Steven Bartlett

It seems obvious to me that child pornography that's illegal, if you have it in your house, should also be illegal if it's published online.

It seems to me that people recruiting for ISIS, that's illegal to do, you know, down the street from here, then it should also be illegal to do online.

And the tech companies have been trying in recent years, and this is an argument that's taking place both in Europe and the U.S.

and elsewhere, to get out of responsibility for just for conforming to the law in the countries where they're active.

And in one or two places, there have been big clashes.

I was just in Brazil, which is one of the places where that happened.

Where the Brazilian law said something that was published on Twitter was illegal and they fined the company for publishing it.

Twitter didn't want to pay the fine and there was an argument back and forth and for a while Twitter was shut down in Brazil.

But it does seem to me that any given country –

whether it's Brazil or Nepal or, you know, Ethiopia, and particularly democracies, I should say.

You know, democracies have the right to say, these are our laws.

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.