“There’s a growing awareness we need to do something about this. It’s not just a moral panic. There are serious issues we need to address.”
These are the words of legal professor Elizabeth Handsley, president of the Australian Council on Children and the Media in a recent article in the Australian newspaper Sydney Morning Herald. Hansley has been researching online safety since the late 1990s, and here I find it fair to call Australia a world leader.
The Australian federal Online Safety Act from 2021 is simply impressive, so is the work of the eSafety Commissioner and their implementation work centering around something as seemingly boring but nonetheless immensely important as codes and standards.
And just this week the Australian Government announced that they would spend millions on a privacy preserving age verification pilot as advised by the country’s eSafety Commissioner in a roadmap for age verification last year.
Good things are happening around the world.
But changes in regulations in favor of child protection don’t come overnight – and they don’t come for free. Big Tech companies have massive financial interests in children. As we know from a recent Harvard study, children constitute a very important consumer market for Big Tech.
That’s why they keep on insisting on ”(…)turning down solutions because they won’t be 100 per cent effective; dismissing regulation as censorship; and an inclination to sit back and let technology companies run the show”, as it rightly pointed out by Hansley in The Sydney Herald article.
In order to keep children as a market, Big Tech uses classic lobbyism but also more subtle soft power devices. We described some of the soft power devices in the report from June 2013 ‘Big Tech – Soft Power’.
And a recent example from Maryland illustrate what we mean.
What’s Up in Maryland?
On 6 April, Maryland passed a “Kids Code” bill, which aims to prevent tech companies from collecting predatory data from children and using design features that could cause them harm, writes The Guardian.
As the digital child right organisation 5Rights writes on their website: “Following the example of California, Maryland legislators on 6th of April unanimously passed the Maryland Kids Code, marking another major win for children’s privacy and safety in the US”.
But it has been a battle. As the Guardian report big tech companies have spent a quarter of a million dollars lobbying against the Maryland bill.
In Maryland alone, tech giants racked up more than $243,000 in lobbying fees in 2023, the year the bill was introduced.
- Google spent $93,076,
- Amazon $88,886, and
- Apple $133,449 last year, according to state disclosure forms.
And they didn’t just conduct “classical” lobbying. One of Big Tech’s soft power lobby tools is the use of shadow organisations or persons. The organisations ‘Accountable Tech’ and the ‘Tech Transparency Project’ have pointed out that the Carl Szabo who testified as “a concerned parent” before the Maryland State Senate didn’t mention that he represents the Big Tech lobby group NetChoice which represents companies including TikTok and Meta.
The Wall Street Jounal investigative reporter Brody Mullins describes this phenomenon, when he writes that: “In this new era, this outside lobbying that we’re talking about now, that type of lobbying doesn’t fall under the lobbying disclosure rules, because companies are not trying to influence members of Congress or public officials, they’re trying to influence the public. And therefore, there’s no disclosure about what they’re doing, which means one of the questions you had earlier, what’s the difference between a grassroots campaign and a corporate-sponsored campaign? We don’t know (…) that can be a concern”.
In the Maryland case a big tech lobby group was disguised as a worried dad. What could appear more trustworthy?
Big Tech – Big Spending
Just a few days ago, The Verge reported that “Meta had its biggest lobbying quarter ever in the first few months of 2024, spending a record $7.6 million engaging with the US government, according to its public lobbying filing released last week”. The Verge concludes that “It’s a 64 percent jump from its spending in the fourth quarter of 2023, and it represents more than a third of what Meta spent on lobbying the entirety of last year”.
But what are they lobbying against and for?
According to its Q1 disclosure, Meta lobbied on kids’ safety bills including the Kids Online Safety Act, Children and Teens Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), and Protecting Kids on Social Media Act (which would impose age verification for social media), The Verge reports and continues:
The last time Meta set its previous lobbying record also had a connection to children and youth online. Because it was in the fourth quarter of 2021, when it spent $5.4 million and “That period coincided with the revelations from former employee turned whistleblower Frances Haugen, who shared internal documents showing the company was aware of the harmful effects of its services on teens, among other findings”.
What’s to Come?
Big Tech will most likely continue their use of massive capital and power but they will be busy because to date, nine states across the US have introduced and are now hashing out bills aimed at improving online child safety. That is: Maryland, Vermont, Minnesota, Hawaii, Illinois, New Mexico, South Carolina, New Mexico and Nevada.
Now we must all work together to secure a DSA implementation that favors children’s wellbeing. In that regard I highly recommend 5Rights’ publication A HIGH LEVEL OF PRIVACY, SAFETY & SECURITY FOR MINORS – A best practices baseline for the implementation of the Digital Services Act for children from February 2024.
If you want to read more about Big Tech’s sot power the subject you can:
- Download the report Big Tech – Soft Power here. It is 100% human made and we don’t accept money from Big Tech.
- Order the book ‘The Wolves of K Street: The Secret History of How Big Money Took Over Big Government’ by Brody Mullins It’s not out until May 7 – and we haven’t read it – but it looks good judged from there is a free excerpt right here
Picture: Caleb Woods
