We have more to fear from social media than AI

For once, Nick Clegg had a point. At the start of this week’s Artificial Intelligence summit at Bletchley Park, our former deputy prime minister spoke about the need to get priorities right. ‘My slight note of caution,’ he said, is that we ‘don’t allow the need to focus on proximate challenges to be crowded out by speculative, sometimes futuristic predictions’. He’s quite right. The most immediate threat is not the prospect of dysfunctional AI but the power wielded by Mark Zuckerberg, Sir Nick’s boss at Meta, and the extent to which the companies it runs, Facebook and Instagram, control the news.

On its own, Facebook has a stunning concentration of power: it’s now the UK’s third biggest news source after BBC1 and ITV, according to Ofcom surveys. More people get their news from Facebook and Instagram than from any newspaper. Algorithms scan the headlines and decide which stories to promote or hide.