Big Tech and News: A Critical Approach to Digital Platforms, Journalism, and Competition Law

Neilson, Tai; Balasingham, Baskaran

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-87086-7_9

Cited by 6 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…A commercial approach to regulation presupposes the idea of both a market and a public interest in the availability of news and information on social media platforms, a broadcast‐era legal framework that allows governments to enforce certain requirements in exchange for rights to produce or offer media content (MacCarthy, 2021). In this context, the NMBC was both innovative and disruptive in its use of competition laws to force platforms to pay for news content (Neilson and Balasingham, 2022, forthcoming). However, it also presents challenges for national regulators dealing with enormous global companies that have the wherewithal to simply disengage from a region if it is no longer in their commercial interest to continue providing all platform services.…”

Section: Background: Moving From Ad Hoc To Formalised Regulation Of D...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Australia's News Media Bargaining Code and the global turn towards platform regulation

et al. 2022

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Governments across the world are struggling to address the market dominance of technology companies through increased regulation. The Australian Federal government found itself leading the world in platform regulation when, in 2021, it enacted the Australian News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code. The furore surrounding the introduction of the legislation, and Facebook's subsequent Australian 'news ban' exposed the limits of a regulatory model that has previously left the tech industry to moderate itself. In this paper, we argue the introduction of the Code is a leading example of a global trajectory towards regulatory change, which sees governments move from a reactive regulation model to specific interventions around the governance of digital media spaces. We discuss how best to measure the successes and failures around this more interventionist model through a case study of the implementation of the Code in Australia. More broadly we consider how global platforms have responded, and whether the reform is an effective regulatory model for other national governments to emulate.

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Section: Background: Moving From Ad Hoc To Formalised Regulation Of D...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Australia's News Media Bargaining Code and the global turn towards platform regulation

et al. 2022

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“…Fuelled by automated feedback loops, algorithms form the basis of this large-scale collection of users' behavioural trace data. Due to the anti-competitive and monopoly-like behaviours of the largest tech-companies (such as Facebook, Amazon and Google), a small number of corporations have amassed extraordinarily large networks (Neilson and Balasingham 2022;Wörsdörfer, 2022). The endless accumulation of data and the expansion of digital networks are key aspects of digital capitalist power.…”

Section: [For Example] the Existence Of The Waitangi Tribunal [Or] Th...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As our social systems are now reliant on the ease and expectation of constant digital connectivity, our need for globalised digital technologies has helped to solidify the hegemony of a few 'big-tech' companies. Through their first-mover advantage and their power to acquire burgeoning technologies and companies we live in an era where a few major companies dominate the technological and communications spheres (Neilson, 2022;Wörsdörfer, 2022). Due to the gigantic networks that these few companies possess, individual users are left with minimal choices in the 'free' market.…”

Section: [For Example] the Existence Of The Waitangi Tribunal [Or] Th...mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Extremism Machine: Exploring the Effects of Digital Capitalism on the Far-Right Field

Lindsay

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Major technological advances brought about by the technology industry have reconfigured capitalist social relations. Digital Capitalism relies on and is driven by the accumulation, analysis and commodification of digital data through complex algorithmic technologies. There are fears that these new technologies have enabled and extended a multitude of intersecting harms. In particular, there is concern that such digital technologies are being increasingly utilised to support the growth of violent extremism and terrorism. This fear was placed at the forefront on March 15th, 2019, when a white supremacist terrorist committed two consecutive attacks on separate Mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. The terrorist’s use of the internet to disseminate his manifesto and to livestream the attacks enabled him to project immense harm across the globe. Five years on, social media and digital messaging applications are still being used as tools to motivate, organise and sustain xenophobic violence and to spread misinformation and conspiracy theories.There is a lack of consensus around methods to effectively curb the harms of online violent extremism. States and technology providers struggle to agree on effective regulation that balances the principles of an open and free internet with the protection of those who are harmed by exclusionary ideas. This thesis interrogates the underpinning structures that give rise to online and in-person hate and identifies how the contemporary socio-technical context has assisted in the spread and cross-pollination of far-right extremist ideas. It does so firstly by developing a novel theoretical framework of Digital Racial Capitalism and unpacks the intersection between histories of racial capitalism and the contemporary moment of digital capitalism. It conducts research specific to Aotearoa New Zealand through semi-structured interviews (n = 28) with representatives from the State, the Technology Sector and Frontline Anti-Fascist Activists to identify the major challenges in responding to far-right extremism within the contemporary system of digital racial capitalism.The findings of this research reveal that despite genuine attempts from regulatory bodies across the globe there are a myriad of barriers currently in place to effectively disempower far-right extremists from spreading their worldviews. One of the key barriers that the thesis focuses on is located within the system of digital capitalism itself. Through the affordances of ‘big-tech’ platforms and technologies that engage us in a variety of ways to keep us engaged and online, we amount to data-generating resources. Simultaneously, we are exposed to a variety of harms that transcend the illegal/legal binary and actions that structure the way we understand the world around us.Overall, this thesis provides a novel way of thinking about structure versus agency by reconnecting the history of racial capitalism to the present-day, and highlighting that the power of the technology industry is such that due to various assertions of power, effectively resists meaningful attempts to rein in harmful externalities. The thesis concludes by suggesting that although nascent attempts to harmonise legal mechanisms to strengthen international regulation are admireable, underscoring the affordances of the platform economy are embedded structural exclusions that lie at the centre of the capitalist system. To focus only on enforcement against those who spread and enact the socially corrosive, racist and violent ideas misses the broader picture of a (digital) society that creates the socially permissive space to hate in the first place, and the digital racial capitalist environment that profits from such division.

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The watchdog role in the age of Big Tech – how news media in the United States and Germany hold Big Tech corporations accountable

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et al. 2023

Information, Communication & Society

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Big Tech and News: A Critical Approach to Digital Platforms, Journalism, and Competition Law

Cited by 6 publications

References 13 publications

Australia's News Media Bargaining Code and the global turn towards platform regulation

Australia's News Media Bargaining Code and the global turn towards platform regulation

The Extremism Machine: Exploring the Effects of Digital Capitalism on the Far-Right Field

The watchdog role in the age of Big Tech – how news media in the United States and Germany hold Big Tech corporations accountable

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