The communications minister, Paul Fletcher, says he has some sympathy with Facebook arguing it is not responsible for taking down lies circulating on its platform, because the social media giant does not hold itself out as a traditional media publisher with editorial standards.
But Fletcher said the social media giant could be required to help its users better assess the veracity of content under reforms the Morrison government ultimately pursues in response to the landmark report by Australia’s competition regulator on digital platforms, released last week.
That review by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission recommended regulation to deal with the dominance of the digital giants and their impact on consumers, the media and the economy.
In an interview with Guardian Australia’s politics podcast, Fletcher said Facebook’s argument that it was not a traditional publisher was “an appropriate point for them to make, because they don’t hold themselves out [as that]”.
“I don’t think we can dismiss reality – a digital platform is a different kind of business to a traditional media organisation that has editorial obligations.”
Fletcher said no one would be happy if the government responded to the escalating challenge of misinformation proliferating on social media platforms by establishing “an Australian government office of truth verification, and this office would be charged with putting a tick or a cross against items on social media, and then, inevitably, against items on conventional media”.
“That is clearly not a workable solution and it creates more problems than it solves.”
But he said both the competition watchdog and the government were thinking about how to send credible signals to users of social media to help them sort fact from fiction.
“It’s ultimately a matter for users to make an assessment of that, but some of the ideas are validating the source of the content.”
The ACCC also recommended digital platforms be required to implement a code of conduct to govern how they handle complaints about the spread of inaccurate information, which would be registered and enforced by an independent regulator such as the Australian Communications and Media Authority.
Asked why it was uncontroversial for the government to regulate Facebook’s distribution practices for objectionable content, such as bullying material, or the live stream of mass murders, such as the Christchurch shootings, but be more hands off about the dissemination of lies, which damage the body politic in a different way, Fletcher said they were “complex issues”.
He said it was important to take the temperature of a range of stakeholders over the next three months, and tread carefully with any proposed move to make Facebook responsible for policing the veracity of posts.
“Do we want a power to make effectively quasi editorial judgments sitting with employees of a non-Australian company, [even though] the content they disseminate is seen by millions of Australians?”
On Friday Guardian Australia reported that Facebook told the ALP it was not “our role to remove content that one side of a political debate considers to be false” in a final, positive, self-assessment of its actions in response to the death tax misinformation circulating on the platform during the May federal election.
A review of the death tax material by Facebook’s independent fact-checkers found much of the content was objectively false. But the material was merely demoted in the News Feed rather than deleted.
Fletcher said the government accepted the fundamental position of the ACCC in the digital platforms review. There was a clear need “for a harmonised media regulation framework”.
But he said: “I don’t think our regulatory analysis should be we’ve got a set of existing laws that say ‘publishers do this’, let’s go through a convoluted exercise of saying to digital platforms, ‘tick the box to be a publisher as defined in existing legislation’.”
He said digital platforms such as Google and Facebook were now all pervasive – “some would even say addictive”. The internet had gone from a niche preoccupation in the 1990s to a mass market phenomenon and that “has presented great challenges to governments around the world because now we have businesses that are enormous and serving hundreds of millions if not billions of people on their platforms”.
Fletcher said the debate about the regulation of the internet in the 1990s leaned heavily against regulation, but now the prevailing view was the rule of law should protect citizens equally in the real and the cyber worlds.
