Debate briefing: regulating the internet
Twice a month, the Great Debaters Club hosts a public debate on a topical issue dividing public opinion as part of the club’s ‘Debating London’ series. The audience are presented with a dilemma facing real-life decision-makers that they must vote on to resolve with the help of our panel.
Instead of inviting guest speakers to sit on this panel, we ask members of our training programme to defend the competing perspectives shaping the debate in their own words. We then invite our audience to interact with those perspectives by asking questions and advancing their own opinions with our speakers staying ‘in character’ throughout when responding to them.
By the end of the evening, we measure success not based on which side wins the debate, but by how confident the audience are to make a final decision.
This month’s debate is about regulating the internet and specifically whether it is time the government put in place new rules about what content on-line platforms can and can’t legally share.
Debate motion
‘This House Would make internet companies liable for illegal content shared on their platforms’
Why are we talking about this today?
Make no mistake, debates over regulating the internet started long before the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal, but this is undoubtedly what has put the issue front and centre again in recent months, spawning the #deletefacebook movement, which calls on users to delete their profiles to protect their data.
However, the internet giants such as facebook, twitter, and YouTube had already been under pressure for a long time to take swifter and stronger actions against content shared on their platforms that incited violence, hatred, obscenity, or misinformation. Examples include ISIS propaganda videos, extreme trolling and even death threats, illegal pornography, and of course targeted political messaging based on fake news.
What has this problem got to do with regulating the internet?
Regulation would specify what sort of content is unacceptable for sharing and hold on-line platforms who do it anyway accountable. This is not possible at the moment in the UK because those platforms are not considered to be legally responsible for the content that appears on their websites. This is despite the fact that even facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, appears to think that his own company is responsible for the content it shares.
As a result, if the government wants to stamp out content that might normally be illegal to share in print or over the airwaves, it has to go after the users who are posting it. This is hard enough to do when those users hide their identities and harder still when they do it from countries on the other side of the world where the government does not even have jurisdiction over them.
So, what would regulation of the internet look like?
In short, the rules that govern acceptable content would look much the same way they do now — the real difference is that they would apply equally to on-line platforms, bringing them into line with publishers and/or broadcasters. The reason for the and/or is that the rules for publishers and broadcasters differ slightly in that broadcasters (in the UK) have a duty of impartiality too.
The introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) across the EU also shows it is possible to hold on-line platforms to account for their actions when the political will exists to do so. However, it is only concerned with protecting the privacy of internet users, not the content they share.
An example of a government reigning in the internet giants to control what content they are legally allowed to share does exist in China, though, which also requires internet platforms to collect and store the personal data of its users for surveillance purposes.
Why are some people concerned about internet regulation?
Despite the growing consensus that the absence of regulation of the internet giants has allowed for the proliferation of fake news and hate speech on-line, critics of regulation argue this is an acceptable price to pay for free speech. They are even critical of the self-regulation practised by likes of facebook and YouTube, which sees them voluntarily block content that they deem offensive.
This policy has proved controversial at times with YouTube being criticised for classifying videos that describe LGBTQ issues as ‘restricted content’ while facebook has come under fire in the past for decisions such as deactivating the account of a user who posted a photo of herself breastfeeding.
Some people say the difficulty of making such judgement calls is why we shouldn’t try to regulate the internet in the first place, while others defend regulation by arguing that it should be for elected governments to make such calls and not technology companies chasing advertising money.
And the Brexit angle (because there’s always a Brexit angle)
One of the reasons the UK government cannot change the way it regulates on-line platforms by itself is because the current law was passed at EU-level. Brexit, therefore, presents an opportunity — in theory at least — for the UK to abolish this law and replace it with new regulations of its own, hence why this debate is more prescient now than it has ever been before.
Join the debate
This debate will take place in the Tea House Theatre in Vauxhall from 7.00 pm to 9.30 pm on Wednesday 2nd May. Admission is free and open to all, but we ask that you book a place in advance — by signing up here — to help us manage the number of attendees.
