Notable links: November 6, 2026

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

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How an obscure website became a force in America’s election information machine

There hasn’t been enough discussion about the proliferation of reference sites that are built not for humans but to influence chatbot answers. Take the Ballot Brief, which was designed to influence questions about the election:

“In tests by The Washington Post, ChatGPT cited the Ballot Brief in 22 percent of its answers to questions about the election. Microsoft’s Copilot cited it in 75 percent of answers. […] Anthropic’s Claude initially turned to established voter guides run by nonprofits — but started frequently linking to the Ballot Brief in The Post’s second round of tests.”

The Ballot Brief is, in itself, built using AI, with one guy — Ben Torres Ezrick — in control. Here in the US, 42% of adults use AI to ask questions, including about the election. That gives Torres Ezrick outsize influence on information people receive that may influence how they use their vote. Given that Torres Ezrick’s most recent position was Chief Marketing Officer at the far-right video streaming service Rumble, that should probably give us some pause.

And even without that potential rightward skew, the Ballot Brief consists of a bunch of content created at scale using AI with little oversight. So inevitably, there are mistakes:

“The Post identified numerous mistakes on the Ballot Brief. Sen. Jon Husted (R-Ohio) was credited with supporting a bill that passed before he took office — an error that Copilot repeated in a response to The Post. Two Robert Garcias running in California were collapsed into one profile. And several House members were listed with incorrect committee jobs.”

The web has already been insufferable for years because of SEO; this has only gotten worse with the rise of AI-generated marketing content. Now it stands to become a battleground as various entrenched interests fight to have their perspectives represented in chatbot results.

Should newsrooms counteract this with their own set of open, validated information? Or is it an unwinnable arms race that is bound to be dominated by moneyed interests? I’m not sure. But the web is certainly no longer just a place for humans to publish and be heard.

Creating a New Internet Bargain to Preserve Fair Use and Protect the Commons

This should be required reading for everyone in news, but also anyone who cares about a healthy knowledge commons:

Two of the most important organizations advocating for a healthy information economy, Public Knowledge and Creative Commons, have produced an important document that describes the threats and some potential solutions.

I particularly appreciated their definition of what they call defensive enclosure. In a world where their content is being scraped for someone else’s profit — and robots.txt files are being ignored at least 30% of the time, while almost nobody is using AI-specific exclusion standards — publishers are more likely to hide their content away. In turn, this has created its own ecosystem of tools, many of which have the potential to also be centralized and monopolistic.

As their article summarizes the problem:

“The blunt tools in use on either side of the AI developer/rights holder divide are serving to shrink the knowledge commons and erode its quality. This isn’t theoretical, AI-doomer prognosticating about some imagined AI future. The digital knowledge commons is contracting at an alarming rate, driven by the rise of AI model developers that have transformed openly shared content into a high-value industrial input and the defensive response of rights holders who are rapidly restricting access through legal, technical, and contractual means.”

This is not just a problem for us humans who would like to learn and build on each other’s work; AI model developers themselves rely on this information to train their future products. They, too, should be invested in solving the problem.

The challenge is that for newsrooms and other publishers, this enclosure is completely rational. The desire to not be intermediated from their communities is based on a need to serve them well and to achieve financial sustainability. To them, these blunt instruments are tools to ward off an existential threat. But, of course, that then has an adverse effect on the knowledge ecosystem as a whole: there’s an enclosure movement in progress, and the battle is really over who is building the fences.

So it’s interesting to read the angle these two organizations take here. They take the stance that training on content is fair use (which has been found in, for example, Bartz v. Anthropic). They also want to protect public-interest scraping, which would allow researchers and journalists (among others) to continue gathering information, and reject legislation that restricts bot activity without the public in mind. Instead, they favor a bigger swing: renegotiating the broad economic framework of the web itself to move the incentives away from enclosure.

They think solutions may involve some combination of public policy and innovation around data governance. The question is really: what does that mean in practice? How might we shift the web’s value exchange in order to promote open publishing? And — beyond the public good — whose interests are aligned with that?

Without a concrete answer, publishers will keep blocking, and AI vendors will keep strip-mining. That’s a path that will lead to a much more restricted information commons, to the detriment of all of us.

How Can Wikipedians Overcome Leadership Succession Crises? Lessons from the Invasion of Ukraine

An interesting dive into what happened to the Ukrainian Wikipedia in the aftermath of the 2022 Russian invasion, told with characteristic care by CAT Lab’s J. Nathan Matias.

“Inside Ukraine, people desperately needed to understand the changing circumstances of the war. Outside of Ukraine, the world flocked to information sources like Wikipedia to learn about the people and places facing the violence we saw on our screens. In the weeks following the invasion, viewership of the Ukrainian language Wikipedia increased by millions.”

At the same time, as you might expect under the circumstances, the number of active contributors plummeted. Wikipedia lives or dies based on its contributions and its editorial process — and Ukrainian attention was diverted elsewhere. Still, a dedicated core remained, and stories like the librarian who contributed edits from a bomb shelter are remarkable.

But the point here isn’t just to highlight the dedication of the volunteers keeping trustworthy information online even as the immediate world around them succumbed to war. It’s a lesson about succession. Our information ecosystem is vulnerable to a diminishing pipeline of administrators, editors, and dedicated contributors; the number of admins in particular is shrinking across Wikipedia. How can we fix that?

In Ukraine, they added a new probationary admin role:

“To fill the urgent need for admins, the Ukrainian Wikipedia created a “temporary administrator role” the day after the invasion. Rather than use their normal extended discussion and voting process, leaders quickly appointed new admins after a 3 day discussion period and [gave] a probationary period of 1-2 months, with the option to extend.”

They basically created an apprenticeship, designed to try someone out, help teach them the skills, and most importantly, demonstrate and build trust. (It also had a quick escape hatch if they turned out to be untrustworthy.) The result: 20% more admins within months.

The full post dives into the lessons to be learned for organizations like Wikipedia in useful detail. There are deeper lessons to be learned for other community spaces too, including in news and journalism. The stat about non-profits without leadership succession being around three times more likely to close is striking; how many non-profit newsrooms have a plan in place?

We often talk about building the organizations and the platform stacks that they depend on. We talk less about ensuring there’s a pipeline for succession to safeguard their sustainability — or the layers of carefully designed community-building and socialization that this requires.

Every leader should be engaged in the work of planning for succession and, ideally, designing their own obsolescence — even when times are hard. That’s as true for volunteer organizations like Wikipedia and organic online communities as anywhere else.

Rest of World faces prospect of shutting down

I was distraught to hear that Rest of World may have to shut down in January. Since its launch, I’ve relied on its coverage about the impact of technology and the tech industry on communities and geographies that often fall outside of a Western lens. And I’ve become a huge fan of its Chief Product Officer Michael Donohoe, who I think is one of the best product and engineering people working in journalism (or in any industry). Working with a small team, he’s built a site and underlying tech that punches way above its weight.

On one level, the forces that have created issues for Rest of World aren’t unique to it: declining search and social referrals, intermediation by AI chatbots, and a fixation with the Trump administration at the expense of other topics.

But then, as Semafor reports, Rest of World had a unique problem in that its audience was partially the tech industry itself, which has shifted to become more insular and conservative:

“The organization’s leaders also attributed the decline to a deeper cultural shift to the right within the tech community. One senior leader at the organization said they believe tech news readers who previously expressed liberal values and an appetite for consuming global journalism have grown disillusioned with the news media, and now prefer an information diet of inward-looking podcasts, YouTube shows, and chatbot outputs.”

This coincided with a tonal shift in coverage of the tech industry from typically fairly optimistic, glowing pieces about connection and innovation to criticism about oligarchy and the role of tech power in the global rise of authoritarianism. Looking at Rest of World’s homepage today, many headlines are now about how communities around the world are being either taken advantage of by American AI firms or left out of AI developments.

That’s vital coverage, in my opinion, and makes Rest of World required reading for me — but for an industry that likes to be praised for changing the world and is bad at engaging with criticism, it might be a tough read. Semafor notes that the likes of Wired and The Verge, which also produce excellent coverage, are suffering from the same problem (although I’ve also heard that Wired’s subscriptions are growing).

What’s surprising to me is that Rest of World should also be required reading for a whole slew of foundations and NGOs that want to make a positive impact globally, as well as investors looking to support ventures in underserved markets. Clearly this either isn’t happening or it’s not happening in a way that converts into the kind of financial support the newsroom needs.

It’s also, in a way, a warning about newsrooms started by founders with deep pockets. Sophie Schmidt (Eric Schmidt’s daughter) committed $60M to Rest of World a months into its launch. That gave it both a solid mission and an enormous runway that may have made it harder to test and pivot. It did pivot, to focus more on countries that Western readers might be more interested in, as well as to require user registration as a way to know its audience better, but it was relatively late in its life. I’m very grateful for the resulting coverage but I think it would be worth having an open conversation about whether those funds helped or hindered its ability to become sustainable in the long run.

Anyway, I hope it finds a home. I badly want it to continue to exist. For me, it’s the best tech journalism there is.

And more:

Here are some of the articles I didn't get a chance to go into in depth this week.

Bluesky hit peak usage for the year on election night

I adore Bluesky and I'm always surprised when people I know aren't on it. It's a community of people that genuinely care about news and information. Newsrooms should know that they disproportionately engage with and support trustworthy journalism. And it's where many of us looked for a backchannel during the night of the midterms.

Building Opportunities: One Year Since The First App

The Newsmast Foundation now powers 16 community apps for journalists and activists around the world, all powered by the open social web. Pretty impressive; pretty cool.

The Tech Bros Who Bet On Fascism Lost. Don’t Let The Internet Pay For It.

A warning against letting the justified backlash to tech oligarchy curdle into regulation that punishes the open internet itself. The distinction between Big Tech and the web matters enormously – but do legislators understand the difference?

Almost no one uses AI agents to book their Uber, company says

Also see a similar note from DoorDash. That doesn't necessarily mean it won't happen – but it's not happening right now, despite the hype. Have the people building and funding AI agents done the research due diligence to know if this actually solves a problem for anyone?

Y Combinator’s Garry Tan uses AI agents so much, he spends up to $200K a year on tokens

The absolutely unhinged counterpoint to the above. But there's a real point here: it costs too much, the technical overhead is enormous, and this is a pastime for the privileged.

Want to Rent an Internet Address at the White House?

"Several staffers at the White House are using computers or mobile devices equipped with residential proxy services that render their internet address available for others to rent, security experts warned today. One of the proxy services is a Russian company whose founder’s web hosting business was ground zero for cyberattacks against election systems in Arizona and Illinois in 2016." Seems bad. But, by the way, do you know for a fact this isn't happening at your office too?

Voters Rejected A.I. in the Midterms. Now Comes an Era of Scrutiny.

"Despite record donations by tech executives to tech-friendly candidates, voters chose a new Democratic leadership raring to investigate the cozy ties between A.I. companies and the administration." This isn't about tech so much as it is abuses of wealth and power.