Why the Facebook/Tsu row should worry journalists
I hadn’t heard of Tsu until a few days ago, when I started to see reports in Twitter that Facebook was censoring it. Users are reporting that when they try to link to Tsu, or even type ‘Tsu.co’, their posts are automatically blocked. The same happens on Facebook-owned Instagram.
Facebook and Tsu
Worse still, Facebook has retrospectively removed millions of earlier postings about Tsu from its pages. Mentions of Tsu are censored from private conversations on Messenger, which feels even more sinister.
Tsu is a fledgling social network, currently open only by invitation. Its USP is that it promises to share ad revenues with its users. Small though it currently is, the model is apparently enough of a challenge to Facebook to draw a heavy-handed response.
(It’s fair to point out that, as far as I’m aware, Facebook hasn’t made any sort of official statement about this. When posts linking to Tsu are blocked, there is automated messages suggesting that Facebook’s security systems reckon the link is unsafe. So there might be an innocent explanation).
It’s a great story, as well as being great PR for Tsu, and I’m sure we’ll hear a lot more about it in the days to come (if there’s enough of a fuss I suspect Facebook may remove the ban and blame it on ‘technical issues. We’ll see). But it’s something that should alarm journalists, too.
Facebook is a major news source for many people. According to Pew, 60 per cent of Americans get their news on the social network: I can’t find a figure for the UK but there’s no obvious reason to think it should be very different.
Facebook is assiduously courting publishers through initiatives like Instant Articles, because it understands that high-quality content will draw users to its network and keep them there. Publishers, for their part, understand the value of going where the audience is.
The more closely newspapers and broadcasters are tied into Facebook, the greater their dependence on it — and the greater the power Facebook has over them. How will that power be used?
Mark Zuckerberg speaks up strongly for free speech; yet in reality his company is a busy censor and the rules and principles by which it judges content are, to say the least, opaque. There is a strain of distinctively American prudishness that has led, for example, to the removal of images of breast-feeding; it is also possible to detect a nervousness about political controversy that manifests in a confusingly piecemeal approach to posts about Israel and Palestine.
I know from previous experience of running Yahoo!s UK editorial operations that liberal Californians are often rather shocked by the robust vulgarity that characterises the British media. How might Facebook respond to a chorus of complaint about a controversial story from the Sun or the Mail published on its network? The company is rumoured to be looking at ways of blocking ‘hate speech’: but who defines what that is?
In most of these cases, you can at least say that Facebook is trying to do the right thing according to its lights: its censorship efforts are directed at removing content that a lot of people genuinely would find offensive. All media do this, and rightly so: we would be appalled if the Guardian or the Mail published videos of Isis beheadings on its site.
The particular problem with Facebook is that its size and global reach mean that its censorship decisions have huge impact and that they sometimes seem capricious, irrational, high-handed and contradictory. These are probably mostly process problems: the result of dealing with vast amounts of material in many different countries, with different cultural norms. In the delicate and highly-contested area of ‘offensive’ content, I think it is probably unfair to accuse Facebook of being deliberately malign. Still, it is something that ought to concern journalists and publishers for whom the network represents a major audience channel.
The Tsu case is a different kettle of fish: Facebook appears to be using its platform clout to harm a business rival and if that turns out to be the case, it really is alarming. When the BBC or the Economist writes about Tsu will Facebook refuse to allow the content to appear on its network? What might it do in the future, if a journalist writes a highly-critical piece about Facebook itself? And, if the publisher is relying on Facebook for half its traffic and a large chunk of revenue, how will it respond to this censorship?
