Can Viking warrior Margrethe cut Big Tech down to size?

It takes a lot for a Government minister to criticise the multinationals that underpin our economic growth.

But Simon Harris fairly lashed out this week at social media giants like Facebook, Twitter and Google for facilitating the spread of disinformation about vaccination programmes.

“These platforms can be a powerful tool for good, or they can be a vehicle for falsehoods and lies, and they need to decide what side they want to be on,” he said.

He was speaking at the launch of a Department of Health campaign needed to combat the spread of online disinformation about vaccines.

Having to spend badly-needed health cash to correct lies on Facebook is one bloody good reason to get riled up. Another is that lives are being lost on his health minister watch.

Thousands of lives are at stake here. Immunisation campaigns have saved millions. But global rates are falling due to disinformation. 

The World Health Organisation recently flagged this as a major concern for global healthcare.

 Facebook’s response was to say it will limit posts by propagandists describing this measure as “appropriately comprehensive and aggressive.”

Seriously?

 It’s typical of the industry response to abuses of its awesome power. 

Users may name “anonymous” rape victims, prejudice court cases, slander people right left and centre and issue misleading information that costs lives. But that’s nothing to do with us, they say.

Should they really get away with this? If conventional media outlets carried such material, they would be bankrupted by libel actions and fined and imprisoned for contempt of court.

The defence that “it's not us, it’s the users” seems to somehow stack up legally, though it doesn’t make sense to an old hack like me who had it drilled in that libel involves anyone who helps distribute it including the editor, the printer, and even the guy who sold the paper on the street.

 Social media giants are more clearly culpable over the dubious ads they accept.

 We all know the online ads for face creams and diet pills with "astonishing powers" to make you shed kilos overnight and look not ten but thirty years younger, all endorsed by celebrities. Needless to say the products didn’t work and the celebs were incensed.Those who signed up had to make repeat payments for months if not years for useless stuff promoted with lies that often didn’t arrive.  This racket may be ridiculous but it is very lucrative. One scammer - who started in his teens when he drove a Lamborghini sports car - was fined nearly $500m by the US Federal Trade Commission.  Google alone made $1.7m from his ads and was not held to account.

Today, unpoliced, these online ads have gotten worse. The products change but the routine goes on. The latest is where a celebrity reveals they recovered from bankruptcy - or bought seven Lamborginis - thanks to investing in a cryptocurrency.

They pop up on Facebook or, via Google, who place them on various websites. Nowadays the celebs are given often-defamatory backstories that I can’t even mention them for fear of being sued, unlike the digital giants who apparently have immunity.

This is a massive consumer issue. A recent survey showed 23% of EU consumers had bought something in the past year based on such fraudulent advertising.

Digital giants are “taking the Mick” in many other ways, often hurting the most vulnerable. 

Most firms fulfil some sort of social contract by paying taxes to help pay for roads, education and water services etc that they use in the countries they operate in.

Not these technology companies. They get around tax rules by routing profits through a country with a ultra-low tax rate that’s all too happy to oblige for the billions it can still rake in.

Oxfam estimates that the world’s poorest countries alone lose out to the tune of $100bn a year from these practices  - in which Ireland plays a huge role – that cost poor countries 100 times more than what we give in charity.

The outrageousness goes on.

This newspaper recently revealed that up to 6500 recordings from Irish Apple devices were transcribed each week as part of a secret global listening project based in Cork.

The likes of Google Facebook and Apple track our every move online and have profiles with thousands of bits of information about us to sell to advertisers.

Sure, we tick the boxes and agree to all this – but only because browsing we need to work would be impossible if we didn’t. And it’s ridiculous to expect us to read contracts running to 18 pages – as Apple’s does - before using every online service.(Could there not be a standard approved contract  so we don’t have to read them all?)

We have complex data protection rules but they seem designed to confuse and annoy us rather than rein in any of this online free-for-all that has four out of ten of our children talking to strangers online once a week, another new survey revealed lately.

Sadistic murderer Graham Dwyer used them to win the first stage of a legal battle to have his case overturned. He successfully argued that gardai investigating his phone messages was a breach of his right to privacy.

Earlier this year, schools warned parents not to take photos at events because they were confused about data rules.

And the Data Protection Commissioner has criminalised the Government for holding a few pieces of information about us via the Social Services Card that many people see as a handy tool and pales into insignificance besides the 1000s of data points social media giants have on us.

So who is going to sort all this out?

 EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager is the woman for that job. 

Remember her? She’s the one who famously ordered Apple to pay Ireland €13 billion in back taxes.

The Dane has just got another five years in the post with enhanced powers and new regulation to shape digital policy across the European Union.

Ms Vestager has raised the ire of Donald Trump  - who dubbed her the “tax lady” - for her aggressive approach to US multinationals. And she could hardly get a better recommendation than that! 

Her impact to date - and hopefully into the future - is a riposte to the isolationism of Trump and Brexit. Multinationals like Google and Facebook are simply too big to be reined in by a single nation. We need the collective power of the EU to do that. 

A new “EU Digital Services Act” will hopefully rein in the likes of Facebook and Google. 

They rake in such massive profits because they employ relatively few people for the size of their business.

Surely they can afford to employ a few more to weed out fake news and fraudulent advertising - or face the wrath of Ms Vesteger!