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COME TOGETHER The report directly addresses UK law, but the management of these platforms needs to be an international affair. “We cannot do this alone, it is important we push for international legislation and transnational organisations to take the lead,” says Briant. “Otherwise, the impacts of data privacy legislation protecting only the already-privileged West will only amplify problems of inequality, conflicts and migration, which can then be exploited for propaganda purposes by the far right and other nefarious actors. We already saw this inequality in how the SCL Group companies operated globally, and this worldwide divide cannot be allowed to worsen.” She adds: “Cross border issues of movement of data and investigation need working out. It’s good to hear Eldon Insurance and Leave.EU will be audited, but
there needs to be international cooperation to enable full investigation of the matter of whether Arron Banks’ companies moved British data or derivatives to Mississippi for their new AI venture there. This has been shockingly slow-moving.” REGULATION DEBATE Briant tells us it is not enough that our parliamentarians have leapt forward in their comprehension of the challenges. The recommendations in the report need to be actioned through legislation. She urges people to write to their representatives to influence industry regulation if they want to ensure ethical conduct in elections. “This report shatters any confidence anyone could have had in the EU referendum and rightly calls for extensive police-led investigation. Our politicians need to know what the people really think of their democracy being corrupted by
foreign influence, dark money, dark ads, cheating, lies and lawbreaking in this way,” explains Briant. The debate of whether to regulate or not to regulate is not so cut and dried. While the report evidences clear reasons for regulation, it does not go into detail about who would be enforcing it or how it would be enforced. Inherently, regulation is a political act. We’ve witnessed what excessive regulation looks like in other parts of the world, where regulations serve only a small subset of the population. Regulators would need to be independent, driven by objective fact and be dedicated to putting public interest first - all of which are contentious in a free society. Briant tells us that for regulation to work, it would need to be put in place through a global collaborative effort, but it could be years before the world powers sit down to discuss this.
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