“Imagine all the people / living life in peace.” It remains a distant dream, made more distant still by online vitriol. This vitriol is already causing enormous harm to western democracies, not to mention mental and physical harm to individuals. The UK urgently needs the government’s proposed Online Safety Bill, flawed though it may be.
In the mid-to-late noughties, I was a reporter based in San Francisco. That meant visiting and writing about lots of tech start-ups; invariably they consisted of a group of very bright and very young guys, a few computers (obviously), a foosball table and a whiteboard with the latest ideas. When Twitter was in its infancy I visited it, too. A colleague had suggested the company might be worth writing about. I didn’t see why anyone would like to use this service, but my colleague suggested it would become a place where professors could post their findings. I arranged to visit the fledgling company, saw the ubiquitous start-up setup, had a long conversation with one of the co-founders and wrote a piece about a promising new platform with 1.9m users.
A place where professors can post findings? Our conversation seems naive now. So, too, does the notion that Facebook could truly connect people, as its promise went. Today, social media provides the perfect platform for people to share constructive messages, yes, but it has also unleashed a now-dizzying volume of misinformation, anger and abuse. Would you post a death threat if you had to attach your name to it? Of course not. But bile and anonymous threats that sometimes migrate into real life are the poison social media has unleashed. People harboured hateful feelings long before 2004 (when Facebook was founded) and 2006 (when Twitter was born), but these and other social media sites have allowed them to spread such feelings with relative impunity (both platforms insist they prioritise users’ safety).
That’s why the UK government’s Online Safety Bill is so important. Published in May, the bill has gained renewed urgency after the murder of David Amess added to wider insecurities, with MPs such as Rosie Duffield receiving appalling online threats. The legislation isn’t perfect: its definition of what constitutes “harmful but legal” content isn’t entirely clear, and as Shadow Culture Secretary Jo Stevens has pointed out, the prospective punishment of social media sites’ executives is light.
But if passed, this legislation will hold social media websites accountable for the content they publish. That’s a crucial step, because since their very inception social media platforms have claimed to merely be facilitators of information, not publishers. That’s why news media can currently be penalised for publishing misleading information, while social media sites are not. Today, of course, social media companies are publishers in the same way that ride-share companies are taxi services. To argue that they’re merely technology platforms is to take the public for fools.
What’s more, inflammatory content generates more traffic and thus more money than the fact-based, earnest kind. Whistleblower Frances Haugen told the US Congress this month that Facebook maximises growth over safety. That growth is massive. In the second quarter of 2021, Facebook’s price per ad had grown by 47 per cent year-over-year, which helped give the company quarterly revenues of $29.08bn—an increase of 56 per cent compared to the second quarter of 2020. Giving evidence to Congress, Haugen noted that the maximising-growth strategy’s result “has been more division, more harm, more lies, more threats and more combat.” Or, as UK Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries put it last week, “online hate has poisoned public life.” It seems to have become so toxic that Facebook recently announced plans to change its name.
This reality makes regulation of social media inevitable. Even US legislators in both parties—otherwise dangerously divided on every matter under the sun—now agree regulation is now a must. If passed, the Online Safety Bill would see Ofcom impose a duty of care on social media companies, which means that as well as policing illegal material, they would have to shield users from “legal but harmful” content. Violations of Ofcom rules would mean a penalty of up to £18m or 10 per cent of global profits (whichever is higher), and social media companies would be obliged to moderate posts from people with different political opinions equally, without discriminating against any persuasions.
But the bill won’t ban anonymous posts. That means users are likely to continue posting vitriol directed at others but masquerading as ideology. To be sure, online anonymity is important in repressive countries, but the Online Safety Bill concerns the UK. Last week, Home Secretary Priti Patel said she is considering banning anonymous users. Twitter’s head of UK policy, Katy Minshall, argued against such a ban, explaining that “if you're a young person exploring their sexuality or you're a victim of domestic violence looking online for help and for support, pseudonymity is a really important safety tool for you.” True—but there are also places infinitely more suitable for such explorations than Twitter.
All the people living in peace ain’t going to happen—but online civility is still possible. The Online Safety Bill, imperfect though it may be, can’t be passed soon enough.
