In November 2020, shortly after Donald Trump’s defeat in the US presidential election, Barack Obama observed that America risked entering “an epistemological crisis”. The prospect of Mr Trump’s return to the White House in January validates his predecessor’s premonition.
Mr Obama was talking about media fragmentation and polarisation: different segments of society existing in discrete information spaces; arguments no longer drawn from a common reservoir of facts; no shared reality, no foundation of truth. “Then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work,” he said. “And by definition our democracy doesn’t work.”
It isn’t only American democracy that is imperilled. Chaos and malicious falsehood in the information arena have disrupted politics in every country where governments are chosen in free elections. Political discourse has coarsened and consensus unravelled wherever constitutional frameworks and informally recognised codes of decency once maintained healthy pluralism.
Mr Trump’s return to office next month is alarming not just because he obviously despises the rule of law but because that contempt did not disqualify him in the eyes of millions of US citizens. The nature of that support is complex. It is inseparable from dissatisfaction with the incumbent administration, which in turn has economic and cultural dimensions.
But no account of the crisis in western democracy is complete without recognition of the role played by digital media. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and owner of the social media platform X, put his resources to use for Mr Trump’s campaign. Mr Musk also takes an interest in UK politics, denigrating the prime minister and boosting radical rightwing figures. Hateful rhetoric and disinformation flow without impediment on X.
The distorting effect of poorly regulated digital channels on politics is well documented. In 2018, Facebook (now Meta) admitted that its platform had been an “enabling environment” in the build-up to genocidal attacks on Myanmar’s Rohingya minority two years earlier.
Reining in big tech
Meta’s policies and algorithms have changed since then, but the underlying commercial incentives to maximise user engagement at all costs still promote radicalisation and militate against responsible curation of the information space. The tech giants that shape the contours of political discourse – whether by accident of the business model or megalomaniac design – cannot be trusted to police themselves. They are more powerful than many national governments.
There are two types of riposte to the demand for action to curtail that force. One highlights the sheer difficulty of any one government imposing constraints on an industry that sprawls across multiple jurisdictions. The other raises principled objections to the idea of regulating information.
The latter concern asserts that any political intervention to police a boundary between good and bad facts, safe and unsafe, tends towards censorship even if the intent is liberal. The aspiration to regulate media, in that view, is inherently anti-freedom.
Wariness of any state involvement in deciding what can be published is a healthy instinct. But there is no jurisdiction that ignores the dissemination of material deemed dangerous to the public. The most liberal regimes ban extreme pornography and incitements to violence or terrorism, for example.
Mr Musk declares himself to be a “free speech absolutist”, but his X platform is not a neutral marketplace. He is permissive of far-right voices and quick to denounce “cancel culture” on the left, but criticism of his own views is less tolerated.
Censoriousness and bullying of dissenters are ugly traits that can be discerned at both ends of the political spectrum. That is mostly a problem of uncivil behaviour, which should not be conflated with threats of violence, racist propaganda and disinformation. Much of the worst material is spread by authoritarian states with the goal of poisoning information wells, sowing distrust and exacerbating polarisation to make free societies ungovernable. Democratic politicians have a duty to counter deliberate sabotage.
Effective safeguards
The globalised scale of the problem is grounds for urgency about the task of regulation, not a reason to flinch from it. Britain’s Online Safety Act, which was passed into law last year, is a good start. But it is also a convoluted piece of legislation, reflecting its erratic evolution under different Conservative prime ministers. Many of its provisions are still to be refined by consultations and guidance to be published next year. But it does demonstrate that MPs have the power to make digital companies responsible for harmful content published on their platforms.
Designing those safeguards in ways that are practical and respectful of rights to free expression, but nonetheless effective, is not easy. It requires courage in resisting a powerful tech lobby. That will be more effectively done in coordination with other jurisdictions. Since Mr Trump is not a reliable ally for this challenge, Britain’s likely partners for dialogue are members of the EU.
Over the past decades, the digital information space has come to mean many things. It is an arena where ideas can, and should, be freely exchanged. It is also a commercial environment that generates innovations, but where behemoth companies dominate. It is a resource that can be shared and harnessed for good, but also monopolised and polluted. There are powerful voices with partisan vested interests lobbying against any political action that might tip the balance in favour of fair and safe usage, arguing from a position of free-speech fundamentalism.
That is a category error. It is true that authoritarian regimes like to police the internet as much as they do every other aspect of civil society, but the possibility of censorship does not mean every effort of regulation deserves that label. Digital platforms have become an intrinsic part of the information infrastructure of democracies. To consider them immune from regulation would be an act of irresponsibility akin to neglecting the contamination of water supplies or refusing to apply highway codes to prohibit dangerous driving.
These debates are not just academic. The case for a better regulated digital realm has to be made with growing urgency. The alternative will be to see Mr Obama’s forebodings about a broken marketplace of ideas that inhibits functional democracy realised with ever more sinister effect.
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