Holding tech giants to account

In these pages at the weekend, News Corp chief executive Robert Thomson wrote of the regulatory “reckoning” that tech giants Facebook, Google and Amazon had coming. “Thankfully, legislators are awake to the commercial and ­social impact of dominant digital platforms that are wildly successful, with the emphasis on wildly as in the Wild West,” he said. The pioneering inquiry of the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission is one of several attempts across the world to update governance and regulate the potentially destructive power of the tech giants. There is a lot at stake.

Like the internet, today’s digital platforms have an origin story of near utopian beneficence. It’s true that innovation has brought wonders; the social and economic effects have been as profound as they are unpredictable. In effect, the tech giants have become public utilities, without proper public oversight. Their ubiquity and reach call for a clever, vigilant policy response.

Start-up idealism long ago gave way to rapacious commercialism. The digital platforms filter the web presence of news, opinion and products in an opaque fashion, inviting the suspicion that they favour their own business interests and impose the progressive orthodoxy that reigns in Silicon Valley and Seattle. We were promised social media would bring together lonely individuals, yet the technology has encouraged a retreat into filter bubbles of identity politics. The new global commons never arrived, and then we discovered that sometimes we were bytes in a black market trade of confidential data. Digital liberation was oversold at the outset, when we had little idea of device addiction or psychologically tweaked algorithms. Now there are myriad concerns — to do with democracy, markets and the social good — and they come together in the plight of news gathering. Elections alone do not make a democracy. It turns on the quality of decisions by citizens afforded accurate news and a contest of honest opinion that sorts good ideas from bad. But the tech giants have gutted the economics of public interest journalism. Facebook and Google expropriate media content and monopolise the advertising revenues that once underwrote the costly business of journalism.

With the media watchdog subdued, the tech giants have enabled fake news, misinformation and plots to manipulate public opinion. Shadowy activist groups such as Sleeping Giants leverage social media to give the false impression of a public backlash against companies advertising with non-left entities such as News Corp’s Sky News. As News Corp Australasia’s executive chairman Michael Miller said in this newspaper yesterday: “It’s a dangerous path for companies to veer down if we allow anonymous groups the power to become de facto censors of the nation’s public discourse.”

The tech giants used to preach openness but they turn opaque when asked about the algorithms that deliver news and opinions to many millions of people worldwide. News Corp, ultimate owner of The Australian, has asked the ACCC to consider an algorithm review board. Call it curation or editing, the tech giants should be held accountable for content they promote — or suppress. Machine learning complicates algorithms but their design and recalibration involve very human values. Are trusted news outlets promoted? Is it true that conservative voices are “deboosted” on Facebook and “showbanned” on Twitter? We won’t get definitive answers until the governance framework is right.