Irish Examiner View: Facebook's power unprecedented as social media a new kind of kingmaker

Facebook and other publishers too have shown indifference to truth.

It's almost 30 years since Rupert Murdoch's red-top, The Sun beat its chest after John Major's Conservatives won an unexpected 1992 election victory. "It's The Sun Wot Won It" harrumphed the tabloid, celebrating its own power at least as much as the Tory victory. 

Murdoch, who will be 90 in March, still holds extraordinary influence. That influence, as his dismissal of climate change shows, can be toxic. So toxic, so antediluvian that last month his son James, once touted as his successor, resigned from the News Corporation citing "disagreements over editorial content". 

Rupert Murdoch's influence also drove Brexit.

 His Fox News - he owns 39% and his son Lachlan is CEO - will be hugely influential in America's presidential election even if it is little more than a cheerleading bandwagon for the nastiest, most regressive kind of conservatism.   

Yet, despite that power, despite how he is courted by politicians - including Trump - he and his news platforms increasingly seem yesterday's news. Those who would celebrate that dilution of private power should reflect on what force, what entity has pushed Murdoch from the very top of the influence tree. 

Even though Murdoch may have swayed as many elections as the CIA his power, comparatively at least, is on the wane. Compared to the unprecedented power of Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg Murdoch seems a fading once-was, has-been.

Earlier this year journalist Carole Cadwalladr wrote: "There is no power on this earth that is capable of holding Facebook to account. No legislature, no law enforcement agency, no regulator. Congress has failed. The EU has failed... " 

She closed her dystopian piece with: "Sometimes you don’t realise the pivotal moments in history until it’s too late. And sometimes you do. It’s not quite yet too late. Just almost."

That rearguard action is playing out in Australia as Facebook fights legislation obliging it to pay news providers for the content they recycle without charge. 

Zuckerberg, with a straight face, dismisses that argument as a Luddites' longing for a dynamic gone forever. That is in part true but it is not by any means the over-riding issue, it is not even in the first order of concern.

Facebook and other publishers too have shown indifference to truth. They are not the first to do this as Murdoch's decades as a kingmaker showed. One current example is a report showing that social media giants failed to act on anti-vaccine misinformation related to C19.

 The Failure to Act report said Facebook took action on just 33 of the 569 - less than 6% - pieces of content highlighted.

If Joe Biden is elected America's president in November it is possible America will join EU efforts to impose responsibility on social media platforms. That may have a disproportionate impact on this economy. 

We have lost friends over the tax opportunities we allow transnational tech giants exploit so it is possible that as governments under the umbrella of the EU move to contain today's media giants, all of whom have a real presence in Ireland, Irish jobs and this economy may be collateral damage in a conflict democracy must win. 

That may seem fanciful and altogether too dark but none of us, not even Rupert Murdoch, understood the potential of Facebook when it was invented just 16 years ago.