David Penberthy: Social media’s promise was a big fat lie

SO social media was meant to replace mainstream media? Two events this week showed it’s both a pyramid scheme for liars and a ruthless exploiter of our souls, writes David Penberthy.

IT was the most explosive political showdown Australia has never seen.

According to Twitter, Tuesday loomed as the final, brutal chapter in the troubled prime ministership of Malcolm Turnbull.

The party room was ready to put him to the sword. The numbers had been done. Turnbull was gone. “It’s on!” the Twitterati exclaimed, with #spill becoming the top-trending search term by Australian Twitter users for over than 48 hours.

The only problem with the story was that federal Parliament wasn’t sitting on Tuesday which means, you know, there was no party room meeting scheduled. Never was. None of the MPs were there.

They won’t be in Canberra for another four weeks. There was no attempt to convene a party room meeting, there was no spill motion, there were no alternative leadership candidates.

Other than that, the story was as tight as a drum.

The great non-spill of Tuesday, April 10, was a terrific demonstration of the so-called power of citizen journalism. In short, that power manifests itself in the ability to make up crap, and for said crap to be shared in record time with the maximum number of people.

It’s a pyramid marketing scheme for bullshit artists, where the most unadorned brand of nonsense can be on-passed exponentially, with the end result being that the community becomes less informed — fast.

Mark Zuckerberg testifies before a hearing at Capitol Hill this week. (Pic: Andrew Harnik/AP)

The past fortnight has been a telling one for the two giants of social media, Twitter and Facebook. We have seen the twin promises of social media crumble away.

In its advent, social media tried to define itself by saying it was the opposite of the mainstream media. The mainstream media was unreliable and intrusive. You couldn’t trust the mainstream media for information, you couldn’t trust the mainstream media with your privacy. Social media, in contrast, promised a new era of so-called citizen journalism — all of it conducted in a safe, collegiate environment where you could chat with confidence with like-minded friends.

What a hollow and laughable boast that has turned out to be.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has found himself in the centre of a scandal that has allowed personal details of private citizens to be accessed for commercial gain.

The number of people affected has been staggering — 300,000 in Australia alone — and, overseas, their numbers even include Zuckerberg, who has conveniently outed himself as an unwitting victim of a conspiracy that, we are told, even caught him by surprise.

From his pantheon of lofty quotes, one of the best from Zuckerberg is the following: “By giving people the power to share, we’re making the world more transparent.”

This rolled-gold marketing tosh belies the truth that Facebook is a steely-eyed business aimed at making vast amounts of money by accessing every last detail about you, and passing that information on to potential advertisers.

It is, to borrow a valid marketing term, the ultimate segmentation model. In newspapers, we know from market research that our readers are in greater number in certain age and income brackets and in certain suburbs.

So, too, for commercial radio stations and the TVs. At Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, the information is so granular that they know what type of undies you bought online, what you last ordered for dinner, and based on your links and likes, who you’re going to vote for at the next election.

This isn’t market research, it’s mass impertinence and intrusion, all of it orchestrated by a company that has no regard for transparency, enabled by the enthusiastic uptake of Facebook users worldwide who simply gave their privacy away.

Enter stage right Cambridge Analytica. It is surprising, in hindsight, that it has taken so long for a company to piggyback off all the info Facebook harvests from its unwitting customers, given the extent to which it is drowning in data about private individuals.

The lack of care taken by Facebook with people’s private information is matched by its indifference to the fundamental question of accuracy when it comes to its self-styled status as a news “provider”.

Facebook provides two types of news: news that it steals from mainstream news providers without paying for it, and news that isn’t actually news at all, but fabricated by people, organisations or governments with a political agenda.

I know Donald Trump uses the term “fake news” almost exclusively in regard to the mainstream media — due solely to its annoying fondness for fact-checking and accountability — but fake news is the entirely inevitable by-product of the digital age.

It simply would not exist if not for Facebook and Twitter. You couldn’t plant these types of cockamamie stories in the mainstream media, and you couldn’t distribute them, either.

They thrive and prosper in social media because of two things — zero fact-checking and the instantaneous and extraordinary capacity to share information.

Facebook’s boast of making the world a more social and connected place is undermined quite spectacularly by the Buzzfeed News analysis which found last year that at least 45 instances of rape, child abuse, killings, and other criminal acts of violence had been broadcast on Facebook Live since December 2015.

The best and, indeed, only defence Facebook has to such grim statistics is that the company is so big that it can’t be expected to monitor and control everything. It’s a cop-out that would never be afforded to the genuine media.

And it begs the question: perhaps if Facebook was less occupied collating information on you, it could spend more time acting like the publisher it claims to be and vetting its own content.