Thread by @sarahmillerdc

Democracy is dying one newsroom at a time.

Facebook and Google’s advertising monopolies and business models are the biggest reason why.

We need to galvanize a bigger, broader movement to save journalism, folding this fight other efforts to protect democracy from autocracy. 1/

https://twitter.com/gregjaffe/status/1248767153186234369

That involves understanding how journalism is financed, and how that financing is shaped by policy.

Many of us think we know what happened — journalism is no match for the innovative Internet!

Only charity can save it now.

But that’s what FB and Google want you to believe. 2/

Today, with my @econliberties colleagues @matthewstoller and @ZephyrTeachout, I published a short paper that tells the story of the slow-motion collapse of journalism.

We tell it through the choices policymakers made as FB and Google monopolized advertising markets. 3/

We lay out solutions that attempt to address the underlying source of so many of these two corporations’ harms: their rapacious, surveillance-based advertising businesses.

And we try to show how autocrats in markets — Google and Facebook — are at odds with our democracy. 4/

We hope folks read it, challenge it, and engage with us and others working on this fight.

And we hope, during this immediate crisis, our leaders provide direct support to local news, as our friends at @freepress have led on. 5/

But we have to make a choice: between business as usual for Facebook and Google or a vibrant, independent press to underpin our democracy.

We choose the latter, and spell out how we think we can achieve it.

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