TikTok in the dock (again)
Opinion
From suicidal car journeys and actual suicide material reaching youngsters courtesy of TikTok to the allegations against Meta, there is a sense that the public mood is changing, writes Ray Snoddy.
Even by their own lamentable standards, it has been a week from hell for the social media giants.
TikTok has led the roll call of shame, for all too many obvious, tragic reasons.
The police have said that there was no evidence that the five murderers of PC Tom Clough and PC Matthew Blades were actually filming their final “joy ride”.
That may have been the case on this occasion, but filming police chases on social media has become a trend, not just in the UK.
One of the five, Makai Saddington, posted a string of TikTok videos that appeared to show him engaging in high-speed police chases.
A Sun investigation found “scores more videos showing feral youths trying to bait cops” on social media, some of them on TikTok.
Prime Minister Andy Burnham attacked the “truly reprehensible” TikTok trend of cop-baiting videos, and Number 10 said it had “raised the issue” of this “appalling content” with the social media group since the tragedy.
The official response seems more than a little underwhelming given the gravity of the situation.
Wrong-way driving videos
In a horrifying prelude to the Middlesbrough tragedy earlier this month, five teenagers wearing balaclavas drove the wrong way down a motorway in Ireland’s County Kildare and died in a head-on crash. They killed not just themselves but two innocent victims on their way to a family wedding.
The teenagers were filming their drive, and if they had survived, the video may have ended up on TikTok, Snap or other forums.
Ireland also reacted with anger when TikTok representatives declined an invitation to appear before an Irish Parliamentary committee investigating the craze of posting videos of people driving the wrong way down motorways on the Chinese-owned site.
Perhaps TikTok was being prescient when it emerged last week that its UK arm, which covers TikTok activities in Europe, Latin America and the Middle East, had increased the sum set aside for legal and regulatory battles to £733m ($1bn). It may not be nearly enough.
Last year, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission fined TikTok £453m (€530m) for failing to guarantee that data from European users sent to China would not be accessed by the Chinese Government.
Suicide ideation videos
TikTok also has questions to answer in the case of the death of the previously cheerful, bright 13-year-old British schoolgirl Blake Gallier.
It emerged in the past few days that before she died, Blake had allegedly been shown “suicide ideation” videos on TikTok after liking and reporting material on suicide a few months earlier.
The Times reported last week that Ofcom is investigating TikTok’s compliance with child safety rules, although the regulator says it cannot investigate individual pieces of content.
To complete a wondrous week for the company, The Times reported that TikTok influencers had been causing “a stink” about supposed perfume harms.
Health experts had to point out that spraying perfume on your neck does not cause health problems such as cancer, let alone needing health warnings on the packaging as if they contained cigarettes.
For good measure, Uber, a digital disruptor rather than a social media site, was fined £705m(€825m) by a Dutch regulator for breaching Europe’s data protection regulations by deactivating driver accounts through automated systems without adequately informing them.
Meta in court
Yet Uber and TikTok’s financial problems could be nothing compared with what could happen to Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
No less than 29 US states, including California where the social media giant is based, have joined together to sue Meta over the tech giant’s alleged failure to protect children.
Previous cases have been limited in their nature, involving individuals and pinprick sums of compensation.
This case, according to Meta itself, could involve fines of up to $1.4trn, close to its total market capitalisation, if it were to be found guilty.
The company is accused of deliberately preying on children and hiding the truth about the effect of social media on their mental health.
In her opening arguments, Megan O’Neill, deputy attorney general for California, claimed that Meta’s strategy was “to hook the users. Hold them for as long as they can. Harvest their data. Hide the truth from the public when making public statements”.
In later evidence to a Federal court in Oakland, California, a whistleblower, Arturo Bejar, a former engineering director at Meta, claimed that the company operated a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy towards underage users.
Meta is alleged to have illegally collected data from users aged under 13, something that had contributed to mental health problems among the young.
In its defence, with the best lawyers money can buy, Meta will of course deny everything, and it is too early to hazard a guess about the final outcome.
Whatever happens, there will likely be appeal after appeal, probably all the way to the US Supreme Court.
The court of public opinion
The courts are one thing. The court of public opinion is quite another and could increasingly involve unpredictable people such as politicians.
Holding tech giants such as TikTok and Meta to account is obviously difficult.
Their financial power, at least in the US in the case of Meta, and in China in the case of TikTok, results in embedded political influence.
Another pillar upholds their continuing strength. It is that they exist and their behaviour has become normalised in the public mind in the way that the madness of President Donald Trump is somehow still tolerated.
Such acquiescence may be about to change. From suicidal car journeys and actual suicide material reaching young people courtesy of TikTok, to the allegations against Meta, there is a sense that the public mood is changing and becoming more hostile.
And that is before we consider the role of social media in undermining democracies everywhere with the platforming of extreme, bizarre and daft, damaging ideas.
For anything to really change, governments will have to take concerted action and actually do something to stamp out obvious and malign abuses of power, rather than “raising the issue”, which those involved do yet again.
Raymond Snoddy is a media consultant, national newspaper columnist and former presenter of NewsWatch on BBC News. He writes for The Media Leader on Wednesdays — bookmark his column here.