Facebook is asking to be regulated but wants to choose how
A year on from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, two and a half years on from the advent of fake news and the 2016 presidential elections, and many years on from academics and occasional journalists raising their hands in concern about the emerging issues of our information environment, are we any closer to fixing the problem?
Like climate change and the financial system, the answer to this question is both yes, and no. Yes in that we now, at least, have a shared understanding of just how great the problems are: we have a totally unregulated media environment run by a handful of giant US corporations that built their companies so fast it is now clear they had no idea what they were doing. Or, indeed, how to effectively stop some of the unwanted consequences such as genocide, live-streamed terror attacks and stolen elections. And no, in that our capacity to agree on what “fixing” might look like is extremely limited.
When I moved to the US nine years ago, people laughed at the stupidity of our EU regulations. Editors told me, in no uncertain terms, that the type of public media subsidy that existed in the practically communist federation of the EU “would never happen here”. And that any restrictions on Silicon Valley growth or expression were extraordinarily unlikely.
Now the picture is very different. Candidates for the 2020 Democratic nomination (notably Elizabeth Warren) have detailed plans for platform regulation which would gain public support.
Lawmakers in the US are looking both at European models of regulation and initiatives to help build more robust civic media. Concerns about platform reach are shared by both the left and the right, and the contest is very much on to establish not the “whether” of regulation but the “what”.
Mark Zuckerberg, the somewhat beleaguered creator and chief executive of Facebook, was touring parts of Europe last week, embracing, and even championing, the idea of regulation. Given his newfound love for this concept, it is a surprise he missed out Britain, where he has previously been ordered to appear in front of parliament but has so far failed to do so (parliament, to be fair, was taken up with other issues last week).
In fact Zuckerberg did something unprecedented during his management of Facebook so far. He wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post outlining the four areas of the internet that should be regulated. His first two areas were “harmful content” and “election advertising”.
Facebook has been in the vanguard of creating ways in which both harmful content can be generated and easily sent to anyone in the world, and it has given rise to whole new categories of election meddling. Asking for government regulation of “harmful content” is an interesting proposition in terms of the American constitution, which straight-up forbids Congress from passing any law that interferes with speech under the first amendment.
But Zuckerberg is hoping for tighter European laws, as it is then easier for a platform to design a more restrictive set of terms of use and not have a constitutional fight at home.
What we are seeing from both Facebook and Google is an epic public relations push to become champions of regulation while avoiding the imposition of rules that would damage their operating profits too much.
Facebook went to the extraordinary lengths of taking out “native advertising” in the Daily Telegraph. In other words ran a month of paid-for articles demonstrating the sunnier side of tech, and framing Facebook’s efforts to curb nefarious activities on its own platform. There is nothing wrong with Facebook buying native advertising – indeed, it ran a similar campaign in the Guardian a couple of years ago – but this was the first time that the PR talking points adopted by the company have been used in such a way.
The 26 articles, which range from a meditation on technophobia to a treatise on how groupthink is the biggest danger to the internet, are emblematic of how much Facebook is adjusting its body language towards traditional lawmaking bodies such as parliament and legacy press such as the Telegraph and the Washington Post.
This is a lobbying campaign in
which buying the good opinion of news brands is clearly important. If it was about reaching a target audience, there are plenty of metrics to suggest his words would reach further – at no cost – on Facebook.
Similarly, Google is upping its presence in a less obvious manner via assorted media initiatives on both sides of the Atlantic. Its more direct approach to funding journalism seems to have the desired effect of making all media organisations (and indeed many academic institutions) touched by its money slightly less questioning and critical of its motives.
At a recent conference, Google explained how newsrooms could use exciting applications such as facial recognition to read the sentiment of a crowd. In related news last week, Google had to disband its own initiative to form an AI ethics committee after both workers and other committee members complained about the inclusion of Kay Coles James from the Heritage Foundation, a rightwing organisation which is associated with transphobic policies. Even self-regulation, it seems, is hard.
It is fair to say that the platforms do want regulation, but they want to choose the kind of regulation they are subject to. The recent changes to European copyright law, which place the emphasis for patrolling copyright on platforms rather than rights holders, were a stinging loss for the tech companies. It further demonstrated that European lawmakers are making platform power their number one priority in terms of regulation. It is after all one of the few things all member states and all parts of the political spectrum can agree on.
When it comes to political advertising, Zuckerberg toured both Europe and American news shows putting the case for new rules. Viewers with short memories might not realise that the same Zuckerberg had his company expressly lobby to keep political comms on Facebook free of the tiresome campaign advertising rules that hinder the analogue world.
Traditionally, there are certain messages which are exempt from carrying political payment disclosure, because it is impracticable. The three examples most commonly given are bumper stickers, pencils and skywriting.
But – handily for Facebook and Google – links, search ads and buttons on pages also fall into this category. Then there’s the new and different ways in which data aggregation companies can be exploited. For instance, during the Brexit campaign ads aimed at securing leave votes appeared not as ads at all but as quizzes or competitions, targeted at the demographics most likely to be persuaded.
As the 2020 election cycle in the US looms, and the shocking mess of the Brexit referendum still spreading, it is fair to say we might have diagnosed the problem but we are perhaps as far as ever from a cure.
We are seeing an epic public relations push from Facebook and Google to become champions of regulation