BEAT THE ALGORITHM AND MAKE BIG TECH PAY MEDIA OUTLETS FOR CONTENT

MANY of you will have heard of Donie O’Sullivan. For those who haven’t, Donie is the Kerry-born CNN journalist who has been following the extremist Trump supporters, reporting on how they organise via social media. He was one of the most informed and impressive TV journalists outside the US Capitol during the January 6 Trump insurrection.

Donie has also pursued social media companies for tolerating the dissemination of extremist fake news on their platforms. Last Wednesday afternoon he tweeted that Facebook was actively promoting prominent antivaxxer Robert F Kennedy Jr on his Facebook feed, despite claiming to be tackling such anti-vax misinformation.

It is just one more example of Facebook not living up to its own assurances. The US-based Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) has accused several big tech companies of doing little to stop the flow of lies on their platforms.

In its September 2020 report, titled Failure to Act ,it estimated that fewer than one in 20 anti-vaccine misinformation posts reported to the platforms is removed.

The CCDH believes platforms are slow to act because the audience for fake news and misinformation is worth so much — in the case of anti-vaccination, up to $1bn a year.

Others agree and have studied the detrimental impact all this is having on modern society.

In his book Why We’re Polarized, Ezra Klein has highlighted the toxic role social media has played in US politics. Dr Ian Richardson of UCD has done similar work here, studying the increasing polarisation of Irish political discourse online.

We see online misinformation spreading across a whole range of public policy and political areas. We see how it was used to muster the insurrectionists and how banning just a few accounts massively undermined their capacity to spread their message.

Social media has rapidly become the dominant means by which people transmit knowledge, maintain relationships, and establish norms and values. But this powerful medium — and social media is a medium in the same way that newspapers, TV and radio are — is governed by algorithms, not laws.

Algorithms have no bias or political viewpoint, but this also means they are indifferent to truth or public well-being.

Algorithms are designed to get us to spend as much time as possible on the various platforms.

Consequently we see more content that is engaging, but which is also driving us to agree less on what is ‘factual’. The lines between truth and fantasy are blurred — and once that happens, we are at risk of being more polarised and less tolerant.

If a newspaper were to be as flippant or careless with publishing false and misleading material, it would be out of business in no time. Not so for social media.

So why do we readily accept the social media claim that they are not publishers in the same way traditional publishers and news providers are?

The fact that Facebook does not generate all the posts on its pages is akin to saying that the editor or publisher of a newspaper does not write — or even agree with — all the articles that they publish.

The difference is that editors and publishers take responsibility for what they print and distribute, whether it is an op-ed from a politician or a letter to the editor expressing contrary views.

Taking responsibility does not mean stifling open debate. The hue the cry from social media platforms that they are serving the cause of open debate

‘Other countries are making progress at a faster rate’

has little credibility. They are coarsening it.

Not because they have an agenda, but rather because they have no agenda above the purely commercial.

The Australian government may have part of the answer. It plans to force the big tech giants to pay media outlets for content used on their platforms. The initiative is an important first step in levelling the playing field among the traditional purveyors of news, often referred to sneeringly as the mainstream media, while forcing better standards on social media.

It has already resulted in Google striking a partnership deal with the largest Australian news media business, Seven West Media group, meaning it will pay for its journalism.

We should be pursuing the same approach here and across the EU. The mainstream media should be supported and protected as a valuable contributor to our political discourse.

It is not something to be denigrated or disparaged, yet that’s what we see from both the extreme left and extreme right via social media platforms which happily facilitate these attacks while using for free the valuable content it produces.

It’s time to call a halt to the double standard.

For today’s solutions, text CLUE followed by the clue (eg: ‘CLUE 1 Down’) to 53307