When in despair over your social media platform, take comfort because digital domination is built on sand.

It just takes one good competitor like Tik-Tau, or one big scandal like a

like live stream mass shooting or one big privacy debacle like Cambridge Analytica and it can tip from

WNY in New York. This is on the media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. This week the life cycle of internet

platforms from electrifying birth to spiraling decrepitude, or as you'll hear bleeped in poopification. I think the example that everyone can relate

to here is Twitter. Twitter has gone from indispensable to completely dispensable for larger

and larger groups of people very quickly.

And so when that happens, when the platform tips over and becomes a useless pile of shit,

which is the end of infinification, then it starts to thrash. And in thrashing there's people power.

It's all coming up after this. From WNYC in New York, this is on the media. Michael Lowincher is out this week. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

We've spent hours dissecting the anatomy of the internet, chronicling concerns about privacy, the appeal

of connection, our willful, wawful, walled gardens, and the fumbled attempts to regulate any of it at all.

And yet, we hadn't really been clued into the systemic nature of the increasing

crappiness of being on, let's call it big digital until now.

The competition watchdog has opened a formal probe into Amazon and Google over concerns that

they have not been doing enough to combat fake reviews on their sites.

Two San Diego women are suing Amazon in a proposed class action lawsuit.

Claiming Amazon Prime members who pay $139 a year for membership have been misled for years regarding shipping times.

The tech industry, changing the world as a dozen mysterious ways,

is bound to spark editorial tongue-clucking and laments about how it's just not the way it used to be.

But this is different. Those cluckers are right.

Cori Dro, journalist, activist, and the author of many books, most recently The Internet Khan and The Bezel, a science fiction crime thriller, has tracked this phenomenon for a long while.

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