Tag: online harms

Journeys through online harms

X.AI – the company was-trillionaireElon Musk built in 2025 by smashing together X (the former Twitter) and xAI, which he founded in 2023 – is suing the state of Minnesota, claiming that its new law banning access to nudification technology violates the First Amendment. X.AI, which SpaceX swallowed early this year, argues that it’s already stopping this sort of thing and that the law is overbroad and will block constitutionally protected speech. At Techdirt, Mike Masnick argues the law is genuinely badly drafted.

I saw this story while reading The Chatbot Trap: How Digital Friends Can Become Life-Threatening, by Geertrui Mieke De Ketelaere, Logging Off: The Human Cost of Our Digital World, by Adele Zeynep Walton, and Users: How Big Tech Took Control and How to Fight Back, by Beeban Kidron. In the first, a Belgian software engineer and AI expert discovers the suicide-inducing tendencies of chatbots, investigates how they work, and builds an organization to push for regulation. In the second, a Zoomer who lost her sister following disturbing online interaction embraces a new balance between digital media and human connections. In the third, a member of Britain’s House of Lords journeys from filmmaker to tireless campaigner for child safety online. All three love technology and its benefits but oppose the business models and individuals who are deciding the direction of travel.

De Ketelaere’s book begins with an email: someone who saw her speak about AI wants help “to assert my rights as a human being” after her conversations with a chatbot turned disturbing – and after reading media stories connecting chatbot use to cases of suicide. De Ketelaere ends with ideas about regulation and ways to recognize the signs of an unhealthy situation.

At this year’s Computers, Privacy, and Data Protection, De Ketelaere warned of the danger of abruptly closing off intimate connections with bots because of the traumatic loss for the people concerned. As she says, even minor tweaks that favor the owning company’s business interests can undermine the relationships users experience.

De Ketelaere’s book is particularly strong in clearly describing the technical inner workings of these chatbots, revealed to her by careful study of the chatbot conversations her contacts supply. Few writing on this topic have presented such careful detail so readably.

Walton’s book begins with loss, and goes on to outline what she’s learned about the services her sister used and her own experiences as part of the generation who adopted and obsessed over Instagram as teens. Following chapters on social media and algorithms, she goes considers the impact of technology design on workers’ rights, individuals, and society more broadly through what she calls the “endless stream of content vomit”. Following some regulatory recommendations – consider social media addiction a public health issue, amend the Suicide Act 1961 to make companies liable, adopt safety by design, and make companies pay for the harms they cause – she concludes by considering how to reshape our relationship with technology so it serves us but does not dominate our lives.

In 2011, Charles Arthur‘s Social Warming argued that social media harms continue because no one chooses to stop them. Walton – like De Ketelaere and Kidron – angrily blames uncaring companies. It’s hard to disagree, although I take issue with Walton’s calling Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act “archaic”; granted, it was not written for today’s algorithmic feeds, but there would be no content moderation without it.

Kidron is well-known as a campaigner for children’s online safety. Yet all along she has repeatedly stressed that the privacy, autonomy, and protection children deserve from data grabs and online exploitation should be available to all of us.

Appointed to the House of Lords as a crossbench peer in 2012, Kidron’s interest began with seeing her 15-year-old daughter and three friends together focused solely on their own phones. Her subsequent investigation became her 2013 documentary InRealLife and inspired her concurrent creation of the 5Rights Foundation. The film is notable for the extraordinary trust and confidence she builds with the many young people she interviews; listening to them was crucial.

Her book is long and loaded with detail on her efforts and frustrations in working on legislation and amendments (making the book’s lack of an index infuriating). Disabused of the hope that a film would do the job, she travels the world, pushing everyone from Nobel Laureates to Silicon Valley CEOs to politicians to popes (plural) to take Internet harms seriously. She explains well the lobbyists’ playbook as she hopes for the industry’s “tobacco moment”. Late on, Oprah Winfrey links the lack of change to the silence after her show on sexual abuse, saying that parents don’t believe it will happen to their child, and they don’t want the fear. In response, Kidron attempts to show a positive vision, including personal changes to reclaim our lives.

Kidron’s tale largely ignores civil society other than the Campaign for Countering Digital Hate and Max Schrems. Yet she has more in common with groups like ORG than she may realize: many strange bedfellows are converging on digital sovereignty to enable resistance against the terms dictated by a distant, self-interested country.

Illustrations: Children playing, by Hubert-François Gravelot, 1760-1761 (via Smithsonian).

Wendy M. Grossman is an award-winning journalist. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. She is a contributing editor for the Plutopia News Network podcast. Follow on Mastodon or Bluesky.

The safe place

For a long time, fear that technical decisions – new domain names ($), cooption of open standards or software, laws mandating data localization – would splinter the Internet. “Balkanize” was heard a lot.

A panel at the UK Internet Governance Forum a couple of weeks ago focused on this exact topic, and was mostly self-congratulatory. Which is when it occurred to me that the Internet may not *be* fragmented, but it *feels* fragmented. Almost every day I encounter some site I can’t reach: email goes into someone’s spam folder, the site or its content is off-limits because it’s been geofenced to conform with copyright or data protection laws, or the site mysteriously doesn’t load, with no explanation. The most likely explanation for the latter is censorship built into the Internet feed by the ISP or the establishment whose connection I’m using, but they don’t actually *say* that.

The ongoing attrition at Twitter is exacerbating this feeling, as the users I’ve followed for years continue to migrate elsewhere. At the moment, it takes accounts on several other services to keep track of everyone: definite fragmentation.

Here in the UK, this sense of fragmentation may be about to get a lot worse, as the long-heralded Online Safety bill – written and expanded until it’s become a “Frankenstein bill”, as Mark Scott and Annabelle Dickson report at Politico – hurtles toward passage. This week saw fruitless debates on amendments in the House of Lords, and it will presumably be back in the Commons shortly thereafter, where it could be passed into law by this fall.

A number of companies have warned that the bill, particularly if it passes with its provisions undermining end-to-end encryption intact, will drive them out of the country. I’m not sure British politicians are taking them seriously; so often such threats are idle. But in this case, I think they’re real, not least because post-Brexit Britain carries so much less global and commercial weight, a reality some politicians are in denial about. WhatsApp, Signal, and Apple have all said openly that they will not compromise the privacy of their masses of users elsewhere to suit the UK. Wikipedia has warned that including it in the requirement to age-verify its users will force it to withdraw rather than violate its principles about collecting as little information about users as possible. The irony is that the UK government itself runs on WhatsApp.

Wikipedia, Ian McRae, the director of market intelligence for prospective online safety regulator Ofcom, showed in a presentation at UKIGF, would be just one of the estimated 150,000 sites within the scope of the bill. Ofcom is ramping up to deal with the workload, an effort the agency expects to cost £169 million between now and 2025.

In a legal opinion commissioned by the Open Rights Group, barristers at Matrix Chambers find that clause 9(2) of the bill is unlawful. This, as Thomas Macaulay explains at The Next Web, is the clause that requires platforms to proactively remove illegal or “harmful” user-generated content. In fact: prior restraint. As ORG goes on to say, there is no requirement to tell users why their content has been blocked.

Until now, the impact of most badly-formulated British legislative proposals has been sort of abstract. Data retention, for example: you know that pervasive mass surveillance is a bad thing, but most of us don’t really expect to feel the impact personally. This is different. Some of my non-UK friends will only use Signal to communicate, and I doubt a day goes by that I don’t look something up on Wikipedia. I could use a VPN for that, but if the only way to use Signal is to have a non-UK phone? I can feel those losses already.

And if people think they dislike those ubiquitous cookie banners and consent clickthroughs, wait until they have to age-verify all over the place. Worst case: this bill will be an act of self-harm that one day will be as inexplicable to future generations as Brexit.

The UK is not the only one pursuing this path. Age verification in particular is catching on. The US states of Virginia, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, Montana, and Utah have all passed legislation requiring it; Pornhub now blocks users in Mississippi and Virginia. The likelihood is that many more countries will try to copy some or all of its provisions, just as Australia’s law requiring the big social media platforms to negotiate with news publishers is spawning copies in Canada and California.

This is where the real threat of the “splinternet” lies. Think of requiring 150,000 websites to implement age verification and proactively police content. Many of those sites, as the law firm Mischon de Reya writes may not even be based in the UK.

This means that any site located outside the UK – and perhaps even some that are based here – will be asking, “Is it worth it?” For a lot of them, it won’t be. Which means that however much the Internet retains its integrity, the British user experience will be the Internet as a sea of holes.

Illustrations: Drunk parrot in a Putney garden (by Simon Bisson; used by permission).

Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. Follow on Mastodon.