Monday Morning Moan - Dirty Sánchez? Let's focus on the dirty war Social Media billionaires are waging about being told, ‘No!’

Do you know what a Dirty Sánchez is? I confess it’s a part of the vernacular that had passed me by until last week when Elon Musk used the term.

A Dirty Sánchez is - and apologies for airing this on a Monday morning! - either a reference to someone having a thick moustache or a sexual act during which fecal matter is intentionally smeared onto a person’s upper lip.

Elon left us in no doubt which interpretation he  meant in a posting on X last week:

Classy, huh?

Why?

Apart from another display of emotional and temperamental immaturity, what was Musk on about? His ire was directed at a particular Sanchez, Pedro Sánchez, who has become a very sharp thorn in the side of Social Media moguls in recent weeks.

Sánchez is Prime Minister of Spain and he’s the hombre who has moved the political debate about Social Media abuses beyond the normal platitudinous ‘something must be done’ faux outrage of most national politicians, a sentiment all too often aired shortly before cosying up to the Tech Bro du jour for another stab at a photo opp on that ever-popular political destination of choice, the bleeding edge of modernity.

What has Sánchez has done differently is, well, he’s actually done something more  than grandstand. I know! Do you think it’ll catch on? I suppose that depends on whether he survives the online assault coming his way from Musk and his entitled elite - and that’s been pretty full-on to date.

As well as Musk’s highly-public tantrums and the usual deployment of the lowest-common denominator insult of ‘Fascists!!!’ - a particularly tasteful touch when aimed at the leader of a country with genuine experience of real fascism! - others have rallied to his cause, not least Pavel Durov, Russian tech mogul and founder of Telegram, the man arrested last year by the French authorities for alleged lack of content moderation which allowed the spread of criminal activities on his platform.

In a blanket message sent to all Telegram users in Spain Durov accused Sánchez of  “pushing dangerous new regulations that threaten your internet freedoms” and that Spain risked turning into “a surveillance state under the guise of ‘protection’”. Political dissent, journalism and “everyday opinions” would be silenced, in the dystopian dark age he appears to see ahead as a result of what Sánchez has dared to do.

So what is that has caused Durov and Musk to soil their diapers  - see Elon, we can all do scatalogical. It's not big, it’s not clever! - in this way? Simple. At the World Governments Summit last week, Sánchez  announced an action plan to regulate what he called the “failed state” of Social Media. Yup, a plan that actually involves doing practical things and doing them now, not in a few years time after they’ve been pushed down a consultation path into the middle distance.

The actions include:

• Turning algorithmic manipulation and amplification of illegal content into a new criminal offense.

• Implementing a hate and polarization footprint system to track, quantify, and expose how digital platforms fuel division and amplify hate.

• Banning access to Social Media for minors under the age of 16. Platforms will be required to implement effective age verification systems — not just checkboxes, but real barriers that work.

Oh, and the plan will hold platform executives - that’d be Musk and Durov et al - legally accountable for infringements taking place on their sites.

Any of that seem desperately unreasonable to you?

Basically, Spain’s ‘crime’ it seems is joining Australia in actually turning its words into actions, rather than nodding sagely and promising to do something…at some point…maybe…but anyway, aren’t those US Tech Bros just awful?!?!?

(To give credit where it’s due, the UK Government did at least appear set to legislate to tackle Musk’s recent Grok controversy when it was revealed to be an enabler for creating illegal content, including kiddie porn potentially , and to produce images of women without their clothes on! Musk wasn’t very happy then either - “Fascists!!!” Et etc, you know the script by now…)

Incidentally, it’s worth noting that a recent Ipsos poll in Spain asking whether respondents agreed that under-14s ought to be barred from Social Media platforms had a resounding 82% in favor and only 16% actively against. Based on that, this isn’t fascism it’s a democratically-elected government putting into action a plan that the majority of the electorate supports. Again, do you think that might catch on? (Spoiler - of course not!)

Egos

Of course, there are some very fragile egos in play here, belonging to very, very wealthy individuals who aren’t used to being told ‘No!’. At the World Economic Forum gathering in Davos last month, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff caused a stir when he declared:

These tech companies will not be held responsible for the damage that they are basically doing to our families, just as the Social media Companies have not been held responsible for the damage that they did....These US tech companies, they hate regulation.

He was talking in the main about AI firms, but pointed out:

We can learn from what happened in Social Media....You can see that there are governments, not our [US] Government, but other governments, that have now taken aggressive actions on Social Media.

That Sánchez means what he said shouldn’t really have come as a surprise. He tore up his planned speech at the same Davos gathering to launch into a full-blooded takedown of Social Media firms and their alleged abuses. He didn’t hold back as he railed against what he said we should all have learned about what goes on “hidden in the bowels of the algorithms":

We didn’t realize it then. But we do now. Now we know that the seamless and free connectivity offered by social media also came with cyberbullying, hate speech, sex offences, privacy violations and a terrible rise of anxiety, violence and loneliness.

Now we know that far from bringing humanity together and “empowering the people”, these platforms have resulted in a concentration of power and wealth in the hands of just a few. All of this at the cost of our social cohesion, our mental health, and our democracies.

He weighed into Fake News and the power of platforms to promote unfettered mis-information:

Every day, our feeds and walls are filled with altered images, flawed data and fake news that distort our perception of reality. Fake News that made many people believe that the COVID-19 virus didn’t exist, that the ethnic and cultural minorities that live in our countries are the source of all our problems, that the state is a scam working against the interests of citizens. Every day we consume millions of Fake News [items] that are 70% more likely to be shared than real ones. And that the owners of large Social media companies have chosen not to stop. Not because it is hard, or because they have read Dérrida, but because they are good for business. 

This has created the “failed state” he characterizes social media as being:

What was supposed to be a space for constructive debate and the free exchange of ideas has become a rigged battlefield filled with manipulation, censorship and falsehood. And let’s be clear: this didn’t happen by mistake. It has been fuelled in a systematic way. By foreign powers – like Russia – that want to weaken our institutions and alter our democratic processes. By anti-system political forces that want to bring chaos to our societies and use it to seize power, like fascists did in the past.

And it happened because of the likes of Musk, he added, the owners of ‘Big Social Media, characterising them as:

A small group of techno-billionaires that are no longer satisfied with holding nearly total economic power: now they also want political power in a way that is undermining our democratic institutions. And they don't even hide this goal. Peter Thiel, Co-founder of PayPal and one of their leading ideologues, openly admitted in an interview that tech-billionaires want to overthrow democracy because – and I quote – they ‘have stopped believing that freedom and democracy are compatible’.

We should wonder, the “freedom” of whom exactly? Because democracy is not only compatible with the freedom of the people; it is the necessary pre-condition for it. What truly limits democracy is the power of the elites. It is the power of those who think that because they are rich, they are above the law and can do anything. That is why, my friends, that is why the tech-billionaires want to overthrow democracy.

These people must be fought, he declared, and we can’t be intimidated by them:

We are all scared. Because the people we are up against are extremely powerful. They have almost unlimited financial and technological resources, and very dangerous allies. And they play dirty because they don't follow our moral rules and live in a world without consequences. But I know that we can win this battle. Because we are right. Because we are more. And because we’ve done it before.

Well said

I’m totally behind Sánchez on this one - and the sooner Macron, Merz and Starmer - or whoever is in charge of the UK by the time you read this! - follow his lead in Europe the better.

But it’s not going to be a battle won easily or anytime soon. Last week the US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee published an interim report into what it called The Foreign Censorship Threat in which it openly accuses the EU of conducting a multi-year campaign to undermine US tech firms and attack general freedom of speech through oppressive regulation designed to achieve global online narrative control. Sanchez can expect no support coming his way from the Oval Office.

That said, it’s encouraging to see that Spain is not taking the hectoring response from various directions lying down with Sanchez hitting back in Madrid after the latest billionaire BS:

Democracy will obviously not be swayed by the tech oligarchs of the algorithm. Just yesterday they addressed millions of people via their platforms to spread lies.”

Of Durov’s postings, the Spanish Government released a statement that alleged that he had “deliberately designed a minimal moderation architecture that has turned Telegram into a recurring space for documented criminal activities such as child sex trafficking and drug trafficking”, pointing to cases under investigation in  France, South Korea and Spain itself.

Never mind Dirty Sánchez, this is going to be a dirty war of words all round - but it’s a war that has to be won.