David Penberthy: Facebook needs to follow Westpac’s lead
Westpac may not deserve any praise, but they did eventually act on child exploitation. Which is far more than can be said for the world’s largest social media publisher, writes David Penberthy.
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The reputational damage endured by banking giant Westpac over this past fortnight is almost without precedent in this country.
Other businesses have been shamed by scandal — James Hardie stands out — but within the banking sector there has been nothing of this nature or scale, far eclipsing the isolated money-management dramas that beset state-based banking institutions in the 1980s.
Westpac has copped a torrent of flak, and rightly so, for this was a spectacular failure of corporate governance.
But without wishing to provide the bank with any cover, it was also a demonstration of successful corporate governance, in that the bank did end up acting against those in charge. Chief executive Brian Hartzer has gone, board chairman Lindsay Maxsted is going, albeit too slowly in the eyes of some, and there may yet be more scalps as the bank raises its hands and subjects itself to full scrutiny.
The bank was sluggish in recognising the extent of public, political and shareholder disquiet around its slovenly indifference to the fact it had breached the Anti-Money Laundering Act on an almost unfathomable 23 million occasions, including some transactions associated with child exploitation.
But it got there in the end. And it is worth making the point that this, largely, is what decent mainstream corporations do — they respond to public alarm, shareholder anger and political pressure, and they also listen to internal voices demanding change.
It’s worth comparing the actions of Westpac on this key issue of unwittingly enabling of the financing of child exploitation with others who underpin this putrid trade. For like everything else in 2019, this is a wholly digitally-driven enterprise, an internet-based criminal industry whose users operate across social media.
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In the course of the past fortnight I have heard plenty of people calling for Brian Hartzer’s head, over alleged crimes that appear to have occurred largely prior to his appointment as CEO, yet none demanding an examination of the role played by digital businesses and social media in enabling child exploitation.
Look at Facebook. Facebook has been slow to the party when it comes to its lead role as the world’s pre-eminent publisher of bullying and abusive messages, despite a surge in recorded levels of teenage anxiety and several cases where young people have taken their own lives as a result of online abuse.
In the field of child exploitation, it is mounting a belated rearguard action to delete images that are scanned by perverts and paedophiles online.
The BBC’s technology section reported this month that in the third quarter of 2018, Facebook removed 8.7 million pieces of content related to child nudity and child sexual exploitation – but that in the same period this year, that figure had risen to 11.6 million.
“Either Facebook is doing an even better job of detection than before, or it has lost control of the problem,” BBC news correspondent Angus Crawford wrote.
Be it on terrorist material, bullying, child exploitation, or the proliferation of fake news that is so pernicious it has the capacity to change the course of global politics, Facebook’s lame self-defence seems to be to plead for understanding, and claim to be the meat in the sandwich.
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It’s almost like the NRA line about guns not killing people, but people killing people. The argument holds that just because they’re the publishers, they shouldn’t be held to account for everything a few bad apples do out there.
It’s an argument that wasn’t afforded to Brian Hartzer, who I am sure had absolutely zero first-hand knowledge of a single one of the 23 million transactions that washed through Westpac’s banking portals.
Perversely, in what Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg calls a “pivot to privacy”, the company is now looking at going down the path of encryption in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where people’s online ideological preferences were being harvested for use in political campaigns.
What this potentially means is it will actually be harder for the authorities to crack into people’s online activities in cases involving child exploitation, terrorism or money laundering, as users will be able to hide behind the kind of untraceable secrecy afforded by apps such as WhatsApp, which Facebook itself owns.
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Zuckerberg — who is personally worth about $70 billion — seems more interested in revenue streams than responsibility. His modus operandi as the world’s biggest publisher is that when it comes to bad stuff, hopefully other people can find it, tell us about it, and we will take it down, eventually, and in most cases.
Comedian Sacha Baron Cohen gave a terrific speech last weekend to the Anti-Defamation League, a noble organisation devoted in large part to protecting the historical truth around the Holocaust, where he skewered the moral ambivalence of the tech giants over their role as publishers.
“The executives of these platforms don’t appear interested in a close look at how they’re spreading hate, conspiracies and lies,” he said.
“Look at the speech Facebook founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg delivered last month that warned against new laws and regulations on companies like his. Zuckerberg tried to portray the issue as one involving “choices” around “free expression.” But freedom of speech is not freedom of reach. Facebook alone already counts about a third of the world’s population among its users. Social media platforms should not give bigots and paedophiles a free platform to amplify their views and target victims.
“When it comes to removing content, Zuckerberg asked, ‘where do you draw the line?’ Yes, that can be difficult, but here’s what he’s really saying: Removing lies and conspiracies is just too expensive.”
You reap what you sow in life. If Hartzer had his time over he would have been much more vigilant and demanding in responding to the mess he inherited.
But in going the way he did, he’s shown a level of ownership that the chief distributors of all this filth continue to evade.