Meta promises to help ‘build community’, ‘bring the world closer together’ and ‘give people a voice’. These are laudable goals embraced as Meta’s mission on their website. What raises concerns, however, is how they are going to do this without news, given their abandonment of the NMBC and their sidelining of news content. Defining ‘news’ is certainly a challenge, but giving people a voice is clearly part of it. As the Society of Professional Journalists prescribes in its Code of Ethics: 'Give voice to the voiceless'. Presumably The Voice, Voice of America and Vox agree. Building a community without knowing what is happening in the community is how you end up with [insert dystopia of choice].
We now face a kind of collision course between internet ideals and entrepreneurial aspirations. On the one hand, we have platforms positioning themselves as neutral spaces that aren’t there to dictate how users utilise their software and the online capacity they provide to broadcast content, aspiring to fit Barlow’s vision of the internet as this freedom-loving libertarian cyber utopia. On the other hand, we see companies trying to expand into every aspect of our lives, acting as our marketplace and event planner, our pathway for ordering cuisine and paying for it, and, for now, our place to source news. Meta wants to be the place where ‘the world comes together’, buying up the personal messaging app Whatsapp and the photosharing site Instagram, and launching Threads to tackle even more communication spaces. 'Given the importance of news to Australia’s democracy and public debate', will Meta direct people to leave its expanding and expansive online environment to consume this news elsewhere?
Whether platforms continue to play an impactful role in funding the news media that is purportedly essential to our democracy, the apparent desire to host all of our society’s diverse interactions is increasingly implicating a responsibility to make visible and available this crucial component of our communication and community.
Tim Koskie, CMT researcher