With racist riots and pogroms in the UK streets, is it finally time for social media and traditional media to be better regulated?
The August riots for some appear to have come out of nowhere. Attacks including burning a Holiday Inn housing asylum seekers, burning a Nigerian migrant’s car or a South Asian man being punched in the face whilst onlookers laugh and call him racial slurs are just a few incidents that have revealed the level of radicalisation against Muslims, migrants and people of colour happening in Britain.
But, it’s arguable that we have long had a media ecosystem that has encouraged increasingly dangerous views about various groups of people. Few would argue that social media has turbocharged the ability for misinformation to be spread, but our traditional media also has a role to play in rising extremism.
To explore this and what role greater regulation can play in combating disinformation and hateful publishing, Naked Politics spoke to Lexie Kirkconnell-Kawana, CEO of press regulator IMPRESS.
Naked Politics: social media has had more attention over the last several days with regards to things like disinformation, can you tell us a bit about what the regulatory landscape is for social media platforms and users?
Lexie: Any individual user on social media is subject to the terms and conditions of the platform. There's no regulatory body or regulatory infrastructure that regulates what those individual social accounts say.
Obviously, everyone's subject to the national law of the country in which they're situated. Currently, there have been individuals who have been identified as engaging in hate speech online, and subject to criminal investigation. However these prosecutions are very novel and it's only going to be in the most extreme cases where that person is identifiable. But there’s no real regulation that sits on top of that. There’s a lot of high pressure if criminal prosecution is used to deal with individual users, and that's regardless of whether they identify as a news publisher or just as Joe Jane blogs posting online. The environment for a lot of this dangerous speech is incentivized algorithmically, as a core part of the business models of these platforms. Those platforms should be accountable to reduce the harm that is caused.
Naked Politics: Does the Online Safety Act currently have much impact?
Lexie: The platform will be liable under the Online Safety Act, which calls on platforms to have systems and processes in place to effectively combat harm through friction, moderation, removals, and banning and blocking users as part of their responsibilities under the law. However the Act has not yet come into full effect. Ofcom (the broadcast regulator) released a statement today calling on platforms to be mindful of their upcoming obligations, and the upcoming compliance deadline, and do what they can in advance to address the harm and the illegality that's occurring on their platforms. But that's not the same as being required by law to respond to Ofcom, or respond to new obligations, just yet. So for the moment there's a sense that it's a little bit of a free for all till everyone is required to comply against the deadlines.
Naked Politics: It feels unprecedented, but there have been multiple incidents of X owner Elon Musk sharing direct misinformation.
Lexie: It's definitely an unusual case; because of how prolifically he engages in these issues it’s difficult to draw those equivalences. But within traditional media it is sort of frowned upon for owners to directly propagate within their own publications. But it's not unheard of either.
Naked Politics: Perhaps in traditional media it’s normally more subtle rather than just so obviously out there; that makes it seem unique, but media owners influencing media narratives probably in effect may not be as unique as we think.
There’s been less focus on the mainstream media, and the narratives they have also framed around migrants, asylum seekers, Muslims, people of colour, more more broadly. What regulation are they subject to?
Lexie: Publishers are not required by law to be regulated. Publishers can choose to be regulated, IMPRESS for example provides regulatory codes of conduct and enforces them against publishers that sign up. This is all entirely voluntary and what that means is that we have a very fractured traditional media landscape where a lot of these publishers, including some very well known publishers are not accountable to any regulatory body, they're only accountable to minimum legal requirements.
Private individuals have taken action against newspaper groups for breaches of individual rights and civil rights, it's nigh impossible for action to be taken by the state. It’s almost unheard of, taking to task a publisher for issues of inciting hatred, engaging in discrimination or inaccuracy even on issues such as systemic discrimination against particular groups and the spreading of narratives that encourage the conditions that create the violent reactions we’ve seen.
For IMPRESS this is another opportunity to call on senior policymakers, legislators, and influencers, and demand traditional media publishers have greater regulatory obligations. Traditional media should also be accountable, and required to engage responsibly in their publication, and respond to complaints about discrimination and chronic issues of discrimination. It requires a lot of courage on the behalf of those particular policymakers and legislators to take on these finely balanced issues of freedom of speech and public responsibility.
Naked Politics: What role does sort of improving the public's media literacy play in this? To what extent do we also want to empower citizens themselves to also try and make better judgments about the information that they're being given?
Lexie: Right now the public has a very low understanding of what standards of good journalism are. They've got very strong views on what there should be: press and social media to be fair and balanced, to be free from harm and disinformation, but in terms of recognising what those standards are and where they've fallen short, there’s a low understanding. IMPRESS have engaged in a lot of awareness raising around this issue.
We are currently trying to create products and services around news and media literacy that we hope to make available to the public to support further education.
The UK has a pretty pluralistic media diet. There is a lot of traditional media, but also a lot of independent media and news influencers out there, particularly on social media as well. What we're starting to see is that there is this groundswell of people choosing to use and adopt very unreliable sources of information at the expense of choosing well thought out accurate, balanced information, We need to understand more of why at an individual and personal level, people are gravitating towards those those choices as opposed to more reliable ones, so public engagement can really address these issues and create a healthier relationship with media overall.
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