Journalism v Big Tech

It is hard to overstate how reliant journalism has become, over the 30 years since the first news websites emerged, on Big Tech companies. Whether that’s distributing pieces via social media, playing the game to get stories featured on Google News, or using platforms like YouTube or Spotify to distribute their content to the masses: journalism bought in big time to the promises of Big Tech. It’s also hard to overstate now, in 2026, quite how fucked that has left the industry.

While it has obviously proven a bad bet, it’s hard to see how journalism (a relative financial minnow) could have avoided falling into this asymmetric relationship. But what was less inevitable was the extent to which tech oligopolists have decided to erode the mutuality of that covenant. Some of this is really transparent: Elon Musk sees X as a platform for civilian journalism, and so has actively deprioritised external linking (indeed, for a time, links to Substack were blocked). Some of this is more insidious: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos buying the Washington Post as his plaything, pushing it into a politically toothless centre-ground and then announcing sweeping layoffs (like they mean anything to a man worth $280bn).

Platforms like Twitter used to actively court journalists and publications, to add credibility and incentivise users to participate. You used to go to Twitter to try and read breaking news before it had even broken. It made Twitter disproportionately influential in politics and the media; an outsized influenced that eventually lured in Mr Musk, and thus led to its demise. All of these social media platforms flourished in the boom of ‘traffic’ as a metric for digital success. Anyone launching or running a publication had to sweet-talk social media firms, hoping for preferential treatment. At the same time, they had to turn a blind eye to the fact that the imperatives of these platforms were, in many ways, functionally the same as those in journalism. Get people to use your service, get them to stay on the platform, expose them to advertising.

As they have matured, and the bottom has prolapsed even further out of the digital ads market, these platforms have been more conspicuous about this ambition. For all his faults, Elon Musk is the most transparent about his desire to turn X into a one-stop shop for the internet. Mark Zuckerberg has been less clear about the way that he wants to trap users in the Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp ecosystem. But this has basically meant that the one idea publications had for driving traffic (build big social media followings) has become a purposeless endeavour, often at odds with their true ambitions.

That was the start. But Big Tech continues its assault on the mechanics of journalism. This week, Pink News laid-off 11 staff members, citing changes that Snapchat had made to revenue disbursement. Spotify, meanwhile, has been reported by PodNews as trialling ad-skipping technology for podcasts, which will likely have a huge impact on revenue (and push more publishers into their proprietary ad-sales business). Meanwhile, YouTube has announced a major overhaul to the way it collects ‘views’, a change that is likely to see significant inflation in view counts. These changes disrupt revenue, they disrupt ad sales, and they disrupt trust for investors.

Obviously, all of these changes are less problematic if you’re a content creator alone in your bedroom, with no overheads and just rolling your dice in the great crapshoot of the internet. But if you’re a media organisation that not only employs staff but also has to make predictions for the coming year(s), it is all highly unsettling. How do you budget? How do you pitch to new investors? Things are changing so quickly. For decades, Google was the primary driver of traffic for most news sites. Google had built its Google News feature in 2002, after 9/11 and the onset of the War on Terror caused a surge in demand for real-time news updates. It rapidly became Google’s most important feature, as far as journalists were concerned. (Apple News, too, has become an important player). But in the space of a year, this has been completely dismantled. Google has prioritised Gemini, its AI assistant, in all searches, meaning that external links have plummeted. Apple News, too, has deployed an AI summary tool for its news updates (often delivered as push notifications to iOS users) which frequently hallucinates stories, or has no clear external point of reference.

This is the sort of exogenous shock to journalism that would’ve been hard to foresee. The collapse in social media traffic was a long time coming; the destruction of the search engine by AI tools happened suddenly and quickly.

We are approaching the point where journalism cannot simply continue to bend to the demands of Big Tech. The media is not some mom and pop shop facing off against Walmart. It is an industry with real political and economic clout. The pushback has to be more substantial. And it will be. Already we are seeing the fight taken to the courts, with Meta in the dock at present, facing allegations that their products are intentionally addictive for children. The legal fight will continue: plagiaristic AI models will inevitably result in class action suits, if publishers don’t take the short-termist approach of signing away the rights to their content. But the media needs to also rethink the extent to which they are providing pro bono content for platforms that are conspiring in their demise, as well as laundering the reputations of oligopolists who are incentivised towards their destruction. That’s a tougher stand to take.

Below the line, for paid subscribers, I will rank the different social media platforms by how exposed I think publishers using them are.