Steven Bartlett

For example, these are our electoral laws.

We have laws on election spending.

And if the platforms violate those laws, they're in breach of the law.

You know, so election spending is a very important one because if you're spending a million dollars on TikTok illegally—

that can be much harder to see than it would be if you were buying television ads.

And so finding a way to bring the social media companies into the legal system seems to be completely legitimate.

And in fact, I would even go farther than that.

I would say that if European countries in particular don't do this, then I'm not sure European countries will be able to maintain their sovereignty.

Will you be able to run an election in Germany or England if your electoral rules can be easily defied by platforms that are based in the U.S.

or China?

Well, laws about spending, laws about advertising.

I'm sure there's a, you know, of course there's a downside.

I mean, the downside is, you know, I don't know, country X has bad laws and then the platforms have to conform to the bad law.

Questions about speech are particularly sensitive.

You know, what one person's terrorist speech is another person's free speech, right?

Yeah.

But somebody has to make that decision about what the rules are.

And I think the person who should make the decision is the, or the people who should make the decision are the elected representatives of that country.

Yeah.

And the decision should not be taken by Elon Musk.