Public service news in a social media age

13 December 2016

 

Dan Brooke speech to Westminster Media Forum, Tues 13 Dec 2016

 

Good morning. It’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me to speak.

 

Ever since Thomas More coined the term Utopia, exactly 500 years ago, the concept of it has been based on the absence of scarcity. The relevant good, whether it is food or money, is always in plentiful supply.

 

Today, the digital utopia being striven for has an abundant supply of information. But, unfortunately, there is something rotten in the state of Utopia.com.

 

Some of the information presented as fact is …. in fact …. fake.

 

News is one of the cornerstones of public service broadcasting. Why? Because it is so fundamental to the information needed for the conduct of a healthy democracy.

 

At Channel 4, we have a statutory responsibility to provide news. Parliament also charges us with the responsibility to challenge the status quo and to provide alternative views.

 

So we are proud, to be the only terrestrial channel to show an hour of news in prime time. And we are proud that it is more in depth, investigative and international than rival programmes.

 

C4 News's ratings on TV are rising, but against a changing tide of news consumption habits generally. TV is still the most popular and most trusted source of news in the UK but 28% of 16-24 year olds now use social media as their main source.

 

But the quality and voracity of some of what they are seeing is just not acceptable.

 

Take the fake news story about Hillary Clinton's ties to a paedophile ring - resulting in a gunman discharging his firearm in one of the alleged ringleader’s Washington pizza restaurant.

 

That incident is extreme, but it is not isolated.

 

Analysis by Buzzfeed of the top 20 real and fake news stories during the US election found that Facebook engagement with fake news stories out-performed legitimate ones.

 

A democracy depends on the quality of information in its public domain.

 

Just as money is the currency of its economy, information is the currency of a democracy.

 

But lets not allow runaway inflation or for that currency to be devalued.

 

It is time to take the problem of fake news … much … more … seriously.

 

But before we do that, let's waylay ourselves with what C4 News has been doing here.

 

First, we ensure that the content we put out in the almost entirely unregulated world of social media meets Ofcom’s high regulatory broadcast standards.

 

Second by providing serious content that has proved very popular.

 

Every week C4 News put out dozens of videos, 2-3 minutes in length, cut specifically for social media.  

 

Videos such as that of a baby being successfully delivered in a hospital amid the carnage of Aleppo. Shot by Waad al-Kateab, a journalist trapped inside the besieged city who has been filming the conflict for us.

 

The upshot of this work is that, in the third quarter of 2016, C4 News was the most popular broadcaster providing video news on Facebook in the UK.

 

We also distribute short videos on Facebook advertising our other programmes, such as The Last Leg. We have had similar levels of comparative success here. Some of the consumption of these non-news short form videos, the small minority, we pay for, as an advertiser.

 

It was therefore in that capacity that we were surprised to hear that Facebook has admitted errors in its data capture this year, including overestimating how long users watch videos on its site for by between 60 and 80%. They have since announced other errors, the most recent just yesterday.

 

Digital advertising revenues in the UK are now greater than TV’s now – and Facebook and Google account for more than 50% of them. Yet, incredibly, there is no external auditing or verification of how viewing data for advertisers is compiled, nor whether it is accurate.

 

Contrast this to TV advertising, which has BARB: a transparent and stringently tested third party measurement system.

 

Both of Channel 4’s main social media activities – C4 News and social media marketing for our programmes – encapsulate the constant balancing act that C4 has always faced.

 

We are state-owned, with a statutory remit to champion, alternative views, innovation, young people and diversity. But we are entirely commercially funded and must pay the bills ourselves.

 

Some activities make a profit, such as popular entertainment programmes, and they fund others, such as news and current affairs, which lose money.

 

It’s a fabulous model that gives the public and advertisers something different, public service broadcasting some competition to the BBC, and an engine for the independent production sector.

 

It’s also a robust model, with five third party reports in the last year confirming C4’s sustainability well into the future.

 

The problem is that where social media is concerned, this Robin Hood model doesn’t yet stack up.

 

We receive limited direct revenue from social media platforms and there is no proven ROI case yet for social media as a marketing tool.

 

So, for broadcasters to do significantly more, either as content providers or as advertisers, social media is going to need to provide more…

 

More information … more accurate information … and more of a viable, long term business model.

 

But, for now, there are other problems and … something must be done.

 

So I’ll say to social media players today: with your power comes responsibility. 

 

Much … greater … responsibility than you have yet shown.

 

Now, it is true that they have said they are exploring solutions to tackle the insidious trend of fake news.

 

Google has announced it is changing its policies to restrict sites that contain misinformation from using Adsense, its lucrative click per view ad tool.

 

And Facebook says it is working on its ability to detect misinformation, by making better use of third party fact-checkers such as Snopes, and by including warning flags on stories known to be false.

 

We welcome all of that.

 

But they are still a long way off the pace. We can tell this from the recent story of Daniel Sieradski, the inventor of a tool that creates red flags on fake news stories on Facebook. Someone incorrectly ran a news story reporting that the tool was one of Facebook’s own inventions, only for the tool itself – the “BS Detector” - to not realise that the story about itself was fake.

 

The solution almost certainly lies with some element of carrot and stick. Overt endorsements for diligent providers, such as kite-marking, and restrictions and repercussions for fake news providers.

 

With some combination of: human editors, as TV and newspapers do; crowdsourcing, as Wikipedia does; and changes to the algorithm, as only social media companies know how.

 

And for the mechanisms to be sophisticated enough to distinguish between serious news and satire, for example.

 

Which must also sit alongside other solutions, such as greater investment in media literacy.

 

But let’s be clear. Social media companies need to get their house in order.

 

They claim they are technology companies … not media companies … and therefore that the regulation of content is not their responsibility.

 

But, I’m afraid this just isn’t good enough. There is too much at stake.

 

The US experience suggests that social media are playing an increasingly important part in elections. Or, as President Obama has implied, fake news is a threat to democracy.

 

It is no utopia when poor quality information gains ground in the public domain and nobody thinks it is their responsibility to do anything about it.

 

So, if social media companies do not start showing more responsibility for repairing the public domain this will have to become a matter for policy-makers.

 

And we think there is a strong case for policy-makers to bring together the leading players in this debate to help think through solutions … and to stand ready to intervene if self-regulation is found wanting.

 

Regulating the internet is, of course, extraordinarily difficult. But tougher regulation will be the only way if voluntary solutions prove inadequate.

 

Fake news does not seem to be quite so rife in the UK, yet the US is often the canary in the coalmine. We have more than three years before our next general election, so lets act now to ensure the same doesn’t happen here.

 

The British Government has committed to look at the issue and we welcome that too.

 

And since I’ve mentioned the Government, let me also take this opportunity to mention its review of Channel 4.

 

Standing here today the most salient thing I can think to say about it is that it has now been going on for over 14 months.

 

Continued delay is in nobody’s interest.

 

Plural public service broadcasting, with a strong moral and legal connection to truth in news, has never mattered more. And Channel 4 provides that, together with the other PSBs and Sky, whatever platform they are viewed on.

 

There has never been a better time for policy-makers to champion public service broadcasting.

 

Conclusion

 

But let's get back to Utopia, which has a more chequered history. In many places the ideas of dreamers turned sour.

 

And we need to be careful that digital utopia does not collapse into its own disaster.

 

Social media platforms are in positions of great power. They are controllers of the means of … information … dissemination.

 

Yet they just don’t seem uncomfortable enough with the … dissemination of … misinformation.

 

In short, the worry is that social media is fiddling with fake news while democracy burns.

 

Or, put another way, that Facebook is becoming … Fakebook.

 

Lets all hope that doesn’t happen.

 

And lets continue to cherish the great and rare tradition of public service broadcasting we have here in the UK.

 

Thank you for listening today. It has been a pleasure to speak to you.

 

ENDS.