Image: Hrag Vartanian/Flickr, Creative Commons License.
During the course of 2017, the large ‘big tech’ internet intermediaries have come under an unprecedented degree of scrutiny worldwide. Facebook posts and Google search listings have come under fire as enablers of so-called ‘fake news’ and propaganda by extremist, terrorist and hate groups, with Facebook’s role in ‘dark advertising’ by hostile foreign powers particularly in the spotlight. Google’s YouTube has been hit by a backlash from advertisers. Google is currently fighting a heavy European Commission fine for steering customers to its own platform.
But the dominance of Facebook and Google on digital and particularly mobile markets continues to grow, outpacing all others. They are the main recipients of the growth of digital and mobile advertising revenue in the UK, at the expense of the rest of the media landscape.
