Techdirt Loses Its Objectivity in Pursuit of Money
SOME people have rightly pointed out (in recent days) that Techdirt's chief works for a competitor of Twitter/X, which overshadows his coverage of the topic. There are also concerns (aired here before) about sponsors of Techdirt, which included the Kochs (in the name of "free speech", which is a tad ironic). Being a business, now outsourced to Automattic (another conflict there), we need to understand the influences of money-related interests.
Seeing the 'article' below (not the first of its kind), an associate of ours called them "sellouts":
And then there was this:
The associate wondered, "how much are these advertising deals affecting what and how Techdirt covers material in its articles?"
This isn't a new problem and it's a very big problem as the site covers companies the authors are directly affiliated with and spam ("deals") like the above can impact what can and cannot be said, even subconsciously (akin to self-censorship). They can impact the choice of topics to cover and/or angles to embrace.
I myself don't condone what the site has become, but I don't condemn it either. Months ago I quietly removed it from my readings lists (RSS), seeing it was getting somewhat Koch-like and habitual GAFAM apologist (in the name of "deregulation"). The Koch-like aspects go years back, but it got worse this past year (it certainly felt worse).
Techdirt peaked more than a decade ago when it focused on areas like copyrights; the Koch-like biases became more apparent after SLAPP (the same person who sued Techdirt had sent threats our way too) and ever since then the site has devoted space/time to censorship/free speech issues. The more concerning aspects are coverage of GAFAM and Microsoft in particular. It just doesn't make sense sometimes. █