Time to face the music, Zuckerberg — but please, no draconian regulators

It is an arresting reflection that the escalating Facebook controversy may yet do as much to shape our collective future as the Brexit negotiations; perhaps more. For years the tech giant has evaded definitive scrutiny, effective regulation and meaningful accountability. It has proved nimble as well as mighty. But now, thanks to the extraordinary revelations about Cambridge Analytica and other data mining firms, it is cornered, and must face the music of democracy.

How easy it is to forget that Facebook was founded only in 2004, an entrepreneurial wheeze dreamt up by Mark Zuckerberg and his fellow Harvard students that became one of the largest corporations in the world. As Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana told last night’s Newsnight, “It’s no longer a company. It’s a country. It’s huge. It’s breathtakingly powerful. Data is the new oil.”

This in turn is a parable of the social and cultural impact that the internet has had, and the unprecedented velocity of this particular revolution. Since the public launch of the basic World Wide Web in 1991 we have been on a hectic rollercoaster ride comparable in significance to humanity’s millennia-long journey from the invention of fire to Thomas Edison. In little more than a generation a single technology has insinuated itself into and transformed almost every field of human endeavour, enterprise and interaction.

Culturally, we are still reeling: awestruck and fearful in equal measure. The most disturbing aspect of the Cambridge Analytica story is not outright illegality but how much of the web remains uncharted territory, ill-regulated or completely ungoverned. As is often the case, legislators and rule-makers have struggled to keep up with the pace of technological change.

In the first decade of the century the web giants curated the myth of themselves as globe-hugging philanthropists, offering a banquet of marvels for free. Of course, nothing so potent is offered pro bono. What companies such as Google and Facebook have done is to trade our attention — and the personal data that comes with it — for services that we find useful or entertaining.

We have all conspired in this Faustian pact, but mostly at a subconscious level. Only now is it becoming clear how much information firms such as Cambridge Analytica have scraped from our social media feeds and the manifold uses to which that data has been put.

Thanks to the painstaking work over many months of a single journalist, the Observer’s Carole Cadwalladr, a vast and shadowy network of information manipulation and political intrigue is being uncovered. Fashionable as it is to attack the “mainstream media”, there has rarely been a better example of the civic importance of old-fashioned investigative reporting.

Much of the attention thus far has been focused upon the impact such campaign tools may have had upon the 2016 US presidential election. But huge questions remain unanswered about the role of data manipulation in the Brexit referendum.

On this subject, Cambridge Analytica has repeatedly contradicted itself. In February 2016 its chief executive, Alexander Nix — suspended this week — wrote that his company had “teamed up with [the organisation] Leave.EU” to help the Brexit cause to “better understand and communicate with UK voters”. CA’s business development director, Brittany Kaiser, appeared at a launch event for the campaign in November 2015, declaring that her firm would be “running large-scale research of the nation to really understand why people are interested in staying in or out of the EU”.

In his book, The Bad Boys of Brexit, the financial force behind Leave.EU, Arron Banks, wrote explicitly that the campaign had “hired Cambridge Analytica, an American company that uses ‘big data and advanced psychographics’ to influence people”.

His close adviser, Andy Wigmore, confirmed this last year and said that he could “highly recommend” CA’s services. Yet appearing before the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport select committee last month, Nix said that “we did no work on that campaign or any campaigns”. So which is it?

The committee will clearly have much to say on the matter. As a point of urgency, the Electoral Commission should also extend the remit of its current investigation into banks and the financing of Leave.EU to encompass its use of digital data.

In the past year I have spoken at close to 100 public events in connection with my book on post-truth and technology. Many attending have voiced their anxieties about the unrestrained power of the tech giants. But that fear is eclipsed by their distaste for a Ministry of Truth or an Of-fact regulator strangling the life out of the digital services that they now take for granted.

So: a great reckoning lies ahead of these mighty companies. That is now unavoidable. But there is still time for them to avoid draconian legislation in the many jurisdictions in which they operate if they show that they are wise as well as clever. Like the Five Families in The Godfather, the tech giants should gather around a table — metaphorically, at least — to decide how they are to reconcile their economic dynamism and awesome capacity for innovation with the reasonable democratic expectations of their users.

This means much greater transparency, and much greater accountability for the content they carry. It means accepting the responsibility that comes with power — precisely what they have, in truth, been trying to avoid.

In practice, the choice is theirs. They can clean house in collaboration with legislators and regulators, or invite a hamfisted global crackdown by populist governments seeking low-hanging fruit and quick fixes.

Indisputably, the internet remains a force for good whose true potential has only begun to be tapped. But the party is most definitely over. That is the lesson of this week’s convulsions. Over to you, Zuck.