Social Media regulation can’t be left to America
As we watch the grinding saga of the American congress grilling “big tech” execs from Facebook, Google and Twitter over Russian meddling in their recent presidential election — we can see new regulation beginning to form in the minds of the US lawmakers: ideas such as the “Honest Ads” act are getting air time.
However, writing new national laws, complete with their local peculiarities, will not produce good regulation of an inherently global industry.
To regulate properly, we need a global response to social media regulation not a local, national one.
America is so dominant when it comes to digital and the internet you sometimes think that’s the way it should be — but America only accounts for 1/12th of Facebook’s users and only 1/28th of the planet.
So why then should we allow one country’s lawmakers to set the rules for the other 6.75bn people?
Imagine if we let a different country, say Thailand, take the lead on social media regulation — would that mean we were all going to be subject to their lese majeste laws protecting their monarch from insult, with 3 years in a Thai prison to pay for a minor infraction? No, of course not!
So why then are we happy to sit back and let American congress lead in the area of digital justice on social media? Are we too apathetic and lazy to fund it ourselves? Or just too slow off the mark?
For one thing, we are already talking about laws that affect state versus state activity — I’m not even clear why that’s a bad thing per se. Why shouldn’t a state use digital media to intervene in the politics of another country? This is common practice around the world — it’s called diplomacy! We are already in the age of digital diplomacy where politicians seek to influence globally and Twitter is used by countries to haggle with each other.
Just because the Russians broke American election laws and the Americans don’t trust the Russians isn’t a reason to skew global social media laws for everyone else.
If other countries are prevented from lobbying in other countries elections as the American congress is leaning towards, that sounds like a good thing right? But what if you are tiny Lithuania and you want to persuade neighbouring Belarus against putting a power station in Ostrovets next to the border, when a third of your ( Lithuanian) population lives within 100km. Surely you should be allowed to use online advertising to influence the decision making in that country? Most people would say of course, yes!
It’s not so clear cut now is it. When you take a global perspective national preoccupations become less of a focus. Social media regulation is needed but we can’t leave social media regulation to the knee-jerk bandwagon of the American congress with their localised concerns.
We need a high quality social media regulator with at least a £300 million annual budget to fund it. We need it to be global not national and local. It needs to work in partnership with the global industry it regulates. That means it’s something we need to create through a global body like the United Nations.
Global industry needs a global regulator.
Clap if you’re with me.
