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How did we let this happen? Why do we appear so weak?

For years Brussels has been the champion of self-regulation. The dogma is – at least publicly – based on the assumption that companies know best how to tackle some of the challenges.

Our failure to understand the underlying challenges and a failure of regulation.

In a six-month period from October 2017 to March 20178, 21m sexually explicit pictures, 3.5m graphically violent posts and 2.5m forms of hate speech were removed from its site. These figures help reveal some striking points.

As expected, the data indicates that the problem is getting worse.

For instance, between January and March it was estimated that for every 10,000 messages online, between 22 and 27 contained graphic violence, up from 16 to 19 in the previous three months.

Internet Forum in 2015 in response to the alarming increase in the use of the Internet by terrorists to spread extremist propaganda

facilitation of a rapid and coordinated cross-border response mechanism to contain the spread of terrorist content online

Protocol only applies in exceptional situations, when national crisis management procedures prove insufficient.

elf-assessment reports submitted by Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla and Twitter

bserved that “[a]ll platform signatories deployed policies and systems to ensure transparency around political advertising, including a requirement that all political ads be clearly labelled as sponsored content and include a ‘paid for by’ disclaimer.”

While some of the platforms have gone to the extent of banning political ads, the transparency of issue-based advertising is still significantly neglected.

Facebook alone handles more than 100 billion transactions a day.

And it is this act of algorithmic determination that has created the communities that have too often seeded division and hate. And because these companies have become so large, we can no longer rely on the free market to correct for the harms they might be causing. The result of the business model, scale and market concentration is a systemic failure.

If you don’t like platforms wielding such tremendous power, then the solution is democratic governance, not more self-governance. It is only by doing the tough work of governance, not  just banning Trump’s tweets, that we will begin to address the harms so clearly on display at the Capitol.