Google and Facebook reinvented advertising for the digital age, and now they own most of it. They control distribution; it is their recommendation algorithms, not editors, who decide what news you see. They are starving newsrooms of attention, readership and revenue. And media outlets are losing their monopoly over content to large language models (LLMs) like Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT, which are extracting the juice from legacy outlets and flooding social media with synthetic, derivative slop.
Every news website is being exploited for LLM training and news summarisation. Meanwhile propaganda has never been cheaper or faster to make or harder to distinguish from real news. Branko Brkic, founder and former editor of South Africa’s Daily Maverick, claims we are approaching something called the media singularity. “The platforms took all the money from the table and now they are coming back to enslave us, and authoritarianism is all over the world,” he explains over Zoom, deadly serious. “Unless the global media wakes up and takes some concentrated action, in ten years we will not exist. The New York Times will be dead, the Washington Post will be dead. The Guardian will be dead”.
Brkic is the most successful editor you’ve never heard of. He fled Yugoslavia in 1991 to escape the draft into the Yugoslav People’s Army, but he didn’t want to be a refugee. “Once a refugee, always a refugee,” he tells me from his childhood home in Belgrade, where he is visiting his mother. He picked South Africa because it was “far enough” from Slobodan Milošević and one of the few places that didn’t require visas for Yugoslav passport holders. In 2009, after doing production and a tenure as the editor of Timbila, the national parks magazine, he founded the Daily Maverick, an online news site that gained momentum with scoops like the “Gupta Leaks” that led to the resignation of former president Jacob Zuma.
“We started with a readership of 20,000 and now we have 40m,” he tells me. He stepped down as editor-in-chief last August, weeks before the Maverick announced a 15 per cent reduction in operating costs. That’s when he founded Project Kontinuum, a “United Nations” approach to the problem of media.
This plan has four acts. The first is “Choose Truth”, a media literacy campaign designed to help ordinary people understand what media actually is. It includes practical elements: an explanation of the difference between an opinion and an investigation, or highlighting the tell-tale signs of propaganda. “People think Tucker Carlson is a journalist!” Brkic exclaims. That needs to be fixed but not, he argues, through education. “Education is slow, righteous, while marketing is immediate, it’s attractive.”
Brkic was inspired by a series of commercials for milk in the United States in the 1990s, which had the tagline “Got Milk?” This well-known campaign advertised not a brand, but the general greatness of milk as a product. “Choose Truth” would advertise journalism itself. It would be disseminated globally and daily for ten years, through the unsold advertising spaces left by the crisis. Here is where the plot thickens. Brkic hopes that, through enlisting hundreds of media partners worldwide to distribute the campaign, a new coalition will be born: the Kontinuum Syndication network.
Once established, the network would launch a second campaign to “define the authoritarian big tech alliance as a threat to civilisation and create an alternative media ecosystem”. That is the second act. In the third, Kontinuum becomes a “no-algorithm social network” called “The News Social”.
Ever since Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, the quest for a healthier social platform for news has haunted the internet. Global users remain undecided between three inconclusive attempts: the decentralised Mastodon, Jack Dorsey’s Bluesky and Meta’s Threads. None has yet managed to attract the critical mass of journalists, politicians, entertainers, experts, corporations and other organisations that made the Twitter experience so uniquely effervescent.
In ethical terms, Mastodon was the most promising, but it feels developer-oriented and still struggles with design issues caused by its federated system—such as difficulty in finding or following users across the various servers that the platform runs from. Bluesky is, in the view of some, too “woke”. Threads claimed more than 100m daily active users within ten days of its launch, but it gained those users too quickly, largely due to its integration with Instagram, and lost 70 per cent of them in just a few days. By mid-2025, the Threads mobile app for iOS and Android showed 115m daily active users worldwide, while X still reached 132m. Bluesky reports almost 40m and Mastodon has dropped below one million.
Despite credible evidence that Musk has altered X’s algorithm to promote his own posts and those of his allies, and despite its openly declared war against news outlets, X retains a global audience of 650m monthly active users, including 36.6 per cent in the premium 25-34 age group. The Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2025 indicates a significant shift: “Since Elon Musk took over, many more right-leaning people, notably young men, have flocked to the network, while some progressive audiences have left or are using it less frequently.” Yet it remains the leading social platform for news updates compared to rival networks. According to the Reuters report, Threads, Bluesky and Mastodon are making little impact globally, with only 2 per cent of users reaching out for news, clicking through links to read news coverage outside of platforms.
Project Kontinuum’s aim is to build a “safe, global, social news media space for real news makers, empowered readers and quality advertising brands”, says Brkic. An experience free from harrassment, unwanted content, abuse or violence, and all without outrage or algorithmic addiction and manipulation. There is no such thing as a no-algorithm platform, but users could have a newsfeed organised by journalists or trusted editors, and and ordered chronologically by publication date and time . The current algorithm-curated content diet is based on demographics, “likes,” shares, outrage or viral triggers.
Reaching Brkic’s utopia involves resolving challenges that have dogged the industry for years. Some are technical, such as how to implement robust identity and verification systems to prevent bots, trolls and mischievous users from exploiting others, without excluding anonymity where needed. Some are economic, such as implementing moderation at scale without sacrificing real human oversight. Even with the fact-checking standards ideally provided by the Kontinuum partners, context-aware filtering is hard (and expensive) to do. We still need humans to distinguish between legitimate discussion, satire and harmful misinformation. Brkic doesn’t know how to overcome all of this: “I am a content person, not a tech person.” He leaves such dilemmas to the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa.
Maria Ressa comes from the future. She founded digital news outlet Rappler in 2012, four years before Rodrigo Duterte became president of the Philippines. She has since endured years of relentless harassment by his government. Duterte publicly labelled Rappler a “fake news outlet” and banned her from all presidential events. He revoked their corporate registration over allegations of foreign ownership, filed tax evasion charges and finally arrested her over alleged cyber libel under his Cybercrime Prevention Act. She has remained on bail while fighting her convictions in court; several cases have since been dismissed. In 2021, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize jointly with the Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov for “their efforts to safeguard freedom of expression”. She met Brkic last year, when he became the presenting partner and creative lead of the annual World News Day.
Originally coordinated by the Canadian Journalism Foundation and the World Editors Forum, World News Day is held on 28th September, Unesco’s International Day for Universal Access to Information. In 2024, Brkic and Ressa co-authored an open letter that was published by more than a hundred newsrooms and media partners. That’s when the idea of the syndication network came about. In 2025, they counted more than 1,000 participants, including news organisations, media support associations and big outlets like the New York Times, Financial Times and CBS.
I reach Ressa on the day CBS’s parent company, Paramount, pays Donald Trump $16m to settle a lawsuit launched by the president over editorial decisions regarding a 2024 interview with Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris. “The same thing happened in the Philippines with ABS-CBN, our largest news group,” she tells me. “They didn’t survive.” Initially, Rappler utilised platforms such as Facebook and what was then known as Twitter to crowdsource stories and engage with its communities. It was the peak of the “Twitter and Facebook revolution” narrative, following Facebook’s role in sparking the 2011 protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square during the Arab Spring. Then it became apparent that platforms were weaponised by authoritarian powers for surveillance, disinformation and the amplification of hate speech.
“If you don’t have information integrity you can’t have rule of law, because law and justice sit on top of facts,” she says. “If our information ecosystem remains as polluted and corrupted as it is, then you’re going to definitely see the world fall into a fascist phase.”
Five years ago, she started working on what she calls a “public interest tech stack”. In tech parlance, a “stack” is the collection of interdependent layers of software, hardware, rules and infrastructure that together make platforms work. For Ressa, a public interest stack is an internet that doesn’t exploit and monetise its users. She began by building a chat app on Matrix, a secure, decentralised, open-source messaging protocol—a set of technical rules that allows machines to talk to each other—favoured by privacy-conscious organisations like Germany’s armed forces or the country’s parliament.
The internet is, in fact, a web of protocols that lets billions of different devices communicate with each other. Matrix is like a public chat system where people can create different apps. Messages, calls, and chat data travel securely between those apps directly, without handing their data to a single company. It offers an alternative to centralised, proprietary, cloud-based, data-hungry solutions like Microsoft Teams or Slack.
Ressa dreams of a federation of apps from different newsrooms, all sitting on the Matrix protocol, “like a co-op for news”. She imagines it like the Internet Governance Forum, a global UN platform on whose leadership panel she currently serves. Open-source means the code behind it is readable, reusable and auditable. Only transparency can guard against backdoors, buried flaws, and quiet partnerships with agencies such as America’s National Security Agency and GCHQ.
Secure means all communications are encrypted so no one but the intended recipients of a message, including the app itself, can read or hear any of it. Decentralised means that it is not dependent on a single person, company or server to work. This is network topology 101: when power and responsibility are evenly distributed across all participants, there’s no single point of failure, surveillance or control.
These values align with Project Kontinuum’s mission, but the way ahead is still difficult. Brkic envisions a system where anyone can comment, yet discussions must be initiated by newsmakers—journalists, politicians and, as he puts it, “the Red Crosses of the world”. The platform would be free of ads and algorithms, meaning it will lack recommendation algorithms based on engagement and clicks. Users will own their content. Those are design choices that can be implemented. No one knows if they would work.
Whether the system can be effectively protected from disinformation and “the tsunami of AI-generated content” is not only a technical problem but also a philosophical one. In its latest report, the Reuters Institute found that politicians, media outlets and online personalities are some of the main sources of false and misleading information. And AI is being integrated into newsrooms, with the promise of faster, cheaper journalism. If the alliance wants to enforce strict standards, who will make the cut?
It’s the Fox News Problem: traditional media outlets with institutional legitimacy that amplify misleading or partisan narratives. Brkic says he would work with the likes of Fox News “but we are free of fake news and synthetic propaganda outlets and influence operations platforms created in commercial and state-sponsored content farms.” And there is the money. Project Kontinuum is a non-profit, and its founder thinks it should forever remain so. Brkic is raising money to fund the campaign, which is harder than a decade ago.
“Trump took $250m out of the system,” he laments. Under the first Trump administration, the US government took a significant bite out of the international programs that historically supported independent journalism, media development, press freedom and civil society abroad. The budget from the US Agency for Global Media was gutted, increasing competition for a smaller pool of available journalism grants. Even the Open Society Foundations, a major funder of independent journalism and media literacy in South Africa, downsized operations in countries from the Global South to relocate most resources to fighting disinformation and hate speech in the US.
If the alliance makes it through the mountains and gets to the gates, there’s still one final question: will an algorithm-free platform be fun enough to hold people’s attention? In Brkic’s vision, media reform isn’t even the endgame, it’s a means to fighting other good fights. The first three acts are really a prelude, prologue and scaffolding for a fourth, final act: a climate awareness campaign called Eve of Destruction, which would feature all over the Kontinuum network. The real battle, he believes, is for the planet.
