Play nicely or get tough? Officials play catch-up to rein in social media giants

UK cold-shouldering of Elon Musk now looks like a mistake even as Western states try to regulate companies as powerful as 'nation state' companies

Governments need to engage with figures such as Elon Musk but also require social media firms to be regulated, say experts. AFP

Britain’s science minister conceded that giants of social media exercise powers equivalent to a sovereign nation state this week as he warned on significantly altered dynamics of dealing with the globe's biggest businesses.

Peter Kyle is accepting the new realities, pivoting to humility and statecraft rather than the threat of legislation. In his intervention on the billionaires with companies able to manipulate algorithms and harvest personal data, he said this tremendous power and influence contrasted with the accountability pressures on elected governments.

“I’m very acutely aware that I can’t sit here in my office in Whitehall and instruct that world to do what I want it to do as secretaries of state have been able to do in the past,” Mr Kyle was quoted in The Times, referring to companies such as Google, Microsoft and Meta.

“I’m probably the first secretary of state that is dealing with companies which are outspending our entire British state when it comes to investment in innovation. So let’s just act with a bit of sense of humility. We are having to apply a sense of statecraft to working with companies that we’ve in the past reserved for dealing with other states.”

Peter Mandelson, the former Labour cabinet minister widely tipped as a future ambassador to Washington, said on Friday that Elon Musk was too big to ignore after he backed Donald Trump's election bid. “He can’t be ignored," he told the News Agents podcast. "We can’t be indifferent to what he’s saying and doing. So, if we can reconnect, we should."

So what can Britain and its peers do about curbing the negative impact of social media operations on individual's lives, while allowing freedom of speech?

Britain is playing catch-up on taming the social media giants, either through improving relations or stricter regulation. How it does so will prove a stiff examination for Keir Starmer’s government.

Clearly confronting mega-rich all-powerful owners, as the new Labour government did with Mr Musk over the summer, does not help. Italy may be about to discover you cannot just insult the tech kings and get away with it after President Sergio Mattarella decided to reprimand Mr Musk for giving an opinion on the country’s migration policy by stating that the billionaire “cannot make it his business to give lessons”.

Australia first

Australia was the first country to take on a social media giant when it attempted to ban Facebook in 2021 in a strategy to make the company pay for news.

Facebook retaliated by blocking all access in Australia, although it belatedly realised this affected important government pages for health and emergency services, not just private companies' news content.

Both sides hastily backed down, but it was a foretaste of a conflict that still appears in the skirmishing stages.

Undaunted, the Australians are having another go, this time by imposing a social media ban for under-16s, with the onus on social media platforms and device manufacturers to implement it.

“The power of multinational social media platforms is a significant challenge for all governments, because their size and reach is such that it's not clear who would prevail in the instance, say, of a country the size of Britain imposing conditions,” Lord Walney, official adviser on political violence, told The National.

He referenced Australia’s Facebook tussle where it was “unclear what might have unfolded” if both sides had gone to war. But what it did reveal was that it was uncertain a government could “mandate changes and expect a company to comply rather than withdraw their services”.

Doom scrollers

The egregious side of social media – notably children addicted to their screens, doom-scrolling for hours on end – is something governments know must be addressed.

A test of Britain’s resolve will come when the Online Safety Act, introduced by the Conservatives last year, comes into force early in 2025 with social media companies facing sanctions if they fail to keep children free from harm on their platforms.

However, it will be down to the power of the Ofcom, the communications watchdog, to enforce the rules. These will require the firms and not parents or children, to ensure their online safety. The law orders social media companies to protect children from seeing violence, pornography and self-harm content.

The new UK government has so far left it to a Labour MP, Josh MacAlister, to push through a private members’ bill to exclude under-16s from the platforms where algorithms are designed to make content addictive.

“I do want the government to push harder,” Mr MacAlister said. He proposes a measure to make social media less addictive for under-16s, to decrease the 21 hours a week 12-year-olds spend on their smartphones to improve “mental health, their sleep and their learning”.

The Labour MP diplomatically suggested social media companies gave themselves “first-mover” advantage, by imposing some self-regulation. “If companies can get ahead of this and act responsibly, there will be rewards from consumers, and we can then harness and make the most of technology here in the UK,” he told the BBC.

Red lines

Politicians agree that more regulation is needed, yet the “how” is tricky, especially given Australia’s experience.

“Governments do have authority, but they are weighing that against the real threat of a company simply withdrawing and the significant impact of that,” said Lord Walney. “This is a genuine dilemma for every western liberal government that prizes innovation and freedom of speech, alongside the very real safety implications that social media is constantly opening up.”

He admitted that governments had been “very slow to adopt a policy that is balanced”. While some had banned TikTok and Facebook, Britain wanted to weigh up “the real importance of freedom of speech” with the need for accountability.

“I don't think any government can simply just say, ‘Oh, well, we're not big enough or important enough, therefore anything goes’. You must amend your regulatory framework with red lines from which you will not cross.”

Divisive ecosystem

The problem, argued independent MP Shockat Adam, is that the massive and somewhat “divisive” ecosystem of social media is “progressing at a rate much faster than we can regulate it”.

The Muslim MP, whose Leicester constituency was among those targeted in the summer’s anti-immigration riots, suggested that “influencers” should adhere to strict guidelines.

“In particular incitement of hatred and religiously motivated hatred should be a much lower threshold than it is, because we saw the consequences of that in the summer, where people could just say what they wanted.”

Greetings, Mr Musk

In the case of Musk, his company X, formerly Twitter, not only played an influential role in Mr Trump’s US election victory, but he will even have a role within the president-elect's inner sanctum. All while keeping his hands on the tiller at X.

Following his impulses should be no challenge for London. Mr Musk freely states what he wants on social media, something that deeply irritated the British government when at the height of the summer riots the X owner issued a series of inflammatory posts.

Keir Starmer’s government took a different view to that of his predecessor Rishi Sunak, who had staged an adulatory interview with Mr Musk at an AI summit last year, by not inviting him to a major investment event last month.

Given that a few weeks later Mr Musk is now arguably the world’s most powerful private citizen after heavily backing Mr Trump, some humiliating back-tracking is required.

“We can’t ignore Musk and my answer to most things [is] we have to talk to people and have an open forum,” said Mr Adam. “Invite Musk over, invite all the Zuckerbergs and the rest, as we have to start talking.”

Not everyone agrees that this approach would work. The government should perform its “duty as the representative of the public to protect them against the whims of messianic billionaires”, said Hamid Ekbia, director of the Autonomous Systems Policy Institute.

“Lack of regulation is a kind of economic order that gives big corporations a free hand in pushing their agendas forward. In such an environment, their agendas essentially become regulations.”

The rise of social media giants is a challenge that, unless there’s some adroit statecraft, could well evolve from skirmish to confrontation.