Stop the (new) press: why putting manners on social media news is harder than it looks
THIS week, World Press Freedom Day prompted more literature about the multitude of problems facing the newspaper industry as it grapples with digital media platforms.
Newspapers, however, aren’t the only ones with difficulties. Online industry providers themselves are dealing with the huge scale and newness of the digital revolution. Multimedia platforms are receiving some rather unfamiliar and unwanted attention as legislators look for ways to regulate the sector as a means to protect citizens from unpalatable online behaviour and fake news.
Against this backdrop, Communications Minister Denis Naughten finds himself wedged between two sectors. Some of us remain captivated by the nostalgia of traditional press, while others wallow in the volume, ease, speed and sheer entertainment of news provided through online platforms.
Current legislation in Ireland, or indeed globally, was simply never designed to deal with the capacity or the reach of media platforms like Google, Twitter or Facebook. This Government, and future ones, face an extremely delicate balancing act if they are to keep commercial interests happy while at the same time protecting the public good.
Given the pace of the growth of online media, crafting any new legislation or amending existing laws to encompass future eventualities is as futile as chasing rainbows – where does it begin and where will it end?
In truth, no one party will fix this problem, because there is no one solution that works for every platform. If there was, it would have been carved out in code by some tech wizard in Silicon Valley, not in Dáil Éireann (no offence, lads).
Complexities arise not because the media is getting bigger or because online platforms are growing exponentially, but because policymakers are effectively trying to legislate for bad human behaviour.
In the past, personal responsibility in relation to news reporting in the traditional press was confined to professionals working in the media industry, like editors and journalists. Now news is anybody’s and everybody’s game.
In what now seems like a bygone age, a newspaper was held up as almost quasi-public service institution. Back then, a journalist’s business was to provide a public service by supplying information that the public needed. Simples. Nowadays, news and media are much more ubiquitous. They are also big business.
A business with public influence remains for sure, but the way it interacts with its customers and the model of its operating costs has changed fundamentally and forever.
Since the earliest ancestors of the modern newspaper were first printed and published in Germany in 1609, broadly speaking the newspaper industry has remained essentially undisturbed and unchallenged. The harsh reality is that the generation of news seekers who currently populate our colleges and schools will simply never know the traditional print press as we understand it. And we all need to get over that.
Small wonder then that in such a climate of change, promoting digital safety is exceptionally important for policymakers. But tackling an industry of such enormous influence while in its infancy is challenging.
Every profession and every industry has faced the challenge of evolution throughout the course of its history – journalism and the news industry is no different. Even though it faces many challenges, there is no doubt that the profession of journalism and the media business will survive, if for no other reason that we as a species have a voracious curiosity at our core (we are exceptionally nosy).
Certainly, the introduction of radio and television, censorship, and advertising has affected the media business. But nothing that has gone before has caused such a cataclysmic revolution to news and media as the development of the internet.
We 40-somethings may think ourselves incredibly urbane viewing our daily news from media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. In truth, however, social media is still only in the foothills of its development.
In terms of its life cycle, at present the current form of social media is basically an electronic version of the 10-year-old boy on a bicycle who used to deliver the newspaper through the letterbox.
It will become bigger, better, brasher, brighter, and monolithic. It is an ingenious circulation platform with limitless capacity.
The ascension of internet-based news is coupled with a growing depiction of the press as a false messenger and this is spreading negativity and serves only to poison minds about the media industry in general. This downward spiral of the journalistic profession does little to ingratiate the case of the media industry. Furthermore, it bolsters policy argument for more regulation.
Even though journalists now present themselves in a mishmash of guises that would appear unfathomable in the early days of the profession, their stock is failing. Nowadays, journalists are expected to demonstrate more professional dexterity than a Chinese Olympic gymnast. Multitasking as reporters, analysts, presenters, contributors and online media experts is now a professional prerequisite for aspiring hacks. Yet despite the modern newshound’s agility, an ungrateful public increasingly looks to their own circle of family, friends and non-traditional news sources as their truth power.
Last year, the Law Reform Commission recommended the Government appoint a digital safety commissioner, a development which has unnerved online providers, who see this as a potentially confining mechanism which may ultimately lead to industry censorship.
For its part, one such provider, Facebook, has introduced a plethora of measures to appease advertisers and legislators alike. Like other platforms, it fears the introduction of oppressive red tape and over-regulation.
However, it is worth noting that industry providers like politicians are themselves trying to deal with the size of the power at their disposal.
No industry has ever simply arrived, it has developed over time. The difference now is that such scale, in such a short time, is unprecedented.
Politicians want in on the act – for them, control means power.
Currently, public opinion is delicately balanced on matter of good user-experience versus intolerable behaviour. On the one hand, Facebook has a global network of 1.2 billion members, many of whom are continuing to enjoy the virtues of an alternative reality. But increasingly, the negative experiences are getting much more attention. You know the old saying, there is no such thing as bad publicity – well sometimes there is. We haven’t quite reached the tipping point of public opinion just yet, but we will.
How online platforms deal with this phase in their evolution is the question which now presents itself. Politicians will be involved in the evolution of best practice whether Silicon Valley likes it or not.
Global providers will no doubt be paying close attention to political policies in Ireland, not least because many of them have chosen to base themselves in Dublin. Legislative frameworks and regulations set here could some day take on a pan-European dimension.
For now, politicians and online operators continue to engage in a polite game of cat and mouse.
Ultimately, the sheer capacity and limitless cash of global tech giants may prove to be a beast that is beyond any real political control – virtual-community connectors who are increasingly more influential than any politician and way too powerful to care.
Social media is still only in the foothills of its development