Ian Ritchie / The Herald Business HQ / February 2024
THE TRUMP 2.0 administration has declared an ‘America First’ policy, inevitably leading to conflict with much of the rest of the world, and a major area of dispute is likely to be over the activities of their dominant social media businesses: X, Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube and Instagram.
In much of the rest of the democratic world, governments have decided that the “wild west” activities of these platforms have gone too far and are planning to clamp down on excessive behaviour. The EU has identified “child sexual abuse material, terrorist content, illegal hate speech or illegal goods and services” as particular issues that they regard as unacceptable.
Canada has launched an Online Harms Act, stating that “harmful content has proliferated under the internet’s rampant transformation of society".
Australia is leading the charge, recently passing a law that will ban anybody younger than 16 from using any social media. Companies that fail to take reasonable steps to enforce this would be liable to fines of A$50m (£25m).
Here in the UK, media regulator Ofcom has responsibility for supervising social media and is concentrating on controlling the actual behaviour of social media companies rather than imposing an Australian-like blanket ban.
Ofcom’s CEO Dame Melanie Dawes, said: “For too long, sites and apps have been unregulated, unaccountable and unwilling to prioritise people’s safety over profits. That changes from today. The safety spotlight is now firmly on tech firms and it’s time for them to act. We’ll be watching the industry closely to ensure firms match up to the strict safety standards set for them. Those that come up short can expect Ofcom to use the full extent of our enforcement powers against them.”
Strong threats indeed, but we’ll need to see what sanctions Ofcom can actually take to enforce the standards we require on social media, from companies which are largely outwith their jurisdiction.
When Elon Musk took over Twitter and renamed it ‘X’ he sacked over 6,000 employees – 60% of the staff – many of which had been engaged in checking for harmful material. As a result, X users are now experiencing more extreme content than ever before.
The business model for social media companies is based on increasing the amount of time their users spend on their platform. Giving users access to extreme material encourages them to stay longer.
But, of course, Elon Musk, who eliminated most of the checking at X, has now become a “bestie” of Donald Trump, and is well positioned to persuade the Trump administration to minimise regulation across the board. A mission which has been taken up by the other social media providers.
Trump’s other new best pals seem to include former liberals, now MAGA supporters, such as Mark Zuckerberg, of Facebook and Instagram, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and Sam Altman of OpenAI, each of which donated $1m to Trump’s inauguration and received pride of place at the ceremony.
Trump has already identified Andrew Ferguson as the next chair of the Federal Trade Commission, replacing British-born Lina Khan, who was often highly critical of Tech giants, including suing Amazon and Meta. Trump posted on Truth Social that “Andrew will be the most America First, and pro-innovation FTC Chair in our Country's History” and is unlikely to strongly challenge social media excesses.
In the early days of Facebook its motto was “move fast and break things”, indicating that they would aim to fix problems once they emerged rather than anticipate and design a safe service in the first place. Under Trump 2.0, moderation and fact checking are seen as abandoning “free speech”. When Meta’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg recently cancelled fact checking for his US users, he appeared to allude to the company’s regulatory fight with the European Union, appealing to President-elect Trump to “push back against foreign governments” that he said were seeking to restrict free speech.
So, the stage is now set for an epic battle: the rest of the world is preparing to increasingly censure and control the offensive behaviour of the social media companies, while the Trump government is moving towards minimising regulation as much as possible.
It will be interesting to see whether Trump, egged on by Musk and others, will use his favourite weapons, including trade tariffs, to strong-arm the rest of the world to accept extreme and dangerous behaviour from the US social media giants.
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