Moral Philosophy for the Internet

Moral Maze

BBC

Society & Culture, Religion & Spirituality

4.5 • 609 Ratings

🗓️ 29 June 2017

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Theresa May has been forced to ditch whole chunks of her party's manifesto in the wake of the election, but one of the key non-Brexit policies to survive is the plan to crack down on tech companies that allow extremist and abusive material to be published on their networks. The recent terrorist attacks have strengthened the arguments of campaigners who've long said that it's far too easy to access this kind of content and have accused internet companies of wilfully ignoring the problem. The promised "Digital Charter" will aim to force those companies to do more to protect users and improve online safety. With the growing power of tech giants like Google, Facebook and Twitter, connecting billions of people around the globe, is it pie in the sky to promise that Britain will be the safest place to be online? On one level this is a moral argument which has been going on for centuries about what we should, and should not be allowed to read and see and who should make those decisions. But is this a bigger problem than freedom of speech? Have we reached a tipping point where the moral, legal, political and social principles that have guided us in this field have been made redundant by the technology? Do we need to find new kind of moral philosophy that can survive in a digital age and tame the power of the tech-corps? Or is the problem uncomfortably closer to home - a question that each and every one of us has to face up to? Tim Cook, the chief executive of Apple, recently said that he was concerned about new technologies making us think like computers "without values or compassion, without concern for consequence." Witnesses are Nikita Malik, Tom Chatfield, Mike Harris and Mariarosaria Taddeo.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to a program from BBC Radio 4.
0:04.6	Good evening. Google's mission statement is nothing if not ambitious.
0:08.4	Quote, to organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful, unquote.
0:14.5	But its unofficial motto explicitly recognised the potential dark side of the internet.
0:19.8	It was, don't be evil. Critics of Google and the other giant technology companies say their success has been morally ambiguous, slating their tax avoidant strategies. They're squeezing out of competitors. Google was fined two billion euros yesterday for favouring its own shopping service. but above all for allowing their globe-girdling
0:39.2	web platforms to be used for spreading hatred and terrorism. A crackdown on web giants that publish
0:46.0	extremist and abusive material was one of the few promises in the Conservatives' manifesto to make
0:51.0	it into the Queen's speech after three terror attacks here in four months,
0:55.2	and growing evidence about how terrorists are being radicalised and trained online.
0:59.6	It's arguable how much one country, or even group of countries, can do to control corporations that connect and collect billions.
1:07.7	We've wrestled over what we should be allowed to see and hear for centuries, where, how, if, freedom of speech should be limited.
1:14.9	But there's a sense that the Internet has changed more than just how we communicate, even how we relate to each other.
1:21.0	Some say it's made society's old rules, the legal, political, moral principles that have guided us redundant, that we need a new
1:29.4	moral philosophy for the Internet age. That's our moral maze tonight. Our panel, Claire Fox from the
1:35.4	Institute of Ideas, Anne McElvoy, senior editor of the economist, the chief executive of the
1:39.8	RSA, Matthew Taylor, and Shiv Malik, co-founder of the think tank, the Intergenerational Foundation.
1:45.5	Claire Fox, you're a libertarian. Does the internet not challenge your ideas of the bounds of liberty?
1:51.9	No, I don't think so. It presents us with new challenges, but I think that whereas I am not necessarily the greatest cheerleader for the web giants, to actually blame them for terrorism, jihadism,
2:04.3	seems to me to be an act of moral cowardice that misses the point
2:07.4	actually means that we end up wasting our time policing them
2:11.4	rather than confronting the ideology that lies behind something very dangerous.
2:15.8	Matthew Taylor, who we should say is on the Ethics Board of a Google subsidiary,
	...

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