Is it hypocritical for news publishers to complain about tech companies’ platforms — but still be on them?

There is nothing publishers like more than to complain about platforms. Specifically, the tech giants whose apps are on your phone — right where they’d rather you had The Daily Gazette’s app installed.

Sometimes the complaints are couched in terms of theft — theft of ad dollars, theft of audience, theft of content. Sometimes it’s about power — the unparalleled reach they have into the minds of humanity. They’re like tollbooths plopped down onto the open internet, so deeply ingrained in modern life that they’re nigh unavoidable. (Go ahead, try to go a week without somehow engaging with a Google product. Heck, even a day.) There are few problems in contemporary journalism that a motivated publisher couldn’t somehow blame on Facebook.

But despite all those complaints, you don’t see a massive publisher exodus from these platforms. Sure, pulling your site from Google search isn’t a feasible option for a media company in 2026. But publishers still, for the most part, dedicate precious resources to filling up Facebook, Twitter, and the rest with #content. Despite the profound asymmetry in the relationships, news companies still feed those beasts.

Does that make them hypocrites? Or is it that their disdain for the platforms, while potent, is still weaker than other interests they think the platforms can help them achieve? That’s the question raised by a new comment paper, just published in Digital Journalism, by our old friend (and frequent predictor) Rasmus Kleis Nielsen. Its title is “Do News Media Want to Disentangle from Platforms?” and here’s part of the abstract:

Publishers have both principled and practical reasons to want to disentangle themselves from platforms and the companies behind them, but in most cases do not prioritize this, because there are other things they want more, in particular audience reach and incremental revenue. That is the hypothesis I offer here, where I briefly outline why the fraught entanglements that publishers and journalists often express their frustration with are often in practice reproduced, reinforced, and replicated…

I suggest such continued engagement is not hypocrisy, but an example of how publishers navigate complex tradeoffs, choosing “freedom to” leverage platform opportunities for audience reach and revenue over “freedom from” platform dependencies and the accompanying contingency.

My hypothesis is that most publishers, their principled objections notwithstanding, in practice continue to work with platforms because they have other priorities they value more than disentanglement, and suggest the balance between entanglement and disentanglement is an important area for further empirical work.

Now, whenever I hear people call news orgs hypocritical for still being on platforms, my first thought goes to the Matt Bors comic featuring “Mister Gotcha,” a highly annoying young man who likes nothing better than to point out people complaining while also existing in the real world.

I mean, expecting publishers to turn into pure techno-ascetics because they don’t like Mark Zuckerberg’s ad model is a bit much. They live in a digital reality that doesn’t reward abstinence. But Nielsen notes that publishers don’t just exist on the platforms — they often shape their content for them. They write keyword-dense headlines for Google’s algorithm and curate cute photos for Facebook’s. They buy ads on the very platforms they hate to promote their own work. They create special customized content just for TikTok or Snapchat or Instagram or YouTube. (Some are even on Mastodon, for crying out loud.)

“Despite decades of concern over the lack of a direct link between off-site distribution and revenue, they generally post this content for free, with no licensing fees or other forms of direct payment,” Nielsen writes. “They actively engage with these platforms on precisely the terms of trade — content in return for reach — that many of them have for so long and so often labeled as unacceptable.”

And the return on much of publishers’ investment has been strikingly limited. Twitter never drove much traffic, even before whatever Elon Musk has done to it. It’s one thing to sell out your editorial strategy for 2015-era Facebook traffic. But today, only about 4% of publishers’ traffic comes from Facebook, according to Chartbeat data. And as Meta has shown in Australia and Canada, Facebook would be happy to be rid of news.

If we focus on what they do, rather than what they sometimes say, [news publishers] are generally not seeking to disentangle themselves from platform power. This is not because they would not, in principle, like to. It is because they, in practice, value the opportunities for reach and revenue that platforms offer more.

Nielsen looks specifically at two outlets that have as much institutional power as any, the BBC and The New York Times. If anyone can disentangle, surely it’s these relative titans. But the BBC “has been very explicit” about its intent to invest more in platforms, not less, with director-general Tim Davie pledging last year to continue “dramatically increasing our News presence on platforms like YouTube and TikTok” and seeking “new, major partnerships with the world-leading big tech companies.” And the Times jumps on every new social media platform that gains even a little oxygen.

He frames this apparent tension as a conflict between “freedom from” and “freedom to.” Disentanglement implies freedom from the many tentacles of platforms; publishers are more interested in the freedom to use them, only with more agency than they enjoy today. The twin goals of nearly every media company — bigger audiences, higher revenues — can happily align with the interests of tech companies sometimes. But only sometimes. They pull out their rhetorical bullhorn when attacking big tech makes sense, and they partner with them when that makes sense.

Nielsen makes a strong argument, as he always does, but if I might offer a couple notes:

— There are many more ways to disentangle from platforms than to stop posting on Bluesky, and I’d argue we’ve seen more aggressive attempts at disentanglement in recent years than he acknowledges.

After all, the industry’s overarching shift in revenue models away from advertising and toward subscriptions over the past decade is a clear attempt to become less reliant on a digital ad business overwhelmingly dominated by Google, Meta, and a few other tech giants. Publishers increasingly see their social media presence as lead generation, a top-of-the-funnel strategy for a subscription model.

Publishers’ investments in newsletters and podcasts are strategies that aim to get the benefits of social media-style distribution while retaining a direct relationship to the audience — which is what the platforms won’t provide. On the business side, every push for first-party data is an attempt to route around the damage of ad tech companies. Disentanglement isn’t just about protesting a platform’s rapaciousness — it’s also a way to build sustainability.

— The BBC and the Times may be on every social platform, but I don’t see that in conflict with their editorial or business strategies. As a public service broadcaster, the BBC has a mission of ubiquity baked in; they want to be everywhere. When Tim Davie spoke of “dramatically increasing our News presence on platforms like YouTube and TikTok,” the next words out of his mouth were “to ensure we have a stronger position amidst the noise.” (When news leaves a platform, it’s rarely something better that takes its place.) And the Times was willing to remove all its content from Apple News, the English-speaking world’s most popular news app, when they saw it as a risk to their own subscriptions’ premium positioning.

— He only mentions AI in passing, but it’s by far the most important publishers-vs.-platforms battle happening right now. And publishers have been notably more aggressive in denying ChatGPT et al. access to their content than they’ve ever been with Google or Facebook. Every day, it seems, there’s a new report of publisher lawsuits or blocking AI crawlers. It’s not the strategy I would have chosen, but there’s every indication that publishers are serious about being willing — anxious, even — to sit out Silicon Valley’s latest generation of content vacuums. I think publishers see the major AI labs as a chance at a do-over, and it’s more of a break from past platform relations than a continuity.