Alexis Madrigal

In some corners of the internet, the tired hypothetical of free speech has been turned on its head: There isn’t one person yelling “fire” in a crowded theater, but a theater full of people yelling “Burn it down.” All of which complicates the situation for the big internet companies. Over the past 10 years, free speech has undergone a radical change in practice. Now nearly all significant speech runs through a corporate platform, be it a large hosting provider, WordPress, Facebook, or Twitter. Speech may be free by law, but attention is part of an economy.

Google does feature work by traditional media organizations more than insurgent conservative outlets. Of course, Google’s ability to divine “quality” as distinct from “popularity” is limited. Search-ranking technology relies on the implicit votes of readers, with all the human biases that come bundled with them. Google, for its part, categorically rejected the claim that it tinkered with search results for political reasons. “When users type queries into the Google Search bar, our goal is to make sure they receive the most relevant answers in a matter of seconds.

Essential Consultants, a shell company owned by Michael Cohen, has no other known employees or directors. It was incorporated in Delaware on October 17, 2016, 10 days after the Access Hollywood tape went public and a couple weeks before the 2016 election. If AT&T paid a monthly fee of $50,000, Essential Consultants would have received more money in the year than AT&T’s highest-paid lobbying firms, Mayer Brown and Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer, and Feld, which were paid $420,000 and $400,000 respectively.

On Oct 31’s technology-executive hearings before the Senate Intelligence Committee, a key tension at the heart of the internet emerged: Do American tech companies, such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google, operate as American companies? Or are they in some other global realm, maybe in some place called cyberspace?

[Commentary] With the launch of new site after new site in 2014, it's been a fascinating time to watch digital media try to figure itself out.

Amid the turmoil of disruption, buffeted by tech companies' control over information distribution, but aware of new fields of possibility, the past few years were filled with defending legacy brands.

There are some exciting sites and they're doing great work, and they are also making mistakes and doing weird stuff as they find their identities. But the more I thought about what's different in this era of media relative to earlier ones: none of these sites is focused on an area of coverage. They are, instead, about the method of coverage.

In a world where traditional beats may not make sense, where almost all marginal traffic growth comes from Facebook, where subscription revenue is a rumor, where business concerns demand breadth because they want scale… a big part of the industry's response has been to create sites that become known by how they cover something rather than what.