Morning Call: Well, that Zucks

Why America’s Big Tech wants to rewrite our laws.

Will

Good morning, Will here. In the increasingly heated competition to see which Silicon Valley centibillionaire can show the least moral character, Mark Zuckerberg edged ahead of Jeff Bezos this week by announcing a bold plan to get rid of the fact-checking and content-moderation programmes behind his social media platforms, Facebook and Instagram.

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Users who have immersed themselves in the rancid soup of scams and advertainment available on these platforms were shocked to learn that they could actually be made worse, but for British politics, Zuckerberg’s announcement did contain a serious message: Silicon Valley would like to rewrite our laws.

The key part of the announcement was Zuckerberg’s commitment to “work with President Trump to push back against foreign governments going after American companies to censor more”. With Trump’s help, Zuckerberg wrote, his platforms can “defend against the trend of government overreach on censorship”.

We can assume Zuckerberg isn’t talking about the government censorship imposed on the citizens of China or Iran, because those countries block his company’s products entirely. It seems more likely he is talking about laws such as the UK’s Online Safety Act, the EU’s Digital Services Act, Germany’s NetzDG law (also known as the “Facebook Act”) and France’s laws on online hate speech, which have sought to hold social media companies responsible for the content published on their platforms.

Zuckerberg is right to say that there is a “trend” towards regulation of hate speech, misinformation and harmful content in many countries. It is an attempt to restore balance. Social media platforms have enjoyed a long and exceptionally lucrative period of under-regulation. The difference in legal status between what’s published on Facebook and what’s published in a newspaper has allowed the former to largely replace the latter. People in Britain today are far more likely to receive news via a foreign technology platform than a local paper. Within a very short space of time, children have gone from watching TV (carefully regulated and publicly discussed) with their families to watching unregulated, algorithmically provided content alone on the internet. In some cases, such as the suicide at 14 of Molly Russell – of whom the coroner said social media had “contributed to her death in a more than minimal way” – the results have been devastating.

This abrupt change has handed enormous power and wealth to the overseas companies that have benefited from it, however, and companies such as Meta (market capitalisation: $1.54trn) are unlikely to relinquish it without a fight. The new Trump administration, it seems, may be their ally.

Trump’s foreign policy is to threaten trade war and then maybe-joke about actual war. With an unstable president at the helm, American companies can plausibly warn other governments that if they’re too heavily regulated, they might find themselves on the receiving end of tariffs.

The Online Safety Act may not be the only law in Silicon Valley’s sights. The UK government is currently running a consultation on whether companies such as Meta and OpenAI should be allowed to help themselves to other people’s intellectual property in order to train large language models (“AI”). The big question hanging over the AI boom that has engorged America’s financial markets is whether the $1trn invested in generative AI will actually pay off. In December 2023 the leading company in this boom, OpenAI, made it clear to the House of Lords that it was “impossible” to build its chatbot ChatGPT without using other people’s work. Documents filed on Wednesday in a US court case claim that Mark Zuckerberg approved the use of a dataset that some at his company knew to be pirated. Silicon Valley does not want the AI race to be impeded by British, French or Australian companies claiming they’re owed redress for the use of their work.

Nor do social media companies want to be held accountable for the scams that infest their platforms. Fraud now accounts for just under half of all crime in the UK, and one of the most common types is Authorised Push Payment (APP) fraud. Hundreds of millions of pounds a year are lost to APP fraud. Banks and payment systems providers have to reimburse the victims, but a recent report by the Payment Systems Regulator found that more than half (54 per cent) of APP fraud in the UK involve Meta’s platforms. Again, if a country seeks to make American social media companies more accountable for fraud than its domestic banks, Silicon Valley may be able to add this to Trump’s inexhaustible list of grievances against the rest of the world.

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Will’s picks

Rachel’s interview with the Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, from July 2023.

Megan Kenyon on the government’s dithering over social care.

Michael Prodger on the year ahead in art.

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