Brandjack News

By Quentin Langley

Dick the Butcher from Shakespeare's Henry VI had a plan: "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers". Superficially attractive as this sounds, there has never been a free country which was not governed by the rule of law.

"The first thing we do, let's shut down social media" has a similar superficial appeal to a great many people. But there has never been a free country without freedom of speech, either.

A lot of bad things, from looting to drug deals to terrorist mass murders, get planned online. But this is to wholly misunderstand the nature of cause and effect.

When I was a child the problem was TV. TV was making children unfit and lazy. TV was causing violence among young people. TV was responsible for teenage pregnancies. But we now know that TV does not cause these things. Facebook does.

You see, the times they are still a-changing, and it is still unwise to criticise what you can't understand. 

In this case, the medium is not the message. It is almost certain that more crimes are plotted in bars than on social media, but not since America's failed experiment with prohibition has anyone thought that closing down bars would actually solve anything. 

People use social media and other digital channels for all sorts of things. That is how I met my wife. But she is not an 'internet wife', and crimes planned online are not 'internet crimes'. Crimes plotted in coffee shops are not 'coffee shop crimes'. The notion that it is either justified or sensible to shut down social media channels during waves of looting – as some in the British Government have recently suggested – is inherently absurd. Just look at the way social media channels are now being used to identify perpetrators. 

It is embarrassing that some in the British government have the same instincts regarding social media Mubarak and Assad.

Nor does it make sense for pharmaceutical companies to shut down their Facebook pages now that their walls have been enabled by Facebook. The problem is that with an open wall, people can post material criticising the company or complaining about side-effects from their drugs. This is, obviously, a marketing problem. It is not helped by the fact that people will attribute effects to drugs which clinical trials suggest are unrelated. Companies are also concerned about the promotion of inappropriate uses for the drugs. Again, this is a serious concern. But do the companies imagine that by closing down their Facebook pages they can wish these conversations out of existence? A policy of hiding from the truth does not make the truth vanish.

Pharmaceutical companies have the legitimate worry that open and transparent conversations about their drugs will interfere with the process of regulatory approval. Frankly, if it comes to a choice between secretive government regulation and transparent public discussion, I will take the discussion every time.