Media Regulation and the Public Sphere

Concerns

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Companies, brands, and organizations are using social media and the internet as a way to engage with their customers and reach a wider market, but it raises issues on regulations and the public sphere. Net users and governments are concerned about censorship and the regulatory framework that leads it. 

Cambridge Analytica and its parent company the SCL Group were accused of potentially violating the law by playing a significant role in the 2014 and 2016 United States election cycles. Legal complaints were filed with the Department of Justice and the Federal Election Commission.

Complaints were brought up by Common Cause, a non-partisan government watch dog, calling on regulators and federal prosecutors to investigate the UK analytics group to learn if they violated US laws barring foreign nationals from participating in election related activities through Donald Trump’s campaign. It said that Cambridge Analytica employees, including the CEO disrupted the decision-making process in the election.

 The controversy surrounding Cambridge Analytica and its ability to influence elections using social media platforms such as Facebook have brought up suggestions for new forms of media and information regulation related to the public sphere such as regulation of social media platforms by prohibiting advertising-based business models, newly crafted legislation, and non-commercial ownership of social media entities. 

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Jurgen Habermas’s “The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article” (1964) refers to “public opinion” as “the task of criticism and control in which a public body of citizens informally and, in periodic elections formally as well practices the ruling structure organized in the form of a state”.

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The weakening of the public sphere grows as the rationalization of power through public discussion grows with the internet age. The transformation of the public sphere that was brought on by the internet and the public’s access to social media is threatening the public sphere itself.

The organization of social and political power under the control of large corporations and companies such as Cambridge Analytica and Facebook are committed to the public sphere in their internal structure and with their relations to the state and personal competition with one another.

Saying Goodbye to advertising-based business models

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Prohibiting the use of advertising-based business models in large social media platforms can be a way to control unwanted content and refrain from constricting freedom of speech.

 In Amelie Heldt’s article “Let’s Meet Halfway: Sharing New Responsibilities in a Digital Age” she describes and analyzes the way that states address hate speech and misinformation in their respective regulatory projects and examines how social media platforms sanction unwanted content and integrate (or plan on integrating) procedural rules such as appeal and due process principles in their moderation policies.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal as well as the live streaming of the Christ Church Shooting in New Zealand raised concerns for the way that social media platforms have handled misinformation, tampering of information, and hate speech.

Natasha Tusikov and Blayne Haggart’s “It’s time for a new way to regulate social media platform’s” suggests that reforms in the area of the prohibition of data intensive, micro-targeted advertising dependent business models should “eliminate incentives for the collection and hoarding of data for purposes unrelated to delivering services”. 

Search engines and social media giants rely heavily on selling detailed data profiles of the customers using the web. The Guardian journalists Carole Cadwalladr and Emma Graham-Harrison said “The data analytics firm that worked with Donald Trump’s election team and the winning Brexit campaign harvested millions of Facebook profiles of US voters, in one of the tech giant’s biggest ever data breaches, and used them to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box”.

It failed to alert users that their information was being collected through questionnaires and that their Facebook profiles were being accessed. The 2016 election was being used as a big commercial opportunity. 

“Social media platforms are our contemporary town squares, they are being operated as for-profit enterprises dependent on the accumulation and monetization of personal data, a practice that Harvard Business School Professor Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism”

-Tusikov and Haggart (2019)

Newly crafted legislation

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Newly crafted legislation that are appropriate to a country’s legal and social contexts as a form of state censorship and government regulation is also inevitable. Tech Giants that globally operate tend to follow US style internet regulations as they are vaguer and more self-regulating.

To safeguard democratic integrity and the protection of public information, government regulation will provide more accountability and responsiveness from social media platforms and data collecting corporations.

Cormac O’Keefe writes for the Irish Examiner in “Government claims draft laws will end ‘era of self-regulation on social media” and explains that the Online Safety Commissioner and the new online safety law will involve a national system of oversight of social media companies.

It is essential that the regulator is given a mandate and the proper resources to hold online service providers accountable for digital safety. Different concerns regarding online communication through state and government regulations are often subject to criticism because of their effects on freedom of speech and freedom of expression.  

According to the US regulator the FCC claims to protect a free and open internet and after the Cambridge Analytica scandal it introduced the Restoring Internet Freedom Order on June 11, 2018, which provides a framework for “protecting an open Internet while paving the way for better, faster and cheaper Internet access for consumers. It replaces unnecessary, heavy-handed regulations that were developed way back in 1934 with strong consumer protections, increased transparency, and common-sense rules that will promote investment and broadband deployment.”

The FCC’s new framework for providing and protecting internet freedom include three key parts, consumer protection, transparency, and the removal of unnecessary regulations to promote broadband investment.

This claims that they will police the internet and take action against deceptive practices and require service providers to be transparent in providing information on their network management practices, terms of service, and removing outdated regulations to create an incentive for companies to put more resources into building a better online infrastructure.

Possibility of non-commercial ownership

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  Non-commercial ownership of social media entities spreads misinformation in that user data is used to promote false advertising.

When false information is designed and spread with the intention to mislead the recipient of the information, it is called disinformation.The element of intent is key when discussing the risks of disinformation for representative democracies because it raises the question as to the level of protection of freedom of expression and information as a precondition for participating in a democratic system. The intent of spreading false information is closely interwoven with the assessment of user data in order to identify target groups necessary to place targeted political advertising.

-Amelie Heldt

The availability of data to social media entities and large corporations for use is an issue that can only be fixed if they are regulated and for smaller providers to have the same opportunities as their larger competition.

The FCC mentions the opposite, that “smaller Internet service providers—fixed wireless companies, small-town cable operators, municipal broadband providers, electric cooperatives, and others—that don’t have the resources or lawyers to navigate a thicket of complex rules” so they aren’t given the opportunity innovate or invest because of the strict regulations imposed on internet providers.

Who owns the media has become a controversial topic as it is highly concentrated in big corporations. These large corporations are owned and run by billionaire businessmen who are large shareholders in publication. 

Paul O’ Donogue mentions that in Ireland the state owns RTE, Irelands largest television and radio organization, which operates semi-state and semi- commercial. He also mentions that Communicorp owns Ireland’s largest commercial news radio stations and a string of entertainment and music radio stations.

New Ideas on regulation

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Regulations regarding the public sphere and the public’s right to freedom of speech and expression on the internet and news platforms are a widely discussed topic after the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandal during the United States election cycles.

New ideas on how to regulate information on the internet are at the fore of public debate and whether or not the new tools will be potentially utilized without breaching the public’s rights is still to be discussed. 

There is no universal model for content regulation as each country has its own specific concerns and governments know that setting more regulations in place for media censorship on and offline can stifle the growth of the internet as well as the business market.

As Tusikov and Haggart mention “This isn’t a call for an authoritarian internet, but rather, an acknowledgement that someone will be making the rules. If our choice is between government and business — and it is — only government can credibly provide the accountability and responsiveness to protect the public and safeguard democratic integrity.” 

The regulatory wheel will have to be reinvented as the idea of the public sphere changes with the introduction of new digital platforms. Based on the differences in each country it is essential that each has their own approach to content regulation and must accommodate the differences they deem appropriate for the specific issues they face whether it be in print or online.

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References