1. Your values-driven organisation can deal with online enshittification and geopolitics - after the uncomfortable process of learning about it.

An account of where we are. In the next article, how we migrate.

The word for what is happening to the platforms your organisation uses to reach the communities it serves was coined by Cory Doctorow in 2022, adopted by the Norwegian Consumer Council in a major policy report, and cited by 29 civil society organisations in a formal letter to EU institutions earlier this year.

What enshittification means for your organisation

The concept works in three stages, and once you see them, you will recognise them in the history of every major platform you currently use.

1. A company launches a service that is genuinely useful, often free or at an artificially low price. It attracts users. It grows. The early version of Facebook did what it said: it connected people and communities. The early version of Google Search found what you were looking for. The early version of TikTok showed your content to people who wanted to see it.

2. Once enough users are locked in and feel they cannot leave, the company begins degrading the experience for users in order to benefit its own customers - advertisers, sellers, sponsors. Algorithms change. The feed fills with paid content rather than the content people chose to follow. The platform stops working for communities and starts working for whoever is paying to reach them.

3. Having locked in both users and business customers, the platform begins squeezing business customers too. It raises ad prices. It charges organisations to reach audiences that used to reach for free. At this point, everyone is trapped, and the value of the service has been transferred to the platform and its shareholders.

This is not an unfortunate trend. It is a deliberate commercial strategy. In the case of Google Search, unsealed court documents from the US v. Google LLC (2024) show that company executives discussed how much they could degrade the search product before it affected revenue. The degradation was planned.

For your organisation, the third stage looks like this: the communities you built on Meta's platforms are still there, but you can no longer reach them without payment. Organic reach for branded posts on FB has dropped to around 2%, and on Instagram to below 3.5%. The people who chose to follow your work are on Meta's platform. Your access to your own audience is rented, not owned, and the rent is rising.

Why leaving is harder than it sounds

If enshittification degrades a service, an organisation should simply move to a better one. This is how functional markets are supposed to work. Digital markets do not function this way, for reasons that are structural rather than accidental.

The first is the network effect:

A platform is only useful if the communities you need to reach are already on it. Your organisation cannot leave them if the community groups you work with coordinate through them, if the funders you report to follow your updates on Instagram, if the volunteers you recruit find you through Meta's platforms. To leave, you would need to move everyone simultaneously. This is the collective action problem, and it is the primary mechanism through which platforms maintain their hold even as they degrade.

The second is what your organisation has already invested:

The community-building, the institutional knowledge embedded in a platform's analytics, the audiences accumulated over time. Switching means starting again, and most organisations may decide that tolerating a worsening service is less costly than losing what they have built. Perhaps, in the short term.

The third is the absence of obvious alternatives:

When a platform has spent years buying up or suppressing competitors, the alternatives are less visible, less populated, and less developed. The Norwegian Consumer Council's 2026 report documents this process: out of 300 companies acquired by the five largest US technology corporations between 2015 and 2021, 64% of the products were discontinued or made inactive. The lack of alternatives is not natural. It was manufactured.

The specific exposure of UK organisations

If enshittification happens everywhere, it is worth asking why UK organisations are in a particularly exposed position.

Part of the answer is regulatory. The UK left the European Union's regulatory framework precisely as that framework was beginning to develop real enforcement power. The EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA), which came into force in 2022, requires the largest platforms to allow interoperability, portability, and fair competition. It has already forced Meta to open WhatsApp to third-party messaging services. It has stopped Google requiring consumers to use Gmail to create a Google account. It has required Apple to allow consumers to choose their own default apps. The UK has no equivalent legislation at comparable scale.

The other part of the answer is geopolitical, and it has sharpened considerably in the past year. In August 2025, the US President threatened "substantial additional tariffs" on countries that maintain digital regulations targeting American technology companies. The Office of the US Trade Representative stated in December 2025 that the US would use "every tool at its disposal" against what it called discriminatory EU enforcement. These are not abstract warnings. Canada scrapped its digital services tax hours before it was due to take effect, under direct US pressure.

The platforms your organisation depends on are owned by companies that are now explicitly instruments of US commercial and foreign policy. Your communications infrastructure sits inside a trade negotiation your organisation has no seat at.

There is a third pressure, different in character but convergent in its message, which the next post in this series addresses directly: the documented targeting of UK organisations by Russian state-aligned cyber actors. The NCSC recorded a 129% rise in nationally significant cyber incidents in the year to August 2025, and issued a specific advisory in January 2026 warning of escalating attacks on UK public sector organisations and civil society. Concentrated dependency on any single piece of infrastructure - particularly infrastructure owned by foreign companies under foreign legal jurisdiction - is a structural vulnerability that both threats expose.

What enshittification is not: Inevitable

Cory Doctorow is explicit on this point, as is the Norwegian Consumer Council's report: enshittification is the outcome of specific choices made by specific people, enabled by a specific absence of regulation and enforcement. The laws that would prevent it largely exist. They are not being enforced at the scale and speed required.

The EU is pushing for enforcement. Civil society organisations across Europe and the UK are pushing for enforcement. 

The organisations that have moved fastest to build alternatives - in their communications infrastructure, their data practices, and their community relationships - are not waiting for regulators to act on their behalf.

This series is about what those decisions look like in practice for purpose-driven organisations: the infrastructure choices, the platform decisions, and the community relationships that reduce dependency on platforms designed to extract value from the communities you serve.

The next post covers the foundations: hosting, email, website, and newsletter, and why where your data lives matters more than most organisations currently appreciate.

Sources

Norwegian Consumer Council (Forbrukerrådet). "Breaking Free: Pathways to a Fair Technological Future." February 2026. storage02.forbrukerradet.no

Forbrukerrådet and 29 civil society organisations. Letter to EU Institutions. 27 February 2026.

Doctorow, Cory. "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It." 2025.

United States v. Google LLC. US District Court for the District of Columbia. 2024.

"Alternative Social Media Platforms Businesses Are Using in 2026." DesignRush. February 2026. designrush.com (citing Social Insider benchmarks)

"EU defends sovereign right to regulate tech against Trump's latest tariff threat." Euronews. August 2025. euronews.com

"US Threatens to Strike Back Against EU Firms for Digital Tax." Transport Topics. December 2025. ttnews.com

NCSC Annual Review 2025. National Cyber Security Centre. October 2025. ncsc.gov.uk

"NCSC issues warning over hacktivist groups disrupting UK organisations and online services." NCSC. January 2026. ncsc.gov.uk