Content is always political
Some tech companies might view it as a Catch-22. For years they have faced a barrage of demands that they clean up their act, rooting out so-called disinformation to prevent it distorting everything from politics to medicine.
The problem is, as soon as they intervene, they face another barrage of criticism: that they have become overmighty – arbiters of what is and isn’t true or, at worst, digital censors.
Nothing could be more sensitive, then, than a platform such as Twitter intervening essentially to mark out the comments of the democratically elected president of the United States as rubbish. Hours later, Donald Trump retaliated by saying he would sign an executive order targeting social media companies.
While Twitter merely directs its audience to other news websites to find out more, the very fact of flagging a tweet is, of course, an editorial judgment – and one that immediately politicises the platform.
For a start, such editorial judgments make it much harder for platforms to argue, as they long have, that they are not publishers which billions of people rely upon for their news, and so are not bound by the strict laws governing such companies (including newspapers).
We just carry the content, they have always said. We’re not responsible for it. Really? Not any more.
The added irony is that all this suits President Trump perfectly. He has long perfected the tactic of polarising his audiences, cultivating an ‘‘us’’ and ‘‘them’’ war between his electoral fans and the ‘‘lamestream media’’. Now, should something emerge on Twitterthat he dislikes, he can easily dismiss it as part of the liberal plot against him.
The fundamental reality is that, since the Cambridge Analytica scandal that rocked Facebook, platforms have known they cannot wash their hands of the content they carry.
This has two consequences: first, they are all in the expensive business of ‘‘content moderation’’ – and that suits the big players. Only they have the resources to deploy the teams of human moderators, and to develop the sophisticated artificial intelligence systems to scrutinise many billions of pieces of new content every day.
Second, it raises a question about power. Military aside, one US analyst I spoke to mused last week, who is more powerful: an American president who will be gone in either six months or four years, or Mark Zuckerberg, who controls the algorithms which determine what news half the world sees, and may well be around for a good 40 more years?
Alive to this, social media companies are already making faux-modest noises.
‘‘We have a different policy, I think, than Twitter on this,’’ Zuckerberg has said. ‘‘I just believe strongly that Facebook shouldn’t be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online.’’
But guess what? While he boasted about the ‘‘oversight board’’ that Facebook has created to monitor content, he has also previously argued that what was needed was ‘‘national regulation’’. And regulation will benefit big incumbents. Such as Facebook.
So the entire content argument has now been turned on its head. When they were smaller, social media platforms hated the idea of regulation on content because it would crimp their growth.
Now they are huge, they welcome it because it will entrench their dominance.
Neither position is perfect. So expect different jurisdictions to yoyo to varying points between the two for many years to come.
For information is and always has been political. There is no getting away from that. – Telegraph Group