Stand up to Big Tech

Facebook made a couple of significant decisions this month. It banned groups linked to the far-right conspiracy theory QAnon and it cracked down on posts that “deny or distort” the Holocaust. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he wrestled with the issue of free speech, but believes he’s struck “the right balance.”

Many people — us included — would agree with stopping the spread of lies spread by the likes of QAnon and Holocaust deniers. The appropriate question here is: why did it take you so long?

But an even more fundamental question is why it should be up to one private individual, Zuckerberg, to make this kind of call. Facebook has literally billions of users, so where the balance is struck there on free speech versus disinformation has an enormous impact on the social and political climate for all of us — even those who aren’t glued to social media.

Social media and the internet more broadly constitute the new public square. Traditional media has long faced public regulation and liability for what it publishes, but governments have mostly abandoned their responsibilities when it comes to facing up to the challenges posed by the tech giants.

Which brings us to comments this week by Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Dominic LeBlanc at a (virtual) forum called DemocracyXChange, dealing with these and other issues. Unfortunately, LeBlanc offered only weak generalities that showed the government is still failing to come to grips with — or even properly recognize — the negative impact of Big Tech.

LeBlanc made the obvious point that there must be a balance (that word again) between allowing free speech and curbing hate speech/disinformation online, and ventured that “I’m not naive enough to think that there’s a simplistic answer or that some piece of legislation in this sphere is going to be a magic bullet.”

This is true as far as it goes, but it doesn’t really go anywhere. It’s now a year and a half since another federal minister, Karina Gould, said that allowing the big socialmedia companies to regulate themselves wasn’t working and it was time for governments to act. Canada, she said at the time, was “talking to partners around the world” on that very issue.

Since then, the government (through Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault) has indicated it plans to move soon in one significant area — requiring companies like Facebook and Google to share the revenue they get from posting news and other content online with the companies that actually produce that content.

That sounds very promising, but the issues raised by the dominance of a few giant tech companies (the so-called FAANG group of Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google) go far beyond paying for content. They also go beyond the high-profile issues of hate speech, disinformation and “fake news,” as important as those are.

The masters of the internet have engineered a world that, in the words of the technologist Tristan Harris, involves a type of “human downgrading.”

They’ve constructed systems that make billions by exploiting our weaknesses, and have aggravated a range of deepseated problems that range from addiction, isolation, political polarization, extremism, even suicide and other forms of self-harm.

That may sound like a stretch, but anyone who needs proof can start by viewing the recent documentary “The Social Dilemma,” in which former FAANG executives sound the alarm about the world they helped to create.

Asingle government, indeed governments as a whole, can’t solve these problems quickly. It took many years to get here and it will take time to reverse the trend. But at this point, all governments should take the issues seriously and do more than stand by while Big Tech continues to regulate itself.

These are issues of democratic governance, and the solutions should be worked out in public with elected governments playing a major role. The solutions can’t be outsourced to the very companies that created the problems in pursuit of their own private goals.

And that means ministers like LeBlanc have to do a lot better than just punt when they’re called on to address the harms inflicted by Big Tech.

The issues raised by the dominance of a few giant tech companies go far beyond paying for content