Donald Trump may have helped protect tech users
The extraordinary scenes at Washington’s Capitol building on 6 January may produce enough consensus to lead to new regulations that curb the powers of Big Tech.
I’ve worked in Government relations for many years assisting businesses and not for profits to achieve their goals. Some people cast lobbying as malign but that vastly over-simplifies the task; civil servants and politicians can’t be experts in everything so they need to hear what life is really like for people and businesses to give them the full picture of how their decisions will impact on charities, jobs and prospects.
Whilst lobbying has a legitimate, vital role, like anything taken to excess it can be harmful and we’ve seen many examples over the years of businesses fighting to defend the indefensible and, in doing so, kicking regulation and legislation down the road.
Last year regulators in the EU and UK began to attempt to exert some control over Big Tech companies for example with the EU Digital Services Act, requiring social media platforms with more than 45 million users to tackle illegal content and poor practices or face massive fines.
Before last Wednesday’s storming of the Capitol building, regulators in the US, UK and EU were facing an uphill battle with the tech companies set to mount a strong and effective lobbying campaign to water down the impact of any new rules. A research paper — “The Grey Hoodie Project” — discusses some of the tactics from the Big Tobacco lobbying world that Big Tech companies are already using to defend their money making machines despite, for example, knowing how addictive their services are. As Tim Kendall — former Facebook Director of Monetization — told the US House Committee on Energy and Commerce “We took a page from Big Tobacco’s playbook, working to make our offering addictive at the outset.”
Social media companies have the budgets to bring in highly experienced lobbyists to push back on proposed regulations and laws. For them, the cornerstone of their defences is that since 1996 they have been protected in law from the usual rules that curb publishers’ activities. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act specifically says that they shall not be treated as publishers which is why their users have been able to post images of child abuse or hate-filled messages, all of which would be banned if they appeared in a newspaper or on your TV.
In banning Donald Trump from many of their platforms over the past week, not to mention the accounts of tens of thousands of others, social media companies are acting as editors of content. I believe it is right for them to do so but there needs to be scrutiny of their editorial policies and frameworks to regulate who is allowed/banned and what is hateful or appropriate for them to publish.
Inadvertently, outgoing President Trump’s actions last week have brought politicians from the right and left together, along with many companies, in seeing the need to move on from that 1996 law and they may finally agree that social media platforms are publishers with a duty of care over what and how they publish.
It took far too long, but in the end Big Tobacco changed. In July 2019 Philip Morris International announced “We are building PMI’s future on smoke-free products that — while not risk-free — are a far better choice than cigarette smoking.”
In financial services, the abhorrent mis-selling practices have left the mainstream and now any decent financial services company thinks about impact on customers at all stages of the business.
Soon tech platforms will also put the best interests of their users first. It won’t be acceptable to design products and services to be addictive and to permit anyone to post anything to their platforms. The question now is whether the tech companies will take the lead in reshaping their services and the regulations around them, changing their business models accordingly, or whether they will drag their heels and resist all the way. I hope they will take the responsible, ethically sound course and avoid years of battling regulation by embracing the change and showing how well they can evolve.
It’s a crucial moment for Big Tech — do they want to be dragged into a new shape or the creators of a better future? I hope it’s the latter.
