On October 10, 1999, The Los Angeles Times published a special issue of its Sunday magazine devoted entirely to the opening of the Staples Center arena in downtown LA. Apparently unbeknownst to the Times editorial staff, including the writers and editors who put the magazine together, the paper had struck a deal with the owners of the Staples Center to split the profits from the ads sold in the issue.
When the staff found out about the arrangement, they rebelled. More than 300 reporters and editors signed a petition demanding that the publisher apologize, which she did. In a sweeping, 12-part post mortem, the paper’s media critic, David Shaw, noted that “many in The Times newsroom see the Staples affair as the very visible and ugly tip of an ethical iceberg of ominous proportions—a boost-the-profits, drive-the-stock-price imperative that threatens to undermine the paper’s journalistic quality, integrity and reputation.” The deal had violated one of the most sacrosanct principles in serious journalism, sometimes referred to as the “firewall” or separation of church and state: the business department should have no influence on editorial decisions.
Things have changed a great deal in the decades since the Staples Center incident. Social media has become a dominant forum for discourse and news distribution. The leaders of social media companies insist that they are not publishers but merely technological conduits for user-generated content. And yet at the same time they proudly advertise the critical role they play in modern communication and access to information. The decisions they make about what material should be seen by whom have a greater impact than anything The Los Angeles Times could ever have dreamed of.
But the social media industry has yet to articulate a philosophy of how the pursuit of advertising revenue should be balanced against other social values. Facebook, in particular, does not appear to have anything like a separation of church and state. An explosive investigative series in The Wall Street Journal last week provided fresh evidence of what happens when there’s nothing preventing the business side from overriding the people working on quality control. In one case, the Journal reported, researchers inside the company studied certain changes to the News Feed ranking algorithm that had been designed to increase “meaningful social interactions.” When the changes were introduced, CEO Mark Zuckerberg had publicly declared they were the “right thing” to do, even if they sacrificed user engagement and time spent on the app. The researchers, however, found that the features, which included amplifying posts deemed most likely to be reshared, inadvertently ended up boosting “misinformation, toxicity, and violent content.” According to documents reviewed by the Journal, when a leader from Facebook’s integrity department proposed a solution to the company’s business department—that is, to Zuckerberg—he declined to implement it. He didn’t want to sacrifice user engagement.
In response to stories like these, Facebook points out that it has increased its investments in safety and content moderation in recent years. This week in a press release it announced that it employs “40,000 people working on safety and security, up from 35,000 in 2019 and a four-fold increase from 10,000 in 2016.” (That’s roughly one employee for every 71,000 users, by the way.) But, as the Journal and other reports have repeatedly shown, at crucial moments, those teams are overruled as decisions about safety, content moderation, and enforcement are made by the executives in charge of the company’s growth and lobbying operations. Facebook, in other words, needs its own version of journalism’s firewall.
In fact, the lesson social media companies should take from traditional media is much broader. The most interesting thing about journalism’s separation of church and state is that it’s self-imposed. No federal statute says a newspaper must keep its advertising operations walled off from coverage decisions. It’s a value that crystallized in the 1920s, when American journalists adopted a commitment to objective, nonpartisan reporting. As historian Michael Schudson explains in his book Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers, this was a key moment in the professionalization of journalism, as reporters and editors “accepted a definition of what it meant to be independent from the state and the market.” In theory, nothing is stopping Jeff Bezos from interfering with how The Washington Post, which he owns, covers Amazon, which he founded. In practice, he’d be risking a wave of resignations and a major dilution of the value of the Post’s brand. No self-respecting reporter wants readers to think they’re doing the bidding of the sponsor. (By all accounts, Bezos has been scrupulously hands-off since buying the paper in 2013.)
The firewall is merely one example. Journalists at reputable newsgathering organizations adhere to a broad set of norms and ethical rules that developed over the course of the 20th century. Fairness, accuracy, the idea of being a “watchdog” whose job is to question government power—these make up the culture of a profession that sees itself as vital to democratic life. Lord knows we don’t always live up to those ideals, and their contours are perpetually in flux. Plenty of low-quality or hyper-partisan outlets ignore them whenever convenient. But they at least provide a common set of standards. Even people who hate “the media” tend to accuse journalists of bias, inaccuracy, or unfairness. In other words, they are judging us using the same criteria by which we judge ourselves. And—here’s the key point—those criteria weren’t handed down by the legislature. They couldn’t have been. The First Amendment’s protection of free speech and the free press gives American government very little power to tell journalists how to do their jobs.
It would be too much to say that these values arose out of pure public-spiritedness. The concept of nonpartisan objectivity caught on in the 19th century in part because American publishers realized they could reach a bigger audience by appealing to the whole political spectrum, according to Edward Wasserman, who teaches professional ethics at the UC Berkeley School of Journalism. Still, journalistic norms tend to serve the public interest. “Ethics, more often than not, is a source of restraint from what might be advantageous to the news organization, at least in the near term,” Wasserman said. “If doing the right thing were always advantageous, you wouldn’t have ethical problems.”
Self-regulation is not a sexy concept right now. Many of the world’s biggest problems, in tech and beyond, can be traced to letting corporations regulate themselves for decades. But the simple fact is that, given the strong protections of the First Amendment, government regulation is never going to fix everything wrong with online content. The government almost certainly can’t force Facebook and Twitter to prioritize civil discussion and downrank malicious comments. It can’t make Instagram or TikTok calibrate their algorithms to improve young women’s mental health and self-esteem. It can’t require YouTube to prioritize enlightening material in its recommendation algorithm. There may be some regulations, particularly around user privacy and algorithmic transparency, that could help. Creating more competition through antitrust could expose platforms to more market pressure. But even if there were a dozen major social networks, each one would still need to deal with the content dilemmas plaguing the existing juggernauts. There’s no road to healthier online discourse without some level of self-imposed professional guidelines.
Those will not be the same as the ones that guide traditional media organizations. The social media industry will need to develop its own set of norms to counterbalance the relentless drive for user attention and ad revenue. As Samidh Chakrabarti, a former civic integrity product manager at Facebook, put it on Twitter, “In the absence of an articulated set of values, engagement & growth concerns will win every single time because they are far easier to measure (and defend). But without them, we are left with social networks that are inherently a-moral yet control our information sphere.”
It’s not as though the industry would be starting from scratch. Social platforms have already taken steps in pursuit of values besides pure engagement. Content policies and community standards are a basic form of this: committing in advance to take down certain types of posts even if they would drive engagement in a given case. Beyond content rules, Twitter has publicly experimented with several methods for improving the quality of discourse on its platform, like prompting users to read an article before retweeting it. YouTube, recognizing the influence it can have on the dissemination of public health information, announced strict measures to prevent the spread of Covid misinformation early in the pandemic. Facebook conducted a massive voter registration drive last year. These efforts are often fumbling, incomplete, and opaque. But they show that social media companies are capable of pursuing goals besides ad revenue alone.
It might be said that these sorts of things aren’t sincere, but are just a way to improve a company’s public image, make users happier, or keep the government at bay. That’s fine. Media self-regulation has always been driven by media self-interest. Journalistic norms, Wasserman said, emerged “as part of a larger movement of journalism that was intended to make journalism more successful, more credible, and more profitable.” The media scholar Amanda Lotz notes that movie ratings and television decency standards are examples of industry groups self-regulating to keep customers and advertisers happy “without triggering formal government supervision.”
Likewise, Facebook and YouTube tell anyone who will listen that showing users offensive and harmful content, however engaging in the short term, is actually bad for business in the long run. What’s missing from the companies’ efforts so far, however, is a public commitment to a coherent set of principles that can resolve conflicts between financial imperatives and civic responsibility. In other words, in what circumstance will they be willing to do something that isn’t good for business, simply because it’s right? Those principles need to be transparent—movie ratings work because it would be obvious if a G-rated movie included nudity—and prescriptive. A media organization doesn’t ask, “Will this breach of ethics make us enough money to be worth the loss of reader trust?” every time there’s an ethical dilemma. Instead, if things are working properly, it says, “Here’s what our rules say, so that’s what we’re going to do.”
Social media executives have mostly shied away from suggesting that their platforms are geared toward any goal besides neutral-sounding objectives like “connecting the world” or “giving everyone a voice,” which are less mission statements than euphemistic descriptions of what the platforms do. But it has become very clear that in optimizing for engagement and attention, these platforms are making design choices that are anything but neutral. The era of social media companies presenting themselves as passive conduits for user speech is coming to an end. The question is what will replace it.
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