Social media companies need to be held accountable, regulators must not be emasculated - David Behrens

No wonder there’s a backlog in the courts system, when people endowed with privilege but not principle think they can commandeer it for their own convenience – as if judges were slot machines that can be made to pay out with a pull of the handle.

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, in going after the police force that questioned him over his dealings with the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, seems blind to the fact that whatever they got up to between them, he was not the victim. Not even Jeffrey Archer had his brass neck.

But the defrocked Duke of York is an outsider now, an annoying fly on the windscreen whom the Establishment can just flick away. ‘New money’ is harder to ignore, though, and the tech barons of Silicon Valley, with their combined forces and unlimited funds, are an altogether more intractable problem.

As Andrew was emptying his pockets to pay his legal bills this week, lawyers representing Facebook, TikTok and X were petitioning the High Court in London to stop the regulator Ofcom from accessing details on how they use all the information they collect.

The UK’s new Online Safety Act, initiated by Theresa May and supported by Labour, gives Ofcom new statutory powers to investigate these firms, enter their premises if necessary and, as a last resort, effectively lock them out of the British market.

This, if we are to believe their KCs, is a diabolical assault on their commercial freedom. It will cost millions, they complain, and constitutes the most burdensome information request ever made by a national authority.

Good. That’s the whole point.

X’s counsel went so far as to suggest it was unreasonable to expect her client to conduct complex processing operations which were not “needed or desired” for its own business. On that logic it would be unnecessary for any company to obey any law at all or even pay its taxes.

The judges, Lord Justice Singh and Mrs Justice Collins Rice, will announce their findings later. But the hearing could not have come at a worse time for Facebook because two other developments this week put the need for statutory control beyond question.

At the inquiry into the Southport killings of 2024 we learned that in nearly all cases, violent, degrading and misogynistic material was being left online, without age restriction, for two weeks after being reported. The possible consequences of that are beyond comprehension.

Meanwhile at the cinema, a drama has arrived which distills the claims and counterclaims into a form even the most technically challenged among us can understand. Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning is a timely sequel to his 2010 film about Facebook’s antisocial origins, and is based on the story of whistleblower Frances Haugen and the Wall Street Journal’s investigation of the company’s operational practices.

If you were minded to sympathise with the pleadings of those KCs in the High Court, The Social Reckoning will disabuse you very quickly.

Quite apart from general observations about putting profit before conscience, the film goes into specific detail about the way Facebook actively promotes misinformation, stirs political division and encourages what it calls ‘rage bait’.

Sorkin and Haugen assert that Facebook’s executives wilfully ignored their own data on the harm they were doing to the minds of young users and instead of fixing the issues, actively worked to shield their methods from regulators. The narrative is of a push for continuous ‘newsfeed engagement’ which has systematically warped public discourse, radicalised users and contributed directly to the Capitol riot of 2021.

This – and here is the nub of the contention – was not by accident but by design. Making people angry, driving them to despair or delinquency, is good for business. And when you cut through the legalese, that is also what the submissions in the High Court were about, M’lud.

So while Facebook and the others claim to be working to stop the spread of dangerous content, the evidence suggests they are actively encouraging it.

As Sorkin contends, if they truly want to make the world a better place, the first requirement is not to be indifferent to the truth.

Drama brings with it a layer of visceral emotion that makes it so often more persuasive than facts alone. We saw in Netflix’s Adolescence and ITV’s Mr Bates vs The Post Office the way it can make abstract concepts seem suddenly personal.

That’s why I hope that before Lord Justice Singh and Mrs Justice Collins Rice consider whether to embolden or emasculate our regulators, they will choose to spend part of their weekend taking in a movie.