Abstract
In the mass media era, the role of the media was universally regarded as fundamental to the proper functioning of the democratic state: the media’s capacity to provide information freely to all citizens ensured they had equal access to the democratic process. There were many, though, who registered concern at the top-down, government-led and highly concentrated structures of power embedded here; it was easy to demonstrate how the flow of information could be manipulated and the power of the media abused. Consequently, the arrival of the digital era seemed to radically modify that power relation for the better. The initial enthusiasm, though, has been challenged by what, a decade or two later, we have ended up with: a digital landscape that does indeed offer unprecedented access to information, in ways that have been transformative – but that is also awash with socially regressive content: fake news, hate speech revenge porn and so on. In this article, I want to discuss some aspects of what we have got from the digital era so far, with a particular focus on the changing relationship between the media and democracy – and within that, the role of news, information and the practice of journalism.
In the mass media era, the role of the media was universally regarded as fundamental to the proper functioning of the democratic state: the media’s capacity to provide information freely to all citizens ensured they had equal access to the democratic process. In this article, I consider certain aspects of how this role has fared as we have moved into the digital era, before considering the so-called ‘crisis in journalism’ as among a number of factors that highlight the need for a more committed engagement – from governments, the industry, and policy-makers – with the principle of regulating the ‘reinvented media’ (Turner, 2016) in the public interest.
My starting points for this discussion come from a couple of days in June 2017 when three media items caught my attention because, together, they appeared to encapsulate certain aspects of what has become of the media as an industry, as a field of representation, and as an institution, over the period during which we have transitioned into the digital era. The first of these reports on an incident in early 2017 when a text message and photograph had been circulating through WhatsApp among the Hispanic community in northeast Miami which claimed that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents were hauling undocumented migrants off to detention centres in buses – seemingly the implementation of Trump’s ‘deportation force’. Panicked callers turned to the information source they trusted most – Univision, the Spanish language television network. Univision’s journalists hit the streets, while their fact-checkers analysed the photograph of the ICE bus in action. The reporters soon learned that there was no deportation sweep under way and that the photograph was from 2014. They pumped out Facebook and Twitter posts debunking the rumour and circulated a corrective television package for Univision stations across the country.
They could do this because they saw the need and because they were ready. Several years earlier, Univision had responded to what they saw as the dangers of a declining commitment to the positive role the media could play in support of their community. They increased their investment in original reporting and the provision of information. They set up new investigative and documentary units, as well as new units for podcasts, mobile video and informational graphics. Over a period of 2 years, during which large numbers of journalists were being laid off elsewhere, Univision made 75 new hires (Rutenberg, 2017).
A few days before that story was published, Australian actress Rebel Wilson succeeded in her defamation action against a predatory journalism outlet which had trashed her reputation in the interests of ‘having a bit of fun’. She was awarded more than 4 million dollars in damages for being defamed by a series of articles in the Australian magazine Woman’s Day that claimed she had lied about her age and her real name to deceive her fans. The articles were based on information that had been investigated in 2013, at which time Woman’s Day, according to the emails cited during the defamation hearing, had come to the conclusion that Wilson ‘wasn’t lying as such’ and that the story was ‘too problematic’ (i.e., untrue) to run with. In 2015, however, Wilson had a new film coming out and so the magazine decided they would do the story anyway. ‘Keep it vague’, the editor instructed, ‘don’t be too mean, and you’ll probably get away with it’. Undermining the professional reputation of an actress, acting on false information from a source who was not prepared to go public, for this editor, was a ‘fun story’. Wilson disagreed, sued, and won.
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She said at the time, far too often I feel the tabloid magazines and the journalists who work for them don’t abide by professional ethics. Far too often I feel that their conduct can only be described as disgusting and as disgraceful. I’m glad, very glad, that the jury has agreed with me. (Barry, 2017)
My third example is a cartoon which was published in The Guardian Online on the same day as the Univision story (Rowson, 2017). It depicted the event in which a van was driven into a group of Muslims gathered outside the Finsbury Park mosque in London; this was a deliberate and racially targeted attack which resulted in the death of one person and injuries to a number of others. (The driver has since between sentenced to life imprisonment.) On one side of the van the cartoonist has inscribed ‘Read The Daily Mail and The Sun’. The accusation made here is that the forces which fuelled the racial hatred expressed in this crime were those of the tabloid news media. 2
I am offering these as points of reference for three types of contemporary journalism practice, each of them reflecting a different set of implied relations to the public interest. The first is an example of journalism practice that is committed to accurately informing the citizenry and prioritising the public interest – assumptions once central to the view that a responsible and ethical media was one of the fundamental components of a functioning democracy. The value of this form of media practice is to the community. In the second example, the Rebel Wilson case, we have a brand of journalism which locates itself primarily within the entertainment business. Here, the performance of ‘news entertainment’, 3 while located discursively and institutionally within the domain of journalism, is used to generate profit with little of the traditional journalistic regard for the public interest or corporate responsibility. Notwithstanding the constant invocation of journalistic principles by outlets such as this, the ethical and ontological lines that distinguish fact from fiction – or, more commonly, rumour – disappear, and any value the story generates is simply commercial. The third example points to those media proprietors who take this one step further and exploit their capacity to generate anger, fear and mistrust as a commercial attribute: this is usually criticised and also to some degree depoliticised by the use of the term ‘sensationalism’, which reduces it to a choice of presentational style. This type of media practice is overwhelmingly focused on commercial or market outcomes, but it is also exploited by some proprietors as a tool of political power that is nonetheless commonly authorised by reference to the public interest.
In terms of the traditional or, perhaps now rather, the ‘ideal’ model of the relation between the media and democracy, the gap between the two extremes of examples 1 and 3 is substantial. However, it is probably the Univision example which is the most surprising because it is running so clearly against the grain of the currently dominant tendencies and practices of mainstream journalism both offline and online. It is worth reminding ourselves how we got to this point: where the most democratically engaged and pro-social model of media practice of these three, the one most explicitly committed to the public value of journalism, is also the most anomalous.
The context from which these models of practice emerged is dominated by the media’s globalisation and commercialisation, to some extent assisted by widespread strategies of deregulating commercial media, as well as the decline in government support for public broadcasting. While not universally the case, but certainly in Australia and in many other Western democracies, the connection between the media and the public interest had already been weakened well before the digital era. Citizens had become markets, the corporate interests of commercial media proprietors had come to dominate the policy agenda, and those interests were increasingly articulated to a transnational corporate footprint and a neoliberal politics, hence the enthusiasm which greeted the development of the online media environment. Here, it seemed, was a sphere of media consumption, production and distribution that was not/could not be controlled by the major global media corporations. With new modes of access to the media, user-generated content and social media, the capacity to ‘produse’, to copy and to share, many claimed that the power of Big Media had been significantly reduced (Bruns, 2008; Shirky, 2008). In what was perhaps the most widely circulated catch-phrase, journalism professor, Jay Rosen (2006), announced that power had now been reclaimed by ‘the people formerly known as the audience’.
I am among those who were critical of this position at the time and of the manner in which so many academic accounts of the arrival of the digital were unduly influenced by industry spin (Andrejevic, 2013; Miller, 2007; Turner, 2010, 2012). Jim McGuigan (2009) has suggested that media, communications and cultural studies’ reluctance to subject industry spin from the digital entrepreneurs to the customary critical scrutiny may have been related to the fact that it was generated by ‘cool capitalism’ rather than by, say, Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp. It is certainly the case that the headline disrupters of the digital era were seen to constitute a progressive, even empowering, turn in commercial media and information services, and thus, their promises and predictions were given greater credence than media studies would ever have offered to the proprietors of traditional media.
There are some areas, I should acknowledge, where you could argue that the promises have been kept – although they are not in the area of news, information and journalism that concern me here. Stuart Cunningham and David Craig (in press), for instance, suggest that we need to distinguish between what happened in the news and information sector and what happened in relation to what they call social media entertainment (SME). In their analysis of SME – that is, user-generated online entertainment – Cunningham and Craig describe a hybrid sector of pro-am production, distribution and consumption that has remained largely outside the control of the mainstream media companies. The pivotal roles played by YouTube and the multichannel networks in this, as well as YouTube’s gradual transformation into something like a traditional television network, do encourage some qualification and nuancing of that proposition, I believe. (In that respect, Aymar Christian’s (2018) new book Open TV provides a usefully complementary account.) That said, it is overwhelmingly in the area of news and information where the dream of online democratisation has most categorically turned into a nightmare.
What the digital era has so far produced confirms the view that the claims for democratisation and empowerment were, to say the least, unduly optimistic. As I have argued elsewhere (Turner, 2006, 2010), while there was certainly a demoticisation of the media, the open access it provided was always just as likely to facilitate the spread of challenges to democracy as the free exchange of liberal views. Predictions that the proliferation of news blogs and social media platforms would revolutionise journalism, expanding the supply of news and information, have not been fulfilled: the Univision example stands out because it is so much of an exception. The number of journalists employed, in most places, is in decline and the rising number of freelancers working under precarious conditions constitutes a major challenge to those calling for better, more courageous and more independent journalism; paradoxically, perhaps, the absorption of journalists into the ‘gig economy’ weakens their capacity to produce precisely the kind of journalism we need. 4 Furthermore, the many news blogs and social media platforms which deal with news largely do so as sites of remediation; in general, as well, they have focused upon comment, opinion, and rumour rather than on original reporting or the development of new sources of information.
The crucial element here has been the thoroughgoing commercialisation of the digital media space and thus the role played by advertising. While there are some other models in play, and I will turn to them later on, the competition for attention required as a means of securing viable levels of advertising revenue has ruled the digital space and has overwhelmingly determined what practices, what principles and what content prevail. Monetisation has been the enemy of democratisation. The battle for attention – and the strategies used to compete in that battle – certainly attracted audiences, and it also skewed the character of what content was made available: towards entertainment, towards provocative, shareable content and so on. The battle has also been highly attritional. As a result, the political economy of the digital world has become increasingly concentrated and the power of Facebook, Google and Amazon, in particular, has grown dramatically. Mathew Hindman’s (2009) critique of ‘the myth of digital democracy’ noted almost 10 years ago that the degree of corporate concentration online had already outstripped what had occurred in the traditional media; as online entities come and go, and as the powerful acquire the weak, this tendency has only accelerated in the intervening years.
The implications of this situation have now become a key public concern – even among those who might once have lined up alongside the digital optimists. The fact that these platforms, notwithstanding their power and influence, are not bound by any of the ethical or regulatory constraints of traditional journalism means that they have been able to compete for attention untrammelled by regard for, or regulatory protections for, accuracy, privacy or journalism ethics. Even key figures in the development of the online economy, such as Pierre Omidyar (2017), the founder of eBay, have registered alarm at this; he has described social media as undermining ‘transparency, accountability, and trust in our democracy’ (2017). Digital media producer and Director of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at USC, Jonathan Taplin’s (2017) polemical book Move Fast and Break Things has the subtitle ‘How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy’. The Australian news magazine, The Monthly, devoted the cover of its July 2017 issue to a piece arguing that ‘Facebook is killing our media, not democratising it’ (Fiek, 2017). (At this point, it is worth noting that such comments could be accused of being as just as subject to hyperbole and exaggeration as the statements from the digital optimists.) Even in the United States where resistance to government intervention is the default setting, the ‘R’ word was being raised on mainstream television: Donald Trump’s favourite TV host, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough of Morning Joe, has suggested that it was now time to regulate Facebook: ‘Tell me’, he said, ‘at what point does the federal government step in and say, “You start handling yourself responsibly or we will step in”?’ (Mandese, 2017). And, of course, as this essay was out for review, we had the eruption of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which provoked widespread calls across the political spectrum for Facebook to be regulated (McNamee and Parakilas, 2018) – with some even asking whether this was to be the ‘beginning of the end’ for the social media giant (Bogle, 2018).
It is probably fair to say that there is now something of a consensus on what is going wrong and a menu of issues cited within public and academic debate: a decline in the quality and accessibility of information; the commercial and political use and misuse of personal data; the separation of political debate from authoritative evidence, from the national or community interest broadly conceived, and from the structures of moderation ensuring accuracy, privacy and civility; the corrosion of institutional authority; the commercialisation of all aspects of media performance, and the prioritisation of the commercial over the public interest. And it is widely argued now, especially in response to the steady emergence of information about interventions in the US elections in 2016, that what Toby Miller (2007) has described as a ‘democratic deficit’ (p. 17) is not just a problem for journalism, or for the media in general, but for a properly functioning democracy.
It has taken longer than one would have hoped, however, for this consensus to emerge, and there are reasons for that. A core reason is that in most democratic countries, the mythology of the open Internet was so powerful that the application of ‘light touch’ regulation was regarded as a positive – a welcome scaling down of the exercise of power. What we might now, perhaps, see as a mistake was then seen as enabling and progressive. It is also important to remember, however, just how modest were the beginnings of such giant corporations as Facebook and therefore why their regulation initially would have seemed totally unnecessary. It is hard to imagine that any of those involved at the conception of any of the early social media platforms, for instance, ever expected to achieve the scale and influence they now enjoy. Early on, then, there was every reason to see this as something like the flourishing of an online cottage industry rather than the beginnings of a global oligopoly. 5 Indeed, that early history continues to be invoked even now whenever regulation is proposed: those resisting such regulation claim that it would threaten the innovativeness and creativity of the technology industries.
There were other considerations at this early stage, however, which also played their part. What was seen as the global and borderless character of the digital world was cited as evidence that nationally based regulation was neither desirable nor viable; this aligned quite neatly with the widespread resistance, among many humanities and social science academics, to what they saw as the inherent conservatism and exclusivity of nationalism as a political force. Against that tendency was a mythology of openness constructed through the ideological alliance between San Francisco counter-culture communitarianism and Silicon Valley libertarianism (Turner, F. 2006) which also made calls for regulation look regressive. As time went on, however, and as the commercial power and social influence of digital platforms (social media, search engines, retail) began to evolve, there was another crucial strategy which facilitated their development into the kinds of enterprises they are now: their successful representation of themselves as technology companies, rather than media companies. As telecommunications service providers, they were not to be held responsible for the content they carried. Furthermore, since they were based on peer-to-peer communication, they were not comparable to the traditional mass media, such as television broadcasters. Consequently, they did not fall under the oversight of media regulatory regimes and were not subject to any of their obligations or constraints.
Napoli and Caplan’s (2017) recent article follows earlier work such as that of Tarleton Gillespie (2010) in addressing the long history of social media companies such as Facebook, ‘insisting they are not news organizations, or even media companies, at all’ (Napoli and Caplan, 2017: 1) in order to be treated as technology companies. Napoli and Caplan’s article provides what is probably the most thorough point-by-point takedown to date of the technology companies’ claims. It also outlines the rationale for these claims being made in the first place: that is, to ensure that these companies are ‘sheltered from many of the negative obligations (i.e. obligations to police/protect against the circulation of certain types of speech) associated with media companies’ (Napoli and Caplan, 2017: 16), as well as ‘more intensive government oversight, in the form of affirmative obligations to serve the public interest and more stringent regulation in areas such as concentration of ownership’ (Napoli and Caplan, 2017: 8). Napoli and Caplan (2017) argue that the platforms’ success in defining themselves in this way has been fundamental to their development: … part of the way that these companies were able to evolve into dominant media firms is by circumventing the media legal and regulatory frameworks that may have inhibited their rapid expansion and/or imposed more legal liability and/or social responsibility costs along the way. And the discursive strategy discussed here likely plays a role in facilitating this circumvention. (p. 9)
Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance before the US Congress may well have marked the point at which this strategy had reached its use-by date.
Journalism and the public interest in the digital era
Journalism has been one of the big losers in this, notwithstanding all the hopes for so-called ‘citizen journalism’ and the proliferation of news sites online. The distinction between fact and opinion has been seriously blurred, right across the news media, and the authority of an ethical journalism has been devalued by the fact that so much of what presents itself as journalism today does not conform to any sort of ethical standards. The battle for attention has created a fertile environment for fake news. As the editor of one high-profile online news blog, The Daily Beast, has commented, the partisan media in the United States focused on a ‘narrow but intense niche audience, and the only way to keep them engaged was to keep them addicted to a diet of anger and anxiety’. That, he said, ‘is where the hate news starts to seep in’ (Sass, 2017). Mark Andrejevic (2013) has argued that in the battle for attention, the category of news and information has been reduced to its discursive characteristics so that the performance of news becomes just another genre of entertainment – with consequences for the authority, credibility and status of news generally. What actually constitutes news – even for more traditional outlets such as the broadcasting networks – has changed, as every day it gets closer to merging with the category of rumour. Naomi Klein (2017), in No Is Not Enough, quotes a report which claims that during the last US presidential election, the three major nightly news network shows combined spent a total of just 32 minutes on issue coverage, and the rest was spent on ‘the reality show of who said what about whom, and who was leading which poll where’ (p. 51). Americans, and indeed the rest of us, are now living with the consequences of this.
On the more positive side, what has come to be called the ‘crisis of journalism’ (Curran, 2010, 2011) may have begun to generate something of a recovery in the industry’s own sense of its proper social function. Reports of the industry talking to itself now cite a growing recognition of the importance of a journalism that does more than generate a profit and that delivers benefits to society. Some industry leaders have highlighted the need to ‘invest directly in quality news producers’, to ‘insist on a fact-based debate’, to ‘call bullshit’ and to ‘make important stories interesting’ (Sass, 2017). This is from Vincent Peyregne, presenting findings from a global study of world press trends to the 69th World News Media Congress in 2017; ‘we used to trade in attention. But trust is our new currency. Any decline in trust erodes the foundation of our business: credible, first-rate journalism’ (Loechner, 2017). It is significant that this comment was in response to a major shift in global newspaper revenues in which reader-based revenue (US$86 billion in 2016) outstripped advertising revenue (US$68 billion), that reflected what now seems to be a fundamental shift in newspapers’ business model (Loechner, 2017). The shift to reader-based revenue has seen the global media building loyal audiences around high-quality journalism, Jack Loechner (2017) reports; a particular segment of this audience is the young, who are prepared to pay for journalism online ‘provided they see the publication as a reliable source of news and bond with its mission and purpose’.
Public support for independent quality journalism also seems to be growing in some areas. While programmes of public subvention for news and information services go back to at least the 1970s in France (Smith, 1977), and are not uncommon elsewhere in Europe and Scandinavia, they are now being proposed as correctives to the current situation in new locations. Using funds generated by the sale of spectrum used by old public media stations, the New Jersey legislature has invested in a consortium to bolster public interest journalism and a focus on local issues. ProPublica has introduced a 3-year programme to employ a fulltime investigative journalist in up to six news organisations located in US cities with populations under 1 million (Guaglione, 2017). The Guardian has set up a non-profit venture in the United States, aiming at tapping philanthropic organisations for financial help to report on issues including human rights and climate change. And in Australia, a Senate inquiry into the future of journalism considered (but regrettably did not adopt) a proposal for a levy on the online platforms to be used to develop a fund to support not-for-profit public interest journalism.
As more and more commentators talk about the Internet ‘destroying democracy’, and as more and more advertisers reveal their sensitivity to public debates about the social and political impact of the online giants who carry their advertising, a number of these giants are showing signs of accepting the need for greater self-regulation. Both Twitter and Facebook have acknowledged they need to do more to counter hate speech, incivility and political manipulation through, for instance, fake news sites from Russia; this may have had something to do with the decline in Facebook usage over 2016–2017 (Hutchinson, 2017), and it also reflects Twitter’s concern about its ongoing viability as consumer and government scrutiny intensifies. Facebook is reported to have hired 10,000 fact-checkers to help distinguish material generated by bots, the identification of fake news sites and so on. Self-regulation on this scale is not a simple matter, however, even if it were theoretically possible for it to be done manually. Some of the strategies already undertaken in this regard have highlighted the difficulties involved. In 2017, in what has become known as ‘Adpocalypse’, YouTube was hit by a massive advertisers’ boycott of the platform, protesting at the manner in which advertisements were partnered with content on the site. The monitoring and screening system YouTube developed in response, as well as the changing policy settings for monetisation, seriously impacted the SME producers and resulted in especially discriminatory outcomes for minority content and producers such as those within the LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) communities (Cunningham and Craig, in press).
While certainly welcome in both practical and symbolic terms, such developments and the related initiatives mentioned earlier are only papering over the cracks. The more fundamental issue for reconfiguring the relationship between the media and democracy for the digital era is how policy-makers should deal with the problem of regulating Facebook, Google, Amazon and the other technology companies now operating as key components of the global media economy. The hard truth is that the social consequences of the reinvention of the media have been far more diverse, far more complicated, far more contradictory and far less pro-social than was originally envisaged. It is time to acknowledge that this reinvention has resulted in the rise of large, powerful and unregulated media companies whose activities generate a wide range of potential social, cultural and political impacts, some of which at this point we can identify but do not sufficiently understand. That is the predicament in which we find ourselves, as we consider how to design a regulatory regime for the digital era that is shaped by a recommitment to protecting the public interest.
How should we go about it? That’s a large issue, and I can’t do it justice in the space remaining – nor could I claim to have the answers we need. I want to make some observations, however, about what we need to consider as we seek those answers. In his response to my presentation of an earlier version of this article, Stephen Coleman (2017), whose most recent book Can the Internet Strengthen Democracy? makes a powerfully persuasive case for the positive opportunity the Internet represents for the rejuvenation of deliberative democracy, 6 argued that my call for a renewed commitment to regulation was aimed at the wrong target in that it was focused upon the regulation of the technologies concerned. If I was correct in my analysis of the situation, he went on, then the core problem is to do with the marketisation of the Internet, not the technologies themselves, and therefore any regulatory intervention should be aimed primarily at managing the market in ways that protect the public interest. I accept the logic of that position and it does chime with certain interventions that have already occurred in various jurisdictions. The approach taken by the European Union as part of their Digital Single Market Strategy (Lewis, 2017), for instance, is one of the most uncompromising and likely to be one of the more effective: it sets specific standards of practice to be met by the digital platforms as the price of entry to their market and is clearly focused on screening out fake news and what it describes as ‘illegal content’ (European Commission, 2017). A market of that scale can do this; notoriously, China has had such mechanisms in place for a long time in the service of very different objectives, but these may be the first democratic jurisdictions to seriously attempt it. Smaller national markets have less leverage to compel compliance, however, and so this is not necessarily the ‘solution’ to the situation. Other options include imposing a levy on social media and transnational streaming services as a form of support for the local content industry (Quinn, 2017) or tweaking the algorithms used by streaming and online search services to ensure high levels of visibility for local or national content. There are further examples of initiatives which are using market-related mechanisms to produce pro-social outcomes elsewhere that are not dissimilar to the frameworks currently used to regulate commercial broadcast media in many jurisdictions – although without the traditional focus upon concentration and ownership. That latter issue, however, is not irrelevant in this context. A core source of the power of Google, Facebook and Amazon is the fact they are effectively transnational monopolies. Targeting these monopolies as anti-competitive, or disaggregating these companies – breaking up Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, for example – is not such a radical idea when viewed against the histories of anti-trust and anti-cartel legislation in Western market democracies over the years. It is hard to imagine any government attempting to do something like this at the moment, nonetheless.
That said, I maintain the view that, in this case, we need to do more than regulate the market. There are key concerns about the current relation between the media and democracy which are to do with the specific capacities of some of the technologies involved in the reinvention of the media, not just about the commercialisation of their applications. The secrecy surrounding how algorithms work, for instance, and the lack of transparency about how private information is gathered and repurposed are just two areas where there are legitimate questions about exactly how we should view what it is these technologies are designed to do. These are not minor issues; the collection and sale of private data is core business for Facebook, for instance, and the lack of transparency about how this business is conducted is built into the technology. The Cambridge Analytica scandal has demonstrated how, and on what scale, the data collected can be misused, raising the level of public and political concern. The European Union, again, has taken the lead in attempting to address such concerns through its General Data Protection Regulation regime which requires companies to acquire explicit consent for data collection and use. The penalties for businesses breaching these regulations include fines of up to €20 million or 4% of global turnover (Bogle, 2018).
Hopefully, we are becoming more aware of the danger of simply allowing whatever technical affordance is in play to just ‘run’ without oversight or constraint as if it was inherently socially neutral; certainly, such awareness has been raised in relation to, for instance, the growth of revenge porn, online bullying, the grooming of targets for paedophilia and so on. Nonetheless, one of the core defences of their business proposed by the likes of Google and Facebook is in fact based on the automated nature of much of what they do: the ‘hands off’, ‘who are we to intervene?’, approach is one of the ways in which the Internet giants have claimed to be corporately disinterested while serving the customised interests of their consumers. Such a position – that these are value-free platforms, driven by consumers’ choices, which should be allowed to participate in the social without human intervention – is losing ground now. Taking its place is a more widespread recognition of the need for a more focused, critical and pro-social scrutiny of what these technologies actually do and how they are used. That is the scrutiny required if we make informed decisions about what aspects of the reinvented media demand regulation and control in the public interest. We are not at that point yet. The patterns of convergence and divergence which make up the contemporary media environment are all too rarely surveyed as a set of interrelated and intersecting forces; rather than approach them as the communications equivalent of an ecological system, we have tended to examine them as separate species existing in specific habitats. The former task is getting much more difficult, of course, given the scale involved and given the fact that researchers working in media, cultural and communications studies reflect the same market fragmentation and generational divisions in terms of media consumption that we find in the broader population. Not all of us working in media studies find ourselves using the full range of media technologies available; this necessarily limits each of us in our capacity to understand how these technologies are experienced by their users. For these and many other reasons, there is a lot of work for our disciplines to do: examining the proliferating cultures of use that now obtain in the multiplatform environment, for instance, or investigating specific platforms, portals or enterprises in order to understand more precisely how the machinery of the algorithm responds to the data which feed it.
Notwithstanding Stephen Coleman’s challenge then, I take the view that we need to regulate both the market and the technologies: we need to regulate the whole operation of an industry that has gradually metamorphosed into something very different to what it originally appeared it would be and now stands to constitute a significant chunk of the domain of the social. Given its power and extent, and given the fact that we know it can do harm as easily as good, this industry needs to be brought back into a closer alignment with the public interest: through mandated codes of practice, legally enforceable constraints and obligations of social accountability (on, for instance, the editing, curation and provision of content). Germany is perhaps taking the lead in this direction so far, with the passing of its Network Enforcement Act in January 2018. Under this legislation, online platforms such as Google, Facebook and Twitter face fines of up to €50 million if they do not remove ‘obviously illegal’ hate speech within 24 hours (Bornstein, 2018). Different strategies currently in play within various jurisdictions include some kind of affirmative levy or taxation regime to fund domains of local or national public interest (such as independent investigative journalism) that may be disadvantaged by these transnational corporations’ scale, influence and profitability. The complexity of the task ahead, however, is underlined by the fact that we may need quite different regulatory arrangements to deal with fake news, or with the use of data, or with the observance of community standards in relation to hate speech revenge porn and so on. Furthermore, whatever is designed will need a mix of agreed standards for self-regulation as well as for more top-down mandated requirements.
All of that said, we found ways of constructing just this kind of multi-faceted regulatory regime for television, radio and, to a lesser extent, print, in the past, although admittedly that was in a very different time culturally and historically; also, much of what was initially established for these media has been wound back as community standards have been perceived to change and as a more liberal approach to regulation itself has been normalised. A regulatory regime for social media, moreover, could well need to be on a scale that far exceeds anything that has been done before. More importantly, and here it differs from earlier media regulatory regimes, it will likely impinge on the rights of individuals, not just those of media organisations. So, coming up with a regime that deals with such considerations adequately is a daunting task. As we saw with the YouTube takedown, even activities undertaken with good intentions can turn out to have negative consequences.
Notwithstanding the difficulties, the problem remains. These platforms exercise a powerful social and political influence much as the traditional media were understood to do, but they are free from the social, political and cultural constraints that regulators had to varying extents imposed on the mass media. There is an urgent need to address this situation. The precondition for that happening, however, is the comprehensive recognition of the necessity of re-establishing some priority for the public interest in the digital era. This is as necessary for those in politics, in policy and in the academy as for those who manage the media industries. All of these groups need a better understanding of what the problems are and what needs to be done to address them before the policy-makers can come up with appropriate strategies.
In Australia, let me say as I close, with the cosy relations between government and the commercial broadcasters continuing to drive policy, with the prevailing attitude still about finding ways to hogtie the digital disrupters in order to protect the favoured local moguls and with very little curiosity from government about how to better understand what actually happens in this new media environment, we are still a long way from that eventuality.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Early versions of this article were presented at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Queensland, the School of Media and Communications at the University of Leeds and the Department of Media and Communications at the University of Sydney. I would like to thank those who attended these seminars and provided comments and suggestions; they have all fed into the development (and hopefully, the improvement) of the article. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers of the first draft of this article for their helpful comments.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.