Notable links: June 19, 2026

Most Fridays, I share a handful of pieces that caught my eye at the intersection of technology, media, and society.

Did I miss something important? Send me an email to let me know.

Change Agent

Gina Chua is one of the people in news who is doing the most to push the conversation forward and prepare the industry for the future. This piece of hers outlines what I think is a necessary skill for survival.

We’re in the fastest period of technology change — and, consequently, the fastest period of journalistic change — in decades. Building takes time; if we aim to build for today, we’ll always be behind. So we need to consider what the future looks like.

That doesn’t necessarily mean having one singular vision for the future, although it may be that one stands out as the most likely or compelling. It may be wise to juggle multiple possible futures, each with their own probabilities, prerequisites, and outcomes. If we deeply research them based on the work of experts in their fields, and then articulate them well, we can share them, and use them organizationally to prepare for what might become true.

Will our information ecosystem radically change in the face of agentic systems? Will people look to community as AI intermediates everything else? Will the open internet fragment in the hands of authoritarianism? None of those things are necessarily the future, but it’s worth considering what all of them might mean.

What we can’t do is assume that the world will stay the same. I would like to burn Gina’s words into the walls of every newsroom and every mission-driven organization in the world:

“You can hear that thinking if you roam the halls of any journalism conference. Get the platforms to pay for content. Do more original journalism. Build deeper relationships with audiences. Drive more direct traffic. But those aren’t theories of change; they are theories that the world won’t change that much, and that the strategies of the past will serve us well in the future, if only we execute them better, faster, and cheaper.”

Each possible future is a kind of speculative fiction. It takes creativity — and bravery — to break out of existing frames and qualitatively consider what might be. These explorations must be informed by how things have played out already, where we are today, and what we know is coming down the pipeline, but they also must be generative and open. In doing so, we uncover ideas that can help us not just navigate what the future might be, but get in front of it and help to shape it — according to our own values and needs.

The world won’t stay the same. Journalism isn’t staying the same. In addition to the rapid change in the platforms we depend on, trust is declining; engagement is declining; for many newsrooms, revenue is declining. A bet on the present is not a winning one. So we need to reach further.

Overview and key findings of the 2026 Digital News Report

This year’s Reuters Digital News Report has a key finding that’s worth paying attention to:

“Though it has been the case in some individual countries for several years, at the global level (averaging across 48 markets) social media and video networks are for the first time the single most widely used way of accessing online news (used by 54% of all respondents), ahead of news organisations’ own websites and apps (51%). This shifting composition of news consumption is happening among all age groups.”

For the first time, social media is the primary platform for news globally.

News is how we learn about the world and make informed democratic decisions. That means that, more than ever before, we need to care about who owns these networks, who dictates how they function, and which narratives they promote.

X, of course, was purchased by Elon Musk specifically because he wanted to suppress what he called the “woke mind virus”. It’s a propaganda play, which anyone can see if they load a feed on the platform: shocking white supremacist rhetoric is central.

But every proprietary social platform is subject to some version of this. We don’t have the access to view (or even the ability to truly research) how companies like Meta choose to promote and suppress information. We are subject to their business decisions, including the backroom political decisions they make in order to ensure their own survival.

In contrast, open social web platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky are open and verifiable. They run on open protocols that cannot be controlled by a single entity. Their algorithms are either non-existent (in the case of Mastodon) or fully under our control (in the case of Bluesky). Rather than gatekeeping the information we need to be democratic citizens, they give us full control over our information ecosystems.

They’re also full of people who have already self-selected to inhabit more ethical spaces. These turn out to be people who are more likely to both engage with and financially support news. So not only does having an open social web strategy mean you’re engaging in platforms that don’t seek to intermediate democracy, they actually provide better return on investment than more traditional platforms. We need these platforms to exist if we want to have a healthy information landscape; it turns out that engaging in them yields real benefits right now.

News has a choice here: it can shrug its shoulders as an industry and say that it should just meet people wherever they’re at, even if that’s on X. Or newsrooms can choose to promote and prioritize their accounts in spaces that are actually aligned with their values, needs, and business models. I strongly think they should do the latter.

CEOs Who Think AI Replaces Their Employees Are Just Bad CEOs

I second this sentiment:

“It seems pretty clear to me that companies that think they’ll be able to layoff huge swaths of workers because of LLM tools are going to find out they’re mistaken pretty quickly. The power of LLMs is that when used well and used willingly it can help employees to get more done, but that doesn’t mean you need fewer humans. You need more humans who know how to work productively.”

I’ve seen some pretty dumb stuff out in the wild: leaders who have expected their engineers to dramatically increase their output to inhuman levels, company-wide token leaderboards, product managers who believe they can replace real user research with synthetic personas, and, of course, high-level leaders who think they can replace their human workers with AI agents. (None of this, I should say, has been at my job, where our work is primarily done by humans and AI, when it is used at all, is an assistive tool.)

I think Mike Masnick’s prescription is accurate: many CEOs are so distant from the actual productive work of a company that they miss the complicated nuance of what goes into it. So if they can produce something with Claude Code that feels analogous to it, a bad CEO might start wondering why they’re hiring all these people.

A good CEO will understand that they’re missing a ton of expertise that goes into building something well, doing work with skill, or even just exercising humane human judgment. The others will find out the hard way that they’re wrong to underestimate their employees.

A Scottish Post: The New Election Threat: Disinformation Inside the Answer

The dangers of AI-generated answers in search results are enumerated here in the context of the recent Scottish election. 75 questions about the ballot were posed on AI systems, and the findings were sobering. On average, 44.4% of responses were at least partially wrong; ChatGPT was specifically wrong 46.2% of the time. Improbably, Grok actually performed the best in this test, with only 8.97% of responses containing factual inaccuracies.

These findings held true in other UK elections:

“Days before the Senedd election in Wales, also held on May 7, BBC Wales tested six major chatbots, ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, Claude, Meta AI, and Grok, against fictional voter profiles. The results echoed Scotland’s almost exactly.”

Some of this is likely just an outcome of how these systems work: hallucinations are par for the course. Nobody knows how to build a completely accurate LLM. But it’s also relatively easy to seed bad information as training data, which can be used to whitewash disinformation: you establish the intentional falsehoods, the LLM poisons its training corpus by ingesting your information, and it then presents your falsehoods as fact.

Researchers at NYU discovered that if 0.001 percent of the training data of a given LLM is “poisoned,” or deliberately planted with misinformation, the entire training set becomes likely to propagate errors. You can do that just by hosting harmful information online: in blogs, on Reddit, in otherwise-trustworthy sites. Once the falsehoods have been internalized by the LLM, the end user will never know.

As the linked article points out, between 7 and 13% of voters in these elections used a chatbot to figure out who to vote for. We’re at the foothills of AI use; these numbers will continue to rise. And with them, a real risk to maintaining an informed democratic voting population.

W Social, Public Institutions and the Theater of European Digital Sovereignty

Elena Rossini (rightly) calls shenanigans on what’s been happening in the European social world. I think what happened should be instructive for any pro-social technology movement.

Here’s what happened:

Earlier this month, the European Commission announced a technology sovereignty plan that included a reliance on open source software as a path to autonomy.

Eurosky, a non-profit fork of Bluesky that is both fully open source and stores all its data in the EU, subsequently launched Mu, a social media application running on AT Protocol that is fully EU-based and is arguably more fully-featured than Bluesky itself.

But the European Commission, including its President and its Central Bank’s President, went another way by migrating to W Social, a proprietary AT Protocol. Whereas Eurosky is a non-profit that has worked extensively in the open with open social web and democratic communities, W Social is a for-profit startup that has been opaque about its intentions and, as Elena now reports, has now pulled its code from being available on an open source basis. These EC profiles now live on a platform that contradicts the EC’s own sovereignty plan.

Worse, the founders have a track record of using causes like climate change for their own profit, notably using Greta Thunberg to raise money for a venture capital firm without her knowledge or consent.

So I strongly agree with Elena’s implication that the Commission made a poor decision here. But it happened because its founders are heavily connected: it launched at the World Economic Forum in Davos, and its advisors include politicians from across Europe.

Ten years ago I joined a top 100 website after working in open source social for a decade. Based on my naïve experience in open circles, I’d assumed it competed on having a great product. In fact, it hired well-connected partnerships people, already known to influential decision-makers, who worked tirelessly behind the scenes. That team included the relatives of Presidential hopefuls and people who had built wildly successful careers as media executives. Having a good product was table stakes at best; being successful meant negotiating politics, making quid-pro-quo deals, and convincing people to join by any means necessary.

W Social is the insider’s tool: a platform created people who know how to work the system for their own benefit. That ultimately means it’s more likely to betray its users. It seems likely to me that when the discourse moves away from sovereignty to something else, the founders will also shift. But it’s not a surprise to me that European politicians are more likely to work with a platform that partners with and pays people they already know.

The nice thing about open platforms is that there doesn’t need to be one winner. The European Commission has made a bad decision, but Eurosky can still find everyone else. By building better tools for the writers, the artists, the culture-makers, and onboarding people through careful outreach one community at a time, it can serve as the basis for a new social commons. I hope it succeeds.