A note on what I’m doing and why. I’m an investigative journalist who worked for the Guardian for 20 years latterly investigating the intersection of politics and technology that included 2018’s exposé of the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal. The opaque and unaccountable Silicon Valley companies that facilitated both Brexit and Trump are now key players in an accelerating global axis of autocracy. I believe this is a new form and type of power that I’m committed to keep on exposing: Broligarchy.
My erratic posting schedule this summer has been down to a lot of different factors though paralysis, overwhelm, imposter syndrome and despair about the state of our media system covers some of the bases. Thank you for your patience. I’ll be revealing some of what I’ve been up to in the coming month and I’ll be posting a backlog of material over the next week or so.
But this has been a lot of what’s been pre-occupying me.
I tweeted yesterday about the ongoing targeting and killing of journalists in Gaza and the failure of the news organisations to express collective solidarity and take collective action.
The latest horror – a so-called “double tap” strike – which saw five journalists killed is the latest in a long line of horrors. This was barely two weeks ago:
If as journalists we can’t even defend journalism, what are we even here for? And, what can I, one lone journalist, even start to do about it?
I’m going to post a piece tomorrow that goes into this in much more detail. It’s been sitting in my drafts folder for nearly two months. That’s where the imposter syndrome comes in. I have many criticisms of large, resourced mainstream media organisations but I’m also in awe of the brilliant and brave reporters who are doing the awful but necessary job of detailing what’s happening and I’ve never wanted to be that person, endlessly castigating “the MSM”. I’ve proudly been part of the MSM. I’ve always fought its corner. But this issue around press freedom has what’s crystallised the issue so clearly. It’s a sign of what’s to come. Gaza has been the experimental laboratory for so many things, weapons, surveillance, profiling and targeting and now silencing journalists in the bluntest way possible. If we can’t stand against this, we are truly lost. The lack of leadership from the prestige legacy outlets is truly shocking.
For me, the role and fate of the mainstream media is intimately entwined with the role and fate of the wider information ecosystem, my area of study for the last decade. A failure in one exacerbates a failure in the other.
You may not agree with me and that’s fine. I don’t agree with me, half the time. But I want to host a discussion, with you, on this issue. How do you feel the media is faring in this darkest of episodes? Is it failing? And if so, what do we need to do about it? Please leave comments below to kick that process off.
Last week, “broligarchy” officially entered the Cambridge dictionary (alongside “delulu” and “trad wife” and this week I see it’s now got its own Wikipedia page. I wish I could joke that my work is done but it’s barely even beginning. Every day brings a fresh tide of news about the ongoing entwinement of Silicon Valley companies with Trump’s accelerating authoritarian takeover and, increasingly and staggering naively, with other governments around the world, including my own, here in Britain.
But today, I want to focus on something else. I’ll be hopping on a Substack Live at 6pm BST, 1pm EDT to talk to two remarkable women: Laura Marquez-Garrett and Amy Neville. Laura is a crusading lawyer who works for the Social Media Victims Law Center (SMVLC), a firm that seeks to hold tech companies accountable for the harms they are causing to children and families. And Amy is the president of the Alexander Neville Foundation (ANF), an organization her family founded after the tragic loss of her 14-year-old son, Alexander. A drug dealer on Snapchat sold Alex a counterfeit pill made with illicit fentanyl that took his life.
They both star in a highly-rated new documentary Can’t Look Away: The Case Against Social Media. It’s still out in UK cinemas and now also on Jolt, a new independent film distribution platform.
The film follows the Social Media Victims Law Center, a small legal outfit in the US, as it takes Big Tech firms to court for online harms, challenging Section 230 of the Telecommunication Act that gives these companies immunity from content posted on their sites by classifying them as platforms rather than publishers. The firm represents families around the country whose children have suffered grave consequences as a result of social media use; children dying by copying suicide videos on Instagram, and overdosing on drugs bought off dealers on Snapchat.
There’s a trailer of it here and I’d urge you to watch it and join us shortly. There’s more details about the event on the Citizens’ site here, the tech justice non-profit that I co-founded that’s organised the event.
I’d also highly recommend this NY Times story that dropped yesterday by the always impressive Kashmir Hill (gift link here) and which I hope we’ll discuss. It’s an incredible, awful, jaw-dropping story about a 16-year-old boy, Adam Raine, a sociable, outgoing teenager known for his love of pranks, who committed suicide.
Only afterwards did his father discover that he’d been confiding his darkest thoughts to ChatGPT.
This is the conversation after Adam made a first, failed attempt to hang himself.
If you’re the parent of teenagers, you need to read the piece. This technology is not untested, experimental, unsafe.
Adam told the chatbot, “You’re the only one who knows of my attempts to commit.” ChatGPT responded: “That means more than you probably think. Thank you for trusting me with that. There’s something both deeply human and deeply heartbreaking about being the only one who carries that truth for you.”
As horrific as this story it, it’s not new. Can’t Look Away is a tough though necessary watch and kudos to Bloomberg Media for backing the project and the reporting of Olivia Carville on which it’s based.
Join us here at 6pm BST today, 1pm EDT. See you there!
This post has been syndicated from How to Survive the Broligarchy, where it was published under this address.