Social media regulation: is fast and shallow better than not at all?

Very slow and then very quick – that is the impression you would get on progress on greater regulation of social media for teenagers from the UK Government. For a long period it wouldn't say anything very much. Then, under increasing pressure (and in the aftermath of the Mandelson scandal), the pace increased substantially.

Action was promised and a quick public consultation held. That closed last night and immediately the UK Government promised swift action. On the one hand, if you're going to start slow when there was urgency, any acceleration is to be welcomed. But on the other, there is still very little information on their intentions and some of the mood music is concerning.

For example, the media is already being briefed that “there are concerns inside government that reforms could be hit by a legal challenge if the consultation process is not properly followed”. Government sources are also pointing to the strength of corporate technology lobbying which has been going on.

This is the problem with open public consultations – there have been 81,000 responses, with 42,000 being parents and 12,000 being children and we can know little about any of them. It has been standard practice in corporate US for a long time now that sometimes you don't lobby politicians, you lobby citizens to lobby politicians. (Corporations don’t have to register or record this, and citizens are exempt from lobbying regulations.)

We have seen that with what appear surprisingly well-organised 'grassroots' campaigns for things which benefit corporations, like approvals for expensive drugs. In the US this is known as 'astroturfing' of 'fake grassroots'. It is unlikely that an open consultation was the best method of gathering reliable information on public attitudes to this issue.

It is also telling that there are public consultation on issues that corporations want to slow down but not on issues they want to pass quickly – there has been no public consultation on the rollout of data centres or the sharp increases in defence spending. And the briefing above raises fears that the UK government is looking for procedural excuses to cover for taking minimal action.

It may be a coincidence that Tony Blair chose the night this consultation closed to issue a shocking call for Labour to become a party of the centre right, a permanent US vassal and a facilitator of US big tech, but he remains highly influential over the policy of this government and he is primarily funded by US big tech.

Which is to say that while it has been encouraging at least to see the pace of progress on the issue of social media and children pick up, there is enough reason to fear that rigour is being substituted with speed here and that we are going to end up with a big tech-friendly voluntary framework with some tweaks.

This is massively insufficient. Common Weal has been the leading body in Scotland trying to highlight the incredible harm that has taken place to children's wellbeing and mental health and we have proposed a credible and extensive set of actions which can be taken in Scotland immediately.

Unfortunately it must be noted that despite having sent briefings to all MSPs and the Scottish Government, neither us nor the report authors have not been contacted by anyone in the Scottish Government or its agencies and the existing 'strategy' for children and tech-impacted mental health is to wait and see what the UK does and encourage 'resilience'.

Which is to say at the moment the UK appears to be setting itself up to be fast and shallow while Scotland appears to be hiding behind Westminster while approaching a 'words but no speed at all' approach.

So yes, the increase in pace has been encouraging in one regard, but as it stands it looks like the message coming from all this is that if politicians have to choose between young people in a mental health crisis and US technology corporations, they will always pick the corporations. It would be truly great to be disproved on this.