Here at diginomica we’ve made no secret of the bemused contempt with which we regard the childish tantrums from Elon Musk whenever someone dares to try to regulate X. Every time anyone dares to pop their head above the parapet and boldly declare ‘Something must be done’, the response is to scream ‘fascist’ and accuse them of trying to introduce a police state!

The UK has been on the receiving end of this lately following outgoing Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s attempt to be butcher than Spain’s Pedro Sánchez by banning social media for the under-16s and casting a dis-approving eye in the direction of  VPNs, all this while making another bid to slip digital ID into public life via the backdoor.

Given that Musk appears to believe that simply owning a social media account in the UK makes you automatically open to a knock on the door by some form of British Stasi, those were never actions that were going to be allowed to pass without the usual declamatory commentary and grotesque noises off.

He’s wrong, of course. Starmer and his government’s actions around social media, and latterly AI, regulation are clumsy, ham-fisted, rash, ill-thought through, and gesture politics of the worst kind. But they’re not being driven by a fascist mentality that wants to clamp down on hatred masquerading as freedom of speech, of the form that has found its natural home on X under its current stewardship. It’s ignorance and incompetence in policy form, not insidious intent.

Mind you….

That said, there are days when the likes of the UK just seem all too willing to play into the Muskian paranoid agenda. This week opened with the ludicrously pompous sight of UK Secretary of State for Media, Culture and Sport, Lisa Nandy self-importantly declaring that she and her department were abandoning X as a swamp of fear and loathing. Nandy and her team are, as commentators everywhere picked up on, the people who ought to be regulating social media, not running away from their duty.

But things have gone from bad to worse. The UK Government has an advisory group in place that is looking into the planned introduction of digital IDs. This is a project that has been on the Labour Party agenda since the days of Tony Blair, a man who even today never knowingly lets slip an opportunity to push the idea as something that Britain desperately needs as much as the Big Tech firms who fund his post-political thinktank do

The latest attempt to get this turned into reality is underway and the advisory group’s recommendations are clearly going to play a large part in justifying what many believe is a foregone conclusion. Nonetheless, democratic process demands transparency of debate and discussion.

But the UK Government has this week let slip that the advisory group will be operating under a blanket of complete secrecy,  with no minutes published of meetings, which were already being held behind closed doors with a ban on the media attending. Cabinet Officer Minister James Frith confims:

The running of the digital ID advisory group will be supported by the Cabinet Office’s existing digital ID task force. The group is not a decision-making body and minutes will not be published..

It may not be decision-making in its own right, but this is a committee that is supposedly helping design a digital ID system that will, if introduced, change the shape of life in the UK forever.  But, no, no-one gets to hear what’s being said!

Reading the bans

In another alarming development, the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, Lucy Powell, appears to be calling for strict restrictions around what can or cannot be published on social media during the run up to elections.  She has form here – back in 2018, she pitched plans to ban private Facebook groups on the basis of them being used by right-wing supporters and organizations.

For non-UK readers, the broadcasting rules in Britain are considerably tougher than they are in the US. While TV coverage and commentary on results on election night in America gets underway while voters are still lining up to cast a vote, in the UK nothing can be said until the polling stations have closed at 10pm so as not to influence the outcome or decisions of people who have yet to have their say at the ballot box.

Clearly social media has changed the landscape here and there are legitimate questions that need to be asked about the power of the platforms to shape – or distort – elections. Controversies around the UK Brexit vote ten years ago or the past couple of US Presidential Elections are indicative of the complexities of the need for a combination of balance and censorship.

Powell appears to favor the latter, urging in an interview that “we absolutely need to strengthen regulation in the social media place, especially when it’s election time.

Powell, who notably restricts the ability of the electorate to respond to her pronouncements on X, didn’t produce any practical suggestions as to how this would be done, a classic ‘Something must be done, this is something to say’ political gambit. But the clear implication is that somehow – how?!? – social media platforms would have to ensure that the views expressed were balanced fairly across the political spectrum as is the requirement placed upon traditional broadcasters.

VPN vacuousness

All of this is before we consider the VPN folly currently under consideration by both Starmer and, it seems, his presumed replacement as Prime Minister,  Andy Burnham. Everyone has pointed out that if you ban social media access for the under-16s, ‘da kidz’ will use VPNs to get around any restrictions. That’s not even a theory – look to Australia and see it in action! It’s interesting to note that in the days following Starmer’s valedictory ‘Something must be done, this is something’ posturing, VPN sign-ups rocketed in the UK!

So, what to do, what to do? Well, ban ‘em, of course, What do you mean VPNs and encryption tech are cornerstones of, for example, the UK Financial Services industry? Will nobody think of the children?!?

Actually, on that shamelessly emotive note, the first resort of the ill-thought through political policy,  it’s worth noting that while Joe and Jean Public on the face of it seem happy that ‘Something must be done’ about social media, they’re less keen when they wake up to the realization that the mechanism for doing ‘something’ will inevitably involve having to upload passports, driving licenses, or credit card details into the care of the authorities – or to the self-same Big Tech that’s supposedly being tamed here.

Just a mess

It’s all a mess and one caused by that ‘something must be done’ muddled mentality, coupled at present with the current aching urge for ‘legacy’ from the politically-bankrupt Starmer regime.  Add into this toxic mix, the schizophrenic post-Brexit need to pander to US Big Tech for inward investment while at the same time trying to look as though you’re as tough on them as the Spanish Government is willing to be.

There are voices raised against this madness. For the Opposition, Conservative MP David Davies warns:

There is growing speculation about the enforcement of Labour’s social media ban for Under-16s involving restrictions or bans on VPNs. Make no mistake, if this is introduced, it will mean an end to online privacy, and the state will know exactly who is looking at what at all times if they so choose. The only other states with restrictions on VPNs are China, Russia, Iran, Oman, the UAE, Turkey and India. This is a dark direction of policy even for the Labour Party.

And there are those in the Labour Party who know this is utter folly. They need to make their voices heard as the next ‘new’ unelected government beds in. 

As noted above and across diginomica passim, there are enormously challenging moral, ethical, societal, legal, and political questions that need to be tackled head-on in this social media age as it opens up to its AI-enabled next stage. In the US, there’s a ‘hands off’ mentality prevailing even as the Tech Bros line up for the latest Presidential photo opp, while in Europe there’s an eternal ‘strangle it at birth with red tape’ mindset that the Eurocrats just can’t seem to shake off.

Meanwhile in the UK, there’s political posturing, empty gestures that will do enormous harm, and that constant refrain of ‘Something must be done!’ ringing out through the corridors of power. 

Yes, something must be done – but not the sort of something that today’s political time-servers wrap around them as some kind of virtuous comfort blanket to avoid getting down and dirty with the real complexities of the situation. So, Elon cries ‘fascist’ again and again and again  – and the message eventually surely sticks. That presumably serves someone’s purpose, but it isn’t that of a fair and equitable society in 2026.

As for UK politicians – this is what you’ve enabled. Happy now?