Social media giants face regulation as publishers, not just postmen
The big stick of regulation on tech seems to be building up steam.
As vision of the New Zealand Prime Minister consoling members of the Islamic community and showing her country’s support and sorrow for the victims of the Christchurch terrorist attack was broadcast around the work last week, the 38-year old was already being mocked and slandered on social media.
As a sign of respect and unity, Jacinda Ardern wore a black headscarf as she visited the families of the victims of last Friday’s attack by an Australian white supremacist that killed 50 people at two New Zealand mosques.
Jacinda Ardern visits members of Christchurch's Muslim community. AP
On YouTube, people peppered a video of Ardern bringing what she described as a “message of love and support and grief of the people of New Zealand” with sexist and xenophobic comments.
Switch to Twitter and the New Zealand leader was described as "disgusting, fraudulent and nasty" – and that's one of the tamer of the misogynistic attacks on the politician who identifies as religiously agnostic.
Over on Facebook, Australia-based groups mocked and insulted Ardern’s healing message, accusing her of submission and spouting vilification about being overrun by immigrants.
All of these examples were easily found on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter in mere minutes by a human, not a complex and finely tuned algorithm.
In the wake of the horrific killing spree, social media companies have come under pressure for both their inability to stop the rapid spread of the live-streamed shooter video and, more broadly, their failure to adequately address hate speech.
Facebook, YouTube and Twitter have struggled to stop the spread of the Christchurch video on their platforms. AP
That livestream was another in a long line of firsts for social media but hardly one to celebrate. Instead, it's focused attention on the underbelly of the platforms that have become part of everyday life for billions of people.
Social media has brought the world together like never before. It's put you in touch with that cousin you haven’t spoken to since 1993, meant we can easily share cherished moments with friends across the road or across the globe and, for many, has become the go-to source for breaking news.
But, as the last few years of scandals and shocks have illustrated, there are some very dark places online. The vitriol spread in the aftermath of the Christchurch attacks is not a one-off. Social media has allowed fringe views – ones not acceptable to the majority who respect the rule of law in modern multicultural societies – to find the mainstream via unregulated and uncensored platforms. It has connected people who share warped world views and in doing so legitimised and inflamed hatred.
Facebook, Google – which owns YouTube – and Twitter did not cause last Friday’s attack – but they have repeatedly failed to address the underbelly of hate, crime and conspiracies that have proliferated on their platforms.
"They are the publisher, not just the postman. There cannot be a case of all profit, no responsibility," Ardern said this week.
The problem is that extremists are good for business. From a revenue point of view, these platforms exist to serve up advertising. Those who choose to engage with conspiracies and other content most would judge to be offensive really, really engage with this stuff, and an engaged audience is easy to sell. Deep engagement is a key pillar of the social media business model.
"Facebook is the worst culprit," says Federal Labor MP Ed Husic. "It has two responses. First, it doesn't acknowledge there is a problem. Then it does acknowledge the problem and says it will do better. The third thing that happens is nothing happens."
Husic, who in 2010 became the first Muslim elected to Federal Parliament, uses Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn to connect with different constituencies.
Ed Husic became Australia's first Muslim federal member of parliament in 2010. Jesse Marlow
"I did cop abuse on both Facebook and Twitter, particularly around the time when I was in sworn in as a parliamentary secretary for Kevin Rudd [in 2013]. I swore in using the Holy Koran and there was massive negative reaction from certain quarters," the Member for Chifley says.
"I had to shut off the messaging option on Facebook because the stuff coming through was truly horrendous and awful."
Husic left Twitter in 2017, not in reaction to anti-Islamic comments per se but because he thought "all it seemed to be good for was throwing a rock at someone else".
On Facebook hate groups have planted deep roots and generated significant harmful outcomes; from Russian and Iranian attempts to sow discontent in the United States to the spread of propaganda inciting violence against minorities in Myanmar.
I had to shut off the messaging option on Facebook because the stuff coming through was truly horrendous and awful.
— Ed Husic
Just last month, YouTube was found to be facilitating soft-core paedophilia rings in comments spreads.
The social media giants say they are doing the best to weed out the noxious content. In the final quarter of 2018, YouTube removed 18,950 videos and 1713 channels for violating its hateful or abusive content policies. It took down 49,618 videos and 16,586 channels for violating promotion of violence or violent extremism.
In the third quarter of 2018, Facebook took action on 2.9 million pieces of content under its hate speech policies and 15.4 million pieces of violent and graphic content.
Hate speech and extremism is more difficult for Facebook, YouTube and Twitter to counter than other types of offences such as copyright infringement. The platforms use visual or audio footprints to track down exact copies of material produced in breach of copyright. Visual footprints can also be taken from material such as the Christchurch attack but when footage is downloaded, altered and uploaded again, the footprint changes, making it harder to track down without human intervention.
Aside from the technical challenges posed by enforcement, there is a bigger conversation society needs to have about stamping out unacceptable behaviour. The heated debate in recent years over proposed changes to the Racial Discrimination Act (ultimately defeated in the Senate) show there's wide divergence of views on what constitutes freedom of speech. But, worryingly, those norms seem to be changing – and it's the online piper calling the tune.
"What we've been seeing is that online activity has been setting the tone," says Dr Andre Oboler, chief executive of the Online Hate Prevention Institute and senior lecturer at La Trobe University's law school.
"Attitudes and views people think would never be aired outside of social media are increasingly being reported in conversations around the water cooler in workplaces. We've seen this particularly around Islamophobia. Online is such a big part of modern life that when values shift there, they also shift in the real world."
Facebook, Google and Twitter did not create Islamophobia, homophobia, racism, or sexism but these platforms have helped give voice and legitimacy to these views.
Dr Oboler believes the social media giants could do more to remove hate. "Initially their view was 'We don't have to do anything about this, we don't moderate the platform, it's got nothing to do with us, we're like a telephone company, we just connect the wires and what people say over the telephone call is not our business'.
"That argument was proven false because they do look at the content, they use it in order to target their ads. They're processing it and they're profiting from it."
Oboler says the platforms, by-and-large, have not done enough because they've got two choices: not spending money, having more content and making more revenue; or having less content, with fewer eyeballs, making less revenue and having to spend big on moderators.
"It's either a double win or a double loss," he says.
If we wait to deal with the problem until we're dealing with that actual terrorist attack, we've left it far too late.
— Andre Oboler
Oboler says Facebook, Google and Twitter have had some success countering terrorism-related content and removing it from their sites, but hate speech isn't caught anywhere near as much and the problem is it can fester into something much larger.
"The hate speech that is posted online is used to create incitement to hate. That is used to create incitement to violence and that, in turn, can lead to some people committing acts of violence," he says. "If we wait to deal with the problem until we're dealing with that actual terrorist attack, we've left it far too late. We need to do more to address the hate speech earlier on, further down that food chain."
Husic, who is also the opposition's digital economy spokesman, doesn't absolve traditional media of inflaming division – pointing to Seven's Sunrise bringing One Nation leader Pauline Hanson onto the show, Nine presenter Sonia Kruger's "vilifying remarks" on Muslim immigration to Australia and Sky News presenter and former Northern Territory chief minister Adam Giles bringing on far right extremist Blair Cottrell. (Nine owns AFR Weekend.)
"They've also got a responsibility with their newsrooms to not constantly pursue ratings at the expense of community cohesion," he says.
However, there is a major difference between traditional and social media and that is accountability. For example, Australian television broadcasters are being investigated over their coverage of the Christchurch terrorist attack by the regulatory body, the Australian Communications and Media Authority.
"There are some companies where – as parliamentarians, as regulators – we need to start thinking, 'What do we do when their own systems fail to kick in,'" Husic says "It's time to recognise they've had an opportunity to fix this and they constantly don't. I think if we don't deal with this, technology is going to undermine its own image and reputation in the longer term.
"We need to work through that and not have a knee-jerk reaction, but we do need to think broadly about what we do and look at the body that traditionally would be relied upon to help give life or breathe life into those regulatory responses."
Eradicating hate speech would be a costly exercise for social media, partly because these are global companies while nuances and attitudes differ from country to country.
But nations are increasingly coming around to regulation. Germany – which has a particularly tough approach to hate speech, in part due to its own history of Nazi and Communist rule last century – enacted a new law last year which holds Facebook, Twitter, Google and other companies accountable for what is published on their platforms. Failure to quickly remove offensive hate speech posts can incur €50 million ($80 million) fines. Facebook has more than 1200 people moderating content in Germany.
Not everyone is convinced of the merits of this approach. Some fringe groups have painted themselves as martyrs in the fight for free speech, saying social media companies, fearful of fines, have moved too far to the other end of the spectrum.
UNSW Canberra Cyber director Nigel Phair believes the answer is to work with the social media companies rather than rely on strict regulation.
"I understand that Facebook, Google, Twitter, are totally commercial beasts. They just want to P in the P&L. If they want long term sustainable businesses, they need to put in a much greater magnitude of effort to bring order on the pages," he says.
"Governments need to take the lead and the social media companies need to step up and make their products with a better user experience, just like the car industry, cars have got safer over time. The third component we need is user responsibility, a bit of personal responsibility online, you can’t blame everyone else, if you see other people flaming other people, you don’t want to get sucked into that as well."
Jason Kint, CEO of US trade association Digital Content Next, says social media platforms can use their algorithms to slow down the rapid spread of hate speech, misformation or and videos such as the Christchurch attack.
We need ... user responsibility, a bit of personal responsibility online, you can’t blame everyone else ...
— Nigel Phair
"Any form of hate speech or this type of disturbing video should be removed as quickly as possible from the platform, but the real opportunity is to do a better job in preventing reach," he says.
"We have asked them to invest significant resources – which they have the capacity to do; they have the finances and the best engineers in the world – to invest those resources into being more responsible about what is able to be quickly spread."
Politicians around the world are now discussing tougher rules on companies which have unprecedented influence on the daily lives of billions of individuals across the world.
US Democratic candidate for president Elizabeth Warren has gone even further, calling to break up Google, Facebook and Amazon due to the centralised power they hold. According to a report on US site Politico, Facebook for a time removed ads Warren placed on its site calling for the break-up. It later restored them.
In Australia, social media faces regulation around its impact on journalism as the competition regulator approaches the finish line on its precedent-setting Digital Platforms Inquiry. And in the UK, there are growing calls for regulation over how tech giants deal with publishers.
It will be tricky to navigate, but the big stick of regulation on tech seems to be building up steam. Only time will tell if Silicon Valley opts to meet the rule makers halfway or has to be dragged into a new era of accountability.