When enshittification comes for your town

This started as a simple essay about why we shouldn’t be diving headfirst into the black hole of a “link tax” to fund journalism.

So let’s start there: link taxes are bad policy.

Especially when considering the alternative, a digital ad tax that funds journalism. I would write a straight-up op-ed about how link taxes are a disaster and digital ad taxes are a cleaner, smarter fix. But then, as I wrote it, this essay kind of veered off course.

We haven’t considered a link tax in Washington, but a lot of the rhetoric around our journalism funding has adopted link tax framing. Oregon is considering a link tax, though. And California just showed how the link tax debate can derail any hope of actually shifting money from digital platforms to journalism.

Link taxes prop up platforms. They accept the smug assumption that platforms benefit from real journalism, and therefore should be forced to pay for linking to it. In the era of Shrimp Jesus and AI-generated sludge, Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t need your 3,000-word explainer on the local government budget crisis. He just needs eyeballs, clicks, and outrage.

A digital ad tax, on the other hand, is like a sin tax. It exists whether or not Facebook will allow users to link to news reporting. If you’re a smart marketer, you’re buying ads from Meta, Google, or some massive programmatic ad exchange. These companies have systematically cut new publishers out of the ad revenue stream, building ad empires that strip-mine value from communities that once supported journalism.

They don’t need to link to journalism to pay, they pay because their business model is the problem. And with a tax, we can peel off a sliver of that revenue to buy pizza for reporters. Or, you know, pay their actual wages. Or, and here’s where it gets interesting, fund moderators of online forums.

This is where the essay went sideways. I started thinking about how we got here.

For years after about 2008 or so, people who made money writing things contorted themselves trying to perform well in the social newsfeed. We all did it, even the newspapers. We started chasing clicks from social platforms, hoping they would translate into eyeballs, and in the case of news publishers, ad revenue. All the while, the social platforms were building ad empires. So it’s pretty ironic now to hear that social platforms “stole” content, when the very same newsrooms were hiring social media engagement specialists to crack the newsfeed algorithm to go viral.

We messed up. We poured energy into platforms that contribute nothing to our communities. My particular sin? Facebook and the death of Olyblog.

In my case, the biggest victim of the Facebook newsfeed was Olyblog. It launched 20 years ago as a hyperlocal community blog, the kind of thing that would now exist as a Facebook group or maybe a subreddit. It thrived from 2005 to 2008, then imploded in a mix of interpersonal drama and everyone just migrating to Facebook. The traffic to Olyblog fell through the floor two years after Facebook opened to the broader public and revised the news feed to become most like what it is today.

These days, I’m basically off Facebook. I’ve iced both my Instagram and Facebook accounts, no new posts, only logging in when absolutely necessary. I was disappointed that more people didn’t bail when Facebook took its latest nosedive earlier this year.

Over the past four years, I’ve been in the trenches of a local fight against election disinformation. I’ve also spent a lot of time thinking about what I put into the world, and I chose to cut harmful, algorithmic media out of my life. That meant not engaging on Facebook, even when it was the easiest option. In balance, I’ve moved to Bluesky, Mastodon, and an RSS feed reader. But microblogging is not a replacement for community blogs or Facebook groups.

So the band plays on. I was disappointed when a new crop of Democratic Party organizers in Thurston County launched yet another Facebook group. But really, I’m not disappointed in them. I’m disappointed that this is still the only viable option for online organizing. I didn’t offer to do the hard work of building an alternative, so I can’t fault them. But I can recognize the gap between the world I want and the world we live in.

In Thurston County, Facebook is where the people are. But it’s a toxic place, one that encourages content that enrages rather than content that solves problems.

Cory Doctorow talks about this process as “enshittification,” how digital platforms gradually turn against every user group they once courted, until we’re all stuck. They ratchet up the costs of leaving until we feel like we can’t go because everyone else is still there.

That’s exactly what’s happened here. Traditional media has been gutted by market forces and corporate consolidation. What’s left is small, siloed audiences mostly hanging out on Facebook. KGY doesn’t really do news anymore, but I remember when Doug Adamson was standing on the back of a truck, mic in hand, giving live updates during a May Day protest. Now, the Olympian is down to a skeleton crew. Meanwhile, the Thurston County Scanner Facebook page pumps out crime updates to a captive Facebook-only audience and pulls better metrics than anyone else around. But because it lives entirely on Facebook, it’s at the mercy of the algorithm.

Anyway, hard pivot, let’s get back to the digital ad tax.

Washington State actually passed one this year. It might get challenged in court (like Maryland’s did), and it doesn’t have any earmarked spending. The money just drops into the general fund. But if it survives, and if we can steer that revenue toward something meaningful, we need to think beyond just giving grants to newsrooms.

Don’t get me wrong, local journalism absolutely deserves public support. But there’s also a growing need to support local online communities that aren’t traditional news outlets.

Think of these online spaces like we think of libraries.

Take Front Porch Forum in New England. Or New_Public’s Local Lab, which is building an open-source platform for healthier town-based online spaces, alternatives to the rage-fueled mess of Facebook Groups and Nextdoor. Their goal is to support and pay local “stewards” to manage these communities. Move beyond toxic algorithms. Highlight high-quality local content. Create sustainable, public-good platforms.

We share ourselves and our lives online for free. We absolutely need more professional journalists reporting on local issues. But we also need to reclaim the connective power of the internet from the corporations that have hijacked it.

A digital ad tax is like taxing cigarettes. Algorithmic ad tech is sucking money out of Olympia and funneling it into corporations that don’t care about our community. Just skimming a little off the top could fund reporters, build home-grown platforms, and pay community moderators.