Великобритания призвана создать собственный социальный медиа-сектор для защиты от американских гигантов

It's difficult, if not impossible, to feel anything other than revulsion, and frankly hate, towards American social media giants. The equivalence drawn between Big Tech and Big Tobacco is entirely justified. Both appear to be industries which actively pursue the immiseration, and even death, of their users, or should that read "addicts"? Channelling anorexia content to girls who then starve themselves; feeding poison to boys who turn to violence; generating sexually explicit images of children; twisting minds with hate, conspiracy theories and lies; corrupting us all with malevolent ugliness; celebrating stupidity and cruelty; and debasing what it means to be human. If social media had a citadel, I'd like to watch it burn. Read more: - Dry your eyes, Stephen Flynn. Why shouldn't the media scrutinise SNP spending? - This is great: I am so enjoying Nicola Sturgeon’s ‘couldn’t GAF’ attitude right now - SNP can either cosplay as social justice warriors or fight homelessness with Burnham - Trapped between cowards and cranks, the SNP has left the indy movement to unravel Yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg’s repulsive corporation Meta settled a landmark lawsuit over claims it hooked a generation of children on Facebook and Instagram. Lawyers for California said Meta knew its platforms damaged teenagers' mental health. The trial was linked to a lawsuit by 29 American states. Meta faces paying out billions. Here’s hoping it’s ruined. Meanwhile, our government had to ask social media companies to take down videos "celebrating" dangerous driving, after two police officers and five young men were killed when a car was driven on the wrong side of the road. Videos showing people deliberately driving dangerously are now a fad, for clicks. Every week some new horror or filth emerges from Silicon Valley. And for what? To make billionaires trillionaires? These companies get rich off our backs, harvesting our data and monetising us for ads. And we're trapped. It's impossible to escape their pull. Many workers must use sites like Facebook to check shift patterns. Anyone in the creative industries feels compelled to promote their work on sites like Instagram. Families stay in touch through these platforms. Invitations are sent via social media; community groups organise on social media. If you want to contact a company, you often must go through social media. The government, police, schools and transport services communicate via social media. Social media has deformed British life both privately and publicly. Every time we use these platforms money goes into the pockets of men like Elon Musk. Social media companies have become the pipelines and roads of 21st-century life and we must pay a toll to use them. Britain depends on digital infrastructure owned by a foreign country, a country which, it's clear, is rather hostile to Britain and our closest friends. It should make everyone uneasy that so much of British industry and society relies on corporations hand in glove with the Trump administration. TikTok, it should be noted, is owned by China, hardly a friendly state. So what do we do? Why has Britain not developed its own social media industry? Why isn't there a British Facebook, Twitter or Instagram? Why don't we have a British Google? France has Qwant, a home-grown search engine which doesn't harvest data or track users, and complies with European privacy laws. Are we any less ambitious than France? We need our own social media industry, just as we need our own railways, pharmaceutical companies, defence sector and farms. It's a matter of national security, especially as we know how vulnerable social media is to the interference of foreign governments. Evidently, creating British social media platforms from scratch isn't easy. A balance needs to be struck between government support and government interference, which could easily be seen as threatening to freedom of speech. It would also be a challenge to lure British users off American platforms and onto home-grown ones. Additionally, British and European funding for tech start-ups is much smaller than in America. However, just because something is difficult doesn't mean it can't and shouldn't be done. British universities could be used to build the kind of digital systems needed to run home-grown social media platforms. The UK's new national supercomputer, hosted at Edinburgh University, is already under construction. Let's set that to work. Suggestions have been made that the UK's huge pension funds could be used to finance venture capital for new digital projects. UK pension funds already invest in foreign AI. So why not spend the money at home? Once UK social media companies were up and running, they could be boosted by a mandate that all public bodies use them. So schools, hospitals, police forces and government departments would dump the likes of Facebook and opt for BritBook instead. The BBC could be reoriented and set to work on the project. Today, the BBC is lost and has no idea what its purpose is in the 21st century. Social media platforms could be integrated into the BBC, so the broadcaster becomes a form of "public commons". The dominance that US social media companies hold globally needs to be challenged. Britain should pick up the hammer and start smashing. It will remain impossible to regulate social media the way British citizens want, while the industry is controlled overseas. There's an analogy with entertainment: we can't expect, or demand, that Hollywood makes the films we want to see. We have to make the films we want to see ourselves. The American government will lean on Britain at every opportunity when it comes to attempts to regulate US social media companies here. So we need to get out from under the pressure. Social media is only a social ill because the people who own the companies have allowed that to happen. It's simply a technology like any other, morally dependent on the humans in control. This country needs a great project to get behind. Creating a Great British Social Media Industry, for the common good, could be that project. If we did it right, we'd regain some stability in our politics, as we could purge all foreign government interference and malicious bots; we'd protect our children; we'd free ourselves from US cultural and political domination; and we'd build a new industry which created jobs and made money for the Exchequer. Evidently, all that requires vision, intellect and courage, traits which are increasingly rare in modern British politics. So, unfortunately, the chances of Britain leading the world in throwing off the shackles of American social media giants are about as likely as someone being nice on Twitter. Neil Mackay is the Herald's Writer-at-Large. He's a multi-award-winning investigative journalist, author of both fiction and non-fiction, and a filmmaker and broadcaster.