Facebook is a social media bully who won’t grow up or play fair
Facebook’s nuclear threat on Tuesday, that it would effectively ban news from its platform, begs an important question. What would Facebook look like without news?
Facebook infamously began life as a college project by Mark Zuckerberg for juvenile frat boys to rate the attractiveness of their female classmates. More than 15 years later, it’s now a global platform with an estimated 2.7 billion monthly active users. Nearly half of the world now uses Facebook to share photos, engage with friends and stay connected with the world around them. It could be argued, however, that Facebook never truly grew up.
At its best, the platform has been a place for strengthening community and staying connected with friends from the other side of the globe.
But there’s an ugly side, hiding in plain sight. Facebook is awash with conspiracy theories and downright misinformation, from relatively minor gossip through to dangerous lies about COVID-19. That content has a tendency to go viral, because it elicits excitement and plays on our emotions. You can see it on nearly every news or political post – a ‘truther’, often using a pseudonym – chiming in with a comment about how the world is a lie.
Despite being a company worth nearly $1 trillion with more than 50,000 employees, Facebook has proven time and time again it’s unable to effectively police fake news on its platform. And yet it says it can turn off real news with the flick of a switch.
It says much about Facebook’s values that it would rather shut down news altogether rather than agree to pay a fair price for it.
If Facebook somehow follows through on its threats and bans news, it will force the platform to return somewhat to what it originally was – a website to share food photos and stay in touch with friends. Australians will go elsewhere for their news, given that the only ‘news’ therefore allowed on Facebook will be crackpot conspiracy theories and opinions. Well resourced, paywalled publications like The Australian will be fine, given their loyal readership. But other small, independent outlets will suffer. Those companies, which rely on Facebook and Google clicks to drive digital advertising, will be decimated.
It’s telling that the tech giant only did one interview to defend its position. Facebook told Australian journalists it wasn’t doing any interviews, instead pointing them to US outlet NBC, which published an interview with Campbell Brown, Facebook’s head of global news partnerships. Other American outlets including The New York Times and CNBC were given the news on Facebook’s position ahead of time, demonstrating that for Facebook, this is a global issue that will have ramifications in other jurisdictions, including the US.
ACCC chair Rod Sims has been in touch with regulators throughout the world about his actions, and they’re watching closely. Australia is not some irrelevant outlier on this issue, it’s instead an important test bed for how the tech giants should be treated by governments, and more importantly, voters.
This kind of reckoning ideally would have happened much sooner. The US tech giants have been too powerful for some time, throwing their weight around and further dividing society with fake news.
The Australian government is to be commended for finally cracking down on the very real market imbalance that has been out of whack for years. Now is a pivotal moment in deciding whether Facebook and Google are more powerful than governments, and for deciding what the point of Facebook and Google actually is.
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