Social Media Regulation: From Trump’s Ban to Zuckerberg’s Fear.
On the eighth of January 2021, Donald J. Trump – the 45th President of the United States of America, commonly known as the most powerful man in the world, was banned from Twitter. While political circles became increasingly divided, Liberal Twitter was gleeful with joy – seemingly convinced the battle against bigotry was won and that Twitter was finally going to drain the cesspool of their more extremist and offensive communities. I think it is important to take a step back and realise that these social media sites are incredibly bad at dealing with illegal behaviour online, and that some strong government regulation is necessary to curb some of the harms they create.
I’m not going to contend that Trump deserved the ban. He obviously did. But he also presumably deserved the ban when he told several POC congresswomen to “go home” to their own nations despite them all being born in the US. Or perhaps when he told Americans to not be afraid of Covid-19, as he’d survived it almost unscathed. Both of these tweets have their own problems – one, a clear racist dogwhistle; the other, blatantly dangerous misinformation – but Twitter failed to act on either. His account wasn’t banned, his tweets weren’t archived or removed; no “this claim is disputed” label was applied; no suspension was given. I’m sure Twitter had its reasons – conservative backlash about censorship presumably being the main one – but leaving it until Trump was both one foot out the door and at his least popular was a strategically powerful move for Twitter. However, perhaps Twitter removing illegal and harmful content only when it serves them is not an indication that we should trust their intentions.
It’s clear this goes beyond Trump though. The LGB alliance have yet to receive any sort of punishment for the transphobic rhetoric spouted in response to President Biden enshrining basic rights for transgender people. Even more concerning, Twitter currently has a pending lawsuit against it from a victim of sex trafficking because, despite multiple reports and calls for it to be taken down, Twitter refused to take down literal child pornography. Heck, it wasn’t until December last year that they said offensive remarks based on ‘race, ethnicity or national origin’ were a violation of the terms of service. As far as Facebook goes, it’s consistently failed in stopping any sort of racist rhetoric – boomers sharing pictures of golliwogs are not an uncommon experience. On various private conservative pages that have been leaked – such as those pertaining to employees of ICE detention centres in the United States - a slew of dehumanising rhetoric towards refugees and other minority groups can be found.
Luckily, Trump’s ban has spun forward some sort of salvation from this unregulated virtual hellscape. Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, has suggested that governments should be tasked with regulating social media censorship, rather than leaving it to the social media companies themselves. Poland, albeit for dangerous reasons, is attempting to introduce laws along those same lines. Australia has also brought in laws to regulate how tech giants operate. Both the EU’s proposed regulatory bills, the Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act, are significant moves to coerce these businesses into clamping down on this illegal content as well. The first issues significant fines (up to 10% of their revenue) for the platforms having illegal content, like hate speech or counterfeit products for sale. While some of these countries aren’t going to be the spearheads of progressive policy, some regulation is going to be far more effective at dealing with illegal content than Twitter and Zuckerberg have proven themselves to be.
Of course, those corporations have pushed back. Google threatened to pull it’s search engine from Australia upon hearing about the slightest hint of regulation against it. It has already pulled a lot of Australian news sites off Google search results pages and it’s likely they’ll get away with it too – Australia isn’t nearly enough of a market on its own for google to care about it and it certainly doesn’t want to open the flood gates for more countries to start regulating. Furthermore, they know that governments can’t afford to lose things like social media or Google – we use them all the time, every day, often as a main source of information for many of us – so they can threaten to pull their services from other nations with little concern.
This is why the widespread regulatory bills, such as those proposed by the EU, are so important. The EU is a massive trading and regulatory bloc, and Zuckerberg is evidently scared – having tried to talk them out of this bill on several separate occasions in 2020. This could be the kind of regulation that puts the fire under Facebook’s feet and makes online circles a significantly nicer place for all those that frequent them.
