Is it right to shift responsibility for misbehaviour online from the users to the platforms?
In January 2014 talkSPORT, the national sports radio station, announced that it would stop promoting Twitter, now X, on air. The decision followed a distressing episode in which its presenter Stan Collymore was targeted with racist abuse and death threats on the platform, and the station said it would not mention Twitter until the company took the abuse of its users seriously (ITV News, 22 January 2014). The ban was reversed within days. The station’s leadership seems to have realised that, whatever the impulse behind it, the gesture came across as somewhat childish and did nothing to address the abuse or to change how the platform behaved.
The episode raises a question about corporate social responsibility in the digital age that is still unanswered. Traditionally, CSR has been associated with companies like Starbucks ensuring fair wages for coffee farmers or Shell safeguarding the environment. When the concept is moved to social media the dynamics change. Here the platform provides the infrastructure and the users provide the content and the interactions. The platform might be compared to the coffee farmer, and the users to the coffee beans themselves.
Is it fair to place the whole burden on the platform?
Social media companies set and enforce community guidelines, and they cannot single-handedly control how users behave. They can introduce policies and tools to curb abuse, but those systems only work when users engage with them. It is worth asking whether users have been getting away with inappropriate behaviour for too long, partly because it is easier for governments and public figures to blame the platforms. Shifting the blame in that direction may have allowed individuals to shirk their own responsibility. Have we lost sight of individual accountability in the digital world? Platforms have a significant role in creating and enforcing standards, but users must also own their behaviour if the online environment is to be a respectful one.
What has changed since 2014
Parliament has since answered the question in this article’s title, at least in law. The Online Safety Act 2023 places statutory duties on platforms with links to the UK to assess the risk of illegal content, including racially aggravated public order offences and threats to kill, to take proportionate steps to prevent users encountering it, and to remove it swiftly once they know of it, with Ofcom able to fine a company up to 10 per cent of its worldwide turnover. The largest services must also give adult users tools to filter out abuse from anonymous accounts (section 15). The individual is not off the hook: the person who sent the abuse is still the one who commits the offence, and the Act added new offences of sending threatening and false communications. The law now holds both the coffee farmer and the coffee beans to account, which is roughly where this article argued the balance ought to sit. Whether the new regime works, and what it costs in free speech, is the subject of my 2026 series, starting with Dear America, Ofcom has sent you a bill.
First published 24 January 2014. Reviewed and updated 28 September 2026.