Paradigm shift in who decides what makes the news - editors or tech bosses?
The tsars of Silicon Valley have to be held accountable if they are the ones who ultimately win control of the headlines
Several years ago, Vint Cerf, Google's "evangelist in chief", lectured on "the future of newspapers". "The problem is there's 'news' and there's 'paper', and those are two separate things," he said.
It seemed so preposterously obvious as to be not worth further scrutiny. But Cerf's pronouncement was more profound than we realised.
On August 20, Dick Costolo, Twitter's chief executive, tweeted: "We have been and are actively suspending accounts as we discover them related to this graphic imagery. Thank you ..." . His tweet linked to the news that US journalist James Foley had apparently been executed in Iraq, on video, by the Muslim militant group Islamic State.
This was a significant moment. For the first time, Twitter acknowledged it was a platform that exercised editorial judgment. It was not controversial somehow for news organisations to censor the images. Yet the debate raged for days about whether executives in software companies could decide what we see. Inside a newsroom, these decisions are called editorial judgments; outside, they are labelled censorship. The truth is both are forms of censorship, and equally both could be argued to be editing.
News, as Cerf said, is increasingly shared outside familiar formats, and therefore outside journalistic institutions and conventions. The most powerful distributor of news now is an algorithm governing how items are displayed to the billion active users on Facebook. Sociologist Zeynep Tufekci noted after the recent riots in Ferguson, in the US state of Missouri, that although many news items were being posted to Facebook, she initially saw none of them in her feed, just Ice Bucket Challenges. That led her to speculate that algorithmic filtering could potentially mute important stories.
Ferguson, she wrote, "is a net neutrality issue". Yes it is. It highlights, as she said, how a news ecosystem that automatically favours one type of story over another can pour very cold water on democratic debate.