If governments can’t stand up to Twitter, says Jon Honeyball, then it’s down to us
There’s a standoff happening between the American tech giants and governments around the world. Google is under significant pressure in the US, with calls for it to be split up. Apple faces legal challenges from EU regulators, having recently been forced to support other app stores within the EU. Then there’s the EU’s new digital antitrust law, which has Meta, Google and Apple in its sights.
There is an emerging view that the historical “do it and sort out the mess later” attitude of these companies is no longer sustainable. Take training of AI engines as one recent example. Is it acceptable to scrape everything out there and stuff it into the gaping maw of an AI training engine?
But there is also another battle brewing over who controls the operation of a global social media company within a country.
Despite predictions to the contrary, Twitter (I refuse to call it X) is still going. And it’s more problematic than ever. Musk’s insistence that Twitter is the one true place where speech is unfettered is causing huge problems for governments, who are scrambling to control the narrative. Handling the mainstream TV, radio and printed press is relatively straightforward. Twitter, however, is not headquartered in the UK and claims to operate according to the principle of free speech as it’s understood in the USA.
Twitter acknowledges it must abide by all local laws, which is lovely until we stop to consider what is meant by “local laws”. I draw your attention to the fact that UK Twitter users aren’t bound by a contract with a UK company, but rather Twitter International Unlimited Company, which is based in Dublin.
The reality is that this a service delivered by an American company, as illustrated by a row going on between the user @alexandre, who is “Ministro do Supremo Tribunal Federal e do TSE” in Brazil, and Elon Musk. The Twitter “Global Government Affairs” account (@GlobalAffairs) recently posted:
“Last night, Alexandre de Moraes threatened our legal representative in Brazil with arrest if we do not comply with his censorship orders... Despite our numerous appeals to the Supreme Court not being heard, the Brazilian public not being informed about these orders and our Brazilian staff having no responsibility or control over whether content is blocked on our platform, Moraes has chosen to threaten our staff in Brazil rather than respect the law or due process.”
It then announced it was closing its Twitter office in Brazil. Musk tweeted that the decision “was difficult, but, if we had agreed to @alexandre ’s (illegal) secret censorship and private information handover demands, there was no way we could explain our actions without being ashamed”.
Yet Twitter is still available in Brazil. Closing the local office is a minor inconvenience for Twitter but not a significant win for @alexandre. Maybe Brazil can block locals from signing up to a paid-for account, but I doubt this is going to be a big financial hit.
I have no idea of the backstory between Brazil and Twitter, but it’s not really relevant. Consider how Musk thrust himself into the middle of the debate over the recent rioting in the UK, saying that we were, in effect, on the brink of civil war. Really, Elon?
While no-one would claim that Twitter was a lovely garden full of flowers and bees before Musk took over, from what I can see it continues to slide into an ever worsening death spiral of fake news, bot accounts and scattergun advertising. The controls that governments have over such platforms are almost non-existent, unless they can apply fines to a local entity. And if, as in the case of Twitter, there’s nothing more than a skeletal crew in any one country, this isn’t a threat that carries weight.
This raises a bunch of questions. Should our locally elected officials have top-level control over services such as Twitter? If so, how would it be enforced? Blocking the DNS at the cliffs of Dover might sound like a good idea, but a cheeky VPN tunnel gets around that in a few clicks.
What happens if Twitter becomes so toxic the government feels it has to take action? It can’t block it. Its options are zero, and the power will fall into the hands of the people
The reality is that we have arrived at an inevitable impasse. This was the endpoint all along. Governments have tolerated social media platforms, and the web in general, because it was thought that the sum of benefits outweighed the negatives.
Now ask yourself: what happens if Twitter becomes so toxic that the UK government feels it has no choice but to take action? It can’t block it. Unlike Google and Amazon, it can’t mandate user policies for it to operate in the
UK. Its options are zero, and the power will fall into the hands of the people; like all social media sites, Twitter relies on us to keep it alive. And recent events suggest that not enough of us are prepared to demand better.