#internet platforms

By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — May 6, 2026 Competition is what keeps markets honest. When users can move freely, platforms must earn loyalty through better service. On X, that freedom has narrowed. The system increasingly rewards staying inside one ecosystem and quietly punishes anyone who tries to operate outside it. This essay explains…

By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — March 30, 2026 Many Filipinos are told that success on social media comes from being seen. Post often. Engage more. Build followers. On X, visibility is treated as proof that the system is fair. But for users in the Philippines, being visible does not mean being paid. This essay looks at the gap between…

Election Watch for the Digital Age is a new research initiative investigating the interplay between digital platforms and election integrity — and confirming that the internet can be used to disrupt democracies as surely as it can destabilize dictatorships.

About Election Watch for the Digital Age

Acknowledgements

Countries are ranked according to a selection of key election-related indicators, where 0 is the worst and 100 is the best. Learn more about the project.

Election watch for the digital age.

A lot of good observations, context, connection-making, and generally clear thinking in this piece about social media and platforms in general and how they inevitably (?) destroy themselves through their “business models.” Or rather, perhaps, how “montetization” destroys digital “products” built around or for online coomunities.

This is enshittification: Surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they're locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they're locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle.

Great summary paragraph about Facebook in particular:

Today, Facebook is terminally enshittified, a terrible place to be whether you're a user, a media company, or an advertiser. It's a company that deliberately demolished a huge fraction of the publishers it relied on, defrauding them into a "pivot to video" based on false claims of the popularity of video among Facebook users. Companies threw billions into the pivot, but the viewers never materialized, and media outlets folded in droves.

(The phrase “pivot to video” still makes my blood boil.)

I’m always interested in what Cory Doctorow has to say, but had missed this piece from January until yesterday afternoon when I heard him discussing it and related concepts with Brooke Gladstone on On the Media yesterday on WBEZ. Part of the discussion on the show: how the current regulatory environment facilitates bad outcomes by tipping the scales in favor of big companies at the expense of consumers and innovation.

WASHINGTON — The Woodhull Freedom Foundation has launched a petition demanding that senators meet with its representatives and other groups concerned about the controversial EARN IT Act.

A rep of the national sexual rights advocacy organization explained that the EARN IT Act “would make internet platforms legally liable for any illegal sexual content posted to their platforms or service — even if they aggressively block and immediately remove such content.”

The rep added that the proposed law “incentivizes internet platforms to broadly censor legal speech under the pretense of pursuing illegal content.”

Woodhull President and CEO Ricci Joy Levy called the EARN IT Act “an attack on internet freedom, an attack on the First Amendment and an attack on human rights.”

The legislation, Levy continued, “allows the government to strong-arm private companies into censoring legal speech that the government itself is prohibited from censoring. We can and should work to stop illegal content, but such efforts should not be used to silence legal sexual expression.”

At a time when anyone can upload an image and have it appear instantaneously online, the Woodhull rep noted, “EARN IT would leave almost every site vulnerable to bad actors and immediate legal liability. To avoid any potential liability, platforms would have little choice but to block any account sharing sex-related content.”

The EARN IT Act passed the Senate Judiciary Committee in early 2022 on a unanimous vote. Since then the bill has attracted additional bipartisan co-sponsors in both the House and Senate.

EARN IT has been opposed by a wide range of organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Library Association, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Sex Workers Project, the Free Speech Coalition, Fight for the Future, Reframe Health and Justice, GLAAD, the Wikimedia Foundation, Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and dozens of other sex worker, civil liberties and free speech groups.