Godfrey's Gospel: 'We did it once and we can do it again'
Meta is to pay €18 billion to states in America
ISN’T it a sad state of affairs to think that an agreement to pay an incredible $18 billion dollars to settle a court case hardly makes the news. That’s exactly what happened last week when Meta agreed to pay that sum to settle a child harm lawsuit in the United States.
However, if you think the owners of that company will be going around barefoot and wearing sack cloth as they try to absorb such a huge payout, think again. As of last month, Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, along with a host of other companies, was worth an incredible $1.5 trillion, give or take a few billion dollars.
And if that’s not sickening enough, they had cash in hand of $90 billion, so the $18 billion will hardly make a dent in that. But even if a few people did show concern about possible losses, they needn’t have worried – as one of the top six or seven companies in the world, it generates revenues in excess of $228 billion from advertising alone.
I am no financial guru, I have difficulty balancing my own finances month to month, but even I can tell that advertising revenue, the motherload for any of those companies, is in a healthy state.
Sadly, it is only young people in the US who will benefit from this court ruling.
We all know the internet has been somewhat of a ‘wild west’ when it comes to governance. It was all new and shiny when Facebook, or as it was originally called The Facebook, came into being in 2004 and, like anything new and shiny, it was the best thing since sliced bread.
Or so we thought. Anything went. It revolutionised the way we interacted with each other. All sorts of sites popped up peddling their wares. There was no end to the possibilities opened up to us mere mortals.
But when something is too good to be true, we should listen to our inner senses sending warning signals. There is no such thing as self-regulation and when that was trotted out as the answer questionable content, we should have paid attention.
But we didn’t. All sorts of cases were highlighted where you would have had to be a fool not to recognise that social media, as we came to term this new shiny toy, was responsible for all sorts of issues.
In particular, children were vulnerable to abuse on the internet. And, yes, some children died as a result, but did we listen? No, we didn’t. It was either a case of not accepting the evidence presented to us or choosing to ignore it altogether.
Legislators all over the world were equally slow to step up to the mark. These companies were providing extremely well-paid jobs, but more importantly they were paying huge sums to governments by way of corporation tax and so on. No one wanted to be the naysayer who killed the golden goose.
Slowly – too slowly in my opinion – matters changed. The evidence kept mounting up that all was not good, especially for children, and unless something was done to curtail the influence these tech companies wielded, we were looking at major problems.
Last week, Meta in the US agreed to pay $18 billion to settle a lawsuit which alleged it deliberately made platforms addictive to children. It will also have to introduce safety measures, including daily usage limits, night-time blocks and stronger age verification checks.
But hold the applause because these measures will only apply in America. It is still open season in the rest of the world and, anyway, the bulk of the money agreed in the settlement will go towards funding safety initiatives.
Where does Ireland stand in all of this? You guessed it, sitting on the fence. Our government wants whatever initiatives are taken to curb harmful content on the internet to be an EU initiative. In other words, we don’t want to get our hands dirty taking on the social media giants or, perhaps, it is not fear of taking on these giants but rather creating a huge hole in our national finances if they decide to depart our shores. Remember, every economist known to man has been warning us that our golden goose could take flight at any time and leave us in the lurch.
We can all recite cases involving young people who have been literally bullied to death on the internet. We all know about the latest craze to generate ‘likes’ by driving down the wrong side of a motorway and the devastating consequences of such actions. We all know about scammers destroying lives thanks to misleading content on the internet. The list goes on. Yet nothing happens. No one is held accountable. Life moves on until there is another tragic incident.
People say the internet is uncontrollable, that there are too many ways to circumvent age verification procedures and so on, but, as we have seen repeatedly, if there is a will to do something, then change can happen.
In March 2004, one month after Facebook came into being, Ireland did something extraordinary. We became the first country in the world to implement a comprehensive ban on smoking in all indoor workplaces, including bars, restaurants and offices.
It was introduced under the by the then minister for health, Micheál Martin. It was groundbreaking in its simplicity – smoking became illegal in enclosed workplaces, public buildings, public transport and vehicles used for work. There were exceptions and these were spelled out.
People said it would never work, that people would ignore the ban and continue to smoke wherever and whenever they liked, but they were wrong and, before we knew it, there was a change in attitude. As a result of the success of the ban, other countries followed suit.
Ireland holds the EU presidency. Wouldn’t it be great if we were again responsible for introducing something positive for the rest of the world? Maybe expecting lightning to strike twice is a bit too much.
