Carl Miller: For the past 15 years, platforms have largely relied on voluntary enforcement and protection measures to address online harms. That created a messy equilibrium in which platforms have responded to various kinds of political pressure around the world. With the change of direction at X under Elon Musk’s ownership and the recent announcements by Mark Zuckerberg at Meta, that equilibrium has collapsed.
All the big platforms – TikTok, Facebook, X – have got rid of many of the safeguards they accumulated over those 15 years. Perhaps one reason for this is that the UK and the European Union are moving towards a new, regulated online safety environment that is likely to conflict with the US’s position on tech regulation.
Alex Krasodomski: Carl is right. The standards the platforms were operating
under during those years tended to be shaped by media criticism and, more
recently, by European regulation. For instance, the General Data Protection Regulation, the EU’s privacy regime, was integral to reshaping social media and search platforms. Whether that evolution led to an improvement in the quality of the content, or the overall information space is debatable, though, and either way efforts have now ground to a halt.
CM: Now, I think we’re moving into a world where the statutory authorities of the EU and Britain are defining what platforms can do much more. I wish it had been sooner. For 15 years, British MPs in parliamentary evidence sessions would tell me these platforms are so powerful and rich, there’s nothing we can do.
AK: Right, and these platforms feel the US government should have done more to protect them from what they regard as regulatory burdens or overreach by the EU and the UK. Now they clearly expect a volte face from the Trump administration when it comes to relations with Europe. President Trump doesn’t like the idea that European regulation is going to affect US companies.
CM: We are about to see an almighty collision between the European Commission and the Trump White House over platform regulation. What began as a geeky regulatory discussion 15 years ago is now geopolitics. Vice President JD Vance has already said that America’s Nato membership may be jeopardized by the European Commission’s regulation of X. I don’t think they’re joking. There is going to be a transactional discussion where the US will try to stop the Commission deploying the Digital Services Act.
But the extent to which the big platforms have got rid of their online safety regimes may well be hardening attitudes among the Commission and European partners. They see the rollback of online safety as a fundamental threat to European values.
AK: In Europe, online safety isn’t just about harmful content or cyber bullying, it is increasingly tied up with this idea of the public square and the persistence of democratic values, and the ability to hold free and fair elections. The thinking is, if we don’t set the rules, the European project will crumble because we’ve built it on digital infrastructure that is fundamentally hostile to it.
CM: Across the EU and in Britain, certain governments, together with elements from civic society, journalists and technologists, are trying to counter what they call ‘foreign information manipulations and interference’ or FIMI. Now is the moment to talk about what foreign interference looks like.
If a platform chooses to make information more or less visible, not on the basis of engagement or attention optimization, but on the basis of the political content of the message – with implications across European and British politics – might that be foreign interference?
Also, the UK is going to start sailing closer to the EU on platform regulation. It’s entirely the right of the American electorate to vote for a president who will take a laissez-faire attitude towards tech regulation in the US. But Britain has a very different history of regulation to the US. Here, we have consensus between the Tories, who brought in the Online Safety Act, and Labour, who did not win power on a platform of rolling back internet regulation.
It is still unclear exactly what British and EU regulators expect from platforms or what they will need to implement. I can see a world where geo-gating or geo-fencing is more common. We’re already seeing this with terrorist groups having different legal designations in Britain, the EU and the US, leading to discrepancies in their visibility on platforms.
AK: For the best part of a decade, Europe has been increasingly aware of the national security implications of online platforms. Look at the elections last year in Romania [in which it’s alleged foreign interests exploited TikTok to influence the result], or how it came to light in the conflict in Ukraine that important parts of the Ukrainian digital infrastructure, such as Elon Musk’s Starlink service, might not be operated in line with Ukrainian wishes. This is about how the fundamental security of Europe’s political, cultural, social and democratic infrastructure is built on this technology.
CM: We have also assumed these social-media platforms have been running as commercial entities, albeit with important social and political implications. But what if they evolve into tools of political influence? The idea that TikTok’s primary aim and business model is to sell advertising is not sustainable. In the case of Facebook, given its ownership structure, its strategy is largely predicated on the wishes of a single person, Mark Zuckerberg. At what point do these platforms switch from being neutral spaces to become political tools? This is something governments around the world need to consider.
AK: One challenge is the lack of alternatives to these big platforms, because of the way that they have grown and swallowed up the competition. Some of these products are excellent, but many are much as they were 10 years ago or worse.
The Amazon my mum used was vastly different from the Amazon I use today. I would say Google search is not as useful as it was a decade ago and is currently battling the rise of AI-generated ‘slop’. I would love to see European alternatives take root and compete, but as we keep hearing – in Mario Draghi’s report on European competitiveness, for instance – Europe isn’t building tech like this.
CM: Europe can recognize a digital world that seems to be closer to its own values, but it can’t bring it about. That is dismaying. Britain has great tech and AI scenes, as does Germany and France, but we can’t make large-scale social media platforms.
AK: When the news about DeepSeek, the Chinese AI model – notionally trained more cheaply than US alternatives – shook the tech industry last month, it had me wondering: could it have been built in Britain? I don’t see why not. But would it have been built in the US? I’m less sure, given the way US companies approach building technology now, often by throwing astronomical amounts of capital at its development to drive the fastest possible growth.
A paradigm of tech development that operates under conditions of greater scarcity seems unlikely to take root in the US but could do in Britain, and did in China, which faced restrictions on access to semiconductors. Other parts of the world, such as India and Brazil, are doing the same with their own digital public infrastructure programmes.
It points to this sense that we need alternatives [to Silicon Valley]. Signal, the open-source messaging service, is run by a foundation and is an alternative to WhatsApp, for instance. In Europe you would expect there to be an appetite for social media that is a bit safer and more sanitized and sold on the grounds of sovereignty or national security, or maybe even European values.