Abstract
The single biggest challenge facing journalism today is the continued unregulated growth of social media platforms and associated ways in which they have been gamed by political actors for their own ends. This is contributing to the steady erosion of independent journalism and a deterioration of democratic politics. Finding a solution to these problems requires not only concerted political will but also state regulation of social media platforms to ensure greater privacy, data protection and transparency. A few important steps towards a solution include effective monitoring of the deployment of targeted advertising for political purposes; ensuring that their algorithms do not promote the circulation of racist, sexist, homophobic and other extremist content; and making social media companies editorially responsible for the content they publish and circulate.
Recent revelations surrounding the use of social media to target and influence voters in elections across the world point to the single biggest challenge facing journalism today; the unregulated rise of social media platforms. This problem is not simply one of nefarious actors using social media to spread ‘fake news’. The problem is much bigger and it concerns how social media platforms themselves contribute to a toxic news media ecology by their very design, business model and lack of accountability.
The true story underlying the Cambridge Analytica scandal, for example, is not that of a shadowy company exploiting Facebook user data to influence people, it is that the exploitation of user data is Facebook’s business model. In the age of ‘platform capitalism’ (Srnicek, 2016), users of social media platforms and the data trails they create have become the very product by which social media platforms make their profits through advertising. Targeted advertising represents 98 per cent of Facebook’s revenues which were $40 billion last year. That this advertising has been exploited by corrupt and suspect companies in the service of political actors should not surprise us, but it should make us worry about the future of journalism not least because it is becoming harder to distinguish legitimate news sources from paid promotions.
The rise of social media platforms has had a profound impact on journalism, presenting problems for which no easy solutions are available. Most obvious is the impact that social media platforms have had on the economics and organisation of media outlets. Advertising revenue for legacy print and television media has been in decline for several years, and as a result news rooms have been dramatically reorganised as news consumption changes and revenues run dry. The vulnerability of local, national and international news organisations is only exacerbated by their growing dependency on Facebook, Twitter, Google and Apple – organisations that are not best placed to be the custodians of a public sphere based on values of editorial independence and democratic communication.
While the impact of social media platforms on the profits and organisation of news organisations are important challenges for journalism, an even bigger but interrelated issue is the steady undermining of democratic politics. This problem is manifest in three ways. First, through political actors utilising social media platforms for the purpose of propaganda and ‘fake news’. Second, through the ways in which social media platforms harbour sexism, racism and xenophobia and third, in how such platforms contribute towards the undermining of trust and truth-seeking in the media.
From techno-optimism to pessimism
The late noughties and early 2010s were marked by a wave of techno-optimism, as journalists, politicians and pundits lauded how social media was enabling new forms of democratic participation and was undoubtedly a force for good in society (Schmidt and Cohen, 2013; Shirky, 2008). Events in recent years have led to more tempered views where social media platforms are seen with more pessimism because of how political campaign teams, state leaders, militaries and other non-state actors including terrorist organisations have ‘arrested the once chaotic social media dynamics and more effectively harnessed them for their own interests’ (Hoskins and O’Loughlin, 2015: 1320).
Since the 2016 Brexit referendum and US presidential election, techno-pessimism has reached new heights as representatives of social media platforms have been called to testify in front of the UK parliament and US Congress. But the problems social media pose for journalism go well beyond current concerns about alleged election fraud during the Brexit vote, or supposed Russian influence. Why? Because social media platforms have made it easy for political actors to bypass legacy public service media and communicate their messages directly to audiences. They have changed how most of us access and use news and allowed the mushrooming of hyper-partisan groups that provoke controversies and conflicts that in turn lead to greater engagement and systematic tracking of users’ behaviours.
Power without responsibility
Political actors no longer need journalists to get their message out, they can simply produce media content and circulate it to large audiences themselves. Not only does this lead to political messaging being devoid of any editorial responsibility according to agreed professional ethics, it serves to spread misinformation that in turn contributes to sexism, racism, xenophobia and an undermining of trust in the media. Examples of the cyclical reproduction of misinformation and disinformation abound: from Trump’s tweets spreading misinformation about his inauguration crowd size, refugees and Muslims, to the Republican party’s use of social media advertising to suppress voter turnout; from Cambridge Analytica’s spread of dark ads on social media, to the Russian state’s creation of adverts to influence elections. The structures of social media governance are now a matter of deep public concern and interest.
What to do about social media?
This is one of the biggest policy challenges of our age. First, there is a need for international and state regulation of social media platforms. Platforms such as Facebook are not politically neutral technology companies, rather they are also news media companies and should be regulated as such. We need regulations that require social media corporations to take responsibility for the ways in which their platforms are utilised by political actors, and here, there is a need to make political advertising transparent, to follow journalistic ethics and to take editorial responsibility for their content. Second, social media platforms also need to change the algorithms they use to minimise the circulation of offensive, extreme, sexist and racist content (Noble, 2018). Such algorithms should also be made transparent so that social media users can understand how and why content appears on their news feeds. Third, there is also a need for social media platforms to move away from ad-based models reliant on the sale of user data and maximising clicks and views. Rather than being focused on capturing people’s attention, social media platforms should be focused on ensuring human well-being, meaningful interaction and ‘time well spent’ (Center for Humane Technology, 2018).
Journalists too need to hold social media companies and political actors to account. This should involve the pursuit of high quality investigative reporting, but it also requires journalists to push back against social media platforms and avoid the lure of clickbait reporting. Lies and misinformation should be called out as such, and rather than ignoring or colluding with falsehoods, journalists should stick to fundamental ethical principles of truth-seeking. In the context of declining trust in the news media and in an age where individual subjectivity and even narcissistic self-promotion on social media is prized over measured evidence-based opinion, it is now more important than ever for journalists to stay committed to accurate, fair and independent reporting.
As state actors bypass the media to engage with audiences directly on social media, it is imperative that journalists do what they can to counter, challenge and critique extremist or hyper-partisan reporting. Faced with neo-Nazi White supremacists, it makes no sense to be impartial. To be objective in this case is to tell it like it is – stay as close to the truth as possible and not fall foul of relativist clap trap.
Finally, journalists need to be wary of becoming beholden to social media platforms. Recent changes in Facebook’s algorithm that prioritised posts from friends and family rather than news outlets have seen media organisations and their business models collapse. Journalists should therefore not base their business on the algorithms of social media platforms.
Social media and journalism are undoubtedly intertwined in the contemporary media ecology. However, through reform and regulation of social media platforms, and through a renewed journalistic commitment to speaking truth to power, the challenges posed by social media platforms can be overcome.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [AH/P00508X/1].