Media regulation, never the sexiest of topics, is having a bit of a moment. Over the last few days, the existing system of governing the BBC has probably entered its death throes, while lurid courtroom tales of phone hacking “on an industrial scale” at Trinity Mirror titles prompted the departure of one of the architects of a new press regulator. Then there is the argument over whether or not broadcasters will break impartiality rules if they call the prime minister’s bluff and run a major election debate without him.
These stories go to the heart of who really holds power in the UK and how unfettered the media should be for the good of society. And not just in the UK. Last week also saw an Australian media watchdog, the Communications and Media Authority, allowed to judge whether the radio station that aired a hoax call to a London hospital had committed a criminal act. Yet amid this cacophony of debate about who should run the rule over broadcasters and the press, there has been a deafening silence over the issue of regulating a media sector which is likely to play a major role in most forthcoming elections as well as every other aspect of our lives - social media.
The Conservatives spend £100,000 a month on Facebook ads, according to research from the BBC. Does that count as a party political broadcast of sorts? Does it matter that Labour says it spends a tenth as much on the UK’s biggest social network? No one seems to know.
In the early days of media regulator Ofcom 10 years ago, insiders were horrified at the very idea of regulating fledgling web companies for two basic reasons - economists hated potentially stifling innovation while pioneers considered regulating the internet akin to regulating freedom. Yet just look at these fledgling web companies now: some of the biggest organisations in the world with revenues and reach dwarfing even the likes of the BBC.
Last week an executive from Facebook illustrated this when he informed a roomful of journalists that social media companies like his are not “media organisations”. Simon Milner, Facebook policy director based in the UK, told an Oxford Media Convention session that the social network was a platform which enabled individuals to pick their own stories. “We do not make editorial decisions,” he said before going on to talk about the way algorithms based on personal choices allowed Facebook to deal with last year’s British floods or the Ebola outbreak. Asked if the company would take anything down, he pointed to product guidelines. Product? “Some people might call it editorial, we call it product.”
Labour MP Chi Onwurah, a former head of telecoms technology at Ofcom who was on the same panel, called this editing by numbers “algorithmic tyranny”. What is to stop Facebook sending more stories to “personalised” newsfeeds about a certain company or indeed political party, apart from the threat of a consumer backlash if found out? There’s also the issue of those stories social media companies decide contravene their “product” guidelines. Dick Costolo, Twitter’s chief executive, has quite rightly gained plaudits for saying it “sucks” at taking down abuse. But once a company - be it via computer or human means - decides what constitutes unacceptable content, what is the difference between that and a newspaper?
Holding the line that says my company cannot be accountable for this abusive/false/libellous comment because it is simply hosting debate, not editing it, becomes much harder when the line keeps being crossed. If a company can remove misogynistic abuse (as it should) why not criticism of an individual? Social media is not immune from the law of course as George Galloway and others have shown. Yet most networks are not exactly transparent in explaining what recourse complainants have.
None of these issues are new. What’s interesting is why so little fuss is made about them.
Onwurah has tabled a Commons question tomorrow asking whether social media news feeds are considered by Ofcom in their assessment of media plurality. With a proposed wide-ranging communications green paper killed off by the coalition government, these problems haven’t been discussed since before the birth of Twitter.
With the debate over the BBC’s future at the end of this licence fee well and truly begun, there has been much discussion of what it will look like come its centenary in 2022. We should be paying just as much attention to what our social media habits will be like and how we hold companies like Facebook and Twitter to account.
