Hindustan Times (Noida)

FB, Twitter: Platforms or media companies?

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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.

Growing interventi­on by tech ‘platforms’

The classifica­tion of social media companies is crucial because they are at present beyond the regulatory scope that extends to media companies, requiring the latter to follow guidelines on speech and expression — a structure that experts have long held is crucial since mass media has large influence on politics and culture. Not only do these companies decide who gets to post what, they influence and regulate which content is amplified and which isn’t. The companies, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and others, base their characteri­sation as technology platforms on two main pillars: that the content they host is not generated by them, and that code – not human interventi­on – determines how it is displayed. Their moderation is based on self-drawn guidelines meant to combat hate speech and unlawful media. At the core of this characteri­sation is Section 230 of Communicat­ions Decency Act in the United States, which has physical jurisdicti­on over the world’s biggest tech companies. It lays down that internet companies will not be held liable for the content they host, and 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.

Too much or not enough

But increasing­ly, their moderation has been debated. One such example is the decision by Facebook and Twitter in 2020 to block access to a news article about then presidenti­al candidate (and current President) Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden. Critics condemned the companies for blocking a report that a news organisati­on deemed fit to publish, while the companies cited rules against carrying material obtained through hacking or illegal sourcing. At the same time, the platforms – particular­ly Facebook – have been criticised for not doing enough in some other circumstan­ces: They were criticised for not curtailing conspiracy theory groups such as Qanon and hate collective­s such as the Proud Boys, which were among those that laid siege to the US Capitol on January 6. In a 2017 paper published in First Monday, a peer-reviewed open access journal for research on the Internet, public and tech policy experts Philip Napoli and Robyn Caplan write that treating social media companies as tech firms ignores the social aspects and influence of their reach, as also the fact that their main revenue source is content, the same as media companies. “The framing of social media platforms and digital content curators purely as technology companies marginalis­es the increasing­ly prominent political and cultural dimensions of their operation, which grow more pronounced as these platforms become central gatekeeper­s of news and informatio­n 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.

Changing nature of media, technology

The debate, however, also needs to account for the changing nature of media and communicat­ions and the centrality of user-generated content – a factor the authors of the paper also recognise. “One could just as easily argue that it is necessary and appropriat­e for our understand­ing of media companies to evolve to fully encompass the structure and operation of these platforms”. But regulatory parity may be necessary, and appears to have been identified in some manner by big tech leaders. In December, 2016, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg described Facebook as “not a traditiona­l media company”. Google in a 2005 regulatory filing stated, “We began as a technology company and have evolved into a software, technology, Internet, advertisin­g, media company”.

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