Talk of a coming crackdown on social media companies is overblown

Is the political power of social networks (and their founders) past its peak? Politicians who feel they have been badly treated on social media or worry about a tide of misinformation might be tempted to think so, after two dramatic events that have dominated the tech headlines in the past couple of weeks. But I don’t think this is the turning point some people are saying it is.

The two events in question were the arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov in France, and Brazil banning Elon Musk’s X in an escalating fight over his refusal to remove accounts deemed to promote hate speech. It’s tempting to think that it’s getting harder for networks to carry illegal content with impunity.

In fact, Telegram and X have become outliers among social networks, whether for ideological reasons (they both have an absolutist attitude to free speech) or self-interest (they have fewer resources, which would make it hard to apply the kind of content moderation seen on other networks). Most social networks don’t operate this way.

In their book Who Controls the Internet? the US academics Tim Wu and Jack Goldsmith pointed out nearly 20 years ago that governments clearly have the power through local laws to determine what happens online inside their countries. The only question is whether officials have a way to enforce those laws, through seizing assets or arresting the staff of uncooperative companies, or applying some other leverage.

The latest social media showdowns bear this out. Durov, who is based in Dubai, was arrested when his private jet touched down in France, putting himself within reach of authorities. Musk’s confrontation with Brazil came to a head after he withdrew staff out of concern they’d be arrested for not complying with Supreme Court orders (which the X owner alleged amounted to censorship). Brazil then shut down X for not obeying a law that requires it to have local representatives — an example of the so-called “hostage-taking laws” that have become common over the past decade as more countries have tried to exert some power over internet companies based far away.

One wild card here is Musk’s Starlink satellite network, which can beam its signals across national borders. Starlink said over the weekend that it wouldn’t obey Brazil’s order to block X in the country. But Musk has since backed down. Starlink’s accounts in Brazil were frozen and it still needs local regulatory approval to sell its terminals inside the country — evidence that, whatever the appearances, it isn’t beyond the reach of national law.

What’s notable about these cases is that they don’t reflect the passage of new laws to clean up social networks or fresh determination by national politicians to exert their power. They’re the result of an activist judiciary.

As the FT’s John Thornhill points out in this Tech Tonic podcast, Durov’s arrest was actually something of an embarrassment to President Emmanuel Macron, who had been angling to get Telegram to move its headquarters to France.

There’s nothing particularly new about the issues in the Telegram case. It’s accused of turning a blind eye to a wave of illegal material it has been hosting. This is little different to the attack on illegal music sites such as Napster and LimeWire two decades ago. As long as unlawful material like this remains on the “dark web”, it’s hard to control. But once it lands on a site that is within the reach of law enforcement (and the FT’s Hannah Murphy pointed out earlier this year that clearly applies to Telegram) then some kind of action becomes inevitable.

Brazil’s Supreme Court, meanwhile, is trying to apply standards of speech that are enshrined in the country’s constitution. As in many democracies, hate speech in Brazil is considered illegal, unlike in the US. Inevitably, the issue has become a matter of vicious partisan politics, but it’s inevitable that courts will try to draw the lines around what is legally permissible.

Musk, with his penchant for conflict, is highly likely to march into more fights like this around the world. And any network that openly carries illegal material and refuses to co-operate with law enforcement, as Telegram is accused of doing, can expect similar treatment.

But most established social networks have learnt these lessons — and don’t go out of their way to provoke a fight. If anything, they might have gone too far in the other direction, as evidenced by Mark Zuckerberg’s rather startling admission last week that Meta bowed to White House pressure to censor Covid-19 content during the pandemic. He claims he won’t make the same mistake again, though the temptation will always be to accede to political influence like this.

What do you think Rana, should we be seeing what’s going on in Brazil and France as evidence of a new crackdown on social networks? And even if that’s the case, what are the chances it will change what we see online?

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Recommended reading

• In his latest FT column, Elon Musk is an unguided geopolitical missile, Gideon Rachman comes to a different conclusion. He argues that the “age of impunity” is over for social networks and they’ll be regulated more like media companies. We’ll see.

• For a deep dive on the havoc Musk is causing around the world with his intemperate tweeting and naively absolutist stance on free speech, read Hannah Murphy’s story: Who’s afraid of Elon Musk. It was published just before things came to a head in Brazil. 

• Amid all the hype that surrounds public debate over artificial intelligence, this rather sober look at the practical uses — and limitations — of AI in drug discovery is worth a read. AI could make the discovery process more efficient, though it’s just one tool among many.

Rana Foroohar responds

Richard, what a great topic you’ve raised here. I’ve been thinking about these very same issues. I do think we are reaching a tipping point, not in action per se but in understanding, and I see the big issue here as a square off between public and private power.

Platforms have done a very good job, as big banks before them did, of making the case that they are special and shouldn’t be subject to the laws that other industries and individuals have to abide by. And yet, as you point out, it’s possible for platforms to do a better job moderating something like, say, hate speech if they do what everyone else does — employ people to do it. One key reason that margins are so huge in such firms is that they employ vastly fewer people relative to their market cap or revenue than either traditional media or previous generations of technology firms did. But that comes with risks and governments have a right to take action when the risks threaten their civil societies and democracies. 

And yet, there’s another issue here, which is that even liberals in countries such as the US are still operating with a neoliberal understanding of the world. Consider, for example, the way in which liberal Supreme Court justices like Sonia Sotomayor, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan ruled in Moody vs. NetChoice. They vacated and sent back to lower courts state laws that sought to limit social media companies ability to edit how people communicate on their platforms. That approach essentially gives the platforms power over the state and the people. Private power trumping public power is one of the core problems of the neoliberal approach.

Now, it’s true that if you live in, say, Turkey or Iran, maybe you trust Google more than your government. But do I as an American citizen want to see private companies being given the power to make their own free speech rules rather than the state taking power to set those rules? No, I don’t. I think it simply creates a tailwind for people like Elon Musk, who have way too much power as it is, to take more in ways that threaten liberty and civil society. All this is part of a larger issue, which is the rise of a kind of super capitalism that wants to be free from any public control, which Quinn Slobodian has written about so well in his book Crack Up Capitalism. 

I think that these platforms will ultimately have to become public utilities (if, like Google, they really are necessary for the public good, like water or electricity) and be subject to the same expectations as other regulated companies. If that means hiring actual content moderators is so uneconomical that it puts them out of business, so be it. I don’t think the world would suffer if X went away.

So, I guess my answer to you is that while we haven’t reached a clear silver bullet regulatory solution for how to put Big Tech in check, I think we are slowly but surely coming to understand the stakes here. They aren’t detailed and technocratic (as the companies would like us to believe, since that creates complexity that allows them to obfuscate), but rather simple: do we want to go back to the 19th century, or would we prefer to live in a world in which nations can successfully curb the power of oligarchs?

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And now a word from our Swampians . . .

In response to “Why the media has so much trouble covering the presidential election”:

“Shouldn’t the idea when covering presidential candidates be objectivity? Bending over backwards to be neutral obscures Trump’s outrageous behaviour.” — Bob Holder

“Further to the point of presidential candidates making themselves more accessible to the press, would it not be extraordinary if there was a candidate that actually communicated something truly ‘radical?’ How exciting it would be to hear a candidate talk not about what he or she is going to do for ________ (take your pick of the identity group both left and right), but to remind the public that the United States was founded upon the principle of self-governance. Benjamin Franklin allegedly stated that we have ‘a Republic, if you can keep it.’ When we lose sight of self-governance, individualism, agency and personal responsibility, we are at risk of the politicians chipping away at our freedom (and the loss of our Republic) through the guise of ‘helping the American people’.” — Henry D Wolfe