The reluctant newsmen by Phill McCoffers

Back in the days when hot metal met rolls of newsprint it was pretty clear who was in control of what rolled off the presses in black and white. It was the journalists, the editors, or the media moguls in the top floor offices. They had the control, but they also held the responsibilities, and ultimately the buck stopped there. It wasn’t the responsibility of the guy who operated the machinery, it wasn’t the company that produced the paper, neither was it the trees that were felled, nor the newsagent on the corner that sold you all the news that’s fit to print. Control was in the hands of a few, but those same hands bore the responsibility. When it went wrong, at least you had a pretty good idea who to haul in front of a judge to sort it all out. It mostly worked, most of the time.

New media, principally social media which, thus far has been virtually untouched by regulation, has a major identity problem, most recently seen in the dying days of the Trump presidency last month, and it is high time it was addressed.

Social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the hoard of smaller, niche networks have been a hotbed of vested interests hothoused by untruths and conspiracy theories since day one, but it all came to a very public head as Trump supporters organised by social media, and inspired by the President himself, all but let themselves into the US Capitol as senators were in the process of legally confirming incoming President Biden`s victory, but perhaps more significantly Trump’s defeat.

During the fall out over the following few days many business and political allies put as much distance between themselves and the increasingly toxic Trump brand as they could. One by one Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube and others deleted Trump’s accounts. Many of Trump’s followers cried foul, and decamped en masse to Parler, Gab and other social networks more sympathetic to their views, and a whole lot less likely to fact check their claims, or delete inappropriate content.

Days later citing postings of death threats Parler was shut down in death by 1000 cuts as Apple, then Google deleted the app from their stores, and the all powerful Amazon Web Services (AWS), the infrastructure behind a huge amount of the web, cut off their life support. Parler disappeared at the touch of a button and looks unlikely to return.

Many called this an infringement of the right to free speech, and they probably have a point. Many people, powerful leaders even, express some pretty egregious views and calls to violence, but keep their accounts, and why are a handful of Californian billionaires suddenly in charge of the main medium of self expression for much of the globe? Fair questions indeed.

Perhaps I`m being naive here, but when the geeky college kids were building Twitter, Facebook, Google and the rest in their Harvard or MIT dorm rooms I assume they were doing so with a mixture of curiosity and half an eye on making a pile of money and buying a massive boat, rather than an evil glint in their eye as they sought to wrest control of the means of expression for nefarious purposes. I suspect that it was as much of a surprise to them as to the rest of us when savvy political campaigners spotted the potential of systems designed to sell us stuff could be co-opted to change our opinions and voting habits through ingenious misinformation. As this became apparent to the world, these same geeks, now billionaire CEOs were dragged in front of politicians and committees and told to stop the spread of this toxic material.

To go back to the analogy in the first paragraph, their defense was that they were suppliers of newsprint, distributors and retailers, rather than the publishers, reporters and editors responsible for the content, but no dice, the politicians forced greater onus on them to be more responsible for anything published on their platforms, billions of posts every day. Effectively by doing this these tech billionaire CEOs were instantly promoted by these politicians to the posts as the most powerful media barons the world has ever seen. A job they didn’t apply for, nor do you suspect they actually want.

Back in the days of newsprint, true freedom of speech was available to only those with a platform, and it wasn’t easy to get one of those. For the rest of us free speech happened over the garden fence or over a pint. Social media has provided instant, free, world wide syndication to everyone with a device and an internet connection, literally billions of us, and it is trying to make Mark Zukerberg, Jack Dorsey, Larry Page, Jeff Bezos and a very small collection of others responsible for every word we type.

That’s never going to work of course, but learning how to control this monster is up there with some of the most important issues facing us. It has already begun to control us.

Phil D. Coffers

The Islander Economics Correspondent