FB, Twitter: Platforms or media companies?

CLASSIFICATION OF SOCIAL MEDIA COMPANIES IS KEY SINCE THEY ARE AT PRESENT BEYOND THE REGULATIONS THAT EXTENDS TO MEDIA COMPANIES, WHILE HAVING MASS IMPACT

NEW DELHI: Twitter’s decision to take down several posts in relation to the farm protests and its criticism has brought the spotlight back on a crucial debate relating to how social media companies are classified: they claim to be technology platforms, but how they moderate – and curate by way of algorithmic prioritisation — their content is similar to editorial decisions exercised by media companies.

On Thursday for instance, the social media company took down tweets of Bollywood actor Kangana Ranaut. Earlier in the week, it temporarily blocked some accounts in India before unblocking them on the grounds that the company believes in “protecting public conversation and transparency”, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named. “We have taken action on tweets that were in violation of the Twitter rules in line with our range of enforcement options,” a Twitter spokesperson said in a statement. that they cannot be held liable for good-faith efforts to hide, remove or filter user-generated content. This law has been regarded as the bedrock for an open, free internet. tion in the contemporary media ecosystem” they write.

In the paper, Napoli and Caplan argue that traditional media roles of “1) production (exemplified by content creators such as news outlets and television studios); 2) distribution (the process of moving content from producers towards consumers); and, 3) exhibition (the process of providing content directly to audiences)” have now merged and evolved due to digitization of media.

They also target the defence that computer code is responsible for editorial functions, and that there is no human intervention. “The asserted absence of direct human editorial involvement helps to further this perception of distance from, and/or neutrality in, the content selection process — a model that is presumably fundamentally different from the kind of direct (and human) editorial discretion that has been a defining characteristic of traditional media companies.”

But, they add, “simply because the mechanisms for exercising editorial discretion — for gatekeeping — have changed doesn’t mean that the fundamental institutional identity of the gatekeepers should be recast”.

A crucial similarity between these social media companies and media companies is the centrality of advertising as a revenue source, Napoli and Caplan write.