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.
Tanya Hennessy, Tracey Spicer, Virginia Trioli and Jonathon Moran on stage at Radio Alive 2018
They’re media platforms in as much as Samsung is a media platform for making the phone.
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)
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.
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.