Closing the Stanford Internet Observatory will edge the US towards the end of democracy | John Naughton

The organisation responsible for monitoring digital falsehoods is reportedly being wound down after pressure from Republicans and conspiracy theorists

For most of us, the word medium" means a channel or system of communication, information, or entertainment". For a biologist, though, the term means something rather different: the nutrient solution in which cells or organs are grown". But there are times when the two conceptions fuse, and we're living in one such time now.

How come? All developed societies have a media ecosystem, the information environment in which they exist. Until comparatively recently that ecosystem was dominated by print technology. Then, in the mid-20th century, broadcast (few-to-many) technology arrived, first as radio and later as television, which, from the 1950s to the 1990s, was the dominant communication medium of the age. And then came the internet and the technologies it has spawned, of which the dominant one is the world wide web.