Keeping Facebook in order
There has been a lot of handwringing lately about how to stop Facebook spreading fake news and misinformation.
The social media giant may help you connect with old friends and share memes but it’s also helping to erode democracy, incite hatred and spread lies.
Tech and social media experts have recently been sharing their views on how to stop this.
They suggest forcing the company to be more transparent about its algorithms, removing the ‘‘like’’ button as it’s too emotive and enforcing the use of real names.
Those ideas may help but the best solution is to treat it like a media organisation.
That’s because, like a newspaper or a news website, Facebook publishes information. It should, therefore, be subject to similar rules.
Those rules could be based on how the New Zealand Press Council operates, though you’d need a few tweaks.
The Press Council oversees media companies and has the power to force publishers to run an apology in a prominent way.
It’s not perfect but it is a good template to use for tech companies which are publishers, such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter, so anyone could make a complaint about a defamatory post or incorrect information.
If found guilty, Facebook would then need to issue a public apology into every news feed. I’d also suggest paying a fine which could fund the regulation.
It would be up to Facebook, which publishes about 2000 questionable posts a day, to decide how it reprimands the person or organisation making the post.
Adhering to these rules would be time-consuming and expensive for Facebook but are necessary to make it take responsibility.
Once you had regulation in place that held Facebook to account, it would then, hopefully, make internal changes to stop the problematic posts from appearing.
Facebook has had 10 years of living in the digital wild west. It has repeatedly failed to fix the problem so now it’s time for regulation.
There’s no reason Facebook shouldn’t have to live by our, and other countries’, media and tax laws – the future of our democracy may depend on it.
Facebook has had 10 years of living in the digital wild west.