The Daily Digest: April 24, 2025
|
| Like the economy and crime before it, perceptions of First Amendment freedoms are largely seen through a partisan lens. By Joshua Benton. |
What we’re reading
The New Yorker / Kyle ChaykaMark Zuckerberg says social media is over →“The company, Zuckerberg said, has lately been involved in ‘the general idea of entertainment and learning about the world and discovering what’s going on.’ This under-recognized shift away from interpersonal communication has been measured by the company itself. During the defense’s opening statement, Meta displayed a chart showing that the ‘percent of time spent viewing content posted by ‘friends’’ has declined in the past two years, from twenty-two per cent to seventeen per cent on Facebook, and from eleven per cent to seven per cent on Instagram.”
The New York Times CompanyNatalie Kitroeff and Rachel Abrams join Michael Barbaro as co-hosts for The Daily →“Natalie has spent the past five years as an international correspondent and Mexico City bureau chief … Rachel was part of the 2018 reporting team that won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing sexual harassment and misconduct.”
TechCrunch / Aisha MalikFacebook cracks down on spammy content by cutting reach and monetization →“The crackdown on spammy content comes as
AI slop is becoming a serious problem across social media platforms, including Facebook. The company told TechCrunch that its crackdown is not targeting AI slop directly, but notes that accounts engaging in spammy behavior while also sharing that type of content will be impacted. Facebook says it’s aware of the concerns around AI slop cluttering users’ feeds and says it will address the issue as part of its broader focus on improving users’ feeds.”
Columbia Journalism Review / Mathew IngramGoogle faces a potential breakup on multiple fronts →“As these cases proceed through the remedy phase, the government is expected to argue that Google should be forced to sell off significant chunks of its business. And those sales—if and when they actually come to pass—could change the way that online publishing works in some fundamental ways.”
User Mag / Taylor LorenzInside the Democrats’ struggle to win over online creators →“Representatives for big name creators said that they feel like [the nonprofit arm of an influencer agency] Chorus is luring their clients with promises of access to political leaders, ‘then they go to a bunch of donors who don’t know anything about the creator space except that we need a left wing Joe Rogan, and they raise money from them. These are dollars that belong to the creators,’ the marketer said.”
Vanity Fair / Paul FarhiDespite MAGA media’s teacher’s pet status, it’s the old guard churning out Trump scoops →“Thus newly empowered, Trump-adjacent media organizations have been safe spaces for interviews with administration officials. But there’s not much to match the MSM’s vigorous and frequent scoops and accountability reporting.”
Axios / April RubinTrump to be interviewed by The Atlantic’s Jeffery Goldberg after Signal scandal →“Goldberg prompted scrutiny of the Trump administration’s ability to
handle sensitive information after he revealed that he was mistakenly added to the group chat with top administration officials.”
The New York Times / Benjamin MullinThe Dispatch buys SCOTUSblog, a Supreme Court mainstay →“SCOTUSblog is something of an outlier in the quirky annals of digital media. Though blogging has fallen out of favor as social media has grown increasingly popular, SCOTUSblog, with its die-hard readership of legal obsessives, has remained curiously durable.”
The Verge / Som-Mai NguyenThe Napalm Girl continues to define free speech →“‘The Terror of War’ is, after all, a violent, nonconsensual nude image of a child. It is also of tremendous historical importance — and before it became history itself, it was hard-hitting, weighty speech of a political nature. It is a troubling photograph that lives at the boundary of free speech; a difficult edge case for social media platforms that has come up time and again as they set, adjust, and modify their content moderation standards. The Napalm Girl photograph has left an indelible mark on how speech is governed, despite never establishing court precedent at all.”
The Guardian / Michael SavageBBC launches satellite news channel in Myanmar after Trump silences VOA →“The BBC has stepped in to launch a news service in Myanmar after the devastating earthquake in the country, replacing a U.S. service that Donald Trump has ceased to fund. A direct-to-home satellite video channel delivering BBC News Burmese content will be launched to cater for what the corporation sees as an urgent ‘audience in need.'”
Substack / Corey HutchinsThe alt weekly Colorado Springs Indy lays off entire staff →“Last February, some were encouraged when a pair of wealthy local developers and businessmen, Kevin O’Neil and J.W. Roth, swooped in and resurrected the Indy and its counterpart the Colorado Springs Business Journal. They changed the papers back to a for-profit enterprise. They said they wanted a voice in the community … Along the way, the paper’s decades of digital archives vanished, creating a sinkhole in the civic memory. The resurrection wound up lasting a total of 14 months.”
Nieman Lab | View email in browser | Unsubscribe
You are receiving this daily newsletter because you signed up for for it at www.niemanlab.org.
Nieman Journalism Lab · Harvard University · 1 Francis Ave. · Cambridge, MA 02138 · USA
͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
