Parasitic Platforms and the Crisis in News

ABSTRACT The viability of news has been in rapid decline since the mid‐2000s. This poster presents a critical analysis of how news publishers themselves helped precipitate the crisis by enthusiastically adopting Big Tech platform technologies and audience‐building strategies. I show how search and social media platforms disrupted publishers' relationships with audiences and advertisers by appropriating control over news distribution and revenue. I use Anthony Giddens' structuration theory and Bruno Latour's actor‐network theory to explore the restructuring of the news industry by the sociotechnical practices and surveillance economics of today's dominating platforms. Leveraging Michel Serres' concept of social parasitism, I present a research framework for assessing symbiotic and parasitic relationships in sociotechnical systems using historical, quantitative, and qualitative methods, and to identify where news publishers still have agency to begin resolving the crisis. And I suggest the urgency of this research framework as publishers rapidly adopt new AI technologies.