George Soros believes that internet giants such as Facebook and Google have become a ‘public menace’ and only the EU has the power to stop them.
He says that by influencing the way their users think without them realising it, the companies have made people easy to manipulate, and this ‘interferes with the functioning of democracy’, pointing to the election of Donald Trump as an example.
While US regulators are not strong enough to tackle the monopoly that Google and Facebook have acquired, Soros argues, the EU is much better placed to do so and has already achieved some success.
Soros bemoans the collapse of ‘open society’ which he says is being eroded by ‘mafia-states’ like Putin’s Russia and North Korea – and which says Donald Trump is trying to emulate in the US.
In the future, Soros fears that internet giants working with totalitarian governments could usher in a world ‘the likes of which not even George Orwell could have imagined’, saying China and Russia are likely to be the first examples.
