How Platform Power Is Undermining Journalism’s Democratic Role

As newsrooms downsize and creators hustle for attention on platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and X, for many publics the lines between journalism and the creator economy is collapsing. At the same time, disinformation flourishes in systems that reward speed, emotion, and engagement over accuracy and accountability.

Based on interviews with journalists, social media editors, and independent news creators in the United States, this piece shows how platform algorithms and unstable business models now define journalistic work. Across newsrooms and creator spaces, workers describe low pay, unpaid labor, constant visibility pressure, and dependence on opaque platforms that can change the rules overnight. These labor conditions affect journalism and shape what kinds of news get produced and how effectively credible information can circulate.

The result is an information ecosystem where precarity fuels vulnerability to disinformation. Strengthening democratic resilience requires confronting journalism’s labor crisis and the platform logics that undermine it together.

Now, what would help?

• Structural: Expand public funding for independent journalism and creator-led news to support alternative business models and fairer platform payment systems.

• Labor & representation: Strengthen protections through collaborations between creator councils and traditional unions, creator branches within unions, and pro-creator language in collective agreements (as seen in recent freelance journalism and SAG-AFTRA influencer provisions).

• Platform governance: Introduce accountability reforms to ensure fair monetization, transparency, and equitable treatment of public-interest and politically sensitive news content.

Without these interventions, journalism’s economic viability—and its democratic role—will continue to erode under platform capitalism.

Read more in Errol Salamon, Monica Crawford and my new open access New Media & Society article.