Facebook ‘completely hopeless and negligent’: Tracey Spicer
Social media giants need to admit they are publishers and news outlets, and do more to protect their users and consumers, Tracey Spicer has urged.
Spicer was particularly critical of Facebook, which she says is being dragged “kicking and screaming” towards regulation and was “completely hopeless and negligent” in a case she took to the police.
“I would like to see the social media companies take responsibility, because I have actually dealt closely, particularly with Facebook with this police case, and they have been completely hopeless and negligent, so I think they need to step up to the plate,” she said.
Spicer referenced various police cases throughout the Q&A session at Friday’s Radio Alive conference, noting she has referred death threats and trolling on social media platforms to the authorities.
Part of the issue, she said, is how the corporations view themselves within the ecosystem.
“I think [that more regulation is required] – with Facebook and Twitter in particular – because they say that they’re platforms, but, let’s face it, they’re also publishers, they are news outlets as well,” she said.
The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph’s entertainment editor Jonathon Moran said the other issue was the organisation’s elusiveness.
Spicer acknowledged the issue would be difficult to tackle locally.
“It’s a global issue,” she said. “It’s something we can’t really address in Australia. I think they need to be taken to task on it.”
They’re media platforms in as much as Samsung is a media platform for making the phone.
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Not quite. A phone is a physical object. That’s like saying banks not responsible for creating a toxic culture of greed. They just provide a building where people turn up to work.
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Yeah not quite true. TV is a media platform and I don’t get death threats via that. I think we are going in the wrong direction if we fall back to the old “Facebook doesn’t troll people, people troll people”
They facilitate a huge community and have a duty of care when they provide that service, especially with such huge returns (regardless of business model)
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Social media networks would argue they are no more a publisher than a postal or courier service. And in the past that may have been true.
But they now analyse users’ behaviour to tailor and push “relevant” content. Curating content via algorithm has elevated social media networks – and ultimately their owners – to the status of publisher.
They would claim it is the users who are responsible for the content, that they are no more liable than the manufacturer of a pen and paper used to create a letter, or the courier who delivers the parcel. But the law holds the owner of a newspaper responsible for the work of its journalists – so why not social networks and their users?
They also have the ability to see if previous interest has invoked a negative or positive response, and gauge the nuance of that response. They can tell the difference between vigourous opposition and mindless vitriol. But a troll’s click and a fan’s are worth the same – so there is no incentive to filter dangerously negative interest from vigorous opposition.
Although first year PR studies would tell you that moral behaviour is as important for business as legal compliance, while social media companies believe they can pull the wool over the public’s eyes with lies about “technical limitations”, they will continue their current denial of responsibility.
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