Big Tech has only itself to blame for the UK government's social media ban
Increasingly, speaking about anything to do with “Big Tech” is becoming a divisive, often ideological activity. On topics such as Palantir, digital identity, AI, datacentres and social media – to hold an opinion is a demonstration of tribal identity.
It’s a terrible shame, because it obscures and even prevents the important discussions that we need to have as a society about the role of technology as it rapidly accelerates changes in the way we live and work.
Take Palantir’s role in the NHS as an example. It seems you cannot sit on the fence – either Palantir is the devil and wants to steal all our health records, or it’s essential to the future functioning of the health service. The truth, of course, is somewhere in the shades of grey in between.
Former NHS deputy director of data engineering, Tom Bartlett – who led the project to implement the Federated Data Platform system for which Palantir’s Foundry software was chosen – attempted to do just that in his excellent five-part analysis for Computer Weekly. But the responses he frequently receives online try to label him as an NHS stooge or a Palantir sympathiser. He is neither – just an experienced, well-informed tech guy trying to bring some sanity and detail to an unnecessarily emotional and often misinformed debate.
Digital identity is the same. On one side, there are those who see it as an issue of liberty and privacy, of state over-reach and intrusion, another step towards Orwell’s 1984 made real. On the other are those who see digital ID as the gateway to a better relationship with public services and an essential enabler for a fairer digital society.
And now, in perhaps the most divisive debate yet, we have prime minister Keir Starmer announcing a ban on social media for under-16s. An unnecessary attempt at state control of our everyday lives, or the only remaining solution left to counter the graceless power of Big Tech?
“What about the children?” is perhaps the ultimate emotive debating point to throw in to any discussion.
Video nasties
I’m instinctively wary of any attempt by governments to proscribe what technology we can and cannot use. When I was at school, newspapers told parents that we spent too much time on the telephone or in front of the TV. The advent of VHS video players was met with lurid scare stories about children watching violent “video nasties”.
We laugh about it now. But is social media just the latest in a long line of video nasties, or is this really the technology that finally proves the fearmongers right?
Clearly parents are worried, and with justification. But what’s the issue here – is it that the technology is fundamentally unsafe, or that technology has become so pervasive and complex, that parents (and governments) simply cannot keep up with it? When we don’t understand something and we can see damage being caused, it’s completely understandable that turns to fear and calls for a ban.
Douglas Adams, author of Hitchhikers’ guide to the galaxy, famously wrote:
I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
- Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
- Anything that’s invented between when you’re 15 and 35 is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
- Anything invented after you’re 35 is against the natural order of things.
That quote seems as prescient today as anything George Orwell wrote.
I’m uncomfortable with the principle of banning social media, but in this case, the move is understandable. Why? Because the UK government – and the Australian government that has already enacted a similar ban, and no doubt other governments to come that will do so as well – has been left with little choice.
Safe social media is possible
As anyone with the slightest knowledge of software engineering will tell you, it is completely feasible for the social media companies to create apps that protect children – apps that are not so addictive, that better filter content, that can be controlled and monitored by parents. There are plenty of tools available that allow parents to control what their children do on their mobile devices – but they are often too complex for anyone without the requisite digital literacy skills to use confidently.
It is perfectly possible to make social media safe for children – but Big Tech has chosen not to.
In part, that’s a reflection of US dominance of the sector and the prevailing politics across the Atlantic. The free-speech libertarians that currently run or fund or otherwise influence so much of US society ensure no tech CEO wants to cross that line – look at the US government’s response to Anthropic trying to restrict use of its AI tools in warfare as one example. A social media ban is as much a statement of digital sovereignty as it is one of social morality.
Big Tech has only itself to blame. We in the West may look at China’s social control measures with scorn and invoke human rights fears, but China has shown that tech companies can be made to conform. Yet they show little empathy to such calls from Western governments.
This could prove to be a significant inflection point for the digital revolution. Does society follow tech, like it or not? Or does tech serve society, and respond accordingly?
It feels like the balance has swung too far to the former. The advent of AI only amplifies the challenge – do we allow AI companies to plough on with developing tools which, according to those companies’ claims, could be catastrophic for society (but probably not if you’re a tech billionaire)? Or does society get to place guardrails around those capabilities – capabilities which we don’t really even know will be possible, but just might be.
Profound social change
Throughout history, technological revolutions have brought enormous social change – whether it’s the Gutenberg press diminishing the power of the church by mass printing of Bibles, or the steam engine taking workers out of agricultural fiefdom. The digital revolution is no different – but its impact will be even more profound, of that we can be sure.
Social media bans are a step along slippery slope. Do we trust governments to rule on which technologies we can use and which not? Probably no more than, so it seems, we can trust Big Tech to develop new technologies with ethics, responsibility and empathy.
I don’t have the answer – I don’t think anybody does. It could prove to be a generational question – when Douglas Adam’s technophobic oldies have gone, or at least stepped down from power, social perspectives may be different.
It’s a strange place to be – where banning technology is both justified and undesirable at the same time. An act that is equally positive and negative. But this is likely to be only one of many similarly improbable and irresolvable dilemmas that society will face in the coming years as the digital revolution transforms more and more of our everyday lives.
We face a choice – does society find the answers, or does it let Big Tech make those decisions for us? When it’s put that way, the solution seems obvious.