The Media Failed to Hold GAFAM Accountable (and Now It Suffers From It and For It)
The "elephant in the room" might in fact be a bull
I recently chatted with a fellow editor (name and publisher shall not be disclosed), who had some insights on what was happening to the Web and to search engines. "I need not tell you the media is dying," I said to him, because "there is less competition and diversity [...] and slop does not count [...]"
I added that "search is hard" and "Google has its own mind (and business priorities)". I said that "many neglected search" because they "just googled it" and now "Google serves quasi-plagiarism" (I meant slop, as in garbage from LLMs).
And "as I understand it," he said, "this is one of the few surviving 2001 stories about Ballmer calling Linux cancer [...] when I just searched the Web for linux is cancer ballmer, there's the reg and then recent articles about microsoft claiming it now loves linux" (that's Microsoft googlebombing in action).
See, Google isn't even being helpful. It's just SEO-manipulated into oblivion. It becomes a PR machine.
I noted that, just like Facebook does, Google isn't trying to be search; "it wants to keep people in Google," I said. And "last week it was reported Google started injecting navigation bars into pages" (perhaps only for its iOS "app"... for now).
So Google's search engine nowadays resembles Reddit or social control media.
And "Microsoft does SEO to bury information... a form of googlebombing," I said (hiding negative coverage by replacing it with something else).
The editor said that "it [Microsoft] plants stories in friendly media, for sure, to achieve that..."
I said "the aim is revisionism... and then it calls people like me names... for standing out from what they optimised for... and sending me SLAPP" (threats to discourage publication of unflattering facts).
The editor said "it was annoying to see larger media sites praising big tech for years and then as soon as the public started to sour on subscriptions and ad surveillance and all that, the same media started crying, "why why wasn't anyone holding tech giants accountable??? [...] like, hello, that was supposed to be your job" (indeed).
Well, for many of them it's too late now. They relied too much on companies like Google, which abandoned them. They took bribes from Microsoft, which discredited them. They outsourced readership to Facebook and Twitter, which became Meta and "X" (both penalise for taking people "away" from their walled gardens).
So we both agreed that search had sucked for years, a lot of the media sucked, and "holding tech giants accountable" is important.
This recognition of the problem emboldens us to carry on. █