Three stories today about who controls the platform — and what happens when that control gets used to suppress, exploit, or monopolize. The BBC commissioned a documentary about health care in Gaza, the journalists spent months convincing their sources to trust the network, and then the BBC refused to broadcast it. The sources, it turns out, predicted this exactly (Reveal). Meanwhile, Amazon tried to sponsor Paris’s major book festival — the same Amazon accused of flooding its own marketplace with AI-generated titles propped up by fake reviews — and France’s booksellers were not having it. Amazon’s sponsorship was quietly “mutually agreed” to an end (The Guardian). And after years of DOJ pressure, Live Nation has settled its antitrust case: Ticketmaster will now be required to open parts of its platform to rival ticketing companies (Politico).
Glasgow, once one of Europe’s great arts cities, is losing venue after venue — and the young creatives who study there are asking why they’d stay (The Guardian (UK)). A familiar story, playing out in a city that used to be the exception.
On the more cheerful end: an opera singer whose career stalled started filming himself belting arias in a car lot, in his name tag, with custom lyrics about the vehicles. He’s now viral (Seattle Times). Timothée Chalamet, take note.
All of our stories below.
