COLUMBIA
JOURNALISM
REVIEW
SPRING
2021:
E mily
B ell 2 2
Off-Label How tech platforms decide what counts as journalism
by Emily Bell Illustration by Richard A. Chance
I
n the aftermath of the deadly Capitol insurrection, technology platforms were forced to acknowledge their role in poisoning the media atmosphere, as the principal distributors of digital news and the sources of so much misinformation. Facebook, Twitter, and Google acted as they never had before: Twitter flagged Donald Trump’s incendiary lies, removed some posts, then suspended his account; Facebook banned him for inciting violence. Overnight, Web hosting services dropped Parler, a social network popular among right-wing extremists. The platforms that had delivered and sustained a toxic presidency were now abandoning their most mendacious hitmaker.
The great deplatforming of January 2021 had an immediate effect: in addition to Trump, thousands of conspiracy-theory accounts disappeared from the internet. It felt like a turning point that technology companies had long resisted, until the pandemic gave them a first push: last March, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, announced a “coronavirus information center” that would place “authoritative information” at the top of news feeds. (“You don’t allow people to yell ‘Fire!’ in a crowded room, and I think that’s similar to people spreading misinformation in the time of an outbreak like this,” he told journalists on a conference call.) From there, platforms began rolling out new features and responding directly
