Facebook seems to spend its days constantly in the news. It's senior members must be getting well used to fending questions from the media and from parliamentarians about its practices. Some of which have been the intense focus for both sets of detractors for some time.
The media, of course, has a vested interest in dampening Facebook’s power. In the last ten years, the social media giant has stolen bread from these media players’ tables in a way they could never have imagined. Facebook offers a ruthlessly efficient, cost-effective and highlight measurable way of being able to hit a highly targeted audience when compared against print advertising.
And we all know some politicians are open to some serious questions over the use of the platform during the original Brexit vote in 2016. My guess is we’ll never get to the bottom of just how influential it was in swinging the vote towards leave.
It hasn’t stopped the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) publishing a report on the problems with tech giants, in which it is fiercely critical of Facebook, accusing them of being digital gangsters’ in their apparent refusal to cooperate fully with governmental investigations into some of its practices.
The report says big tech companies are also “failing in the duty of care they owe to their users to act against harmful content, and to respect their data privacy rights.” It’s interesting that while it paints a broad brush stroke across big tech companies it seems really to just be all about Facebook for them. Mark Zuckerberg’s refusal to sit in front of them must really grate.
But is Facebook really the sole platform propagating fake news? Like me, you’re probably thinking it’s a bit rich for a set of MPs to criticise anyone they feel isn’t doing enough to halt the volume of fake news we now encounter on a daily basis.
There was once a clear line between opinion and fact. Columnists, paid to give their opinion, had their place in the newspapers. Usually towards the back. Now, so much news’ is presented with a clear political slant, so deciphering what’s fact and what’s opinion becomes more and more difficult. It’s not hard to find two wildly differing reports of one news item. So which one is the truth and which is fake?
These once all-powerful news titles now have to share their power of influence with far more people. Now, we chose to have our opinions formed just as much from our friends on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram than we do by picking up the Guardian or the Daily Mail each morning.
But do we trust our own circles any more than these media outlets? On Facebook just this week I noticed what must have been a concerted attempt from Tommy Robinson fans to spread his right wing commentary into new avenues. I subscribe to two different regional Facebook groups at either end of the country. Two separate people, separated by 250 miles, shared his live post into those community pages. Coincidence? Possibly. I don’t know how many more did the same in their respective town page. Regardless of his views, enabling your supporters to share videos in this manner can get you reach into an enormous (and potentially new) audience very quickly at very little cost.
So it’s a tough job someone like Facebook has. Can you justifiably shut down Tommy Robinson for having extreme views? Do you have to find the Yin to his Yang and shut down someone with extreme left wing views to balance things out? This gets tricky, doesn’t it?
Regulation is needed, of course. But who does that? The politicians? They have a vested interested. We go back to a highly subjective view of what’s deemed acceptable or otherwise.
We work with bloggers and influencers a great deal. It works for our clients. But they’re now being targeted by regulators with both the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) and the Competitions and Markets Authority (CMA) to tighten up and be more transparent about the things that are gifted to them, whether they’re paid or even whether they’ve been given a free invite to an event or launch party. Where does that stop? To some extent, we’re all influencers now. Are we really going to have to add #gifted’ in our Instagram caption when we post a picture of those crappy novelty socks Aunt Maureen got for us from Poundland for Christmas?
Truth and transparency will become highly valuable commodities for brands trying to work their way through this confusing mire, but there will be more unwitting victims along the way. It’s not always going to be Facebook’s fault.
Christian Cerisola is head of W North, part of W Communications www.wnorth.co.uk @WCommNorth
