Reality sucks, especially if you are Facebook, Google, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, or any of the other hypermedia players. To you, reality looks like The New York Times or the Public Broadcasting Service – decades of very respectable truths, but plodding growth. Why take that road when you can juice your global audience with outrage, confrontation, fake news, voyeurism, consumerism and theatrical confrontations?
Rather than follow the broadcast standards established during the Edward Morrow and Walter Cronkite eras, when a very few networks – ABC, CBS, NBC and the BBC – dominated global discourse, social media has reverted to an earlier era – one where news cowboys, such as Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, thought nothing of inventing, juicing and staging stories, or even inciting wars, to sell news.
In 2019, social-media companies will realise they will have to go back to a more sane sense of what is “real” and understand the consequences of the game they have been playing. They will do that because we are beginning to see the real effects of their laissez-faire carelessness.
In 2017, anti-vaxxer trolls helped increase European measles cases from 5,273 in 2016 to 23,927. That figure had risen to more than 41,000 in just the first six months of 2018. WhatsApp groups have led to the lynching of innocent individuals in India. And there are plenty of cases, in Turkey, Hungary, Poland, Brazil and elsewhere, of populist demagogues rising in popularity on the wave of social-media misinformation.
But above all the social-media giants will realise they need to change because their toleration of fakery is now damaging trust in them. They will face huge pressures for regulation of the societal contract that exists between them, their users and government.
This won’t be an easy transition. Facebook estimates that fighting fake news will increase its operating costs by 45 to 60 per cent. But change is what they will have to do. In 2019, the social-media companies will, at last, decide to become broadcasters.
Juan Enriquez is managing director of Excel Venture Management and author of The Untied States of America: Polarization, Fracturing and our Future
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
