John Herrman

For the past year, the political class has been wearing itself out over what sounds like a simple question: Why are Americans so down on the economy? One point of agreement is that core indicators seem to have diverged from how people report actually feeling about the economy or are insufficient to explain such things in the first place.

Each of the big social platforms handled the challenges of the Trump presidency in its own unique way, scrambling to address or neutralize various urgent and contradictory concerns from users, advertisers, lawmakers and occasionally the president himself.

For people who spend a lot of time on TikTok, the last few months have been surreal: a president with no presence on the platform has been agitating to ban it on the basis of national security.

When the biggest platforms seem to be flailing or punting on problems, it’s often because they’re trying to address broad social issues with market solutions. They’re rediscovering, at scale and at great expense to their users, the ways in which a society is more than a bazaar, and the pitfalls of allowing human attention to be sold and resold as a commodity. If a platform is addressing a collective problem in a maddeningly strange way, consider that it might see itself, or only know to govern itself, like an eBay.

Conservatives are zeroing in on a new enemy in the political culture wars: Big Tech. 

Our present panics tend to arrive just as new parts of our economy, culture and politics are reconstituted within platform marketplaces — shifts that have turned out to be bigger than anyone anticipated. Aggravation about “fake news” followed the realization that the business and consumption of online news had been substantially captured by Facebook, which had strenuously resisted categorization as a media company. Children’s entertainment has migrated to new and unexpected venues faster and more completely than either parents or YouTube expected or accounted for.

Breitbart, the website at the center of the self-described alternative online media, is planning to expand in the United States and abroad. The site, whose former chairman became the chief executive of Donald J. Trump’s campaign in August, has been emboldened by the victory of its candidate. Breitbart was always bullish on President-elect Trump’s chances, but the site seems far more certain of something else, as illustrated by a less visible story it published on election night, declaring a different sort of victory: “Breitbart Beats CNN, HuffPo for Total Facebook Engagements for Election Content.” It was a type of story the site publishes regularly. In August: “Breitbart Jumps to #11 on Facebook for Overall Engagement.”

On social platforms, all media had become marginal; elsewhere, much of the media was in structural collapse. Growing distribution systems belonged to technology companies and their users. Publishers had become mere guests, their own distribution systems, like printed newspapers, stagnant or shrinking. So a news organization’s ranking in that online world — one in which the importance of legacy was diminished — meant something. Faith in the importance of social metrics was a common trait among pro-Trump media, and for obvious reasons. They were clear indicators of support, participation and success, though exposed to no methodology. They were relative to other media and, by proxy, to politics.

There is talk of Breitbart bureaus opening in Paris, Berlin and Cairo, spots where the populist right is on the rise. A bigger newsroom is coming in Washington, the better to cover a president-elect whose candidacy it embraced.

Mainstream news outlets are soul-searching in the wake of being shocked by Donald Trump’s election. But the team at Breitbart News, the right-wing opinion and news website that some critics have denounced as a hate site, is elated — and eager to expand on a victory that it views as a profound validation of its cause. “So much of the media mocked us, laughed at us, called us all sorts of names,” said Alexander Marlow, the site’s editor in chief. “And then for us to be seen as integral to the election of a president, despite all of that hatred, is something that we certainly enjoy, and savor.”

In media business terms, it is now clear, the 2016 election could not have arrived at a more precarious moment, as industries defined by their futures struggled to handle what was happening in the present. A new business model had not replaced an old one — not yet. There was, for the duration of the campaign, effectively no model at all.

Through this lens, some of the defining narratives about the media and the election start to make a little more sense. Major news organizations, household names trusted for decades, lost a great deal of ownership over audiences. The organizations exist among many contributors in infinite feeds. Their news stories could be more easily brushed aside and ignored as a product of bias or motivated reporting. Once privileged with the leverage to shape narratives, or declare stories important, they now found themselves competing with rivals shaped by new incentives. It seemed that readers and viewers had been prompted, all at once, to ask news outlets: Who are you to assume we trust you?

Facebook, in the years leading up to the 2016 election, hasn’t just become nearly ubiquitous among American Internet users; it has centralized online news consumption in an unprecedented way. According to the company, its site is used by more than 200 million people in the United States each month, out of a total population of 320 million. A 2016 Pew study found that 44 percent of Americans read or watch news on Facebook. These are approximate exterior dimensions and can tell us only so much. But we can know, based on these facts alone, that Facebook is hosting a huge portion of the political conversation in America.

The Facebook product, to users in 2016, is familiar yet subtly expansive. Its algorithms have their pick of text, photos and video produced and posted by established media organizations large and small, local and national, openly partisan or nominally unbiased. But there’s also a new and distinctive sort of operation that has become hard to miss: political news and advocacy pages made specifically for Facebook, uniquely positioned and cleverly engineered to reach audiences exclusively in the context of the news feed.