Is it a problem that Musk, the world’s richest man, uses his personal social-media megaphone to promote racist conspiracy theories and boost far-right insurrection across Europe? Is it relevant, when Palantir is awarded contracts to develop IT systems for the NHS and MoD, that the company has built apps for ICE, Trump’s anti-immigration militia; that it feeds them federal data to locate potential targets? Does it matter how much leverage an elected prime minister has if those tech behemoths take against him? Those are not questions of free speech but sovereignty, which is something Conservatives used to care about.
The current debate around social-media bans for under-16s barely skims the surface of these issues. More optimistically, it indicates growing awareness that the mass migration of human activity online is an epoch-defining political event and the default settings on the tools and platforms involved may not be designed with citizens’ best interests in mind. The implications for democracy cannot be reduced to a facile equation of regulation with censorship.
I completely agree with the content of this article.
However, this is an opinion piece, not news.
In the early 2000s there was a lot of talk about social media being used to lie/spread false propaganda and then a Republican got elected and they stopped talking about it
Fair, my bad, it just feels extremely prescient given the current moral panic about social media and young people.