When my kids were little, we spent a lot of time working on teaching them to take responsibility for their actions. The house I grew up in was not big on personal accountability, and I reacted to that by heading to the opposite extreme, and taking responsibility for everything. There’s certainly a middle ground in there somewhere, but I’ve never been very good at middle grounds. Nonetheless, it has always seemed to me that the world would be a better place if we all learned to take responsibility for our actions, accept the consequences, and make reparations.
When you look at technology companies through that lens, though, it becomes clear that a lot of their preferred talking points are about not being responsible for anything at all. AI companies are not responsible for the mistakes of their chatbots, after all there’s that lovely disclaimer to absolve them of responsibility.
AI companies are also not responsible for their emissions. Or they are, but they’ll switch to renewable Any Day Now Really. Or they are, but it’s necessary so they can Save The World by burning it down. Or something.
Google absolves itself of responsibility for its directions, with another helpful disclaimer.
And social media companies absolve themselves of responsibility for everything. They pronounce themselves very sad about scam ads, but seem to do very little to prevent them, probably because they form a significant fraction of their revenue. They are literally profiting from their users being scammed.
They are quick to insist that they are not responsible for content anyone puts on their platforms, either, because they are not publishers, no no. They are more like a carriage service. People use them to send content. The platforms don’t publish it, so they are obviously not responsible for any of that content. Because they are not publishers. Unless it suits them to argue that they are, of course.
And perhaps, back in the early days when social media platforms mostly showed you the content your friends wanted you to see, the argument that they were not publishers was reasonable. After all, your friends were really the ones showing you content.
But now, most social media platforms, with the notable exception of Bluesky and Mastodon, choose what you see. A sprinkling from your friends and people you choose to follow, of course, to maintain the illusion of choice, but the vast majority of your feed, from scams to misinformation, from climate denial to manosphere, is chosen for you. It is curated, selected, and, yes, published at the whim of the algorithm. An algorithm which is wholly owned and tuned by the platform on which it dwells, all toxic and oozy, choosing the content that maximises your time on the platform, and hence the profit of its masters. Much of that content also maximises the harms – both to you and to the society we live in – but that’s fine, because it’s profitable.
The thing is, it does not have to be that way. We could legislate, tomorrow if we chose, that the platforms are, in fact, publishers, and responsible for slander, misinformation, and both personal and societal harms. For deep fakes, for scams, and for election manipulation. We could insist that the algorithm be stripped back to a simple, chronological feed that shows you the content of people you choose to follow and nothing else.
Or we could choose the appearance of action, and regulate people instead of companies. We could ban mobile phones in schools, ban under 16s from social media, and pat ourselves on the back for looking like we’re making a difference without actually making one, or we could regulate the companies, and insist that they are responsible for the harms they perpetrate in search of a quick buck.
It would certainly decrease their profits. But the Australian government’s job is not to maximise the profits of social media platforms (or any other company). It is to govern, and legislate, for the benefit of Australia and Australians.
Radical, hey?
