I've spent the last two and a half years studying this problem, pretty much from the day I woke up after the U.S. presidential election in November 2016, and I'm convinced of the thesis that I've just laid out to you. However, I want to be clear: Technology doesn't cause this problem. It accelerates it. It shapes it. It shapes its growth and its direction. It determines in what ways social development and history flow. Technology is an amplifier of the intentions of those who use it. These consequences are, in my view, not inevitable. There's no technological determinism here. We can fix this.
Just as we made policy decisions to expand access to affordable Internet and to make net neutrality the law of so many lands—we did that to support the democratizing potential of the technology—we can now make policies to limit the exploitation of these tools by malignant actors and by companies that place profits over the public interest. We have to view our technology problem through the lens of the social problems that we're experiencing.
This is why the problem of political fragmentation, hate speech or tribalism in digital media, depending on how you want to describe it, looks different in each of your countries. It looks different in each of your countries because it feeds on the social unrest, the cultural conflict and the illiberalism that is native to each society. There are common features that stretch across the board, but each country is going to see this in a slightly different way.
To be fair, our democracies are failing a lot of people. People are upset for good reason, but that upset is not manifesting as reform anymore. It's manifesting as a kind of festering anger. That radicalism comes from the way technology is shifting our information environments and shaping how we understand the world. We rarely see the world through the eyes of others. We are divided into tribes, and we are shown a version of the world day in and day out, month after month, that deepens our prejudices and widens the gaps between our communities. That's how we have to understand this problem.
To treat this, this sickness, this disease, we have to see it holistically. We have to see how social media companies are part of a system. They don't stand alone as the supervillains, as much as we might like to brand them that way, although they carry a great deal of responsibility. Look and see how the entire media market has bent itself to the performance metrics of Google and Facebook. See how television, radio and print have tortured their content production and distribution strategies to get likes and shares and to appear higher in the Google News search results. It's extraordinary. It reinforces itself, the traditional media and the new media.
Yes, I completely agree with Professor Owen that we need a public policy agenda and that it has to be comprehensive. We need to put red lines around illegal content. We need to limit data collection and exploitation. We need to modernize competition policy to reduce the power of monopolies. We also need to pull back the curtain on this puppet show and show people how to help themselves and how to stop being exploited.
I think there's a public education component to this that political leaders have a responsibility to carry. We need to invest in education, and we need to make commitments to public service journalism so that we can provide alternatives for people, alternatives to the mindless stream of clickbait to which we have become accustomed, the temptations into which we are led as passive consumers of social media.
I know this sounds like a lot, but I invite you to join me in recommitting yourself to idealism. It isn't too much to ask because it's what democracy requires.
Thank you very much.