Stephen Kinsella writes:

We have come a long way from the optimism that surrounded the internet in the early 1990s. As Tim Berners-Lee has remarked several times, there was a ‘utopian’ view of its potential to democratise news and reinforce social cohesion. Indeed, only 10 years ago, we were celebrating the role that online communications played in the Arab Spring. Now, when the subject of social media is mentioned, it is far more often associated with organisations such as QAnon or the riots at the United States Capitol; with wild conspiracy theories or the bullying and silencing of women and minority groups.

As a European Union antitrust lawyer whose work in recent times has largely involved advising or challenging the large tech platforms, I take a professional as well as a personal interest in how they have developed. I am also focused on practical solutions. With that in mind, I founded Clean Up the Internet as a campaigning organisation seeking to try to improve the overall level of discourse online and to tackle abuse and disinformation.

A particular feature of many online platforms is that, whether explicitly under their terms and conditions, or in practice because of lax enforcement of those terms, they allow users to be anonymous and to conceal or even misrepresent their identities. There are of course many good reasons why a social media user might want not to be identifiable. But allowing uncontrolled use of anonymous accounts presents challenges in terms of whether users can trust the posts they see. In their report into social media manipulation, the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence in 2020 revealed just how easy it is for foreign governments, antidemocratic groups and commercial companies to manipulate public debate through campaigns using networks of fake accounts. For just €300, they were able, via ‘social media manipulation service providers’, to generate inauthentic engagement, including 1,150 comments, 9,690 likes, 323,202 views and 3,726 shares across Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter and TikTok. [Continue reading…]