MacDougall | Canada does not need to lie down and accept Elon Musk’s giant mess

Good commentary:

…Welcome to the classic Big Tech manoeuvre: make (or enable) a giant mess, and then bark at others to clean it up. But that’s a poor response to minor offences and an egregious one to the generation and distribution of CSAM [child sexual abuse material]. Canadian legislators and regulators shouldn’t accept it.

But how do we stop them from making a mess? And can we do it short of a controversial “ban”?

To begin, we must understand that legislators and regulators have spent most of Big Tech’s existence trying to regulate their content outputs instead of taking a hard look at the inputs, imperatives and incentives driving these services. If these services are spraying crap like CSAM around social media platforms, the answer must be to prevent the platforms from spraying the crap, not trying to clean up all the crap after it has been sprayed on unsuspecting users. This is a business model problem, and we must focus on the model, not what it produces. 

As it stands, the major social media platforms and AI services are free to use (Musk only tucked some of Grok’s features behind a paywall after it was caught facilitating CSAM, though users can still access the features in other ways). And when a platform is “free” to use, it must make its money elsewhere: through advertising. In other words, these platforms exist to monetize our attention, not to provide free speech. And when attention is the key revenue metric, addiction becomes the business model, because more time on screen equals more money. That’s how you end up with a world where children now spend an average of five hours on social media every day, with adults struggling to control their usage, too. 

Given these figures, it’s no wonder the platforms call us their “users” not their customers. If we were customers, we would exchange some money for these services at the point of sale, not be monetized after the fact. If we were customers, we could demand changes to the service we are provided, not simply be forced to accept whatever content the platforms find delivers better “engagement” (hint: it’s not journalism). If we paid, the platforms would be forced to compete on utility, not addictiveness.

In this new world of competition, nobody but pedophiles would be asking X and Grok for CSAM. So let’s build this world instead of accepting the business models people like Musk are now forcing on us. And if the platforms don’t want to have that conversation, we should look good and hard at a ban, but of their business models, not their outputs. There is no rule saying we must accept a business model that generates tremendous harms while forcing the public to bear the cost of those harms.

Source: Opinion | Canada does not need to lie down and accept Elon Musk’s giant mess