News organisations are struggling to respond to the downgrading of news on social media.

Numerous speakers at the 2024 Global News Forum highlighted the issue, including panellists for the discussion on “The social media tango – the changing relationship between news organisation and social media companies.”

The Head of Innovation at France TV, Kati Bremme, said when social media companies first launched, they presented news organisations with a type of “hyper-distribution strategy”. “They (social media companies) really needed us. They needed our quality content.” She said over time, as consumers became content producers, “Facebook did not need us anymore and they changed their algorithm and did not push news forward anymore. Instead of that you have fake news circulating six times faster than the real news.”

Emilio San Pedro, Senior Editor of Eurovision, said in contrast to the situation 10 years ago, news organisations and social media companies now have very different objectives. “We have the news side of it – especially Public Service Media – on one hand wanting very specific things and wanting to get that information out to its audience or draw in new audiences. And on the other side you have these tech companies that have ballooned, that are now huge corporations with massive budgets and a very different culture.

“Their culture is first of all American to a great extent. That is to say, in America, the dollar, the money, talks first. So you’re talking about a culture that is driven in one direction and here we come from public media especially, saying you know we have all these wonderful values and we want you to play ball with us.”

Professor Emeritus Dr Pirongrong Ramasoota, Commissioner at Thailand’s National Broadcasting and Telecommunication, (NBTC) said data-ification was driving the attention economy, and helping platforms to predict and drive audience preferences. She said in some ways, news organisations were fighting a losing battle because of the economics of platforms.

“Algorithms are all about attention, it’s all about engagement…We’re pursuing totally different ideals. When it comes to news, you have to report the truth, you have to nourish citizens into democratic participation but what the algorithm cares about is engagement…the number of people who click.”

CEO and Co-founder of Wisesight, Kla Tangsuwan, noted the social media tango required news organisations to dance 24/7.

Several speakers encouraged delegates to negotiate with social media companies for improved prominence to rebuild trust in the digital ecosystem. Emilio said: “We need to engage, we need to be there in that landscape…. the tech companies are not completely unreceptive.”

Kati said France TV was now trying to transform its platforms to be as engaging as social media. “We have different strategies…especially around gamification, around engagement, around story telling.” She said it was important for journalists to understand how social media works, and ways to improve engagement. She said France TV had recruited social media influencers in newsrooms to help make content more engaging.