State action to regulate social media is unproblematic in principle, but deeply problematic in practice – and the law of unintended consequences applies.
We are seeing the rise of the outrider. These ‘non-party campaigns’ often spring up in and around elections – with the public in the dark about their funding.
My own experience when I was a minister showed two institutions which really didn’t care very much what we thought: the Chinese government, and Google.
A small community radio station with a few thousand listeners requires a license, but a social media channel with millions of individual subscribers does not.