Oligarchs don’t care about ‘public good’

Don’t think the tech oligarchs are the good guys, fighting for democracy, in the next battle that’s coming.

Because they’re not.

In the next few months, both the federal government and the government of Manitoba will examine putting laws in place requiring social media companies to meaningfully block teens under the age of 16 from accessing their sites.

“It’s obvious why it’s a priority,” federal Culture Minister Marc Miller told reporters on Tuesday. “Kids are dying.”

If we’re lucky, parliament and Manitoba legislators will look for pitfalls and opportunities in the new bills and work out the best possible law — through compromise and careful non-partisan examination — to protect children and teens from the demonstrable harms of internet social media sites.

But don’t expect the social media giants and their emperors — billionaires such as X’s Elon Musk and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg — to go along quietly.

Cloaked in the mantra of freedom of speech and freedom of expression, they are likely to fight tooth and nail against anything that keeps young minds from being affected by their online presence — and more importantly, keeps advertising dollars from flowing into their own pockets.

There is a basic, crass reason for that fight, and it has nothing to do with freedom of speech.

It’s an existential fight over future profit.

Because the habits — and vices and addictions — of a lifetime are often cast as teens cross into young adulthood. (Which is why the alcohol industry is so worried about Generation Z’s decline in drinking, and why vape manufacturers so desperately want to give users the “freedom” of flavoured vapes such as cotton candy, bubble gum and black cherry.)

Social media billionaires haven’t been elected to act for the public good. They have no mandate from voters, no checks and no balances.

If they have any mandate at all, it’s from their shareholders, who mandate financial returns — though, with the elevation of billionaire CEOs to near-godlike status, it’s questionable whether Zuckerberg and Musk actually answer to anyone other than their own egos.

It’s true that billionaires only have one vote, just like the rest of us.

But they have shown a willingness to use their power to skew what you see and what you read — the information their platforms present to the public — and have also demonstrated their willingness to put up funds to take part in things such as the pay-to-play presidency of Donald Trump. In fact, you can expect Trump to come out firmly on the side of the social media oligarchs, calling restrictions on social media giants both a trade and a free speech issue.

After all, he depends on social media’s prevailing algorithms to ensure that his followers read only his messaging. And owners such as Musk have demonstrated time and time again that, faced with truths they don’t like, “tweaking” the algorithm can make messages they don’t approve of simply disappear from view. Permanently.

Business leaders undoubtedly have a role to play in public life: they employ people, spend money, invent and market products and can move the abilities of free society forwards by developing new tools.

They can power progress.

But their policies aren’t public policies, and their goals are not good governance.

In other words, let’s keep that in mind when the inevitable (paid, placed and algorithmically driven) opposition rises to protecting Canadian and Manitoban teens, and keep the oligarchs on the other side of the fence.

They do not have your best interests — or the best interests of our children — at heart.

Elect politicians who you think represent the proper goals for a government.

And remember that the oligarchs will never, ever deign to run for an elected position and put themselves at the will of the people — because they would rather own governments than serve the public.