Media Profits By Amplifying Hate: Can We Fix It?
There may be no more galvanizing center of gravity for the tech community than South By Southwest, affectionately known as SXSW., in Austin, Texas.
It’s tricky to do a serious subject among the alluring draw of beer and BBQ, but with the rising tide of hate overtaking civility on the internet, it seemed like a topic that needed a public conversation. So I signed up for a panel.
Brian Stelter, the former anchor of “Reliable Sources” on CNN, served as our moderator. Other participants were Jade Magnus Ogunnaike from Color Of Change, and Lauren T. Krapf from the Anti-Defamation League, along with me, representing the Sustainable Media Center. We had agreed to take the question “Can we fix it?” seriously, and worked to both raise issues and seek solutions.
Ogunnaike took on the platforms with pointed criticism. “Today, a lot of us get our news from Facebook and Twitter, long before we open The New York Times or The Washington Post. In Kenosha, Wisconsin, there were marches planned to support Black Lives Matter, and a militia group had posted an event on Facebook and they had invited members of this militia to come and counter-protest and to bring guns. This is a great example of how these tech platforms are a new form of media.”
Kyle Rittenhouse learned about the call to come armed, and did so, fatally shooting two people. Ogunnaike says Facebook should be held responsible. “Who's to say if that event hadn't been on Facebook, maybe Kyle Rittenhouse wouldn't have heard of it at all? Facebook had a duty and a responsibility as a technology company, as well as a media company, to take down what was advertised as a violent event -- and it didn't.”
Krapf agreed. “We are today facing normalization and mainstreaming of extremist ideologies like never before. We are being served up hate and extremist content at the top of our mainstream news feeds because it's profitable, because certainly for social media, hate and extremism and salacious content drives engagement.”
Here I joined in: “I think the question is going forward, how do we figure out where the money is moving? And that's when we talk about solutions, it's who's benefiting economically from amplifying fringe ideas."
Ogunnaike didn't pull her punches. "Facebook is just one of these giant tech companies inflicting civil rights abuses virtually every single day," she said. “They're not interested in building a sustainable media culture or a sustainable world. They're interested in making money."
If that is the business model of outrage, then where are the interventions for hope?
“So I think we have to talk about who has the power to fix it. There are two pods of power that I think have not yet been implemented,” I said. “One is all the people in this audience. Few of us are paying for news they trust. That means platform winner are turning readers into the product, and using outrage to gin up audience. They are selling your attention by the pound,” I said to the Austin audience.
“The second thing, and I think this is maybe the one that we can start to really make change around is, there are enormous, enormous, powerful piles of money that are funding this current state of affairs, from brands. So consumers are beginning to say to brands, ‘Hey, you know what, we don't really want to fund hate.’”
Krapf had a third pod of power to add to the mix. “This might be an unpopular opinion, but the government has a huge role to play here,” she said. “The laws and regulatory frameworks that underpin our online lives are from 1996. The Internet looks very different now than it did in 1996, and those laws were meant to spur innovation... We need to compel transparency because self-regulation is not working. We need to push the government to create and update internet frameworks.”
The power to make change will come from internet users brandishing their economic power.
“The fight is coming to all of us, because it's a fight for dignity, it's a fight for humanity, and it's something that we're all involved in,” said Ogunnaike. “You need to pick a side.”