“A decreasing presence in the Facebook algorithm and data concerns. The often toxic environment of Twitter. The surfacing of fake news in Google searches. News organizations have realized more and more that their content is being held hostage to other platforms.” ~ David Beard at Poynter
Back in the early days of social media, I tried to warn colleagues in public broadcasting that the big platforms don’t share our public mission. The goal of tech giants like Facebook and Twitter is aggregating and monetizing human attention by dominating every online landscape.
In their early years we in public media helped them achieve this. We gifted them with near-constant free promotion on the air, in print, and on every web page and email newsletter. We told people to like us on Facebook and tweet us their questions. We optimized our websites for social sharing by adding Open Graph and Twitter Card metadata. We pushed out hashtags representing our “brands” without realizing we were pushing out Twitter as a meta-brand. We added “social media skills” to staff roles in News and Marketing, and in big markets hired “digital natives” to monitor and hammer out updates on Tweetdeck basically non-stop.
One public radio station even tried publishing news only on Facebook. Thanks to Facebook’s fickle algorithms, their audience reach actually decreased.
I too helped push our content (and audience) out to social media, because we “had to be there.” And yes, it’s still true: there are many informational, social, and engagement aspects of social media that do match our mission. And that’s fine, but…
What’s not fine is how disruptive the social media environment has become. Disruptive to community, discourse, deliberation, and the possibility of democracy. Disruptive of actual elections. Disruptive of confidence in objective reality, humility, and empathy. And as we can’t help but know now, massively disruptive of our own privacy, and that of our audience.
In the business model of the dominant players in social media, our attention remains important. But our data is now the main course.
There’s an old saying about free services: If you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product.
I’m not a purist about this; I’m still on Facebook and Twitter, and I use Google services every day. We probably really do “have to be there.” The big tech platforms provide many benefits while they mine our every keystroke, like, and click. So what can we do?
I don’t have a complete answer. But here are a few partial steps public media can take:
- Be strong with our own public media platforms. We can control them, and we can make them places where people can trust us to treat them as human beings, not sources of monetizable data.
- Engage audiences through digital platforms without compromising their privacy or security. Be a place on the internet that always maintains trust as a core value. Exploit knowledge, not people.
- Publish outstanding works of journalism and public service on our own platforms. Curate and manage the content we produce, and make it super-easy and satisfying for people to find and use.
- Treat our owned content as permanent. Preserve everything important and make it accessible, with the understanding that public media is a vital contributor to the growing public library of universal knowledge. Keep faith with the idea that this is a thing that really can happen, and it is worth the effort.
- Engage audiences through whatever platforms we can, but privilege public platforms. We are our own social media, or could be.
Of course we can’t compete with Facebook or Google. But they can’t compete with us either. We need to be clear that we’re not only not competing with the behemoths of social media, we’re not even in the same business.
We’re in the business of serving the best interests of people. Social media is in the business of delivering people to the highest bidder.
The Venn diagram where those two things overlap is smaller than we’ve been willing to imagine.