Why isn’t the government using its power to stop social media causing so much damage?

Molly Scott Cato is Vice Chair of the European Movement and author of the recently published Lacunae and Laocoön: For the Triumph of Democracy over Oligarchy. She is on Bluesky at @greenpartymolly

After the suicides of young people and the endless racist and fascist messages, the latest social media outrage is encouraging foolish young men to drive the wrong way down roads. At least, this was the suggestion of the Prime Minister after two policemen and seven young men died in a crash.

The crash was caused by a young man driving his car the wrong way along the A66 near Middlesborough, where he collided with a police car.

I have a simple question: why doesn’t the government use its power to stop social media causing so much damage?

Instead we hear ineffectual bleatings. Luke Pollard told the Today programme that ‘social media companies could take the content down easily and adjust their algorithms to stop it being distributed’ and the PM followed up by condemning the sharing of such content as ‘truly reprehensible’.

This reminded me of Lisa Nandy’s decision, shortly after becoming Culture Secretary, to take her department off X, stating that ‘isn’t healthy for our democracy or our communities and I don’t want to support it’. That was it: no suggestion that Ofcom might use the powers our government has accorded them to stop the attacks on our democracy.

For good, democratic, reasons, Nandy doesn’t have any power to directly regulate media but the government has given powers to Ofcom under the Online Safety Act  to remove illegal content and protect users from ‘harmful’ content. We should expect to see urgent action against TikTok, although the desultory past record of Ofcom enforcement suggests that we won’t.

The lack of action against X has set a pattern of ‘learned helplessness’ on the part of this government, failing to use its massive majority to protect the public and our democracy. It’s been clear for several years now that Musk has been using his platform to instigate race-based violence and encourage the rise of fascist forces. 

Ministers hide behind legal interpretations suggesting that the Public Order Act, which does outlaw incitement of this kind, requires the threat of provoking ‘immediate unlawful violence’. If that is not sufficient to prevent Musk’s dangerous hate speech, then the law needs strengthening—and this government has the power to do it.

Let’s compare the action taken by Brazil’s Supreme Court, which banned X when Musk ignored a court order requiring it to remove accounts that were spreading lies about the 2023 election, attempting to instigate a protest similar to the January 6^th putsch in Washington. Musk caved and the ban was lifted. If Brazil has the courage to take action to protect its democracy, why doesn’t our government?

Other robust actions could be to require the licensing of all digital communication platforms, with licences being issued by a socially representative citizens’ panel based on their positive vs. negative impact on the public good; to assign to social media platforms the status and responsibilities of a publisher; to ban all encrypted and secret communications channels that are not prepared to allow open regulation by public bodies charged with defending the public interest.

Not just in the UK but across the western democracies, politicians have adopted a fawning, subservient attitude towards the tech oligarchs who are dominating not just our economy but our minds and now our politics. 

Could we imagine politicians taking the same hands-off approach to the aviation or automotive industries? Or even conventional press or broadcast media? Is it that there’s something different about digital products or is it that our politicians have become used to handing away their power and performing helplessness rather than doing their duty of protecting citizens?

Their failure to act is the culmination of several decades of grooming by oligarchs and corporate bosses, until they believe that such action is beyond their powers. As well as enabling profiteering by the world’s most wealthy, this supine attitude has also undermined our faith in democracy, as those we elect seem to side with the powerful few against the interests of the many.

This abdication of responsibility dates back to a deliberate handing away of power by politicians like Clinton and Blair under a series of pro-globalisation trade treaties around the turn of the century. Extending the power of the WTO so that corporations could use ISDS clauses to overrule national democratically elected governments was the apotheosis of this betrayal.

We must demand that our politicians stop believing the myth of their own helplessness and start using the power we have given them to defend us against the destruction being wrought by the oligarchs. Because transnational corporates and off-world oligarchs are hard to constrain by democracies that operate at nation-state level, we will also need we need politicians who are still committed to democracy and the rule of law to work together to reclaim their power. If not, I fear for the future of democracy.