{"id":501743,"date":"2026-03-29T12:24:08","date_gmt":"2026-03-29T12:24:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/501743\/"},"modified":"2026-03-29T12:24:08","modified_gmt":"2026-03-29T12:24:08","slug":"the-observer-view-they-knew","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/501743\/","title":{"rendered":"The Observer view: They knew"},"content":{"rendered":"<p role=\"text\" tabindex=\"0\" class=\"is_Paragraph font_caslonIonic _dsp-inline _bxs-border-box _ww-break-word _mt-0px _mr-0px _mb-0px _ml-0px _ff-f-family _fw-f-weight-3048 _fs-f-size-18 _lh-f-lineHeigh3500605 _col-grey_600 _select-auto _ws-normal\">The platforms have created what are effectively utilities, and for two decades have used them to harvest prodigious quantities of data and wealth, helped by the legal protection of section 230 of the US Communications Decency Act, which exempts platforms from liability for what they host, on the basis that they are not publishers. This \u201cdigital public square\u201d defence has always been flimsy. Public squares have to be maintained and policed. The platforms would naturally like to be allowed to go on extracting extraordinary profits with scant regulation, but governments are realising that cannot be allowed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The platforms have created what are effectively utilities, and for two decades have used them to harvest prodigious&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":501744,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,7203,224,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-501743","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-mark-zuckerberg","tag-social-media","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501743","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=501743"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501743\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/501744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=501743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=501743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=501743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}