Tech moguls are exercising power without the slightest shred of responsibility - Andrew Vine
It’s difficult to imagine the revulsion and horror that MP Jess Asato must have felt when she became aware that fake images of her had been posted online. They depicted the Labour MP for Lowestoft, in Suffolk, in a state of undress, and one especially repellent image had overtones of her as the victim of a sexual assault.
Even given the torrent of abuse MPs of all parties now have to endure via social media, this obscenity crossed a line.
Ms Asato is now pursuing a landmark legal case against tech billionaire Elon Musk’s xAI company, whose Grok chatbot was used to create the images.
Let’s all hope she wins her High Court case for misuse of private information, because Ms Asato is taking a stand for decency and against exploitation, using her status as an MP to fight on behalf of the countless other women who have been horrified to discover fake sexualised images of them have been posted.
Yet sadly, even if justice prevails as it should, Ms Asato will not even dent Musk’s colossal fortune sufficiently to make him think twice about facilitating the online degradation of women.
Worse, even a win for this courageous MP will do nothing to curb his seemingly limitless power or that of his fellow tech moguls who behave with absolute impunity.
There was another chilling manifestation of that a few days before Ms Asato’s legal action was revealed.
Author Sarah Wynn-Williams, who wrote a bestseller about Meta – parent company of Facebook – which alleged it is anything but the benign entity it portrays itself as, was forced to stay silent during an appearance to promote her book at the Hay literary festival, one of Britain’s leading events of its kind.
The reason was that Meta and its owner Mark Zuckerberg has spent a portion of its vast wealth on legal action battering her into silence, even though the book remains on sale.
Barely believably, at an event in a free and democratic Britain for which tickets were on sale to the public, this author was banned by an unaccountable entity based in the United States from saying a word about her work.
Ms Wynn-Williams’ lawyer has compared Zuckerberg’s behaviour to that of a medieval despot, and that striking analogy is reinforced by the craven behaviour of those supposedly in power display towards big tech.
Before it, governments around the world abase themselves, quaking and cringing, wringing their hands at the evils of AI or social media while exhibiting a cowardly unwillingness to do anything about it.
They have rendered themselves puny and powerless, their protestations shrugged off or ignored as the tech titans simply steamroller them.
That is to be seen amid the country’s agonising over the murder of 18-year-old Henry Nowak in Southampton, with its questions and implications for policing and how both suspects and victims are treated.
Elon Musk has posted commentaries about the case condemned by Sir Keir Starmer as inflammatory and interfering in British politics.
Does anyone even for a moment believe that Musk cares what the Prime Minister says? The uncomfortable truth is that infinitely more people will take notice of Musk than they will of the country’s elected leader.
The tech moguls are exercising power without the slightest shred of responsibility. That much has been apparent from their disregard for the tragic toll of people – especially the young – driven into taking their own lives or self-harming by what they have been exposed to on social media. Lives have been destroyed as profits have grown relentlessly.
And it's a bit rich of the Prime Minister to start trying to sound stern about big tech less than a year after he was fawning all over it to attract investment in Britain from its AI data centres.
It is time the government started to show the same resolve in taking on the Musks and Zuckerbergs as Ms Asato.
Restricting access to social media for under 16s – or banning them from it as Australia has – sidesteps the real problem of addressing the harmful or degrading material it disseminates.
Protecting the young isn’t enough. As the women who have fallen victim to fake sexualised images can testify, adult lives are being devastated too.
The government should take the step it has avoided out of fear of big tech for too long – classify the likes of Facebook and X as publishers who are responsible for the content on their platforms, just as newspapers and broadcasters are accountable for what they carry.
The fiction that social media is only a host for the posts of others has been allowed to persist for too long.