MARKETS are wonderful things. Like wildebeest near a watering hole, they move en masse at speed when they sense danger. And now on the shores of the great internet lake, herds of advertisers are fleeing from the two mighty predators Google and Facebook.
The wily pair have been snapping up advertisers unaware of the danger of getting too close to them, lured in by Google and Facebook’s equally insatiable appetite for any kind of content that moves, literally in the case of video. They have been gorging themselves while the rest of the media jungle goes hungry.
That was before an investigation by The Times newspaper which alleged that as well as footage of cute kittens, bad football tackles and soft porn, adverts from major corporations were appearing alongside videos posted by homophobes, rape apologists and hate preachers who found the likes of YouTube to be easy vehicles for their vile messages. Thanks to slick technology, once the client has paid for access to social media channels, the adverts can appear anywhere there are eyeballs, which includes some pretty unsavoury places. So if you were seeking the views of Wagdi Ghoneim, an Islamist promoter of terror, you could apparently be enticed to buy a Volkswagen at the same time. Or if you spend your evenings wrapped up in a pointy sheet watching crosses burn, then as you’re taking in the latest video from David Duke of the Ku Klux Klan you were also able to find out what’s on the box from ads for ITV. Thanks to the ad payment system, for every 1,000 clicks the Klan and Ghoneim trousered around £6 and the companies knew nothing about it
Now advertisers are pulling out of Facebook and Google faster than you can say Abu Qatada, and sensing the loss of UK business worth around £50 million a year the internet behemoths have moved just as fast to reassure advertisers that they will be putting systems in place to deal with extremist content.
I say systems, because Google has already said that while it takes responsibility, it doesn’t actually intend to take on anyone with responsibility to weed out extremist content before it gets into wider circulation. It says it will act on complaints but not actively police its content.
Nor does it see it as its role to prevent the spread of fake news, the new weapon of choice for extremists to undermine not only the independent media which would help bring them to book but to rock the foundations of democracy.
The problem is that Google, Facebook and other internet service providers do not regard themselves as publishers in the truest sense, merely conduits through which other people or organisations make their material available. They argue it’s like blaming telephone companies for nuisance callers, but perhaps it’s more like saying road-builders have nothing to do with traffic.
The truth is that Google and Facebook want to behave like publishers when it comes to booking adverts and taking the money, but not when it comes to being responsible for the content which drives the audiences, which then attracts the advertisers. They certainly don’t care about the damage they do to the news companies which provide the corrective to the fake news seeping out through their channels.
As Sir Martin Sorrell, chief of WPP, the world’s largest advertising agency, said in 2015: “Google monetises its inventory just like any media owner. Google is not a technology company it is a media owner, the same thing applies to Facebook.”
Meanwhile the rest of the media world fights a war on two fronts. On one is the anarchy of the internet orchestrated by companies which take all of the money but none of the blame, and the other is an ever-tightening and costly regulatory regime to which ISPs pay lip service.
In the 1930s when Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin described the Press as having “power without responsibility” he didn’t know the half of it.
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