America Has Become a Digital Narco-State

Social media giants have bought our government, and are trying to bully Europe

Imagine what would happen if the United States were to legalize the distribution and sale of heroin — and do so without any restrictions or regulations on how the drug is marketed and who can buy it.

Heroin distribution and sales would quickly become a huge, multibillion-dollar industry. They would become a significant part of GDP, even though heroin harms and often kills those who consume it. Given the increasingly naked corruption of U.S. politics, the heroin industry would be able to purchase massive political influence, enough to block any attempts to limit the harm it does — the harm it knows it does, because heroin industry executives would surely be aware of the damage their products inflict.

Through massive political donations — enabled by the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling - and de facto bribery enabled via cryptocurrency deals, the industry would be able to enlist the U.S. government as an ally in its efforts to block regulation in other countries. For example, U.S. officials might threaten punitive tariffs against countries that try to limit and regulate heroin use.

If this story strikes you as extreme and implausible, here’s what you should know: replace “heroin” with “social media,” and this is a description of actual events.

Yesterday I wrote about how hostility to Europe is a central theme of the Trump administration’s recently released National Security Strategy. The main driver of that hostility appears to be MAGA fury at the nations of Europe for being excessively protective of civil liberties and insufficiently racist.

A secondary source of anti-Europe sentiment, however, is the tech broligarchy’s fury at the European Union’s Digital Services Act. The Act obliges large platforms to self-police a variety of potential injurious effects ranging from “dissemination of illegal content” to “negative consequences” for “physical and mental well-being.”

Is comparing social media to a dangerous drug over the top? Not according to the U.S. Surgeon General’s office, which in 2023 released an advisory titled “Social Media and Youth Mental Health” (download it now before RFK Jr. suppresses it!), which summarized extensive evidence of mental health damage to children and adolescents who consume excessive amounts of social media.

Furthermore, the operators of these platforms know that they’re doing harm. In 2021 the Wall Street Journal published an article titled “Facebook Knows Instagram is Toxic for Teen Girls, Documents Show: Its own in-depth research shows a significant teen mental-health issue that Facebook plays down in public.” In 2024 Meta finally introduced some relatively ineffectual limits on what teens can see.

Nor are children and adolescents the only victims. Last month Reuters, after reviewing a cache of internal Meta documents, reported that

Meta internally projected late last year that it would earn about 10% of its overall annual revenue – or $16 billion – from running advertising for scams and banned goods, internal company documents show.

A cache of previously unreported documents reviewed by Reuters also shows that the social-media giant for at least three years failed to identify and stop an avalanche of ads that exposed Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp’s billions of users to fraudulent e-commerce and investment schemes, illegal online casinos, and the sale of banned medical products.

At the same time, Elon Musk’s X has become a huge promoter of hate speech, with many of its major MAGA accounts based overseas while posing as American patriots.

So social media clearly do considerable harm. But social media giants have been able to use the power of money to block regulation. Last year Congress seemed on the verge of passing the Kids Online Safety Act, legislation intended to, yes, protect kids online. The legislation, which would have been the first ever to impose rules on social media, had overwhelming bipartisan support. Ninety-one senators supported it. But then Mark Zuckerberg and his billions came to town, and the legislation died.

Other countries’ governments are less easily corrupted. Australia has passed a law, which goes into effect tomorrow, intended to prevent anyone under 16 from having a social media account. While no one knows yet how well the law will work, it is a worthy attempt to protect Australia’s youth from the pernicious effects of social media.

Under the auspices of its Digital Services Act, the European Commission imposed its first fine last week — 120 million euros, basically a tiny slap on the wrist — on Musk’s X. The Commission’s case is straightforward:

· X’s “Blue checks” are a fraud. X claims that a blue check means that the poster’s identity has been verified. But in fact X sells them without making any effort to verify that posters are who they say they are.

· X does not provide enough information on advertisements for outsiders to determine whether or not they are scams

· X refuses to make its public data available to researchers

These are clear violations of European law, and the fine, as I said, was little more than a slap on the wrist. Yet Musk went berserk, declaring that the EU should be abolished and threatening personal retribution against the “woke Stasi commissars” responsible for the fine.

I’m not an expert on European law, but isn’t threatening to take personal revenge against government officials whose decisions you don’t like itself likely illegal?

What makes this episode especially disturbing is that the U.S. government appears to be using its power to support the broligarchy’s fight against European regulation. Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, has explicitly linked U.S. tariffs on European steel to demands that Europe weakens its digital regulations. If the EU tried to make comparable demands on the United States, we’d consider it an outrageous infringement on our national sovereignty. And I’m pretty sure that making this linkage violates U.S. trade law too. But rule of law is for the little people.

The key point is that if you think of unregulated social media as dangerous drugs, as you should, then we’ve become a nation in which drug lords control much of government policy. Social media billionaires have enough power to prevent us from protecting our own children. They have enough power to dictate U.S. foreign policy, punishing our erstwhile allies for daring to limit their ability to push their product.

America has, in practice, become a digital narco-state.

MUSICAL CODA

Another grim piece that calls for a bit of uplift