John Battelle's Search Blog Marketers Have Given Up on Context, And Our National Discourse Is Suffering

Media on the incumbent web is in crisis. It turns out that paying publishers for clicks, endless loops of “content” and ads, all served on platforms far beyond their maximum-viable scale is ideal for misinformation, disinformation and the decay of trust.

The usual cycle with social media sites is that they start out being very flexible and open, and are happy to have users even if those users are sharing content that sends other users off-site. But, over time, they try to get more content hosted on their own systems, and to promote it more relative to the competition. Google, while not a social pla... See more

But as AI accelerates our ability to (1) generate, (2) manipulate, and (3) distribute information, this weird tension becomes even more pronounced. We're entering an era where the battle between content and context will reshape how all policy is created, communicated, and understood. Digital platforms and AI tools have created an environment where:

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