Tech file: Social-Media Empires Starting To Crumble

“When a dreamer alienated by the big social networks would start a new one, the internet would make fun of them for a while and then let the thing die in peace,” Ben Smith recalls at BuzzFeed. But now something’s changed: “Having grown unprecedentedly large,” networks like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter “became toxic and subject to manipulation. The attempts to rein in the ultimately ungovernable has meant that the platforms may become more like launching pads, spinning off niche networks of the disaffected.” We were riveted by Facebook’s congressional hearings, Smith says, but “it is possible that scale and centralization are just yesterday’s and today’s problems in this landscape of media and politics. Tomorrow’s may involve the birth of a fragmented new ecosystem with no Silicon Valley headquarters and no executives to grill.”