We won’t let Facebook ignore ‘fake news’

MPS should consider what legal liability social media sites should have for bad content on their platforms

The founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, said in January that his new year’s resolution is to fix the social media company, in response to widespread concerns that it is not doing enough to address the distribution of harmful content across the platform.

Not everyone, it would seem, has got the message. On Tuesday, the comedian and actor Jim Carrey announced to his 17.5 million followers on Twitter that he was “dumping” his Facebook shares and deleting his page, because in his view the company has “profited from Russian interference in our election and they’re still not doing enough to stop it”. By the following morning, his post had been “liked” more than 28,000 times.

There is increasing concern about the distribution of disinformation and fake news through social media. These campaigns are often designed to incite racial hatred, divide communities and undermine public confidence in our institutions. They may also have been deployed by Russian-backed agencies to try to influence the outcome of elections.

Such negative forces have always existed, but social media allows bad actors to target repeatedly millions of people, without the recipients being aware of who is behind it or why they are receiving their messaging.

This is a serious issue in its own right, but even more so when you consider that, according to a recent Yougov survey, over half of Facebook users in the UK use the site as a source of news. In the US, two thirds of users get news from social media, including over half of all people aged 50 and above.

This week the House of Commons select committee for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport is visiting the United States to discuss these issues, and the potential solutions. Yesterday, I met senators Richard Burr and Mark Warner, who are running an inquiry into Russianbacked disinformation on social media sites. Today, my committee will be holding hearings on the same subject, at George Washington University, with global policy leaders from Google, Facebook and Twitter, the first time a session like this has been held by a British parliamentary committee outside the UK.

As in the US, the UK has seen political activity on social media from Russian agencies, targeting voters during election periods. And following repeated requests from my committee, Facebook has now agreed to initiate its own investigation into Russian-backed activity on its platform during the Brexit referendum campaign.

But some people have questioned whether it is possible for the tech companies to monitor what goes on on their platforms so that they can more easily detect harmful content. In fact, they already do this to sell advertising.

The business model of companies like Facebook is based on analysing the points of information created by its users every time they interact with the site, and then making these data profiles available to advertisers to promote their products. Similar techniques can be gamed out by people seeking to spread disinformation like fake news.

I believe there are important questions for Parliament to consider, and to which we are endeavouring to provide recommendations in our inquiry. These include whether we need a new legal definition of what social media companies are.

It is clearly not good enough for them to regard themselves as merely platforms with no real responsibility for what is posted by their users.

We should therefore consider what legal liability they should have for failing to act against bad content that they have either been made aware of, or could easily have spotted.

Governments should not seek to regulate free expression through the internet, but nor can the large corporations which profit massively from these new public utilities that they have created be allowed to be indifferent to the harm some of their users can cause.

Damian Collins is Conservative MP for Folkestone and Hythe, and Chair of the House of Commons select committee for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport