World News – UK – Social media needs to focus on news and transparency

Recently, both Google and Facebook have funded initiatives to offer various forms of support to publishers. Last month, Google announced that it would allocate $ 1 billion over a three year period to publishers to pay for the news featured in its new Google News Showcase. File Photo: Getty

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If you are a Facebook user, you will likely get some of your news from stories in your news feed every week.

About half of Irish people aged 18-44 say social media is their main news source for Ireland, according to Reuters Digital News Report 2020, and the numbers in the UK are about the same as UK regulators, according to a 2019 report Ofcom. A 2018 study by Pew Research in the United States found that 68 percent of American adults use social media for their messages.

However, as has been pointed out for years, the publishers that fund and generate much of the news associated with it are losing the advertising revenue that supports their creation.

In 2020, most of the UK’s digital advertising spend – 80 percent according to eMarketer – went to Google, Facebook or Instagram from Facebook, a steady increase over the previous year.

Just surviving is the challenge for news companies now as print sales plummet and digital income can’t keep up. Still, in studies like Reuters’ in most countries, most people say that trusted news sources are important and that the demand for news remains high.

This is especially true in 2020, when the publishers’ online sites saw a huge surge in readership of people searching for information about the arc of the pandemic on a daily basis. The already scarce income from digital ads has fallen, however.

At the same time, public and political frustration and anger against social media companies continues to grow, not least due to the associated problem of cloudy news sources and the easy spread of disinformation on social media – and the giant platforms’ inadequate efforts to get it to tackle.

A major US election in 2020 only raised public awareness of the harmful role social media played in enabling fake, dangerous « news » campaigns.

People are also realizing that local and national news are losing – with local news being particularly affected. It is often much cheaper and easier for small businesses to run ads on Facebook or Google. Smaller local publishers cannot fund a dedicated digital team to get these ads straight into their publications.

This has meant the slow death of local news sources and the cessation of reporting and reviewing local events, an alarming development for communities and for transparency and accountability.

The platforms know that the public and political mood has changed. They have been forced to acknowledge that they have created problems to deal with.

Recently, both Google and Facebook have funded initiatives to offer various forms of support to publishers. Last month, Google announced that it would allocate $ 1 billion over a three year period to publishers to pay for the news featured in its new Google News Showcase.

This week Facebook announced that it would be launching a news feature in the UK in January called Facebook News, a dedicated news tab on its app that will display news from a variety of UK publishers (as well as a Facebook team of contract journalists). The deal is believed to divert millions of pounds into beleaguered news outlets.

In the United States, where Facebook introduced the feature earlier this year, 95 percent of the traffic it now controls on news websites comes from new readers, according to the company.

Facebook has also had a program for some time now to train and support journalists in covering local news, and announced further funding.

While such efforts will help publishers in the form of much-needed income and training subsidies, they have long come from platforms whose profits have been driven by content they have not previously created or funded.

Ultimately, these programs are little more than plasters covering a festering wound and fail to address the structural causes of media destabilization and the growth of disinformation that affect everyone.

The source of these simmering problems lies in the way platforms make their money.

There is a mass collection of personal data that we often don’t even know is happening, and the vast, opaque global advertising networks that buy and sell that data, serving billions of millisecond ads on the Internet every day.

There are endlessly tweaked and redesigned search and placement algorithms that amplify the worst viral clickbait and are constantly being played by bad actors to enable entire networks of disinformation.

There are lucrative business models that depend on minimal human control over any of these platforms, and the platforms insist that they are not legally liable for content, posts, or comments (are editors).

Millions of third-party developers have the ability to collect personally identifiable information from apps that have been shown to have been insufficiently verified and audited.

Lo and behold, the platforms are only offering these new support programs at the same time that several countries – including the US and UK – have started or have announced their intention to file lawsuits, expand regulation and reduce penalties against both to increase Google and Facebook.

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