The appeal of British efforts to keep social media under watch
PremiumThe UK plans to regulate online platforms for the hazards they pose
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Facebook Inc managed to distance itself from the most damning document leak in its history by renaming itself as Meta Platforms Inc last week, but that does not mean it will not face greater regulatory scrutiny around the world. Where will the US-based company get the most heat? My bet is the UK.
After blundering on Brexit, the UK is moving much more effectively on a law aimed at tackling the same social media harms that were outlined by Facebook whistle-blower Frances Haugen. The UK’s Online Safety Bill tackles a wider range of issues than the European Union’s similar proposals, and it will likely come into force earlier, potentially next year.
The law cleverly threads the needle between human welfare and free speech by treating social media firms as public environments, not publishers, and with appropriate final touches, it could be a template for other governments to follow.
In essence, social media companies will be required to carry out regular risk assessments on the nature of harmful content on their platforms, and to take action on those harms as well as on any prevalent illegal content. The British communications regulator Ofcom will assess the companies on those outcomes. If they don’t comply, the companies in question face multibillion-dollar fines, and potentially even criminal charges for executives.
In other words, social media companies will have to provide much of the kind of information that Haugen leaked: internal research. That could, for instance, be data showing that women in certain parts of the UK are more liable to read covid misinformation, or that certain teens are “hyper-exposed" to self-harming content. Ofcom would then require the social media firm to tweak its algorithms to change those statistics, or be punished.
In effect, social media will become regulated like a hazard industry. Haugen praised the UK’s bill as a “world-leading" approach to regulating social platforms.
The bill has its critics, particularly on free speech. It risks forcing Facebook and other social media platforms like Twitter Inc and Alphabet’s YouTube to “over-remove" content, according to Big Brother Watch, a privacy campaign group in the UK. But so do efforts to reform free speech laws in America, an issue over which there has been little consensus so far. The UK has the benefit of moving quickly and with an existing regulatory agency to test its new rules and then suggest changes where necessary.
The real weak link in this promising law is the regulator and its capabilities. The bill, as it stands, allows social media companies to set their own standards for defining a risk assessment, not Ofcom. That could make it easier to worm out of diligent reporting. As Haugen noted in her testimony, “Facebook is good at dancing with data."
It will also be difficult for Ofcom, which was designed to regulate telephone companies and TV channels, to pivot to the vast online world and its difficult-to-measure impacts on human rights.
But it helps that the regulator will be assessing reports provided by these tech companies, and might not necessarily have to hire an army of computer scientists to investigate their algorithms. Will Perrin, a former civil servant who helped set up Ofcom and whose research sparked the upcoming law, tells me that Ofcom has plenty of experience and ability to extract the information it needs from companies.
The current law is fuelled by painful experience. British schoolgirl Molly Russell died by suicide in 2017 after viewing self-harm images on Facebook’s Instagram, and her father has become a powerful public advocate for regulation of these platforms. On Tuesday, while questioning Haugen, British politicians working on the new law also brought up the threats and abuse they’d received on social media, as well as the recent killing of another Member of Parliament, Sir David Amess.
The bill is based on a storied and well-known “duty of care" principle at the heart of British health and safety law. This obligation to protect people stems back to 1928, when a woman named Mary Donoghue bought a bottle of ginger beer in Paisley, Scotland, and found a dead snail inside, later falling ill. She sued the manufacturer and won when her case went up to the House of Lords. Lord Atkin of Aberdovey, who presided over the case, said in his judgement, “The rule that you are to love your neighbour becomes in law ‘You must not injure your neighbour’."
An age-old principle is now set to be a cornerstone for regulating social media. The UK could pioneer this effort in the same way the EU pioneered wider privacy standards with its GDPR law. Let it not be a missed opportunity.
Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology.
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