The new tycoons

The giants of the internet have long said that they are not publishers but mere platforms — or couriers — of the new information age. Companies such as Google and Facebook insist that they’re the digital equivalent of the vans, newsagents and paperboys who distribute what other people publish. So they ought not to be held responsible for it. In the early years of the internet, their argument made sense. Most news and comment came from newspapers and magazines (like this one). But then social media arrived and restraint vanished.

Military-grade email encryption has emerged as standard, giving security to those who don’t want their email hacked, but also cover to criminal networks. The tech giants, worried by the demons they were nurturing, started to behave as publishers. They began moderating and sometimes banning content. Facebook started to editorialise its news feeds, tweaking ‘emotional content’ to see if it would make users happy or sad.