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Terence Corcoran: The political addiction to blaming Big Tech

From OpenAI's ChatGPT in Tumbler Ridge to Mark Zuckerberg's Meta Platforms in California court

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Meta’s billionaire CEO Mark Zuckerberg survived another 15 minutes of unwanted media notoriety last week after appearing before a Los Angeles court in what has been described as a landmark jury trial over social media as a cause of “addiction” in children. Zuckerberg testified that while the company designed sites to attract users, there was never any attempt to foster addictive behaviour among youth or anyone else.

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Not that it matters, since the political effort to turn tech giants into social and moral scourges is a global affair and standard political repertoire across the United States and Canada. Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier told ABC News last week that the Los Angeles Meta trial was proof that “We need to see Big Tech held accountable for intentionally making these social media apps addicting, especially for children.”

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The words addicting and addicted are thrown around like ping-pong balls with nobody defining what the words actually mean, either in common usage or in law. As an example of everyday use, Webster’s dictionary cites a recent Condé Nast magazine article: “Eggs Royal offset by more unusual serves that include an addictive plate of flatbread with honey, ricotta, and grapes, and a feather-light stack of orange-scented pancakes liberally doused in a shiny chocolate sauce.”

Not much there to base a court case on, especially since U.S. legal definitions are usually based on traditional hard-reality forms of drug addiction. A Cornell Law School definition says that in law an addict is “any individual who habitually uses any narcotic drug so as to endanger the public morals, health, safety, or welfare, or who is so far addicted to the use of narcotic drugs as to have lost the power of self-control with reference to his addiction.” Not quite the same as orange-scented pancakes.

Whether habitual logging into Instagram, TikTok, X or ChatGPT should be elevated to legally addicted behaviour has not yet been determined. One reason may be that there is no evidence that a fixation on social media alone can cause destructive mental and other health problems.

There is however reason to suspect that intense concern about social media is highly correlated to the behaviour of politicians addicted to portraying Big Tech as the cocaine of our time. Nothing quite matches the twitching movements of political junkies set to pin wrongdoing on tech executives.

Among the Canadian addicts are Ottawa’s Minister of Artificial Intelligence Evan Solomon and his cabinet colleagues. When news broke late last week that there was a connection between British Columbia’s Tumbler Ridge murders and ChatGPT, the chatbot operated by tech giant OpenAI, Solomon jumped at the opportunity.

OpenAI banned the shooter in the Tumbler Ridge massacre from its ChatGPT platform last June, presumably due to violent comments, but did not report this at the time to the RCMP or other Canadian officials. Solomon summoned OpenAI officials to Ottawa for an explanation.

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Backing Solomon’s decision to meet with OpenAI was Taylor Owen, a McGill University professor recently appointed to Ottawa’s AI Strategy Task Force. In an email to Solomon on Tuesday, Taylor compared OpenAI’s failure to inform to a totally unrelated scandal. “This tragedy has become another example of real-world harms caused by AI systems, including the Grok ‘undressing’ crisis in January, where xAI’s chatbot was used to generate millions of nonconsensual sexualized images of women and children, prompting regulatory investigations across Europe and Asia.” The Grok affair, however, had nothing to do with OpenAI or ChatGPT nor with any issues related to Tumbler Ridge.

At the meeting with Solomon, OpenAI reps apparently failed to adequately outline reasons for determining that the 2025 bot posts did not appear serious enough to warrant alerting police. The company revealed the teenager’s ChatGPT information to the RCMP only after the Tumbler Ridge murders earlier this month.

Following his meeting with OpenAI officials on Tuesday, Solomon came close to saying that OpenAI bore some responsibility for the shootings. “Of course a failure occurred here. I mean, look what happened. This is a horrific tragedy,” Solomon said on Wednesday. “We were really disturbed by the reports that there might have been an opportunity to escalate this to law enforcement further.” A Globe and Mail story published Thursday quoted four Liberal cabinet ministers ranting about the need to clamp down on social media suppliers — as if social media bore responsibility for Tumbler Ridge.

Then there was the grandstanding of B.C. Premier David Eby, who came close to slandering OpenAI. “The news that OpenAI might have had the opportunity to stop this terrible tragedy in Tumbler Ridge, it’s just devastating for families in Tumbler Ridge, and I think, for families across Canada.” Eby said he wants OpenAI officials “to meet with the families. I want them to look in the eyes of these families and tell them why they made the call they did.”

This from the head of a provincial government that, along with local officials, RCMP and health-care providers, have much more to answer for than a tech company monitoring a chatbot. As National Post columnist Terry Newman wrote this week, Tumbler Ridge is a tragedy that requires a full, objective investigation of all that happened leading up to the shootings. Until then, political addicts should just shut up.

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