What is hidden in the debate about the regulation of digital platforms
The passionate debate on the regulation of digital platforms runs the risk of prioritizing only part of the interests at stake, leaving two fundamental issues aside. The current agenda of discussions in the media, in parliament and in the courts is being dictated by business communication conglomerates and by the political and justice establishment. On the other hand, the issue of the appropriation of personal data by social networks such as Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, YouTube, Google, Telegram, TikTok and WhatsApp, to mention the best known. The other major omission relates to the need to clearly distinguish the business of platforms from their structural function within so-called relational communication in the digital era (1).
The fierce campaign by the main press organizations against the platforms occurs in the context of a change in the relationship between the involved parties. At the beginning of the last decade, most major global newspapers believed that networks like Facebook were the most efficient and cheapest channel to reach the general public. The main communication groups in Europe and the United States sought strategic agreements with Mark Zuckerberg’s company, as was the case with The New York Times. The agreement provided that the NYT would be part of the Facebook structure, a situation that would give the paper the chance to get access to an audience estimated, at the time, at one billion people.
But, over the years, the evolution of facts showed that the platforms functioned more as an environment for internet users to comment and share news than as a mandatory infrastructure for the survival of the press. This led newspapers to have to rethink their strategies, as it was no longer enough to just bring news to the public but to sell it and participate in the billion-dollar advertising business created by users of the social network.
Today, the big newspapers fight with the networks for revenue and not for access to the public. In this fight for greater revenues, the press incorporated the issue of fake news as part of the effort to regain credibility in newspapers, magazines, radio and television news, which has been declining worldwide since the mid-1990s. Another argument indirectly linked to financial interest is the issue of copyright (2) as a way of disguising the priority given to the main factor, which is the survival of the press business model based on the sale of advertising.
Planetary network audience
For the future of journalism, the issue of platforms is a crucial topic because everything indicates that the profession will need them as much as it was dependent on ink and paper at the beginning of the 19th century when the first printed newspapers appeared. Today, the public is on the web where it can read, listen and watch the news, but above all, interact based on the news menu. The modern public space debate is the space where digital platforms reign, which makes them essential to the press and journalists.
Until now, this space was limited because the combined circulation of all printed newspapers in the world did not reach 100 million copies, according to estimates from the virtual encyclopedia Wikipedia, which allows the number of potential readers to be estimated at around 500 million. Today, the Facebook network alone reaches 3.05 billion people around the world. If previously the conventional press dominated the entire news cycle (gathering, processing and distributing news), now it has to share these activities with multitudes of social media users, through a relationship that is not yet possible to design.
In this effort to survive the need to adapt to the changes generated by digital technologies, the mainstream press has allied itself with the political and economic establishment, having in common the fight against the proliferation of fake news, defamation and hate speech through social networks. It is a well-known fact that all these critically important informational distortions have found on digital platforms the favourable environment for their exponential multiplication, which, obviously, implies the need to combat them by all possible legal means.
Fake news and disinformation
While the press fights fake news to regain credibility and, consequently, the purchasing value of news, politicians, judges and lawyers want platforms to be regulated because they are influenced by an institutional and operational culture based on a dichotomous approach to the complex issues created by the avalanche of information on the internet. The oversupply of online news allows for the dissemination of various versions and opinions about the same data, fact or event, which complicates classification as right or wrong, legal or illegal, true or false. The increase in organizations specialized in checking the veracity of news has expanded the fight against fake news, but misinformation, as a deployment of fake news, is still poorly struck by the press, despite the possible damage to social coexistence.
The excesses committed by Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Telegram, TikTok and YouTube in managing online disinformation must be corrected through regulation that, instead of emphasizing the punitive or financial issue, prioritizes the issue of information flow through networks. It is essential to take into account that communication on the internet has become relational, that is, news and information circulate based on the flow of recommendations between people. The data indicates that the number of users searching for news on Facebook in the United States has now reached almost 50% and 35% in Europe.
News is no longer a ready-made product delivered to the public by journalists, but rather a form of knowledge developed jointly by ordinary people, journalists and opinion makers. As news becomes the result of a social relationship, the fight against fake news necessarily incorporates platform users in the fight against informative distortions, which puts the debate on regulation on another level. It is no longer possible to solve a complex problem that involves so many different issues, with simple solutions, true or false.
A new type of colonialism
The complexity becomes even more evident when one realizes that, despite large digital platforms practising the so-called data colonialism (3) and adopting an unequal distribution of advertising revenue fed by the attention of their users. The small newspapers and independent journalists get only 3% of the global advertising revenue of Big Techs like Google, but 70% of the local press in the US and the UK rely on the money distributed by the platforms.
Local and independent journalism could end up victimized by a possible demonization of social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and X during the debates and voting on the platform regulation bill. Almost all community news projects and informative pages produced by individual journalists use digital platforms and their online applications to reach the public. Despite the known fact that digital platforms have enabled greater democratization of communications, it’s impossible to ignore that just five mega-companies are still controlling the flow of information on the internet.
(1) Relational Communication is based on recommendations, between individuals, regarding informative content. It already existed in the analogue era, but it was unidirectional. The journalist suggested information to the public. In the digital age, relational communication began to be developed in a multidirectional way, that is, several people suggesting news to each other. The phenomenon of virality on social networks is an example of relational communication.
(2) Copyright is a financial solution created in the 18th century to monetize intellectual assets reproduced in texts, images, sounds and objects. With digitalization, intellectual production began to be expressed, in an immaterial way, in digits 0 and 1, which allowed recombination without identifying the origin. Recombination, or remixing, is at the origin of the innovations that today fuel the modern digital economy.
(3) Data colonialism is an expression established by British sociologist Nick Couldry to identify the processing and commercialization of data obtained for free by the so-called Big Techs (Facebook, Google, Twitter, Microsoft and Apple)
P.S. Translated from Portuguese with the help of Google Translator and Grammarly
