Meetings between UK government and Facebook et al are more ritual than battle as they avoid subjects both parties disagree on, such as tax and user privacy

As the government and technology companies butt heads yet again over extremist material on social media, both sides may be giving a silent prayer of thanks that the battleground is one on which they are both quite comfortable.

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Unlike many disagreements, extremist material on social media is one where each side broadly agrees on what the best outcome looks like. Neither the government nor the social networks – in this case represented by Facebook, Google, Twitter and, oddly, Microsoft, but not Apple – want pro-Isis material sitting on the open net for anyone to read. All agree that the systems in place need improvement and all are working on better models and definitions to help precisely identify extremist content and remove it rapidly.

That is not to say there are not disagreements over the detail. Parsing the UK home secretary Amber Rudd’s comments on Sunday, about finding “people who understand the necessary hashtags”, at their most reasonable interpretation, the government would like tech firms to not only take extremist material down, but prevent it from being posted in the first place.

Technology firms, perhaps reasonably, object that to do so would turn them into judge, jury and executioner over content that is for the most part legal, if unpleasant. And even that may be a moot point given pre-emptively censoring content is somewhere on the scale of technologically tricky to effectively impossible.

Simple term searches, such as those used in China to prevent social media users discussing the Tiananmen Square protests, fail in the face of human ingenuity at coming up with synonyms and allegory. For evidence, take a look at the American far right, which decided to use the product names of tech companies in place of ethnic slurs: “kill all the Skypes”, for instance.

But the potential for disagreement is, by and large, limited to a narrow area of dispute and one where the technology companies and government can always come out of any discussions agreeing to work together in the spirit of shared ambition.

That is very different from other, more divisive, disagreements, like those over how much tax should be paid in which jurisdiction, the extent to which giant technology firms have, and abuse, monopoly power, or the tension between the revenue sources of social media companies and the personal privacy of their users. On those discussions, there is not only the potential of damaging disagreements, but also much more at stake for the technology companies if they lose the argument.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Uber VP of communications, Rachel Whetstone – pictured here in her former role as Michael Howard’s political secretary – is part of the rotating door between government and the upper echelons of the technology industry. Photograph: Martin Argles/The Guardian

It’s no surprise that the two groups want to keep on largely good terms, however. Small though Britain may be on the world stage (and two years from shrinking further), it still represents a large, wealthy market for all the firms summoned to meet the home secretary. And for the British government, technology firms occasionally seem like a form of magic, a bottled potential which only Silicon Valley has ever really been able to successfully replicate. No government wants to be perceived as “anti-tech”: to do carries connotations somewhere in between “anti-business” and “anti-success”.

That pro-technology attitude is helped by what can be seen as a rotating door between government and the upper echelons of the technology industry, in both the UK and US.

Rachel Whetstone, the VP of communications for Uber, hit the headlines earlier this week for her close ties to David Cameron’s administration. Whetstone, who is married to sandal-wearing former policy adviser Steve Hilton, is close to both Cameron and George Osborne, and allegedly used those connections to successfully lobby Boris Johnson to support the cab-hire company.

Twitter’s public policy manager in the UK is former Tory parliamentary candidate Nick Pickles; Airbnb’s lobbyist team in the US includes former Republican congressman representative Vin Weber. In 2016, it was found at least 80 people have made “revolving door” moves between European governments and Google in the preceding decade.

From the government’s point of view, the need for easy wins in the court of public opinion – looking tough on tech firms who, if they didn’t radicalise the perpetrator of the attacks in Westminster, are probably radicalising someone, right? – is balanced by a desire to avoid the tricky business of actually legislating.

Not only is there not really time to hammer out a carefully considered bill on hate speech now that Brexit is likely to dominate the agenda for the foreseeable future, but doing so would open the government up to questions that it doesn’t really want to have to answer.

Questions like “what actually constitutes extremist material?”, “How can you write a bill that limits what can be said on social media without also affecting what can be printed by the British press?”, and “Won’t any bill serve to concentrate yet more power on the large tech firms, who are the only ones with the resources to actually implement such filters?” No government will want to bring these upon its own head when all it was looking for was a PR win.

So the tech companies get called in for their ritual berating, hang their heads and say they’re sorry. The government gets to say it’s tough, without losing its powerful friends. And the whole thing goes on as it was before.