Irish Health Minister, Stephen Donnelly, has accused social media, online chats, and Roblox of being a source of harmful content.
Governments and political candidates from around the world have been grappling with how to crack down on the internet and disrupts people’s ability to communicate with each other. For them, freedom of expression is a threat to democracy and the solution is to shut everything down and have people who build online communities arrested.
While the calls for authoritarianism has been pretty strong, it expands across multiple major political parties. Mainstream media, who do more to actively cheer on their own political party of choice rather than objectively report on the news, simply regurgitate their talking points by calling these efforts to crack down on civil rights as “public safety” issues, “defending democracy”, or even “protecting the children” among others. This to cover up the obvious fact that this is an effort to stamp out civil rights and take us back to the bad old days where communicating on the phone was the only way to communicate with people long distance.
As we noted earlier, convicted felon, Donald Trump, called for the arrest and jailing of Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg. Meanwhile, a prominant Democrat called for the arrest of X/Twitter owner, Elon Musk. Brazil, on top of it all, recently banned X/Twitter and threatened to fine anyone who used a VPN to get around that freshly imposed censorship. France, for its part, arrested Telegram co-founder, Pavel Durov. While French authorities never gave a real reason for why the arrest occurred, mainstream media jumped to the conclusion that it was because Durov wasn’t moderating the platforms content good enough and that this was an arrestable offence in their eyes.
While the nature of Durov’s arrest isn’t actually all that clear, what is clear is that governments are cracking down on expression all across the internet for whatever reason they see fit. Social media networks have been declared the enemy and governments are doing whatever they can to shut down these communities.
Recently, we learned that Irish Health Minister, Stephen Donnelly, has also recently made calls to shut down social media and break up online communities. Relying heavily on the questionable claim that social media is like tobacco (even though there’s a pretty clear difference given that tobacco is something people consume), Donnelly argued that social media can’t be “trusted” to “do the right thing”. This while suggesting that action needs to be taken to crack down on social media. From MSN:
The time of asking or expecting online companies to do the right thing and remove harmful content “is over”, the Minister for Health said as he pledged take a tougher stance on dealing with online platforms.
Stephen Donnelly said the partnership approach between government and social media companies has not worked in the past, comparing it to asking a “tobacco company” to do the right thing.
He made the comments as he announced the Government is establishing an online health taskforce, to develop a public health response to the harms caused to children and young people by online activity.
Mr Donnelly said it has been set up in recognition of research and evidence showing the link between online and physical and mental health harms.
Of course, it’s worth pointing out that the research and evidence doesn’t actually show such a link. There have been repeated studies and mountains of evidence that suggest that the reality is actually that there is no link between social media and harms to young people’s mental health. Further, many of the claims of there being harm, whether it is the US Surgeon General, or the notorious UNESCO report, is sourced to a single slide presented by Facebook where it is painfully clear that the statistical data point was cherry picked for the purpose of pushing a narrative rather than warning of any inherent harms. So, all those talking points about how social media leads to Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) and teenage girls feeling bad about their bodies? It’s a long debunked talking point that has little to no bearing on reality that only mainstream media is desperately trying to keep alive in their efforts to bash the internet.
What’s more, efforts to crack down on social media, while carrying little to no hope of any appreciable benefit to society, runs the risk of breaking communities apart and leading to further social isolation as like minded individuals suddenly lose the ability to communicate with each other. So, not only is there little appreciable benefit to these efforts, there’s major risks associated with attacking social media.
Donnelly, for his part, went even further and went so far as to call for a crack down on video games, specifically singling out Roblox of all things as a source of harmful content:
Mr Donnelly said that while the use of Twitter is “phasing out” among young people, Snapchat and TikTok are a “big target” in promoting harmful content.
He also said that harmful content is not limited to social media sites, and is also shared on popular games like Roblox and online chat rooms.
I think the time of asking or expecting online platforms do the right thing is over,” Mr Donnelly said.
“I think we might as well be asking tobacco companies to do the right thing.
“The online platform, some of them have taken measures. Many of them have not.
“We’re all aware of platforms where they’ve been asked to take down horrific content and refuse to do so.
“I think the partnership approach is over.
“I wouldn’t suggest a partnership approach with tobacco companies. I’m not suggesting the partnership approach with online platforms, We have tried that and it didn’t work.
“I’m suggesting a public health led approach that says our obligation is to keep children safe, and we’re going to do that.
“We have legislation do it already, and if we need that legislation strengthened, then so be it.”
He said children are not safe online, adding that online activities, features and content directed at children are harming them.
This isn’t even the first time we’ve seen a call to crack down and censor video games. Earlier this year, Australian lawmakers were considering the idea of expanding age verification laws to include video games in an effort to crack down on the entertainment medium. As we pointed out at the time, age verification laws are ripe for abuse and expansion. Once you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Same thing here where once you have efforts to crack down on “harmful content”, it can easily be expanded to anything at all, including video games.
The idea that Roblox is inherently harmful to youth doesn’t even pass the laugh test. To suggest otherwise shows a complete disconnect from reality. The sad thing is that politicians from around the world have long been disconnected from reality when it comes to technological issues. Whether it is a reluctance to pass privacy laws, censoring platforms altogether, or trying to legally demolish all protections for online services in general (ala Section 230 removal), politicians are seeking to destroy decades of progress in the online world because they have their own personal pet project of forcing laws governing what is and is not allowed to be said on the internet – typically in ways that politically benefits themselves.
