Ben Smith on Gatekeepers in the Internet Age
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 11 February 2021
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode of Arbiters of Truth, Lawfare’s miniseries on disinformation and misinformation, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Ben Smith, media columnist for the New York Times and former editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News. Ben spends a lot of time thinking and writing about the gatekeepers who hold the power to shape our public sphere. At BuzzFeed, he capitalized on the way the rise of the internet allowed upstarts to work around the Old Gatekeepers, the legacy media organizations; now, at the Times, he’s one of them. But there are also the other New Gatekeepers: the Platforms, flailing around as much as the rest of us in trying to make sense of the role they’ve found themselves in. So what does Ben think about the current state of the media ecosystem and where it's headed? And why, in his view, was February 26, 2015—almost exactly 6 years ago—the last good day on the internet?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains advertising to access an ad-free version of the LawFair |
| 0:07.2 | podcast become a material supporter of LawFair at patreon.com slash LawFair. |
| 0:14.7 | That's patreon.com slash LawFair. |
| 0:18.2 | Also, check out LawFair's other podcast offerings, rational security, chatter, LawFair |
| 0:25.6 | no bull and the aftermath. |
| 0:32.6 | People give Facebook too much credit to think that they even really have a game. |
| 0:37.2 | I think they're mostly in a sort of constant state of panic and reaction. |
| 0:40.8 | And if you just look at how they've behaved over the last couple years, and several years, |
| 0:45.2 | like they state some grand principle, they get beat up mostly in the New York Times. |
| 0:49.6 | It turns out that principle isn't really a principle and they totally change what they |
| 0:52.2 | were doing. |
| 0:53.2 | Or then they get beat up on Capitol Hill and change again. |
| 0:55.8 | I don't think this stuff is so predictable or predetermined that they have gone and created |
| 1:01.4 | this quasi-international institution, but I don't think they really know or can predict |
| 1:07.0 | what they've unleashed. |
| 1:08.0 | It could absolutely turn out to be a press release, nothing that ever matters. |
| 1:12.1 | Or we could wind up taking away by the black helicopters at the oversight board in several |
| 1:16.9 | years and thinking, huh, I guess this wasn't an advertising stuff. |
| 1:20.9 | I'm Quinta Jurassic and this is the Lafayette Podcast, February 11, 2021. |
| 1:27.2 | It's another episode of Arbiters of Truth, Lafayette's mini-series on disinformation and |
| 1:32.3 | misinformation. |
| 1:34.1 | This week, I've been Dwak and I talked to Ben Smith, media columnist for the New York |
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