Holding social media platforms to account has become critical

When Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez stood at the World Government Summit in Dubai and said social media had become "a failed state, a place where laws are ignored and crime is endured", he was being accurate.

- Styli Charalambous

He backed his words with action, announcing legislation to hold platform executives criminally liable for failing to remove illegal content and to criminalise the algorithmic amplification of harmful material.

The response was predictable. Elon Musk called him a tyrant. Silicon Valley's lobby machine cranked into gear with well-worn warnings about censorship and free speech. But here's the thing: Sánchez is not proposing anything radical. He is proposing that the laws every democracy already has should apply online, too. And he's right.

When TikTok's recommendation engine decides, from a pool of millions of videos, to push a specific snippet into your feed, it is an editorial decision. It's akin to an editor of Daily Maverick deciding which story goes on the home page or the front page of DM168 — just done at a speed and breadth unimaginable to us.

The US Supreme Court recognised this in 2024 in Moody v NetChoice, acknowledging that algorithmic curation constitutes "editorial judgement". And yet platforms face none of the legal consequences that every newspaper, broadcaster and online news publisher accepts as the cost of the power to publish.