With age assurance and other online safety laws gaining momentum, stakeholders are facing the rugged terrain of the incoming U.S. administration, which is set to have a seismic impact on global tech regulation as it invites Silicon Valley’s biggest names into its inner circle.
While residents of Canada and Greenland ponder threats of actual territorial annexation, officials in the UK have pledged to keep calm and carry on regulating the digital space according to its privacy laws, as Silicon Valley curries favor with Donald Trump through both financial and ideological contributions.
The Guardian quotes UK Technology Secretary Peter Kyle, who says the government won’t dilute protections laid out in the Online Safety Act in order to court big tech companies and their wallets. Kyle says the UK’s new laws to boost safety and tackle hate speech online are “not up for negotiation.”
“The threshold for these laws allows responsible free speech to a very, very high degree,” he says. “But I just make this basic point: access to British society and our economy is a privilege – it’s not a right. And none of our basic protections for children and vulnerable people are up for negotiation.”
At the same time, Starmer’s government has just launched an AI action plan pitching the UK as a “sweet spot” for AI development – a campaign being led by Peter Kyle.
Muskian freedom to clash with digital laws in more regulated nations
To date, massive social media firms like Meta and X have been prone to adjust their position on safety to suit whatever government or policy is at play in a given moment. Now, they are leaning into a U.S. agenda hooked to the First Amendment but fueled by an insatiable appetite for deregulation.
However, as shown by Kyle’s statement about privileges and rights, Silicon Valley’s enthusiasm for the meme-ready American brand of free speech could rankle governments in countries that don’t share First Amendment fever.
Under the OSA, the tech secretary has granted stronger powers to UK regulator Ofcom, which has noted the failure of current declaration-based age assurance methods to do their jobs. Kyle has also said he hasn’t ruled out a social media ban for users under 16, similar to what Australia has imposed. Some of the pressure comes from advocacy groups who want an overarching duty of care put on tech firms, making them legally responsible for the safety of their users.
Now, with Elon Musk’s influence amplified through his alignment with Trump on both economic and social issues, the X CEO has been twiddling the knobs of the UK government, slinging accusations and Prime Minister Kier Starmer over a decades-old grooming scandal (despite his ongoing fight to kill measures intended to protect kids from predatory behavior online.)
Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg recently binned Facebook’s fact checking system, saying fact checkers “have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created.” He has vowed to “work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more.” That presumably includes the UK.
‘Weakness, and not strength’ explains cozying up to Trump: Financial Times
An essay in the Financial Times argues that “the social media platforms have realised that they cannot win the battles with foreign governments and legal systems by themselves. They are not powerful enough to solve their own problems. They need help.”
The piece by David Allen Green notes a “looming contradiction between what Meta wants from its social media platforms in the jurisdiction of the EU and what the EU is willing to accept.” It cites previous instances of antitrust legislation that doomed monolithic entities like the East India Company and Bell telecom.
Meta and X, Green says, know that in the end, they’re no match for international governments, as demonstrated by X’s recent caving to Brazil after the platform was banned.
Unless, that is, they have the world’s most powerful government at their backs. Hence the calculated obeisance to Trump and his allies, in the form of less content moderation, theoretically leading to “freer” speech.
And if that speech ends up being a societally debilitating mix of disinformation, misinformation, paranoia, rage, bigotry, child sexual exploitation and AI deepfake fraud? So be it.
“The business models of most social media platforms require engagement above all – for without engagement you cannot have data mining and monetising and advertising,” Green writes. For the social media tycoons, “it really does not matter that the engagement is generated and amplified by misinformation and disinformation.”
Article Topics
age verification | digital identity | legislation | Ofcom | Online Safety Act | regulation | social media | UK
