State: very rough first draft.
1 Advertising: give the people what they don’t want
We are in a strange place when two of the world’s most valuable and influential companies make their money by delivering a product that nobody wants. Facebook and Google are not alone: advertising has long been a business model for media organizations of all kinds, but that only emphasizes the peculiarity of the model. We go to these companies for something else, and put up with advertising in order to get it.
The conflict—between providing what we do want and delivering ads we don’t—is made public in the companies’ mission statements.
Most companies have a “mission” that matches the way they make money. In the UK, Greggs makes its money by selling sandwiches, and its mission is to “become the customer’s favourite for food-on-the-go”. This seems reasonable and to some extent reassuring for the customer. Greggs has an interest in making sandwiches that are good value if it’s going to carry on making money.
But advertising companies are different. The way they make money appears nowhere in their public mission statements.
- Google: “Our company mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
- Facebook: “Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.”
- Twitter: “The mission we serve as Twitter, Inc. is to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly without barriers. Our business and revenue will always follow that mission in ways that improve – and do not detract from – a free and global conversation.”
And news companies:
- The New York Times: “Our mission is simple: We seek the truth and help people understand the world.”
- The Globe and Mail: “To inspire and inform Canadians through courageous, empathetic, and honest journalism.”
- The Guardian: “Our values were set out by CP Scott in his centenary leader in 1921. They are: honesty, integrity, courage, fairness, and a sense of duty to the reader and the community.”
2 In conflict with independence and authenticity
Delivering advertising is not just different to the stated mission of each of these companies, it’s in conflict. We look to news organizations for integrity and independence from financial manipulation. We look to social media companies for authenticity. As paid content, advertising plays by completely different rules.
The answer to this conflict has been to create a clear boundary between advertising and “mission”.
This clear boundary creates problems for advertising, because it makes advertisements easy to ignore, and ads we ignore have no value. The result is that advertising companies continually blur the line between the two.
In some cases the blurring is simply annoying: product placements in TV sitcomes, sponsored content in “influencer” social media feeds, trailer ads during TV shows, “advertorial” content in the lifestyle sections of newspapers.
But in the case of news and of social media the blurring has more consequence, because of the conflict between these types of speech and paid advertising. As a result, the boundaries are drawn, lines are crossed, lines redrawn, and so on.
Keeping the boundary intact has been particularly important to newspapers, because a “free press” is not just an industry, it has an explicit role in many democratics countries as a means of preserving a variety of perspectives and holding power to account. The news industry gets special consideration because of the importance of a free and independent press: protection of sources, access to government, some level of immunity from prosecution. To justify this special treatment they have responsibilities to present the news fairly.
3 Governance: not a classification problem
The partial, flawed, but still important, ways in which the news industry / free press has struggled around these boundaries helps provide a perspective on the challenge facing social media.
Let’s start at the top. There are independent regulators like the Independent Press Standards Organization in the UK or the National Newsmedia Council in Canada to provide some level of accountability. But a self-regulating body (Canada) is vulnerable to corruption in one direction, while a government body is vulnerable to state interests. IPSO is an arms-length regulator, and this is where many countries have settled: an uneasy middle, being pressed from both sides.
At the level of individual newspapers, there is a tradition of editorial independence from publishers, which is supposed to set up a boundary between the money side of the business separate and the integrity of the mission. Many newspapers now also employ an ombudsperson to act as a voice for the reader.
At a finer scale, boundaries are also built into the physical organization of the newspaper itself. News runs on the front pages, opinion is in its own section near the back, further divided into editorials giving the “opinion of the newspaper” and op-eds giving independent columnists space to debate their views.
But even this is not always enough. Sometimes a complex news story, or a scoop of particular importance, will call out for commentary. Then “analysis” or “editorial opinion” may encroach onto the news pages. The boundary is then propped up by subheads (“Editorial Analysis”) and even distinct typesetting – it has been common to typeset opinion with ragged right, and news as justified.
This maze of conventions, norms, standards, regulations and laws, each with their own accompanying institutions to manage them, still does not exhaust what is needed to manage the conflict between advertising and a free press.
News organizations face incentives to stretch the boundaries of “news”, to abuse the protections and traditions of journalism to deliver this material, along with more advertising, and pull in more money.
So we get the phone hacking scandal at News International, in which journalists undertook illegal and corrupt practices, asserting that their right as part of a free press to act in the public interest extended to delivering celebrity stories, digging up details on people who were part of real news stories, and hacking the phone of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler.
Managing this “speech” demanded public outrage, the Levison public inquiry, the closing of The News of the World, arrests and convictions of Murdoch employees including an editor, the replacement of the Press Complaints Commission, and more.
From regulation to self-regulatory rules to norms to typographic conventions, the boundary-drawing mechanisms are flawed and imperfect, but together they provide a complex, multi-layered system that helps maintain an independent press in many countries.
3.1 Lessons
One lesson of the media regulation picture is that the problem is not one of classification, which is one reason why it is not a problem that automated methods can solve. There is no rule that says what is acceptable and what is not: the landscape evolves over time through a series of individual cases, each challenged, disputed, and argued over. The next section explores this in more detail.
Another lesson is that we cannot look to “values” or “culture” or to putting good guys in charge, to manage even this one sliver of the “speech” pie. The pressures of commerce are too great on one side, and the temptations of censorship too strong on the other. An uneasy peace is perhaps the best we can hope for.
News governance is like a house of cards: it makes no sense to think of good cards or bad. The constuction is a continual effort to balance each card with another as we build the house higher and higher. Move one, and other cards fall over. The existing landscapes of media governance in different countries may be incomplete houses of cards, but we should not lose track of the fact that what there is comes from decades, in some cases centuries, of continual tension and conflict at every level.
5 Coyne again
Let’s go back to Coyne and Owen. The rules for journalism and news are different to those for other forms of speech. The press has rights and responsibilities that are peculiar to it, however imperfectly this system works. We must talk, not about “content” or “information”, but news and journalism and how this public good gets produced.
We should accept that journalism, and particularly news and the investigative journalism that is its archetype, is a specific activity that may need unique rules to protect it (while at the same time preventing abuses such as the hacking scandals). It’s not just “content” or “speech”. It’s probably different to sports journalism, or arts journalism, although there I admit my views are unclear.
Investigate journalism cannot capture enough of the value that it produces to make money by itself. Wherever we look, news needs to be subsidized, by advertising, by other parts of a newspaper, or by the patronage of a benefactor. And yet, to sustain its integrity, it must stay at arms length from each of these supports.
Coyne’s opening paragraph is misleading. Should taxi drivers pay a fee to restaurants for every passenger they drop at the door? he asks. Should agents pay actors when the bring them a script? Then why should social media pay newspapers when a link from Facebook takes someone to a news site?
The idea is that FPB are connectors, bringing people to the news. “Facebook and Google don’t use our content, they link to it… Facebook and Google send millions of readers and billions of page views our way every year.” Also: “links to news sources are a tiny fraction of what gets posted on Facebook, perhaps 5%. Google doesn’t even bother to sell ads against news searches… Facebook and Google dominate online advertising because they built a better mousetrap.”
Everyone selling advertising needs something to sell it against. Google sells ads against YouTube, against search results, against email, and acts as a global online ad broker to sell against everyone else’s content too. Similarly with Facebook. No longer is advertising the place for Leopold Bloom, a famous fictional nobody, walking the streets of Dublin to make a living: now advertising runs the world.
7 Bundles and subsidies
Newspapers work by cross-subsidising the material they publish. By bundling different kinds of thing together, they can survive on a combination of subscriptions and ads. Maybe you throw out the lifestyle section and I throw out the sports, but they come together as part of the bundle. Pick that bundle apart and the whole enterprise fails. The scoops give the enterprise standing, but it is not enough to sustain the newspapers by themselves.
So now what? We’ve bought into the new bundle - the internet subscription and the platform. Facebook and Google organize it for us.
When Andrew Coyne says that Facebook and Google “built a better mousetrap”, he means that they created a bigger organizational and delivery tool alongside which they can sell advertisements. Advertisement scales.
Governance of the contexts in which ads are sold is itself a matter of balance, with different balances for each context.
(Ads are not only unwanted and unliked and trivial, they are also inefficient. The “relevance” doctrine is on flimsy grounds. Companies are forced to spend money to build fences around their brand names, protecting each from the other, in an arms race that generates no value for anyone but FBG.) It’s a wasteful and corrosive foundation on which to build the core institutions of societies around the world.
What we have learned over the last decade is that the “community governance” model fails and the reputation / gamification model fails. These methods are too coarse, too vulnerable to gaming in their turn. And they completely fail to address the different specific governance needs of the contexts in which they appear.
(The argument that things go wrong only rarely is no defence. When things go wrong badly, that’s enough, and the general corrosion of discourse is the other side of that coin.)
As we have seen with news, drawing eyeballs is not enough of a measure of success.
8 What do we lose?
What do we lose if we lose newspapers? We lose a fragile and imperfect but valuable house of cards. We don’t just lose a product to be replaced by another – a BlackBerry to be replaced by an iPhone, an old mousetrap replaced by a better. What we lose is a system of governance, and the platforms have nothing with which to replace it.
There are many things that can be done better in other ways, but right now all the social media promises are monolithic, and that is in itself a failure.
The present/old-fashioned news world is a compromise. We (the public/government) give you permission to create a business around news, but under conditions that have responsibilities, to keep the news clean. To manage the tension between producing news and making money.
Somewhere here is a story about the need for a diverse news environment, because each organization’s incentives created different news decisions.
Let’s get more specific about the problems with news.
We know there are problems with mainstream media, and the consensus it has represented. Some of the most valuable voices come from outside this realm: committed journalism with unconventional viewpoints or specialist points of view. THe mainstream media has been one distribution system among many. Alternative media has always been important, and not just as an irritant.
So now what has changed? Those institutions that restrain the corrupting effects of money and ulterior agendas are not present when Facebook and Google relay the news. There is nothing to restrain the interests of money. It’s not a matter of free speech, it’s a matter of accountability and what countervailing mechanisms exist.
4 Social media and the news
The social media industries set out to demolish the old industries, confident that they could do a better job of providing what society wants while also making money. Down with the gatekeepers! Democratize the public square! Move fast and break things!
But 15 years after the founding of Facebook and YouTube, governance problems have appeared, as they do with traditional journalism, at every level. “Fake news”, This is not surprising, because the conflicts are the same. But the case of social media is more important, because of their global reach and unprecedented audience sizes.
Social media companies have succeeded at advertising for the same reason they are failing in other ways: they have ambitions that go far beyond those of the news media, even those of the Murdoch empire. They want to universalize content: one platform on which to access the world.
The problems start with the word “content”, as if there is a single set of problems that must be solved to deliver content properly. Different forms of “content” demand different balancing acts. No matter how sophisticated the machine learning behind them, the governance rules they are putting in place are crude and will fail (see below). They are based on statistical models that will fail at the edges, which introduce new incentives to shift boundaries and invalidate their own recommendations.
Beyond a certain point doesn’t help, when developing governance tools, to look more and more closely at the content: the context is important too. For newspapers, the rules are different for a given piece of text depending on whether it is intended for an op-ed page, for a news page, on whether it will be typeset justified or ragged right.
(It does not help that Mark Zuckerberg and others have a naive understanding of how language works: that we have a pre-verbal “thought” which we then express.)
If social media has built a better mousetrap, as commentators such as The Globe and Mail’s Andrew Coyne suggest, it’s not built a better news-delivering mousetrap, it has built a better advertising-delivering mousetrap. One of the ways that newspapers make a living is, as said above, by bundling lots of non-news content along with the straight news; Facebook and Google have massively extended the range of experience that can be bundled together with advertising, and that is not the same thing.