For years, Governments have been told that regulating social media is either impossible, impractical, or an assault on free speech. The technology companies have been particularly fond of this argument. Apparently, the moment Washington, Brussels, or Georgetown asks them to accept responsibility for what their algorithms do to children, democracy itself is supposedly under threat.
Then came Meta’s (the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, with a valuation of US$1.47 trillion and projected revenues this year of US$228 billion) US$18 billion wake-up call. Meta has agreed to pay up to US$18 billion to settle claims brought by several US states alleging that Facebook and Instagram were designed in ways that encouraged addictive use among children and teenagers. Separately, New Mexico took Meta to court over allegations that its platforms enabled child sexual exploitation and failed to adequately protect children from predators. A New Mexico jury found Meta liable under state consumer-protection law and imposed a US$375 million penalty. At long last, it appears that regulating social media does not look quite so impossible with alleged threats to “protected speech”. So we see that regulators elsewhere – Australia, South Korea, Brazil, and the European Union – have already taken the hint and are demanding that Meta’s new protections for American teenagers should not stop at America’s borders. We should be demanding the same with also the broader New Mexico precedent.
A week ago, President Irfaan Ali had reiterated the need to address the harmful use of social media, particularly where children are concerned, and Attorney General Anil Nandlall was tasked with examining international legislative models. The Meta and New Mexico settlements provide them with something even more valuable than another foreign law to study: a demonstrated international precedent that the platforms can be compelled to change their behaviour.
We should therefore stop treating the President’s call as merely a question of regulating what people post but going beyond to what the platforms themselves are permitted to do to our children. Guyanese children should not need to become lawyers, psychologists or digital detectives before being protected from doctored pictures or algorithms deliberately designed to keep them scrolling. Nor should parents be expected to compete with billion-dollar technology companies armed with sophisticated algorithms, behavioural data and armies of engineers.
The Government should consider legislation requiring platforms accessible in Guyana to provide not only effective age verification, parental controls, and meaningful limits on children’s usage but also protections against harmful or exploitative content.
And there should be consequences since a multinational technology company should not make money from Guyanese users without also being prepared to accept Guyanese responsibilities. We may have a small population, but we are not operating in a legal vacuum. Most importantly, however, the legislation must be carefully drafted so it does not become a convenient excuse for Government censorship or political control of legitimate speech. The target should be harmful content, manipulative design and exploitation of children and others – not inconvenient opinions. That distinction is crucial.
The Meta settlement has demonstrated that Governments do not have to surrender to Silicon Valley simply because Silicon Valley is rich, powerful and technologically sophisticated. If the United States and other jurisdictions can tell the world’s largest social-media companies that children require protection, Guyana certainly has the right to do so with not only that company but also those who use their platforms.
Mr Nandlall, therefore, need not reinvent the wheel but can examine what the Americans have extracted from Meta and also what Australia and other countries are doing, and then ask a very simple Guyanese question: Why should a child in California or New Mexico receive protections from Instagram or Facebook that a child in Georgetown does not?
Guyana should follow suit – not necessarily by copying America’s US$18 billion price tag, but by copying the principle behind it. If social media companies are big enough to influence our children, they are big enough to be regulated when they harm them. And if Meta has finally discovered that children’s safety is a legitimate reason to change its business practices, then Guyana should help it make that discovery universal.
The post Taming social media in Guyana appeared first on Guyana Times.
