Platforms Are Not Publishers

Google, Facebook, Twitter, and the internet are not media. They are something new we do not yet fully understand. To call these platforms publishers is to presume that their task is merely to produce content. It is to presume, then, that the internet should be produced, packaged, and polished, and that when someone says something bad anywhere on it then the entire internet is beschmutzed. The larger question, of course, is what the internet is and how it fits into society and society into it. We are just beginning to see what it can be. The essential value of the internet is conversation, not content. The internet connects more than 3 billion people and enables a grand diversity among them to speak, if not yet to be heard. We should view the evolution of the internet in context.

• First, it is vital to judge the totality of the value of the platforms and the net.
• Second, we need to understand the problem we are trying to address: not technology, but human behavior using technology, the bad acts of some small—yes, small—number of propagandists, trolls, misogynists, bigots, thieves, and jerks.
• Third, those of us in media must acknowledge our responsibility for the messes we’ve made. 
• Fourth, it is hubris to think that we understand the full impact of the internet already. 

[Jeff Jarvis is the Leonard Tow Professor of Journalistic Innovation in the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York, where he directs the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism]