Ye, Elon and Facebook versus news media: sifting through the wreckage
• The European Commission has warned Musk against an arbitrary approach to moderation and suspending users
Early on Tuesday we learnt that the “US news outlets versus Facebook” fight has stepped up a notch, with the social platform — owned by parent company Meta — threatening to take all US news off its platform if a new law about content goes ahead.
The Journalism Competition & Preservation Act has been introduced in the US Congress and has widespread, bipartisan support. It is seen as just one of a raft of new measures designed to curb the Big Tech that serve us our search results and news, connect us to our loved ones and transmit our messages.
The legislation empowers news media outlets to negotiate with social media companies for a share of the huge advertising revenues it collects from the use of news content on social platforms. Meta responded, arguing that Facebook actually provides increased traffic to news outlets, and that news shared by users contributes only a fraction of its revenue.
If any of this sounds suspiciously familiar, you might be remembering a similar fight that played out between Facebook and Australian media last year. There, after a similar law passed, news was temporarily removed from the feeds of Australian Facebook users, before the company backtracked and brokered a deal with the Aussies.
With all due respect to our friends Down Under and their news outlets, the new battle is its fight on steroids due to the global dominance of US news media, which includes many of the household names of the news spheres.
And I would argue that to really get to grips with the issues at stake this development must be viewed in context with two others in digital taking place on a wholly different platform a few days earlier.
On Friday, after tweeting an image that looked like a mashup of the Star of David and a swastika — yes, seriously — and shortly before being suspended once again from Twitter, rapper Kanye West shared something: screenshots of his private back-and-forth with Chief Twit Elon Musk.
Musk sent him a picture of the offending (and offensive) tweet on the platform, and said “Sorry but you’ve gone too far. This is not love”, to which Ye — which is now West’s legal and preferred name — responded: “Who made you the judge” [sic].
BIGOTRY
This leaves me in the awkward position of finding myself agreeing with the repugnant former musical artist who — finally dropped like a hot turd by his sponsors — keeps busy repping racism and unhinged right-wing-ism on any realworld or digital platform that hasn’t banned him.
Now it must be noted that West (who has been open about a prior diagnosis of a personality disorder) appears to be in the midst of mental health crisis — not that this excuses his antiSemitism and other demonstrable bigotry. But it does mean I will refrain from participating in any further pileon, except to say that Britney Spears was sectioned for far less. Apologies for the pop culture detour.
Still — stopped clocks being what they are — West’s question “who made you the judge” cuts to the chase admirably. Musk made Musk the judge, by buying up the “digital public square” he told us was so important to keep independent, and proving once and for all that his “free speech absolutist” position applies only to himself.
Rebanning West was the right move, just as certainly as reinstating Trump was the wrong one. But forget the individuals and let’s talk principles and precedent: will Musk make choices for every dispute from now on, every flagged piece of smut, disinformation and anything that offends? Will he be making decisions by user poll? Will he weigh in only when the user is famous or influential? How famous do you have to be before Musk steps in?
These questions are not keeping just me up at night. Last week the European Commission — represented by Thierry Breton, commissioner for the internal market, had a video call with Musk in which
— the Financial Times reports — he warned the entrepreneur against an arbitrary approach to content moderation and suspending (or reinstating) users. Failure to do so could result in a fine or even the banning of Twitter by the commission, for infringement of content regulation standards under the new EU Digital Services Act.
FLIP FLOPS
Musk has always promised that the platform will adhere to all relevant laws, but since he flipflops harder than a Durbanite in summer, I’m not prepared to take it at face value, and nor it seems are the regulators.
Also on Friday, Musk co-ordinated the release of “The Twitter Files ”— a cynical play on the Facebook Files, the internal documents leaked by a whistleblower in 2021. Here, he gave journalist Matt Taibbi access to internal Twitter communication, which Taibbi published in a megathread on the platform, hyped by Musk himself.
The focus was an internal Twitter discussion about how to handle tweets about the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story, the Jack’s magic beans of conspiracy theories. Why this is being treated as a “gotcha” moment I do not know. We know the source was Musk. They both told us. As UK-based journalist Ross McCafferty pointed out in a tweet on the topic: “[Taibbi] didn’t ‘get’ the story. It was handed to him so he could do PR for the world’s richest man.”
The anti-“mainstream media” crowd are declaring it evidence of censorship, a victory for the “free speech” brigade. To my eye, it looks like a crowd of people seriously debating the ethics of their decisions on their “public square” platform.
Call me old-fashioned, but that’s what I want: editorial and legal oversight, a framework to shape those discussions. I don’t trust a group of content moderators or journalists to always get it right, but at least there’s a system, a grievance process for challenging decisions, an accountable source.
The point is — wow, we really took the long way round — that what we once called “new media” has aged out of newness and must be held to the same standards as “mainstream media”. “Social” is where we get our news sometimes, and often it is not very social (see all the criticisms against Instagram lately).
Your newspaper prints tweets. Twitter is the home of journalists. “New media” is old enough to officially buy a beer in the US. There are no new or social media anymore, it’s all just media.