Parliament’s Science and Technology Committee said recently that social media providers owe a duty of care to their customers and also called for a body to be established to regulate those same providers. Additionally, former deputy prime minister, Sir Nick Clegg, in his new senior role at Facebook, has pledged that he would throw his political weight behind making the platform safer for users. If the mood music on the subject is anything to go by, it would appear that the UK is about to have a conversation about how we regulate social media.
The motivation behind this comes from a place of care and legitimate concern. Britain was shocked recently by the suicide of 14-year-old Molly Russell who was found to have viewed self-harm posts on Instagram prior to killing herself. This tragic news has sharpened our national focus on the need for a discussion about online safety and about the responsibilities of social media providers and users, particularly when it comes to children and young people.
However, as the irritatingly true cliché has it, the road to hell is paved with good intentions and there is a real risk that with the well-meaning rush to regulate social media platforms there could be some unintended consequences that we would certainly regret. Therefore, if we are determined that a regulatory framework and agency is required for social media – we have to be very careful in how we do it.
Firstly, there is the real risk that in barrelling forward with this project we simply wallpaper over the real cracks in our society and pretend we’ve fixed them. By focusing so intently on the practicalities of social media, we risk trivialising or neglecting the real issues of mental health, bullying, disenfranchisement, and loneliness that are behind what we’re trying to fix. Surely, it would be far better to focus on those issues directly rather than what’s being said about them on Twitter?
Furthermore, there is also the risk that, fuelled by the sincerest of intentions, we create a monster that threatens the creative freedom that social media offers. As human beings, we become awfully complacent about the familiar but it’s important to remember just how new, dynamic, and revolutionary platforms like Facebook, Twitter, are Instagram are. They have only been around for a handful of years and have already revolutionised the way creatives, intellectuals, public bodies, companies, and more or less everyone else communicates, promotes what they do, and engages with the world and the wider cultural conversation.
While tragic events linked to social media do occur, and nobody is denying that they do – cyberbullying, online racism, and identity fraud are real and pressing concerns – overall, social media has made a positive impact on life for most people and part of this is because of how much relative freedom it allows both providers and users. Any moves made towards clamping down on the ability of either group to do what they do unencumbered should be viewed as potentially dangerous to that success story.
Finally, there is also the real risk that whatever rules or oversight are put in place when it comes to social media are completely redundant. When I was an undergraduate economics student, I was introduced to the concept of technological change in economics as an identifiable but ultimately difficult to measure element in economic modelling. Essentially, it is represented by “A” in most models and discussions and assigning a numerical value to it is difficult – it is almost always given an arbitrary value in a classroom setting. This variable is, for obvious reasons, very important in this particular discussion and would have a significant impact on policy going forward.
Moreover legislation is always, without fail, a few steps behind business and commerce – owing to its mostly reactive nature. When an increased level of technological change occurs in any given industry – as it does in social media – then the lag that legislation experiences is increased significantly. Basically, if such a body were in existence today, there is a real risk that it could still be talking about the appropriateness of ranked friends on Bebo pages or the long-term impact of MySpace policy changes while those of us in the real world are busy with our Tweets and Instagram stories.
Nothing in this article is intended to suggest that nothing be done in terms of regulating social media – there is a clear need for some kind of action. However, it is vitally important that due care, consideration, and composure be mixed in alongside the positive spur to action in order to avoid ruining the fastest evolving type of media currently in existence. When the penalty for error is as high as it could be here, caution must be our watchword.