OPINION: Big tech is hiding behind the free speech mantra

The uncontrolled power of social media is truly frightening. Efforts to roll back its extraordinary economic power or inhibit the scale of operations have been ineffectual. Whatever the abuse be it financial, pornography, incitement to violence or anti-Israel hate and antisemitism it is impossible to corral. 

Two years ago, when Roman Abramovich was still in charge of Chelsea Football Club, he organised a Stamford Bridge breakfast to combat antisemitism. Guest speaker Sharon Nazarian of the Anti-Defamation League in the US, warned TikTok was straying far from its perceived image as a fun place to watch dance videos.

She argued targeting 9-13 year- olds with uncensored, ill-informed-messages about Israel and the Middle East, with their underlying anti-Zionist, antisemitic messages, was capturing the minds of young people.

As long as TikTok, owned and controlled by China, avoids Beijing politics or advocacy of Taiwan, its output is largely untrammelled and unregulated. Economic and strategic relations between Beijing and Jerusalem have strengthened. China, which buys arms and tech from Israel, is the nation’s second largest trading partner. Yet it has done nothing to prevent TikTok being occupied by Israel and Jewish hate.

Much of the British Jewish community’s venom since 7 October has been aimed at the BBC, the Guardian and other unfriendly outlets. The BBC has enormous influence globally; its reporting shapes public opinion. the Guardian online has tremendous reach in the US and Australia.

One may dislike the reporting, some of it shameful in its willingness to swallow Hamas propaganda, but content is monitored and complaints heard. Corrections, when they come, are mostly too late, as at the start of the IDF campaign when Israel accused the BBC of ‘blood libel’ over misreporting of the loss of life at the Al-Shifa Arab Hospital.

Social media, where most young people gather their news, is more insidious. Elon Musk was treated like a conquering hero when he showed up at Rishi Sunak’s AI safety summit at Bletchley Park. Shortly after, Musk went on his own social media site X to endorse a hate tweet which alleged Jews stoked the same hatred about whites ‘they claim to want people to stop using against you’.

X may continue to propagate hate but US politicians will be fearful of outlawing the wrong-headed genius to whom the Pentagon has outsourced satellite surveillance of Ukraine and the Middle-East.

It is doubly unfortunate no one seems to have been listening to the Anti-Defamation League and warnings about how young minds at schools and American universities have been poisoned on Israel by TikTok. In much the same way as social media was used by activists to propagate revolution (since largely crushed) in the Arab Spring, it has been ruthlessly exploited to stir up Islamic populations to demonstrate in London and other cities for Gaza.

Suella Braverman may have been defenestrated for using the term ‘hate marches’, but that is what they are.

Marches of hundreds of thousands don’t just happen. Emotions are stirred up by Palestinian activists, antisemites and the Socialist Workers Party on social media. Israel, among the most polyglot nations, with a two million-plus Arab minority, is labelled a colonialist power.

The audiences are so vast and the platforms so many that stamping on anti-Zionist propaganda and tropes is impossible, the equivalent of the ‘whack-a-mole’ fairground game.

Yet at the Bletchley summit it was agreed self-regulation by the tech behemoths was the way to go. AI, with its huge processing power, ought to offer the tools to kill internet hate. It won’t because the tech tribes have no interest in interrupting traffic.

Big tech hides behind the mantra of free speech but it is all about oligopoly power and accumulating riches beyond Croesus.

• Alex Brummer is a Jewish News columnist and the City Editor, Daily Mail.