Making good on Facebook's threat to Australia
by Chris ZapponeFacebook’s threat to block Australia from news on its platform comes at an opportune time.
As social media-enabled chaos disrupts the political order of the US, Australia should think about the role it wants social media to play in forming political opinions at home.
From Donald Trump’s tweets, to anti-5G protests, to QAnon – the rising trend of conspiracy theory is a cost imposed on society by social media – different yet relevant to the financial consideration sought by Australia from the Big Tech platforms.
Under the proposed reforms, technology platforms like Facebook and Google would be forced to reimburse Australia's media companies for use of their articles and allow their algorithms to be scrutinised for their effects on consumers and the market. The government hopes to pass the bill before the end of the year.
Silicon Valley’s tug-of-war with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission over the proposed news media bargaining code should prompt the bigger question of whether this technology – including Facebook – supports or hinders a stable democracy and society?
Despite Facebook’s professed “reluctance” to block Australian media, splitting news from social media would help solve the problem of disinformation and conspiracy theory we’re experiencing in society.
It would create a firewall of sorts in the first line and last line of defence against tainted information: the human mind.
We would know that if it’s on Facebook it would be for fun, for friends, and easily fake.
If it’s on a news website, it would be researched, edited, vetted and balanced.
Dividing information this way would help us build our understanding of the world in a new digital age.
Blocking Australian news would be an experiment certainly but maybe not as risky as you would expect.
Jason Kint CEO of Digital Content Next, a US-based trade group for trusted digital content told The Age: “If Facebook blocked all news, it would certainly impact traffic to news publishers in the short term and likely revenue to an extent but long-term it's less clear as behaviours will modify to get to trusted news.”
The public would adapt and stop looking for news on Facebook. Something similar happened in 2014 when, after Spain passed a law requiring Google to pay a licence for the news it aggregated on its site.
Google News shut down its site for the country, yet, the web traffic to the Spanish news sites mostly survived, analysis shows.
Perhaps, the greater risk for Australia is to not split news from Facebook. Already we watch how conspiracy theory consumes more of our attention in the newsroom. Reporting on it presents a problem of how not to legitimise it, spread it, and advance it.
There is a fundamental confusion over the aims of news and social media.
News, vetted, verified, and fact-checked before publication gives us an accounting of the world that orders our reality and appeals to our reasoning mind. We can then have a debate about a shared reality and its political imperatives.
By design, social media personalises our experience of the world, appealing to our emotions in the process. For that reason, on social media, things that aren’t true such as conspiracy theory, misinformation, disinformation, rumours, can spread as easily as any other shared feeling or delusion.
“Social media incentivises users to engage with ‘hot’ and emotional topics,” says David Golumbia, Associate Professor in the Department of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, who has studied the ideology of computing.
This rush for the hot topic – which invariably rewards extremism, conspiracy theory and – is “baked into” platforms like Facebook, he said.
“In many ways the whole point is to bypass the cooler, more rational parts of our minds, which are the parts that all the Enlightenment discourse about democracy” that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg champions, Golumbia told me.
And a reason-based public discussion is at the heart of a democracy.
As a journalist working in Australia, I have an interest in the outcome of the ACCC’s news media bargaining code, perhaps even a financial one. But as a citizen here, I have a perhaps more profound interest in living in a functioning democracy.
Look at the role social media – led by Facebook – has in the political debate in the US.
Who wants that for Australia?
Facebook, in making their threat, says: “The ACCC presumes that Facebook benefits most in its relationship with publishers, when in fact the reverse is true.”
But really, the media is increasingly called upon to do fact-checks of the misinformation flowing on social media.
Who pays for that?
Like Justin Hendrix, Executive Director of NYC Media Lab observed quite rightly: “Trudging through oceans of disinformation increasingly falls to journalists – a kind of 'tax' on the news media, labour to deal with an externality of big tech firms that essentially goes unpaid.”
For this reason, keeping Australian news on Facebook, and allowing it to be muddied by social media’s disinformation, is a step backward for our political debate overall.
In this way, Facebook’s threat to block Australia’s news sounds more like an opportunity to me.
Would demanding Facebook exit Australia’s news be too great of an experiment?
Before you answer, remember: we’ve been living in an experiment on our democracy for 15 years – but the scientists running the laboratory are the unelected and unaccountable engineers in Silicon Valley.