algorithms are destroying what made social media platforms stimulating and fun to begin with. Watch a heartwarming video on Instagram about Italian nonnas making ravioli and Meta’s algorithm will push several similar videos in quick succession. This zombie-like attempt to capture people's attention could be considered the equivalent of ultra-processed food for the brain: highly addictive but lacking in any meaningful nourishment and ultimately unsatisfying.

That algorithmic Achilles heel in social media platforms is a weakness to be exploited: as people become increasingly disillusioned with life online, those who work in food can remind them that offline conviviality is a touchstone of real human social connection, and the vital senses of smell, taste and touch just can’t be experienced via a screen. Community and a spirit of kinship can grow from the most unlikely sources: in November 2024 the Washington Post reported on cookbook stores across the United States feeding a growing appetite for community hubs. One reason cited by Lara Hamilton of Seattle’s Book Larder: “Talking to someone is just so much better than relying on an algorithm.”

Chef José Andrés drew on his experience of running restaurant kitchens to create a formidable disaster relief operation in the form of World Central Kitchen. Another practical approach might be to contact local libraries, religious venues, schools, universities, businesses, and cultural institutions, and suggest events, partnerships or exhibitions, to treat food as a way to encourage civil society initiatives. Since the worst days of the COVID-19 pandemic, people have craved in-person experiences. Find collaborators who also see the possibilities arising from unexpected connections and have both the gumption and experience to do something about it.

Using digital tools creatively to strengthen already existing networks and build new ones is another constructive response to the challenges everyone faces in the age of social media and AI. On Ruthie’s Table 4, River Cafe restaurateur Ruth Rogers’ podcast features erudite conversations with the likes of Adam Gopnik, Simon Sebag Montefiore and Christiane Amanpour, alongside big hitters from the food world such as Yotam Ottolenghi and Nigella Lawson. Her interviews with cultural legends Tracey Emin, Steve McQueen and Mel Brooks are a good reminder that sitting down at a dining table together can lead to meaningful connections and serendipitous discoveries: the kind once found on social media platforms. Let’s have more of this cross-pollination, both on and offline please.

Signe Johansen is the author of seven books on food, drink and culture, and co-writer/ghostwriter/recipe tester of a dozen more.