The evolving role of digital platforms: Media regulation and tackling disinformation
On December 4, 2017, then Treasurer, the Hon Scott Morrison MP called on the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) to conduct an inquiry into digital platforms. The Inquiry was designed to investigate the impact of digital platforms on the supply news and journalistic content. Since then, the ACCC has published its findings and recommendations in its Final Report, which have been provided to the Treasurer.
Our submission to the Treasury addresses the ACCC’s Digital Platforms Inquiry Final Report recommendations. You can read our full submission here.
Developing a harmonised media regulatory framework
There is a pressing need to develop a regulatory framework that both addresses anomalies arising from sector-specific regulation in the context of media convergence, and the regulatory imbalance that now exists in Australian media and advertising markets between digital platforms and traditional media businesses and industries.
The issue of harmonising Australia’s media and communications regulatory framework has been on the agenda since the early 2010s. The limitations of the historical approach to media regulation, which was based upon specific and discrete media industries (print, broadcast, advertising, telecommunication), have been observed by many.
Digital media has increasingly operated across a series of convergent layers, rather than stand-alone vertically integrated industry silos. This has led to periodic regulatory anomalies and at times absurdities, such as the Australian Law Reform Commission’s discovery that Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire was treated in eight different ways within Australia’s classification system, whether it was a book, a feature film shown in a cinema, a DVD available for rental, a film shown on broadcast TV, a film shown on subscription TV, a downloadable film from Apple iTunes, a board game based on the book, or a game based on a downloadable app.
It also leads to clear concerns in terms of the overall regulatory framework, such as the different treatment of online political advertising carried on platforms such as Facebook as compared to that appearing in print or on broadcast media.
The issues have changed somewhat since the early 2010s, in that the concerns are increasingly about the relative standing of digital platforms compared with traditional media, in addition to those arising from convergence across traditional media.
Monitoring efforts of digital platforms to implement credibility signalling
It is of great importance that ACMA, or the relevant regulatory body, be empowered to obtain relevant data and information from digital platforms in order to undertake effective monitoring of actions to reduce the visibility and prevalence of mis-, dis- and mal-information as news.
The major digital platform companies are moving in various ways to help users identify the reliability and legitimacy of the news they consume and share online. However, there are still reasons to believe that these efforts will need to be monitored closely by government.
The first is the recognised, continuing disparity between platform policies on the signalling and removal of inaccurate news. In recent responses to the distribution of a manipulated video of US speaker Nancy Pelosi, insinuating she was drunk, YouTube moved to take down the material, while Twitter and Facebook did not, and did not indicate how it would be made less visible, even after Facebook’s own fact-checking bodies identified the material as false.
Such differences in content policies, interpretation and enforcement suggest that some ongoing national analysis is required of how voluntary initiatives are affecting the quality of news publishing on social media locally, in Australia, rather than the U.S.
Second, there is a lack of publicly available, comparative data on the types of platforms initiatives taken to lower the visibility of disinformation, and subsequent effects on the distribution of this content. There is little detailed information about the ways in which platform algorithms have been adjusted to promote trusted news brands or to reduce the incidence of mis- and disinformation in news feeds, and evidence of the influence of these actions on content consumption.
Platforms have produced useful transparency resources, such as YouTube’s Community Guidelines Enforcement Report, which reports on the effectiveness of its user flagging regime, and its contribution to identifying misinformation. However, there is a lack of robust comparative information about user reports and their effectiveness.
The problem of networked disinformation is a critical one for democracies to address
There is likely to be a need for regulatory enforcement of any industry code, and particularly with this instance given the significant market power of the platforms and their international operations.
The ACCC proposal addresses only one aspect of the threats to news journalism considered by the inquiry, and is less future proof than broader codes of practice concerning content regulation and dispute resolution. If there is to be a regulatory overhaul of digital communications, information integrity could be considered as part of a larger suite of issues to be governed in a code of practice. It will be essential to consider to what extent such a policy instrument should extend to the activities of all media companies, not just those hosting user generated content and facilitating multi-user communications.
There is certainly merit in the idea that platforms could collaborate on a code of practice which includes more effective approaches to handling user complaints about content standards and regulation.
Any platform specific new code requires some definition of these companies as other than tech or IT companies, their preferred terms. They have rejected the label ‘publishers’ in order not to lose the safe harbour protections afforded them under existing telecommunications legislation, and argue that the large proportion of their business is not publication but the hosting of publishing and communications. However, they also engage in curation, moderation and commissioning of content, which identifies them as acting them beyond the realm of carriage alone.
This submission forms a part of ongoing work being undertaken by Professor Terry Flew (Faculty of Creative Industries, QUT), Professor Nicolas Suzor (Faculty of Law, QUT) Dr. Fiona Martin, Associate Professor Tim Dwyer (Department of Media and Communication, University of Sydney), and Dr. Rosalie Gillett (Faculty of Creative Industries, QUT) as part of a three-year Australian Research Council Discovery Project, Platform Governance: Rethinking Internet Regulation as Media Policy (Australian Research Council Discovery-Project (DP190100222–2019–2021).
