Social Media and the state

[Innula Zenovka]

I want to also point out that the thread title makes it sound like this thread is about the greater issue and not just UK law. I think that is part of the disconnect between some of the comments and your possible original intention for this thread.

Also, there are many practical challenges with censoring content just for one market when a company like Meta, X or Google is trying to be world wide. There have also been issues with authoritarian governments demanding contact on their affairs be removed from platforms when their citizens post them even when living abroad. I remember an incident where Musk caved to Turkey's demands to remove criticism that was being posted by Turkish people living outside of Turkey for example.

Obviously the UK is not Turkey but I think there are reasons to doubt censorship can be easily confined to just the nation that is asking for it. There are also many examples of media like movies and video games that can't easily censor content just for the one market that forbids it, so they have an incentive to exclude offending content for all markets.

I agree -- the general question is how do states -- any states -- respond to the flood of misinformation and downright falsehood that bad actors, often backed by hostile and totalitarian states, can deploy online.

Everyone, I hope, would agree that defending the right of bot farms in St Petersburg to intervene in US politics in the name of their free speech is disingenuous, to say the least, and so, I think, is trying to defend as "free speech" Elon Musk's deploying his platform's algorithms to promote far right lies and distortions in an attempt to destabilise the British government, or Mark Zuckerberg's removing safeguards on his plattorms against anti-gay and trans slurs worldwide in order to curry favour with the incoming US government.

I don't agree, though, that " there are many practical challenges with censoring content just for one market when a company like Meta, X or Google is trying to be world wide." On the contrary, these companies' business models depend on both being able to deliver advertisements to particular, extremely granular, demographics, and to maximise customer engagement by ensuring they'll see posts/videos/whatever that will keep them watching and clicking for more, either because they like what they see or because they're angry about it.

Of course they can easily tweak their algorithms to prevent particular types of content being delivered to people with UK IP addresses, or promoted to users under particular ages in the UK. Their whole business model is predicated on being able to do precisely that.

 

[GoblinCampFollower]

I agree -- the general question is how do states -- any states -- respond to the flood of misinformation and downright falsehood that bad actors, often backed by hostile and totalitarian states, can deploy online.

Everyone, I hope, would agree that defending the right of bot farms in St Petersburg to intervene in US politics in the name of their free speech is disingenuous, to say the least, and so, I think, is trying to defend as "free speech" Elon Musk's deploying his platform's algorithms to promote far right lies and distortions in an attempt to destabilise the British government, or Mark Zuckerberg's removing safeguards on his plattorms against anti-gay and trans slurs worldwide in order to curry favour with the incoming US government.

I agree with all this.

I don't agree, though, that " there are many practical challenges with censoring content just for one market when a company like Meta, X or Google is trying to be world wide." On the contrary, these companies' business models depend on both being able to deliver advertisements to particular, extremely granular, demographics, and to maximise customer engagement by ensuring they'll see posts/videos/whatever that will keep them watching and clicking for more, either because they like what they see or because they're angry about it.

Of course they can easily tweak their algorithms to prevent particular types of content being delivered to people with UK IP addresses, or promoted to users under particular ages in the UK. Their whole business model is predicated on being able to do precisely that.

I don't know about you, but I frequently get advertisements that aren't at all relevant to my interests.... this is annoying but the penalty is much less severe than violating censorship laws of any kind. And it's easy enough to detect if someone has a UK IP address, that's not the hard part. The hard part is using shitty AI to determine if the content should be forbidden in the first place and to who.

I also made the point other forms of media struggle with this more. It's not always practical to just chop out the scenes in a movie or video game that offend one market vs another. This is the part that worries me a lot more than social media posts. ...and as I said before, this isn't really just about the UK, which I don't worry about nearly as much as places like China in this regard.

 

[WeFlossDaily]

How do you suggest the UK, or the EU, should go about getting Zuckerberg or Musk to remove this kind of content, if not through force of law? Ask them nicely?

I'm honestly not seeing the sort of content your talking about overflowing in massive piles of hatred in such a way that it needs more laws to constantly ensure that anything we disagree with is promptly removed. And since much of it is already illegal, or at the very least, against the ToS of the social media services you're concerned about applying external regulation to from Britain, then I do not see a need for implementing overreaching British laws that I believe would ultimately lead to an decrease of free speech throughout the world. But then igen, I'm a centrist and largely A-political on a lot of issues that other people constantly lose their minds about, so it is always possible that some of what you consider harmful content, I don't even notice or care about. But, like how far is the British government prepared to take this? For example, do they plan on censoring the flat-earthers out of existence? The ideology behind it is arguable harmful, as it makes those who begin to think their might be something to it much stupider than they'd be otherwise and creates a harmful cycle of nonsense that could be argued is quite damaging to society. Of course this is a sort of joke example. There are all kinds of religious and political ideologies that could be censored. Hell, we could wipe out entire languages while we're at it. I'd love to see the russian language go into decline. How do I declare that everything written in russian is hate-speech and convince the British government to force Twitter to remove. Perhaps there is a special form or something that I can fill out.

 

[Katheryne Helendale]

I'm in favor of removing all of it, I agree with you on that. But I am not in favor of the way the British are going about it. And I am concerned about a massive increase in censorship and how it will be abused.

I think you may be reading too much into it. All the UK law is saying is, "keep your harmful material out of our country yourselves, or we will block it from entering our country for you and fine you for it," the "you" being social media.

 

[WeFlossDaily]

I think you may be reading too much into it. All the UK law is saying is, "keep your harmful material out of our country yourselves, or we will block it from entering our country for you and fine you for it," the "you" being social media.

I think that is a provocative and unfriendly way to go about things and don't much care for it. There's just something aggressive about it that I find extremely irksome. I'll shut up, though. It's all good.

 

[Noodles]

Asså, vad som helst, okej, okej. Jag ska är snäll och håll munnen. Engelsktalande är så fucking galna ibland. Gah . . .

/me slips out the room.

Translator says its Sweedish, and here I am wishing I had kept going with my Norwegian instead of going back to Spanish.

 

[WeFlossDaily]

Translator says its Sweedish, and here I am wishing I had kept going with my Norwegian instead of going back to Spanish.

Yes, it's Swedish. I should probably be learning Spanish, though.

 

[Essence Lumin]

Translator says its Sweedish, and here I am wishing I had kept going with my Norwegian instead of going back to Spanish.

Oddly, google gives the first legible translation to me for

Asså, vad som helst, okej, okej. Jag ska är snäll och håll munnen. Engelsktalande är så fucking galna ibland. Gah . . .

As a North African language named Tamazight translated as

So, whatever, okay, okay. I'll be quick and keep my mouth shut. English is so fucking crazy mixed. Gah . . .

Where if Swedish is selected the translation becomes

Oh, whatever, okay, okay. I'll just shut up. English speakers are so fucking crazy sometimes. Gah . . .

That so called Tamazight translation seems highly suspect since there doesn't seem to be any linguistic history relating Sweden to North Africa.

 

[WeFlossDaily]

It probably doesn't help that I spelled alltså as asså, which is more like how it is pronounced then how it is supposed to be spelled.

 

[Tigger]

Late to the party and I can't decide what to quote so I'm just gonna go with generalities.

Firstly there is no such thing as a right to unrestricted free speech anywhere. Make a bomb threat, suggest you want to shoot the US president (or your own head of government) or go to Germany and wave a swastika flag and see how unrestricted your free speech is. Everyone regulates speech to some level the only argument is where the line is drawn. I largely approve of where the UK draws the line. Personally I would love to see our regulations on advertising applied to internet ads as (even though I block the vast majority of advertising) many of the few that do reach me are deliberately deceptive and would never meet the standards required to be shown on TV here.

Secondly any entity that provides a product or service to countries outside of it's home country is subject to the laws of the destination country. If you're shipping electronics into the UK you'll have to get certification that it meets safety regulations. If you provide architectural services you'll have to design in such a way that respects UK building codes.

So if you are a social media company and you want UK users you will either respect UK laws and regulations or you will not have UK users. It's that simple. The UK is not enforcing its laws on the US or Europe, its enforcing its laws on a product being supplied into the UK. No one has to follow UK law, they can simply not provide their product into the UK.

A case in point, there's a TV show I love and it's recently caused a bit of a stir in the fanbase when people discovered that the central thread of the story, a lesbian love affair, is cut entirely out of the the version aired in China. Not only do they not show the sex scene but other scenes where the pair are just being non-sexually intimate and close are shot differently for China. Don't approve? Great, neither do I, but the fact is only China gets to determine what China allows. Perhaps it would have been more moral to not provide a release for China? But that's the choice. Meet the local requirements or don't provide the product.

Pretty much every type of company has to deal with this when they trade internationally, it's difficult and complicated and makes international trade a pain in the ass but whether its orange juice, TV shows, financial services or social media you are always subject to the laws of the target country. There is nothing new in this, except that social media companies don't want to deal with it.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

A couple of interesting articles

Meta opens the floodgates

Back in the days when people were still working out whether social media companies could be forced to take responsibility for hosting antisemitic and other hateful content, a Facebook page called ‘Jewish Ritual Murder’ became the test case for many Jewish organisations.

everydayhate.substack.com

But Zuckerberg is going even further, pledging to “work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world” who are “going after American companies and pushing to censor more.” That means Britain’s Online Safety Act, the European Union’s Digital Services Act, and others besides. This threat of political and economic confrontation comes at a time when Elon Musk, who is due to take up a position in the new US administration, is very openly speculating about directly trying to influence politics in several countries: calling for new elections in Britain, trying to remove Nigel Farage as Reform Party leader, backing the far right AfD in Germany, and so on. Even if he does not directly fund any of these parties, it is reasonable to expect that he will use X to tip the social media battlefield in favour of whoever he chooses to support. We have grown used to the idea that Russia is a hostile state actor using social media to manipulate and influence our politics; it will take a 1984-level reality inversion to get our collective heads around the notion that the United States might now play a similar role.

and

The Guardian (@theguardian.com)

Elon Musk and the new world order: the hijacking of the global conversation https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/12/elon-musk-and-the-new-world-order-the-hijacking-of-the-global-conversation?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=bluesky&CMP=bsky_gu

bsky.app

When the internet first appeared it seemed people would be able to represent themselves more directly. The early blogs were like 18th-century pamphlets, but now anyone could write and you would engage with them directly. And it was global too – the promise of a worldwide digital Agora seemed possible.

Then social media changed all that. A few men seized control of that slightly vomit-inducing word, “the feed”. Suddenly you weren’t engaging with the ideas of others directly. Instead, some algorithm behind a curtain was dictating, for reasons you would never know, what you saw, when, and in what amount. Your own likes, fears, desires were being constantly analysed and then manipulated without you knowing. You were personally being sucked into an online crowd, with no understanding of why you were seeing one thing and not another, whether it was being pushed by a real person or a troll-farm.

The lords of the algorithm dictate not just headlines but your sense of time, place, the destiny of your desires. For Mark Zuckerberg, how we see the world seems largely to be driven by short-term profit. With Musk, as my Johns Hopkins University colleague Henry Farrell writes, it seems more to do with his personal kinks. Sometimes, as one witty observer told me, Musk seems like a weird descendant of Cecil Rhodes, rebuilding a right-wing English-speaking empire on social media. Born in South Africa, of Canadian-English heritage, he can never be president of America – but he can try to dominate digital dominions. Whatever drives Musk, X users are all becoming dramatis personae in his obsessions. And so, now, is parliament.

 

[Noodles]

Yes, it's Swedish. I should probably be learning Spanish, though.

I have been slowly working on learning additional languages, starting in Duoling, but supplementing with other aources as I get better. Of the three I have been working on, Spanish, Japanese, and Norwegian, Spanish has been the most annoying. Its the one I have done the most of, and the one I am best at, but the verbs are just so, random with tensing and who its addressing.

Duo says I am at the equivilant of B1, I think, but I am not so sure. And I definitely can't really speak it because I never do the speaking exercises.

 

[GoblinCampFollower]

Yes, it's Swedish. I should probably be learning Spanish, though.

I've studied languages on and off for much of my life.... I learn some, then forget it all from lack of use. Languages are a very perishable skill, and I think it's very common to learn some then forget it with lack of use. The people in this world who are truly multilingual are usually immigrants or live in "crossroads" type areas where they actually get to practice more than one language regularly.

I live in the American midwest, where basically everyone only speaks English. And my international friends all speak English... For many Americans, there really is no incentive to learn another language other than as a hobby or bragging rights.

I do think there is some value in learning new tongues just because it teaches you to rethink why your native one is the way it is, but for many of us, there isn't really any practical reason to learn any other language that well.

I think if I was going to invest the time to really master a language it would be Mandarin/standard Chinese since it's the only real competitor with English for the most common international language. The value of spanish is more local.

 

[WeFlossDaily]

I have been slowly working on learning additional languages, starting in Duoling, but supplementing with other aources as I get better. Of the three I have been working on, Spanish, Japanese, and Norwegian, Spanish has been the most annoying. Its the one I have done the most of, and the one I am best at, but the verbs are just so, random with tensing and who its addressing.

Duo says I am at the equivilant of B1, I think, but I am not so sure. And I definitely can't really speak it because I never do the speaking exercises.

I tend to do a little bit of a lot of different things and take my time. I mostly learned bits and pieces of Spanish at work, so my spelling is an abomination, I can't conjugate anything at all, I greatly dislike the word order, and struggle to understand native speakers when they speak mucho rapido, but at the same time, I haven't really sat down and studied it like I have Swedish, so mi no buneo. Speaking exercises sound like they could be kind of boring, though. If so, try something else. Music, TV, and chatting with native speakers in SL works pretty good. =]

 

[Innula Zenovka]

The Guardian (@theguardian.com)

Fears for UK boomer radicalisation on Facebook after Meta drops factcheckers https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/12/fears-for-uk-boomer-radicalisation-on-facebook-after-meta-drops-factcheckers?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=bluesky&CMP=bsky_gu

bsky.app

 

[WeFlossDaily]

I've studied languages on and off for much of my life.... I learn some, then forget it all from lack of use. Languages are a very perishable skill, and I think it's very common to learn some then forget it with lack of use. The people in this world who are truly multilingual are usually immigrants or live in "crossroads" type areas where they actually get to practice more than one language regularly.

I live in the American midwest, where basically everyone only speaks English. And my international friends all speak English... For many Americans, there really is no incentive to learn another language other than as a hobby or bragging rights.

I do think there is some value in learning new tongues just because it teaches you to rethink why your native one is the way it is, but for many of us, there isn't really any practical reason to learn any other language that well.

I think if I was going to invest the time to really master a language it would be Mandarin/standard Chinese since it's the only real competitor with English for the most common international language. The value of spanish is more local.

English isn't really the language of the New World, though. It's Spanish, minus America, Brazil, and Quebec. But I agree with you on pretty much everything else, especially the bit about thinking. What languages have you studied? Sorry, the topic of language fascinates me to no end.

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

but for many of us, there isn't really any practical reason to learn any other language that well.

To talk about social policy or criticize capitalism in English is to invite some (usually American) jokewagon with McCarthy Tourettes to barge in swinging the COMMUNISM BAD mallet. If the discussion is in a language other than English that becomes a significant barrier to that intrusion.

 

[Soen Eber]

To talk about social policy or criticize capitalism in English is to invite some (usually American) jokewagon with McCarthy Tourettes to barge in swinging the COMMUNISM BAD mallet. If the discussion is in a language other than English that becomes a significant barrier to that intrusion.

I really should get more serious with learning German just because of this. When I earlier figured out I was too lazy and inconstant to learn a foreign language to acceptable levels, I instead double-downed on English and general history, because language is so intimately tied to relics of the past.

 

[GoblinCampFollower]

English isn't really the language of the New World, though. It's Spanish, minus America, Brazil, and Quebec. But I agree with you on pretty much everything else, especially the bit about thinking. What languages have you studied? Sorry, the topic of language fascinates me to no end.

I think a lot more people around the world speak English than Spanish... Europeans, Indians, and Asians are all more likely to know English. And Brazil and Canada are not small!

German is the language I spent the most time on other than English. Also used to know a little Norwegian. ...need to dive into Chinese...

 

[WeFlossDaily]

I think a lot more people around the world speak English than Spanish... Europeans, Indians, and Asians are all more likely to know English. And Brazil and Canada are not small!

Pretty much, ya. English is currently the dominate linguca-franca of the world.

German is the language I spent the most time on other than English. Also used to know a little Norwegian. ...need to dive into Chinese...

Swedish tempts me into wanting to learn German as I find it way more readable at a glance now than I used to. The Chinese alphabet scares me, but as we continue adding emojois to Englsh, I wonder if maybe it's not that bad.