Patricia Clarke
Appearances
Pod Save the UK
Trump’s plan for “Peace” in Ukraine only pleases Putin + The Politics of Modern Love
I sort of paused because there was a moment where the tech secretary sort of said, OK, we're going to try and put pressure on Ofcom, who's a tech regulator, to put pressure on the tech giants to do this. And if they don't do it, then maybe we'll consider an Australia-type ban. And then a week later, he said, actually, that's not on the cards at all.
Pod Save the UK
Trump’s plan for “Peace” in Ukraine only pleases Putin + The Politics of Modern Love
I think they're in a really difficult position right now because they are pushing this idea of growth. You know, we don't want to be like Europe, which has currently got this reputation for being stagnant and regulatory and boring. So maybe Brexit provides an opportunity for us to be able to say, actually, we're the place where innovation and growth happens.
Pod Save the UK
Trump’s plan for “Peace” in Ukraine only pleases Putin + The Politics of Modern Love
But then equally, the UK has been a country that's actually been really forward thinking in terms of its online safety laws. So the online safety bill is the first of its kind.
Pod Save the UK
Trump’s plan for “Peace” in Ukraine only pleases Putin + The Politics of Modern Love
There are parts of it that are really, really, I think, positive and exciting. For example, we're going to be the first country to look at actually prosecuting people for creating deepfakes, not just distributing them. There are going to be fines levied against big tech companies.
Pod Save the UK
Trump’s plan for “Peace” in Ukraine only pleases Putin + The Politics of Modern Love
That's the first of its kind law in this space, and it could mean that other countries follow suit, and that's all really positive. But there are other things that have come under criticism. One of the things that's on the table is Age verification, for example. We know that I think it's between five and seven million people in the UK alone don't have IDs. So what would that actually look like?
Pod Save the UK
Trump’s plan for “Peace” in Ukraine only pleases Putin + The Politics of Modern Love
There's a lot of kind of things that could go wrong, but I think it's an interesting starting point. And I think it's equally, though, it's cornered people like Peter Kyle, because they're saying on the one hand, we want growth. And on the other hand, we're this kind of...
Pod Save the UK
Trump’s plan for “Peace” in Ukraine only pleases Putin + The Politics of Modern Love
Ofcom has really good data on this. So, you know, they say nine in 10 children own a mobile phone by the time they reach the age of 11. That's obviously very young. The House of Commons report found that children between the age of 13 and 17 have encountered one or more potential harms online. That can be violent content, that can be content that's pornographic.
Pod Save the UK
Trump’s plan for “Peace” in Ukraine only pleases Putin + The Politics of Modern Love
And three in five secondary school aged children have been contacted online in a way that potentially made them feel uncomfortable. More than that, we have, you know, Frances Haugen, the Facebook whistleblower, leaked that Instagram had data that young women's mental health was being harmed by the kind of content that they were seeing.
Pod Save the UK
Trump’s plan for “Peace” in Ukraine only pleases Putin + The Politics of Modern Love
And it was that whistleblower that forced Meta to take some form of action against this. The problem with this is that we don't have sort of big longitudinal studies that tell us exactly how linked these harms are to social media. And I kind of think both things can be true. We can see a trend. We know that young people's mental health, anxiety, depression and suicide rates are all going up.
Pod Save the UK
Trump’s plan for “Peace” in Ukraine only pleases Putin + The Politics of Modern Love
And we know that smartphones came into the picture 15 years ago. We can see that link. I don't see why we can't start taking protective and decisive action.
Pod Save the UK
Trump’s plan for “Peace” in Ukraine only pleases Putin + The Politics of Modern Love
Yeah.
Pod Save the UK
Trump’s plan for “Peace” in Ukraine only pleases Putin + The Politics of Modern Love
So just on the Australia ban, what's kind of interesting is that they've just done a blanket ban. And some of the critiques are, well, you know, people will find ways around that. Norway banned social media for children under 13. And there was a study that found that 72% of 11 year olds had found a way around that, which I thought was amazing. Wow.
Pod Save the UK
Trump’s plan for “Peace” in Ukraine only pleases Putin + The Politics of Modern Love
But I think it's a broader cultural conversation which needs to be had in terms of practical measures. I think you need public health campaigns. I'm still pro things like algorithmic transparency. I think that's something that you could push on the companies to try and see how this data is being used and how they're targeting children in that way.
Pod Save the UK
Trump’s plan for “Peace” in Ukraine only pleases Putin + The Politics of Modern Love
I mean, the UK has a point in that it's slightly kumbaya. It's like, we're all going to be open and transparent and ethical. And it's got these six points and it's not very specific. And the UK actually did say, you know, it didn't provide enough clarity on global governance and the national security challenge that AI poses. poses. And to that extent, they have a point.
Pod Save the UK
Trump’s plan for “Peace” in Ukraine only pleases Putin + The Politics of Modern Love
Equally, I think it does go back to what we were talking about earlier, which is this idea of growth and this feeling of they don't want to be lumped in with Europe and all of the countries that are pushing for regulation and they want to look like they're doing innovative things.
Pod Save the UK
Trump’s plan for “Peace” in Ukraine only pleases Putin + The Politics of Modern Love
I think some of the figures there have been a little bit misreported. So they want to raise about £70 million from the big tech companies. They're saying this is 0.02% of global revenue. It's about £10 million each, which if you think of a company like Apple, that's like 1p for most of us.
Pod Save the UK
Trump’s plan for “Peace” in Ukraine only pleases Putin + The Politics of Modern Love
And so they've put out these statements where they've said, you know, Google said it could disincentivise people. Uber said that as well. X said that as well. But they weren't very strongly worded. And realistically, the amount of money that they're going to make from staying in Britain is going to be much bigger than 10 million. And so... I'd be surprised if they left.
Pod Save the UK
Trump’s plan for “Peace” in Ukraine only pleases Putin + The Politics of Modern Love
Equally, I think you do have a point that Elon Musk has obviously spoken out against the UK. Ofcom, interestingly, the regulator said that there was a clear link between what happened on X and the discourse on X and the actual violence on the street. And I think the implication was, although they didn't say it you know, we could fine for something like that.
Pod Save the UK
Trump’s plan for “Peace” in Ukraine only pleases Putin + The Politics of Modern Love
The maximum fine there, again, is 18 million, which for Twitter isn't a huge amount of money. The optics would be so bad to say that as soon as a country tries a little bit of regulation, we're just pulling out of it entirely. That would look... For Google, TikTok, the US, it would... Look so bad, but I don't think that they would do that.