News organizations around the world are promoting principles and criteria that can define who is a “news provider of public interest.”
All your news is managed by the invisible hand. Content moderation and content management measures are two sides of the same coin, and they lie at the heart of digital intermediary services. The gentle nudges of behavior behind those measures can steer audience choice on Google Search and Facebook in one direction or another, through processes that law expert Karen Yeung describes as “subtle, unobtrusive but extremely powerful”.
Questions about what content the public should see are always part of media and communication discussions. Newsrooms and parliament also echo with debates over free speech and what content is in the ‘common interest’. And while governments ponder how to Intervening with the digital giants to protect democratic institutions and deliver reliable, diverse news to the public, the media industry is trying to solve the problem from within.
News organizations around the world are promoting definable principles and criteria Who “public interest news provider” is. One of the prime examples is the Press Trust Initiative (JTI) in Europe.
It started as a standard-setting collaborative process, following the guidelines of the Commission on European Standards (CEN), led by Reporters Without Borders and supported by the European Broadcasting Union ( EBU), Agence France Presse (AFP), and more than 120 professionals and organizations.
In 2019, promulgating reference documents, developing technical standards and professional norms for journalists and media agencies. These standards set forth several provisions, such as transparency requirements for ownership, funding, editorial duties and data collection practices, but also accountability requirements. accountability to promote professional standards, accuracy, and both internal and external accountability systems to such media bodies to a greater extent applicable to JTI certification.
These standards can enable trusted and public-interest journalism to thrive in the digital age. As the implementation phase progresses, JTI is also calling for the inclusion of these standards in search engine algorithms and social media platforms, to better display, recommend and highlight “reliable and trustworthy online sources of information for the benefit of society and democracy”. Such measures may be applied through self-regulatory instruments, codes of practice, or more stringent co-regulatory frameworks.
To ensure JTI standards are implemented through fair and accountable frameworks, self-assessment and accreditation processes must be independent and auditable. This is especially true if governments support its implementation through additional co-management interventions, because of the transparent and procedurally fair processes for reviewing criteria for reporting. even ‘in the public interest’ will be important.
While salient algorithms are capable of promoting trusted news sources, they can also be exploited for forms of censorship or soft propaganda, related to democracy and human rights.
These standards also need to gain broad support and consensus among journalists and media, which can be a challenge. In some countries, there are now independent press regulators with their own industry standards, to which not all news and press providers are registered (such as IPSO and IMPRESS). in the UK).
And with growing concerns around online misinformation, other networks are also trying to develop principles and guidelines for ‘credible’ or ‘public interest’ journalism, for example. such as News Guard and its ‘trust rating’, the Trust Project with its ‘trust index’, or the Reputation Coalition and its guidelines for promoting information quality online.
As the European Digital Media Observatory has emphasized, using metrics as the sole means of determining the credibility of content sources can create a media environment in which “long-time players have more competitive advantage, while new players face unprecedented barriers to entry,” leading to problems for media pluralism and distortions in the media market.
The benefits and consequences will have to be assessed, reflecting the voluntary nature of both technical standards and other emerging indicators, as well as the need for methodological transparency of indicators so that users can aware of their limitations.
Following increasing public pressure, services such as Google Search and Facebook have been improving the transparency of their algorithms. However, as highlighted in the 2020 Digital Rights Accountability Index, they still have a long way to go.
When it comes to prioritizing content across these services, as argued in the Council’s 2020 study Europe, these companies are increasingly mixing their usual commercial criteria with some vague mutual interest considerations. For example, in Google’s search ranking guidelines, among criteria such as query meaning, relevance, novelty, and context, its algorithms also take into account “content quality.” and “expertise, authority and reliability”.
Whether a news source is considered trustworthy or authoritative and therefore ranked higher seems to be determined based on a number of factors, one of which is whether “other prominent websites link to it.” or refer to the content or not”. However, it remains unclear what other factors are considered and how they are considered in the final recommender system. Industry standards do not appear to be one of the distinguishing criteria.
Facebook provides some general information about how the company manages and ranks “newsworthy content.” The company says its selections are based on “a test that balances the public good against the risk of harm.” They mention that the tests and related rulings are all based on “international human rights standards,” but which standards and what types of human rights risks are unclear.
These measures show that search engines and social media companies are also willing to reduce misinformation through measures to support news providers of public interest. But there is an overall lack of coordination. Worldwide shared industry standards, or at least benchmarked best practices, have the potential to help guide the digital giants.
Meanwhile, in both Google search and the Facebook cases, there was no independent assessment of how these criteria included their content prioritization measures, how they were weighted against other popularity criteria, user relevance or engagement and their impact on users’ access and consumption of news. Increasing the transparency of these elements will drive real change.
Ultimately, however, the core purpose of digital intermediaries like these is to censor, sort, select, and filter what content can be found on their service. It remains to be seen whether they will accept to subscribe to the principles of non-discrimination and the public interest. Policy practice and industry could benefit from a more coordinated approach.
If a society is hoping future-proof regulatory proposals can also be replicated at the European and international level, it needs to broaden its reach, because ultimately, we are dealing with common problems with the flawed platform governance system.
Principles of good practice for prominent algorithms can include industry technical standards such as JTI, but also leverage existing Council of Europe recommendations regarding freedom of expression and information , media freedom and media pluralism. It is a question of the intersection of free speech, media freedom and media pluralism that demands our attention.
