The dilemmas of journalism vis a vis the Big Techs (*)
The politicization and judicialization of the debate on the regulation of social networks brought to the public attention two issues with serious consequences both for society as a whole and for the survival of the press. We are being faced with two possible approaches to the social network problem:
a) A simplified one, outlined by the transformation of the debate into a dispute between a ‘good side’ and a ‘bad one’, embedding the fallacy that there will be a winner and the problem will be resolved;
b) And another more complicated approach, because it requires pondering and balancing the issues at stake, signalling a likely consensual outcome.
The surprising intervention of Elon Musk, the erratic billionaire owner of company X (formerly Twitter), politicized the debate on the regulation of social networks, especially in Brazil. Coincidence or not, far-right parliamentarians, even in the US have polarized the discussion, transforming it into a fight between left and right. The situation became very controversial in Brazil, after Musk’s statements calling for the resignation of Justice Alexandre de Moraes putting the Federal Supreme Court (STF) in the middle of the convulsive and chaotic debate about the future of digital platforms in the country.
The controversy involves two issues that in the short and long term will define the relationship between the press and social networks, regardless of the outcome of the current debate between ‘good guys and bad guys’ about regulation. The future of press conglomerates depends on their relationship with virtual social networks, such as Facebook, X, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Whatsapp, Kwai and Bluesky, for example. Most of the mainstream newspapers have conveyed to their audiences the idea that there is editorial antagonism between the press and social networks. The reality, however, is that the divergence is essentially financial and commercial.
The current exchange of accusations and commercial frictions has to do with money and only secondarily with issues such as disinformation, fake news and news reproduction. The legacy press accuses the networks of not paying royalties for the reproduction of texts and images published by newspapers, radio and television stations. Therefore, they demand a law that guarantees them this payment, which if approved will give a medium-term survival to the news industry, affected by the consequences of an outdated business model.
Copyright and news made on the networks
It is a struggle between a business sector, in sharp decline due to revolutionary technological innovations in the communication and information sector, and a new digital corporate elite (Big Techs), which accumulates fantastic profits by exploiting the absence of rules in a frantically evolving virtual space. The strategy used by most large press groups is to mask the financial nature of the antagonism by giving more visibility to the fake news, an issue that common readers and web users already know.
Resolving the financial and commercial differences between traditional media and large digital platforms, better known as Big Techs (Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, Apple and X) is complex because it involves dealing with authorship rights, an issue that can be seen from two different angles. The traditional one, where, for example, a report, photograph, video or illustration is treated as a finished and priced commodity, while in the digital environment, any textual, sound or visual content can be infinitely remixed, making the monetization of journalistic news very difficult to establish.
What so far, very few journalists have realized is the fact that social networks are already, and tend to become even more so in the future, the true audience for journalism. Until now, the press has used social media as a sort of shop window for its journalistic production. In other words, a virtual newsstand. The current trend goes in the opposite direction. The press starts to gather raw data for news on social networks because the platforms are becoming a public space for debates.
It is an irreversible process because the digitalization of communication and information has become so embedded in our daily lives that there is no turning back. It is also a much broader phenomenon than the mere attempt of the legacy media to limit the regulation debate to a political and legal struggle against the proliferation of misinformation, xenophobia, hate speech, sexual deviations and social psychopathies on the internet.
The news remix
The most important and least discussed role of networks is to produce knowledge through the interaction and recombination of data, facts, events and ideas posted on the internet by all types of people. This process of remixing knowledge has taken on unprecedented proportions in history and its potential is impossible to measure and evaluate, as recent studies on artificial intelligence (AI) show.
Journalism plays a central role in this recombination because news is increasingly produced from posts by ordinary people, empowered by tools such as smartphones, tablets, portable computers, digital camcorders, etc. As the number of actors with access to the internet now reaches almost five billion human beings, there is no longer any possibility for journalism to compete in the quantity of data, facts and events posted online.
What is beginning to be demanded, with increasing intensity, is the participation of journalists and the press in the processing and contextualization of raw data posted on the networks. The journalist becomes essential in the flow of information as a curator, tutor or checker of data, facts and events.
Until now, these functions were performed alongside news production flow, but in the digital age, this parallelism of tasks has become unfeasible due to the exponential increase in the volume of material to be analyzed. This is a mission with enormous social repercussions since the production of knowledge directly depends on verifying the quality of information inserted in the space of social networks. It is now up to journalism and the press to decide which direction to take in the face of the challenges posed by Big Techs.
(*) Original text in Portuguese translated using Google Translator and Grammarly
