Public Ownership — Trial

I claim that it is essential in this era to put social media and search engines under stricter governmental control. The recent exposes about fake news and interference in the US election through paid advertising and bots led many to suggest that Facebook, Google and others should be put under the same media laws as traditional media. Some people even suggest that search engines and social media should be treated as public utilities, just like electricity and water, and should be strictly regulated by the state to secure a fair distribution of information to all people.

To support my claim, I shall proceed with cases that emphasizes why social media and search engines –Facebook and Google in particular — should be put under governmental control after they have proven to us that they only work for their business interests no matter what the consequences are. Furthermore, I will also elaborate on examples that show how social media is undermining the key principles of objectivity, accuracy and neutrality that sit at the heart of media ethics and media’s social responsibility.

Facebook:

The case put under trial is Facebook’s free internet initiative; Free Basics. In 2014, Facebook launched Internet.org, an initiative intended to help narrow the global digital divide by giving people free access to web-based applications on their mobile phones. The main product of the initiative is a mobile app that gives users an access to a small suite of data light websites and services: literally a set of apps within the. But don’t let the name fool you! Internet.org doesn’t give full access to the Internet, however, it gives free access to a limited number of websites including, Facebook and Facebook Messenger. At the time, the title “Internet.org” mislead the public because it neither offered the whole access to the internet nor was it a charity. The owners then changed the name to Free Basics. It works in collaboration with mobile and targets countries that have poor infrastructure and are considered to be developing or under-developed countries. Those countries are found in Africa, the Middle East, Asia Pacific, and Latin America.

This initiative is not as ideal as we might think, for it violates some principles of media ethics and it does not hold responsibility to the users it caters to. Moreover, you might think that Free basics is independent from Facebook, however, it is not. The owner of Facebook did not employ different board members for free basics which technically means that Free basics is Facebook but with a different name.

1- Violates net neutrality:

The division of applications into two tiers results in making Facebook the gatekeeper. Furthermore, the high technical standards that Facebook demands for a platform to join the initiative results in creating an imbalance between local and international platforms. In addition, there is no other social media platform besides Facebook, which limits users’ ability to connect to a broader global public on local or global issues of public interest.

2- Violates privacy:

Every time a person signs up to be part of the initiative, he or she must agree to the terms and conditions of Facebook and not Free Basics. This means that without having to have a Facebook account, Facebook is being allowed to gather data about users’ online behavior through either the use of cookies or traffic collected from its centralized proxy server. This also means that by acting as the only provider of all these sites Facebook went far beyond being a social media platform and beyond being a tech company and more close to being a telecommunication operator. If Facebook wants to act as a telecommunication operator than it should be treated like one and put under governmental control.

3- Forget about objectivity:

The owner of Free Basics, also owns Facebook, and this ownership pattern is that of vertical integration. This allows the owner to self-promote Facebook on the Free Basics app. Moreover, there was some subjectivity in choosing the apps that get to be featured in Free Basics and in what tire they get to be placed in. For example, Facebook and Facebook Messenger are put in tire 1and Bing is chosen to be featured instead of Google. A criteria has not been identified for how they choose nor did they choose based on what the people wanted, which makes their choices bias. Furthermore, between all social media platforms why did Facebook get to be featured in the free initiative instead of Twitter, Instagram or Snapchat? Because of subjectivity. Twitter on one hand, until recently, was a neutral platform. Each Twitter user chose a list of people to follow. When you logged into Twitter you saw a list of recent tweets by those people in strict chronological order. So Twitter could plausibly argue that it was not responsible for the stories users see. Twitter has moved away from this approach somewhat in the last year, but for the most part the tweets users see are determined by choices made by users, not Twitter (Bray, 2017). Doesn’t that make Twitter more alleged than Facebook considering that the first doesn’t violate net neutrality?

In this case, Facebook took advantage of its position and permitted itself to create a platform that offered free internet. Providing a platform for the less fortunate to access free internet is a great idea to end the digital divide, however Facebook’s business interest was prioritized over the main cause of this app which led to its failure. Was this app or platform regulated by each government in which it was offered in, net neutrality would’ve not been violated, since each country would choose what apps they want, making them the only deciders of the information they access (through surveys addressed to their people or taking into consideration the app ratings in their counties). Privacy also wouldn’t be violated because instead of signing up to the terms and conditions Facebook (which allows them to collect your metadata) the governments of these countries would’ve implemented the terms and conditions that the law orders. Finally, no place for subjectivity would’ve been open if the mass had control instead of 1media mogul who has some sort of vertical integration that puts the ownership under his subjectivity.

Besides free basics, there are many cases that show how the Facebook company isn’t alleged to be responsible of a platform like Facebook. According to Lee, reporters have come under increasing pressure to write “clickbait” articles since Too-good-to-check stories gain more traction online than thoroughly reported stories (2016). The problem here is that Facebook’s board members are in denial about the kind of organization it has become. “We are a tech company, not a media company,” Zuckerberg said repeatedly over the past few years. According to him, Facebook is just a “platform,” but that’s wrong. Facebook makes billions of editorial decisions every day. And often they are bad editorial decisions steering people to sensational, one-sided, or just plain inaccurate stories (Lee, 2016).

Facebook hasn’t told the public very much about how its algorithm works. But we know that one of the company’s top priorities for the news feed is “engagement.” Facebook’s algorithm doesn’t take into account whether a particular story is accurate or not. If it generates a lot of “engagement,” it gets moved to the top of the pile (violating net neutrality — showing you what they choose to show). Most often, a sensational-but-wrong story will generate more engagement than a story that accurately explains that nothing nefarious actually happened (Lee, 2016).

A BuzzFeed article illustrates how catastrophically bad Facebook’s editorial judgment can be. According to BuzzFeed, a group of young people in Macedonia has created more than 140 pro-Trump news sites. “Most of the posts on these sites are aggregated, or completely plagiarized, from fringe and right-wing sites in the US,” BuzzFeed reports.

Facebook has become a media company. Just like traditional media companies are regulated by governments to minimize fake, sensationalized, and biased news the same should happen for Facebook.

Google:

1- Personalization — no objectivity — leads to violating net neutrality:

According to Mobasher , “Personalization” is the development in Internet-delivered services referred to, and consists in tailoring online content to what will interest the individual user (n.d.). But objectivity may require telling enquirers what they do not want to hear, or are not immediately interested in. So personalization threatens objectivity. Objectivity matters little when you know what you are looking for, but its lack is problematic when you do not. Pertinently, Google’s search engines now personalize your results. Entering exactly the same query, I may get a set of results different from the results you get. In practice, this means that sites you have previously visited will be prioritized in your search results pages- individual personalization. In addition, sites that are visited by other people whose browsing histories resemble yours in ways picked out by the algorithms as relevant are also prioritized- profile personalization. The Council of Europe has turned its attention to search engines, and in April 2012 its Committee of Ministers adopted a Recommendation to Member States concerning the protection and promotion of respect for human rights regarding search engines. The non-binding recommendation recognizes the potential challenges of search engines to the right of freedom of expression and the right to a private life, which may come from the design of algorithms, de-indexing, and/or partial treatment or biased results, concentration in the market, a lack of transparency about how results are selected and ranked, the ability of search engines to gather and index content that may not have been intended for mass communication, general data processing and retention, and the generation of new kinds of personal data such as individual search histories and behavioral profiles. Member States should cooperate with the private sector and civil society to develop strategies to protect fundamental rights and freedoms pertaining to search engine operation, particularly regarding transparency over how the search engines provide information, the criteria according to which search results are organized, how content not intended for mass communication (although in the public space) should be ranked and indexed, transparency as to the collection of personal data, empowerment of users to access and modify their personal data held by search engine providers, the minimization of the collection and processing of personal data, and the assurance that search engine services are accessible to people with disabilities.

2- Invading Privacy- case study :

In 2012, Google manipulated a feature in Apple’s Safari web browser in order to place the DoubleClick ID Cookie on Apple devices. Allegedly, Google used the ‘Form Submission Rule’ exception within Safari (which allows users to click on Like buttons and similar interactions) to then trick the browser into thinking the user had visited the first-party domain that the DoubleClick cookie is sent from — thus allowing Google to set the ID Cookie and update it as a third-party cookie via other web sites. With that, it became able to trace a user’s browsing history. The former director of consumer group Which?, Richard Lloyd, is seeking compensation for up to 5.4m Britons in the equivalent of a class-action lawsuit. He alleges that Google circumvented the default privacy settings for Safari on iPhones and iPads to surreptitiously collect browsing histories of individuals and serve targeted advertising. The issue was first brought up back in 2013, but Google argued at the time that it did not have to answer to the English courts and that UK privacy laws don’t apply to it, as an American company. But in 2015, Britain’s Court of Appeal ruled that UK consumers do actually have the right to sue Google over the issue, after which the internet behemoth agreed to an undisclosed settlement in a subsequent lawsuit. In this situation Google claimed that they “don’t have to answer to courts outside America” this means that we don’t have any rights on the platforms and engines we use neither do we have any sort of law that protects us against them, thus to protect our privacy and to put our rights out there, we should implement laws and regulations in our countries that can balance the interests and duties of these search engines and social media platforms — regulate Google, Facebook and others.

Ethical decision making:

The key duty and obligation of social media is to provide a space for people to interact, connect and share information in a secure manner were the users maintain their rights and are not manipulated. In addition, social engines’ duty is to provide their users with an open library, without “wall-gardening”- choose for them what not to see- their search. However, the media moguls behind these social media platforms are taking advantage of their power. Their interests are prioritized over their duties and social responsibilities; Facebook making editorial decisions to keep their users visiting the platform, disregarding the accuracy of the news and violating net neutrality, Facebook and Google collecting users’ metadata to incorporate ads or for marketing purposes, violating privacy and Google violating net neutrality by limiting the users’ search etc. These interests are coming on the expenses of the billion users of these platforms and engines, where these users have little to null privacy and are deemed to access or see what the moguls want them to access and see. Have these platforms and engines looked at the key aspects of media ethics and media responsibility, ownership wouldn’t be an issue. The decisions taken to violate these key aspects do not justify the harm caused, and that is because, using people, manipulating them, hooking them, and taking their metadata for the sole purpose of achieving “business interest” is not justified. According to the consequentialism theory, acts are right when they grant the greatest amount of good to the greatest amount of people, and not granting the good to 1 corporation on the expenses of billion users. Since private ownership only brings benefits to a single owner, public ownership should be given a chance to regulate new media as it successfully regulated the traditional ones.

References

Bray, H. (2017). Can Facebook or Google be regulated? The Boston Globe.

Lee, T. B. (2016). Facebook is harming our democracy, and Mark Zuckerberg needs to do something about it . vox.

Mobasher, B. (n.d.). Data Mining for Web Personalization. chicago: Center for Web Intelligence School of Computer Science, Telecommunication, and Information Systems.