Problematizing Performative Policy in the Name of Future Evolutions

Reflecting on the long-ago times of digital optimism - when the internet was cherished for its promising capacities of liberation, social connection, democratic inclusion and barrierless economic capacities – this year’s 2024 Milton Wolf seminar fostered important discussions of evolutions in media and diplomacy.

Today, as the Israel-Palestine conflict continues into its eighth month of destruction, leaving over 37,000 Palestinians and 1,100 Israelis dead, and forcibly displacing over 2 million Palestinians within the Gaza Strip, the long-abandoned role of an agentic internet has once again bubbled to the surface of public discussions pertaining to the ever important role of media in a democracy. Legacy news organizations have, according to numerous studies, and as a repeated point of discussion at Milton Wolf this year from journalists themselves, disproportionately covered the crisis in Israel’s favour, often due to the censoring power of higher-ups. In response to such biases (which have been reflected upon and spoken out against by countless journalists themselves, including at massive global facing organizations such as CNN and the BBC, in addition to collectives of journalists signing letters in protest of organizational censorship surrounding the long-standing biases of coverage when discussing Israeli aggression towards Palestine) many news consumers - particularly young viewers assigned the title “news avoiders” - have abandoned traditional media spaces altogether. This abandonment, often in hopes of finding credible sources of information in alternative spaces, is regularly adopted via a turn to social media platforms – a shift that one article warmly described as the “Instafada”. Of course, young adults shifting news consumption habits towards social media and away from legacy news is not exactly a new discovery, but the return to a prescription of afforded agency through platform use (such as on X, Tiktok and Meta’s Instagram and Facebook) demonstrates a substantial shift in tone after years of public scrutiny and a more generalized social dismissal of user generated content being contrasted against proper, “credible” journalism. These inspiring attributions, such as the description of “social media as resistance” – demonstrates a return to a conception of the internet as a tool of empowerment that has been long dismissed.

The assignment of user-based resistance and power on digital platforms, while tempting to embrace in a traditional media landscape seemingly void of agency, cannot be discussed without acknowledging what Human Rights Watch described as the “systemic censorship of Palestine content” on some of the largest social media sites. Practices include the removal of users posts, stories and comments; the suspension of accounts; restrictions on the ability to engage with content and use certain features; and “shadow-banning” accounts (a process that involves suppressing content circulated by the algorithm so posts receive less visibility). While some have come up with creative approaches to try and get around these forms of censorship, the increased reliance on social media platforms out of desperation amidst a failure within the news industry to serve the public it proclaims to protect demonstrates signs of a larger problem at hand. All democratic theory is premised on the idea that democracy requires an “informed, participating citizenry, and such a citizenry can only exist with strong and vibrant journalism”. In the repeated failures of legacy news organizations to provide informative reporting on the situation in Gaza – a crisis that has been described as “massively exceeding the death toll of any other major conflict in recent years” – we can see that this shift back towards early-internet conceptions of free-lance and citizen journalism is indicative of the limited places to turn for information distribution in the highly consolidated and thus tightly gatekept communication realm within the United States.

The consolidated domination of any type of communication industry by a handful of corporations – be it internet service providers, broadcasters, journalism organizations or platforms – possess a risk to the information needs required in the democratic functioning of a nation. Even key figures in the conservative Chicago School of economics – often credited as the intellectual home of modern day neoliberal market fundamentalism – agree that competition is a necessary component in the successful functioning of a market-based economy. Such competition, under these mainstream logics, allows for consumer choice and thus encourages accountability and good practices under the risk of losing clientele to alternative providers. In the case of journalistic reporting, the role of accountability is, of course, a particularly important one due to the broader implications of reporting influences on not just market forces, but on an informed democratic citizenry.

The current dilemma thus represents a two-step failure of communication regulation directly tied to the role of media in sustaining a healthy democracy and thus fostering effective diplomacy – the first being the widespread failure of journalism to provide accurate and proportionate accounts of Israel’s war on Gaza, in part due to the high consolidation of the almost entirely private American news industry. This commercial domination of the US news market, alongside it’s increasingly dismal economic state, allows for narratives to be crafted to the behest of owner interests – of which scholars have equated to bowing to the influence of pro-Israeli lobbyist donations. The second being the active censorship of user voices by digital platforms that mean to counter the hegemonic narratives provided by legacy media in the first failure. Such blatant suppression of speech on massively used digital platforms – the very same platforms being praised for providing rare insights into the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza (insights into, for example, what UNICEF described in December of 2023 as “the most dangerous place in the world to be a child”) – presents a contradiction between the ever-increasing significance of digital platforms in fostering an informed democratic citizenry, and the allowance of private, largely unregulated digital giants to control these handful of spaces as they see fit.

And yet, American policy responses to this consolidation of digital gatekeeping often take the shape of protecting privacy and security, promoting safety, and fostering education initiatives against mis and disinformation. Such initiatives echo the very regulatory approaches approved by the corporations at hand, specifically (and perhaps coincidently) the very same goals outlined by Meta that are meant to broadly address “today’s toughest challenges”.

The recently introduced Kids Online Safety Act, for example, aims to enforce that a company “shall act in the best interests of a minor” and that it must “take reasonable measures” to “prevent and mitigate mental health disorders” or “addiction”. These broad initiatives (which often leave the explication of important definitions to those being regulated), while arguably addressing important issues, leave out a more structural level critique that calls into question the very premises of the corporations to begin with.

Another example includes the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA) introduced in 2021 as a sort of news bargaining code meant to allow news organizations to band together and demand collective payment from platforms based on their advertising revenues collected from clicks on the news content produced. While it would be difficult to find someone who objected to the notion that journalism organizations should be compensated for their stories – the JCPA emphasizes that advertising revenues remain the best source for journalism revenue (a notion many scholars have pushed back against), and in turn allow for a further siloing of already consolidated media power.

Dr. Seeta Peña Gangadharan, associate professor of communications at the London School of Economics, in her description of tech focused policies (those that meet large corporations where they are, rather than push them to where democratic, public centered society collectively needs them to be) described a tendency to “settle for crumbs instead of striving for the whole baguette” within DC policymaking spaces. Further, Gangadharan critiqued notions of “performative policymaking”, describing how focusing too much on how to protect users from the bad parts of tech actually perpetuates and normalizes larger, overarching problems. Instead, the focus of such collective policy and NGO efforts must encourage the denaturalization of overarching funding structures of media systems – be it big tech and platforms, or the struggling journalism industry – and reflect on how such funding models are intrinsically contradictory to the public values afforded to said platforms. Such a deconstruction might, according to Gangadharan, require a de-centering of tech and tech governance in favour of looking at other domains of social/economic realms.

The failure of traditional media across much of the western world to provide educational, investigative, and compassionate coverage of historical and ongoing state sponsored violence against Palestinian civilians – a breach of human rights that has led to what has been described as “perhaps the most significant student movement since the anti-Vietnam campus protests of the late 1960s” – has encouraged a shift in information consumption habits through reinforcing the importance of self-reliance and self-organizing. But, it is crucial to remember that the commercially exploitative platforms dominating the digital realm also come with their own ingrained set of priorities set by the handful of corporate interests at play. In order to address this gap between the democratic failures of commercial media industries – either those that normatively aim to inform publics through compiling liberating journalistic reporting, or those that mean to foster space via a digital public sphere - we must acknowledge the social and economic conditions outside of conversations grounded in the naturalized state of commercial domination. This involves policymaking that surpasses performances of change within environments limited by the logics set by the corporations in need of said change. Instead, impactful policy must speak to larger social and economic structural conditions limiting the capacities of media spaces – that is, it must address the contradictions that arise when capitalist logics underpin democratic spaces.

Practical implications of such might include the nationalization of communication sectors as public utilities, the enforcement of anti-trust as a means of breaking up the largest media conglomerates, or greater public investments into the important functioning of journalism, alongside much needed accountability measures within policy spaces to hold and publicly trial the incorporation of personal interests by those meant to serve the public. Such change will not be easy, but the failures of US media systems – as clearly indicated in widespread news biases favouring American ally action over the most basic standards of human rights, and active censorship of user generated content created in response to such biases – will only intensify if we do not address and actively fight underlying corporatocracy. In other words, in order to maintain further evolutions in the progression of media, diplomacy, democracy, or any type of social cohesion in an increasingly divided world – and especially an increasingly divided United States - we must, as perhaps best articulated by Robert McChesney, “be realistic, [and] demand the impossible”.