How to launch a social media revolution to strip Musk and Zuckerberg of their power

The pro-democracy ‘Arab Spring’ revolutions that began in 2011 initially seemed to confirm this theory, particularly when Tunisia’s then dictator, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, was forced to flee the country.

The dream, however, has become a nightmare. Ben Ali’s largely peaceful downfall was followed by the brutal civil war in Syria. And social media has been exploited by the far-right and dictatorial regimes to spread disinformation in the West designed to undermine democracy.

Romanticising self-harm

The largely US-based social media companies’ overly enthusiastic commitment to free speech has also resulted in content about self-harm and suicide being promoted to children. Children like Molly Russell, who took her life at the age of 14. In 2022, a coroner ruled she had died from an act of self-harm while suffering from depression “and the negative effects of online content”.

In a report sent to the UK Government and social media companies, the coroner wrote: “The platform operated in such a way using algorithms as to result, in some circumstances, [in] binge periods of images, video clips and text some of which were selected and provided without Molly requesting them.

“Some of this content romanticised acts of self-harm by young people on themselves... In some cases, the content was particularly graphic, tending to portray self-harm and suicide as an inevitable consequence of a condition that could not be recovered from.”

The evil people who did this to a depressed young girl could not have done so without social media. Following an outcry over such cases, social media companies introduced some safeguards.

However, shortly after Donald Trump’s re-election as US President, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg announced it would stop using independent fact-checkers on Facebook and Instagram because they were “too politically biased” and it was "time to get back to our roots around free expression".

In response, Andy Burrows, chief executive of the Molly Rose Foundation, set up in memory of Molly Russell, wrote in a letter to regulator Ofcom: “Meta’s bonfire of safety measures is hugely concerning and Mark Zuckerberg’s increasingly cavalier choices are taking us back to what social media looked like at the time that Molly died.”

Musk’s personal political foghorn

Zuckerberg’s decision was widely seen as a means to curry favour with Trump and Elon Musk, who is currently causing mayhem by firing or attempting to fire large numbers of US Government employees in his role as Trump’s head of the new Department of Government Efficiency, aka Doge.

And, of course, self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist” Musk runs X/Twitter as his personal political foghorn, blasting out messages of support for far-right parties. It also provides a platform for the likes of English Defence League founder Tommy Robinson to spread lies about a child refugee that have been ruled to be defamatory by a UK court. Robinson has gone to prison for contempt of that ruling but, nonetheless, the ‘documentary’ containing his claims can still be watched on X.

Meanwhile, TikTok – owned by a Chinese company but not available in China – has been accused of profiting from sexually explicit livestreams by teenagers as young as 15.

An antithesis of the Arab Spring uprisings and the idea of social media as a force for democracy and for good was perhaps the far-right riots in the UK last summer based on misinformation about the Southport killings, in which mosques, asylum seekers and others were violently attacked for no good reason.

‘The enforcement of decency’

Far-right lies designed to destabilise society, child pornography, content promoting self-harm and suicide to children, and a style of public discourse that is about as civil as road rage – this is the online world that most of us have willingly been a party to. And this virtual toxicity has seeped into the real world, making society increasingly unpleasant, fractured and, in some cases, dangerous.

On Friday, headteacher Manny Botwe, president of the Association of School and College Leaders, told its annual conference that social media platforms leave a “trail of harm”. “This chaos must end. For too long, tech billionaires have been given immense power without accountability. They hide behind the defence that they are champions of free speech while profiting from platforms that allow harm to fester.... As a society, we have the right to demand the protection of our children, the enforcement of decency, and the upholding of standards.”

His solution was to force social media websites to police themselves properly. I think we need something far more radical – a democratic revolution.

Power to the people

I have long thought that the world’s democracies should band together in a ‘Democratic League’ – combining a global, Nato-style defensive alliance with an economic bloc that provides trade benefits for members – to defend themselves against the rising power of dictators.

This would be a considerable undertaking but it could perhaps start in the virtual, rather than the real world. Instead of the current Wild West in which almost anything goes, a new and very different social media platform could be set up, by either a group of democratic countries or wealthy philanthropists.

However, unlike Facebook, X and the rest, its users would elect a ‘parliament’ that would be in charge and set the rules. Giving control to ordinary people would be in keeping with the original spirit of the early social media idealists and I feel confident that the ‘wisdom of crowds’ would quickly get rid of content promoting suicide and self-harm to children and many other online harms.

There would be a risk of a populist takeover, but that’s true of any democracy. The argument needs to be won in the real and virtual worlds.

It’s time for ‘the people’ to storm the online barricades, oust the social media barons and make the virtual world anew.