It was inevitable that when News Corp's executive chairman Michael Miller launched his powerful attack on poor behaviour by social media giants this week he would suffer the usual fate of people who live in glass houses and start throwing stones.
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Reporters at the National Press Club were quick to point out News' less-than-perfect record, which includes climate denialism over many years and a long history of actively campaigning for one side of politics.
But, while those are fair points, they don't mean the problems highlighted by Mr Miller aren't real or that what he was saying is wrong.
His call for legislation that would make tech and social media giants operating in Australia subject to a "social licence" deserves support.
And, in Mr Miller's defence, he was right to say that, regardless of its faults, News Corp, like every other media company in Australia, must accept "total responsibility" for everything it publishes.
Newspapers, television and radio broadcasters and news websites can all be held to account: "In short, all businesses accessing Australian people play by these rules - except the tech monopolies. It's time that changed. It's time for a level playing field".
![Michael Miller's call for a 'social licence' for big tech and social media companies deserves support. Picture by Gary Ramage Michael Miller's call for a 'social licence' for big tech and social media companies deserves support. Picture by Gary Ramage](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/LLBstgPA4H8EG9DTTGcXBL/46b318b6-c7f4-4515-ba04-8e0b6d32597e.jpg/r0_600_6000_3987_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
He's right. When it comes to fake news, indecent content and criminal scams Google, Meta and X are an example of "very little care and absolutely no responsibility".
If a person has an issue with something broadcast or published on legacy media they can pick up the phone. They can also send an email or even call into a bricks-and-mortar office to press their case. Or, in the case of defamation, they can call in a lawyer.
Try doing that with Facebook or X. Who are you going to call? Where's the phone number? The office? Or even a postal address?
Mr Miller's call for mandatory and effective consumer complaints systems to be made a condition of the "social licence" is eminently sensible. He envisages call centres contactable by phone and with expert staff in Australia.
The licence would also include a requirement to honour the media bargaining code which Meta, the owner of Facebook, Instagram and Threads, has walked away from.
Mr Miller also wants the tech giants to contribute money to addressing mental health problems in the community.
This last point is an important one given the leading cause of death among Australians aged 15 to 24 is suicide and that mental health disorders amongst the young increased by 50 per cent in just 15 years at the same time as the emergence of social media.
He rejected Mark Zuckerberg's recent claim that "the existing body of scientific work has not shown a causal link between using social media and young people having worse mental health".
"Government statisticians and mental health experts, and especially the parents of children we have lost, know otherwise," he said.
The reality is that when people first began using Facebook, Google and Twitter (now X) almost two decades ago they had no idea how pervasive these services would become or how quickly they would change the way people connected, stayed in touch and obtained their news and other information.
The world is part of the way through an open-ended experiment to find out what happens when technology and society experience an information explosion.
So far we have seen that there are more losers than winners and that the powerful companies, some with more clout than many nation states, are determined to stay above the law in what is an unregulated realm.
That has to stop. A "social licence" is a sensible first step down that road.
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