Tech Tonic | More tech bosses should be very worried about the law catching up

Elon Musk may not be travelling to Brazil anytime soon. Or he just might, with his eccentricities, it’s difficult to predict. Mark Zuckerburg may worry a bit every time the doorbell rings unexpectedly. A facet of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov’s arrest in France (he’s since out on bail, with strict orders to stay within the country) may find a megaphone calling it a clampdown on free speech. There are arguments for that, but scratch away its surface of politicking and social media trends, witnessing that reasoning fading away rapidly.
The French and indeed the European Union law, is holding a tech boss accountable. One at the helm of a platform used by more than 900 million active users globally. Some of you may remember that I had, in my column a few weeks ago, asked the question about why the EU regulations may be morphing into activism that’s best avoidable. I’d not expect that to be thrown back at me because the finer details are crystal clear – regulations governing tech companies cannot be a shield (or argument) for breaking the law.
What Durov is being held accountable for is his platform enabling activities which are societally and legally classified as crimes. It is a long list. Complicity in enabling and allowing illegal transactions, possession and distribution of pornographic images of minors, sales of narcotic substances, organized fraud and providing cryptology services without necessary certifications or declarations.
This is where things get uncomfortable for quite a few other tech bosses. Could Europe have just reset the benchmark with how local laws perceive tech platforms and the results of weak self-regulation?
Take another look at the list of charges I mentioned above. Meta’s Instagram and Facebook platforms have a big problem too. “I’m sorry for everything you have all been through,” the moment Zuckerberg stunned parents at a US Congressional hearing earlier in the year when he turned and addressed them during a grilling about sexual exploitation and harassment that’s commonplace on the tech giant’s social media platforms.
But have things changed? Just last month, I’d written about a letter addressed to Zuckerberg (you can read that here), in which as many as 19 members of the US Congress asked Meta’s CEO why drug dealers are still being allowed to post ads on these platforms. There hasn’t been a response we know of, since. This followed a report released this summer by the watchdog group Tech Transparency Project, which found more than 450 ads on Instagram and Facebook selling an array of pharmaceuticals and other drugs.
In that congressional hearing in January, Meta wasn’t the only one with this set of troubles to answer for.
“I’m so sorry that we have not been able to prevent these tragedies. We work very hard to block all search terms related to drugs on our platform,” the words of Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, addressing parents about the issue of illegal drugs being sold on Snapchat. In late 2023, parents of more than 60 children (most of this demographic were teens), had filed a lawsuit against Snap, alleging the platform’s lack of moderation facilitated their children in acquiring drugs subsequently the cause of overdoses.
I am not entirely sure Snapchat has been able to do a successful cleanup in the months since, though we should hear more about content moderation policies and changes at Snap’s annual Partner Summit in September.
Some of you may have noticed how active Musk has been with posts defending Telegram’s Durov, in the past few days. In case you’re not well-versed with his troubles in that part of the world, you’d have thought Musk was probably genuinely feeling bad for Durov. He might genuinely have been but as with most things about X’s CEO, it is often layering self-benefit and building a narrative alongside.
In July, the European Commission’s preliminary findings detailed how X has breached the region’s Digital Services Act. The method by which the “blue checkmark” is being sold “does not correspond to industry practice and deceives users”. That X does not comply with the required transparency on advertising, as it does not provide a searchable and reliable advertisement repository. That X prohibits eligible researchers from independently accessing its public data, such as by scraping, as stated in its terms of service, which is one of DSA’s important conditions.
X, as a factor of its user base, is classified as a Very Large Online Platform (VLOP) according to the DSA. The law requires specific actions from VLOPs to tackle hate speech, misinformation, threats or terrorism. The other side of that coin is Musk himself, who has spent most of the time winking at dodgy content on the platform since his takeover of Twitter – so much so that advertisers left in large numbers, and Musk’s brilliant business idea is to sue them for not advertising on X anymore.
The next time Musk plans a trip to any country that’s still part of the European Union, he may have to worry about potential legal repercussions. Actually, be very worried. Or even Brazil for that matter, where he’s been in Justice Alexandre de Moraes’s crosshairs since April for turning down the country’s requests to crack down on certain social media posts (they say false information; there are always two sides to that coin, and we can also not take Musk’s ‘free speech’ assertions at face value). Musk and ‘free speech’ are always to be taken with a pinch of salt.
I’ll come back to my original point. There will always be voices that call any sort of action on communication platforms as a crackdown on free speech. Of course, there are political motives too (Donald Trump, in his upcoming book, reportedly threatens Zuckerberg with arrest). But the other side of that story sees tech platforms wielding far too much control over the global conversation. Durov being arrested was unprecedented, and will certainly make more tech bosses consider a quick scrape and a brush of what ails the platforms they run. Or maybe not.
Vishal Mathur is the technology editor for the Hindustan Times. Tech Tonic is a weekly column that looks at the impact of personal technology on the way we live, and vice-versa. The views expressed are personal.