Google and Facebook must now act as responsible publishers

The likes of Google, Facebook and Twitter need to voluntarily take on the responsibilities of publishers, both commercial and editorial, or risk having it imposed upon them, writes Raymond Snoddy

The spectre of GAFA is stalking the world of the media and a lot of other companies besides. Something that sounds like a character from a horror movie was released at the recent IBC conference in Amsterdam by Saul Berman, chief strategist for IBM Gobal Business.

As a result of the scale of the threat, companies would have to move beyond mere “digital transformation” and go all the way to something more fundamental – “digital reinvention.”

GAFA is, of course, just a scary acronym invented by consultants to frighten the children, just as “digital reinvention” is a case of dressing up old ideas in new verbal clothes to grab attention.

We know the constituent parts of GAFA very well – Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon – but bringing them altogether as a concept helps to highlight the scale they represent and the challenge they pose to media organisations in particular.

Since 2014, for example, the share price of Amazon has grown by 304 per cent, giving it the corporate financial firepower to do almost anything it wants.

During the same period the US media group CBS has grown by 17 per cent and Viacom by only 9 per cent.

Another well-worn management consulting concept – boiled frog syndrome – was also given another outing at IBC.

It has long been said – although the scientific evidence is actually far from clear – if you put a frog in warm water and very slowly heat it up the frog does not notice the gradual changes and is said to stay until it is boiled alive.

Yet the media companies which have been cast in the role of frogs in the past are showing increasing signs of life, or at least agitation and thinking of legging it rather than be boiled alive by GAFA – or at least the most relevant members of that frightening club, Facebook and Google.
[advert position=”left”]
A small but telling example came this week at Mediatel’s Future of Newsbrands conference from James Wildman, Trinity Mirror’s chief revenue officer, who appealed for the creation of a unified sales platform to better compete against “the duopoly” of Facebook and Google.

Wildman warned that the duopoly was getting 90 per cent of all incremental money spent on digital. He highlighted what we have all known for years, lying in the warm water, the total economic imbalance between those creating expensive content and those merely curating it.

How do you pay for 2,000 national and regional journalists across 160 titles, as Trinity Mirror does, and compete against those creating no content at all who manage to scoop up the revenue?

Earlier this month former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger gave another telling example when he claimed that Facebook had sucked up £20 million of the newspaper’s digital advertising revenue last year.

Instead of the forecast £100 million in digital revenues the newspaper’s digital turnover came in at only £81.9 million – a 2.3 per cent drop on 2014.

We have known all these things for ages but at last there are signs that the frog is moving, although action is made more difficult because the national newspapers also do get revenue from the online “curation” of their content.

Yet even those who benefit greatly from Facebook and Google and give them billions in digital advertising revenue, Sir Martin Sorrell’s WPP is not happy.

In a comprehensive performance at IBC, Sir Martin almost echoed Wildman in arguing that the scale and power of the Facebook and Google duopoly was not good for WPP clients.

Crucially Sir Martin got to the heart of the matter by analysing their status.

“They are media owners not technology companies – they masquerade as technology companies. They are monetising inventory just like other media companies,” he said, suggesting that regulators may have to look at the scale and power of companies which account for 76 per cent of internet advertising revenue – a percentage that is actually rising.

Google had got better at sharing data, but according to Sir Martin, Facebook remained difficult to deal with.

The underlying implications of persuading, or perhaps having to impose on Facebook and Google, the responsibilities of being publishers as well as tech companies, are potentially huge.

In particular, it is being argued vociferously that Facebook needs an editorial brain – an editor- and not just algorithms.

The lack of such a thing has been thrown into sharp perspective by the case of the Pulitzer Prize – the winning “napalm girl” image that probably more than any other summed up the barbarity of the Vietnam war and America’s part in it.

Facebook censored the image because it featured a naked child and that violated its “community standards.” The decision was reversed under fire and Facebook acknowledged the “global importance of this image in documenting a particular moment in time.”

To critics, the incident highlighted how ill-equipped Facebook was to face up to its so-far unacknowledged role as a publisher and the need for founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg – net worth US$55 billion – to recognise his responsibilities as ” the world’s most powerful editor.”

The matter is urgent and far more important than the censorship of historic images. GAFA has to be persuaded of their importance as news distributors – apart from hoovering up digital ad revenue – and take responsibility for what goes out under their name even if they are only “curators”.

Matters are made more complicated because all of GAFA, plus Twitter, have an obvious American attachment to the First Amendment guaranteeing freedom of speech.

But the run-up to the Presidential election and the possibility of a Trump victory takes matters beyond a theoretical legal plane.

For more than 50 per cent of Americans, Facebook is their primary news source and with it a diet of unchecked facts, lies, prejudice and nonsense.

Americans have never faced a choice like Trump v Clinton before and the media has a huge collective responsibility in challenging the records of the candidates; and newspapers such as the Washington Post and the New York Times and television channels such as CNN have, on the whole, been discharging that duty.

Meanwhile, Facebook has been curating nonsense while censoring historically important images.

The challenge for GAFA and Twitter is to voluntarily take on the responsibilities of publishers, both commercial and editorial, or risk having it imposed upon them.

Is it too idealistic to suggest that some of the social media billions could be devoted to hiring skilled fact-checkers or sub-editors as we used to call them, or at least challenge what is manifestly untrue?

Because the frog is stirring and might jump to safety one day.