Life in the petri dish

It's now 24 hours since Facebook turned off access to news on its platform here in Australia.

We are now part of a grand, global experiment, and the world is watching.

In that 24 hours, thousands (millions?) of words and comments have been written and made. In the rush to comment in the moment (my goodness, they have trained us well!) the bigger picture was arguably missed.

Are we missing the point?

Media around the world are unique because they have two conflicting roles.

First, they are always owned by someone, even if that's a government dictatorship, and they exist to make money.

Kerry Stokes, Rupert Murdoch and Jeff Bezos were preceded by Frank Packer and Keith Murdoch, Conrad Black, Robert Maxwell, Harold Harmsworth, Max Aitkin, Joseph Pulitzer, and many more back into history. Today that list includes Mark Zuckerberg.

Daily newspapers as we know them today originated as information sheets to provide updates on stock prices in the coffee shops of London and Europe, though government-issued daily updates were published carved in stone or metal across the Roman Empire.

Alongside this distinct, and usually ruthless aspect of the media (read John Preston's new biography of British newspaper magnate Robert Maxwell, who bought Britain's Daily Mirror simply to compete with Rupert Murdoch) sits its role as the lubricant of democracies. The flow of information that is objective, reasonable, informs or entertains, and allows for discourse, debate and argument, is rightly seen as part of the definition of democracy, and also allows for important information dissemination.

When communities formed in the printing press era, the first three buildings that were erected were often a church, a pub and a newspaper.

Today that function is also fulfilled by social media platforms.

The role therefore of governments (at least democratic ones) is to regulate to allow this to happen, remembering that most regulation is the result of our inability to behave appropriately without it. That concept of regulation has been part of the political and social process for thousands of years.

What's more, the media are indeed regulated, though it's usually a fraught relationship. We saw that in the UK when Rupert and James Murdoch squirmed before a Commons committee investigating the media a couple of years ago, and we should remember that Mark Zuckerberg refused to attend a similar committee.

Other regulatory mechanisms include the law of slander and defamation, and we've seen that work effectively in recent times here in Australia.

All are contentious, and every media outlet has complained about them, in particular when the spotlight is shone on them.

But a spotlight there is, that's the point, and that's partly the point of the legislation now moving through parliament here in Australia.

Other elements in the mass-communication, mass-information industry are also regulated to varying degrees: advertising, marketing, data, even to a lesser extent my own industry of public relations are regulated (and my friend Alan Kelly has trenchant and thought-provoking views on that).

What's happening here in Australia is the rebalancing of the ledger to maintain a viable, public media sector. It's not a penalty for the commercial success of Facebook. Were that the case, we might assume (perhaps naively) that government would be less interested in the arguments of the mainstream media. (After all, media owners are still kingmakers and queen makers.)

That's why the rest of the world is so interested. That's why Facebook threw the switch.

The challenges for businesses

As many experienced first-hand yesterday, our livelihoods are to a degree dependent on the whim of a few individuals a long way away. Digivizer itself has clients that, though in no way news sources, lost their Facebook pages. Our own sister company goto.game, which does carry news, went blank on Facebook. As Facebook itself glibly said, it’s sometimes difficult to define news!

And companies we've worked with in the past and know well, and which rely almost solely on Facebook for commercial success, also went off-air.

What's more, Facebook's terms and conditions allow them to do this. The questions for business, it seems to me, are whether that's a commercially viable way to operate, and what might the alternatives be? Can they sue for lost revenue? Loss of reputation? They can try, I guess.

Why are we surprised?

Facebook has form, and we all know it.

I was surprised that we were as surprised as we were that the company had removed news from its platform.

I noted above that companies lost their Facebook pages. In an opaque operating model without accountability, was that internal complexity at Facebook, incompetence, or a random set of choices to teach us all a lesson?

And if they can turn off pages that aren't news feeds on a whim, perhaps they might not turn them back on, on another whim.

Facebook has always resisted doing anything against its interests, and has never faltered at taking decisions that were in its interests that skated close to the law or to generally-acceptable behaviour.

Facebook (and Google) are commercial organizations. Their primary interest is financial success. While we might like the idea of operating with social permission, if an organization chooses not to, and if an organization is large enough and entrenched enough to be able to operate with impunity, as Facebook has until now, and as Facebook clearly continues to believe it can, it probably will.

Perhaps what has been surprising is the public relations failure: turning off government pages, turning off pages clearly serving non-news outlets, organizations and communities, even turning off their own pages, but also choosing to go thermonuclear when all they had to do was resist, lobby, and comment, while working the numbers in the background, makes no PR sense at all.

After all, the clue is in the words 'public' and 'relations'.

The experiment is nowhere near over

I started by noting that media are unique because of two roles: make money and preserve democracy.

Social media upset that balance because they currently operate outside these regulatory frameworks and under the protection of the US Communications Decency Act Section 230 (CDA 230) which provides immunity for website platforms from third-party content.

Whilst the current legislation here in Australia relates to fees for fair use of content published by news organisations, the regulatory battle around ownership, freedom of speech, disinformation, incitement, all the way up to the freedom of the Internet, continues.

As Nicholas Suzor reminds us in his book Lawless, because no-one is required to use Facebook, the US Constitution has little to say about how it operates. The libertarian instinct around Internet freedom is strong, and the Internet is fundamentally owned and operated at the behest of US owned organizations and companies. Most of what we consume on the Internet is presented to us via one of two companies.

As we've seen, one thing leads to another, all the way up to the events of yesterday here in Australia, and the censorship of Donald Trump (and I'm no fan at all of the former US President, his politics, style or character) by Twitter and Facebook. (Think about that for a second: the CEOs of commercial organizations silenced a democratically-elected head of state.)

That is what marks the social media giants out as different to other media organizations in the US, Australia and around the world.

That is the regulatory battle that is now under way.

That's why we in Australia will remain in the petri dish for a little while longer.