While Tethics and AI are buzzwords du jour, the problem is more general: The weakening of liberal democratic values.
We need laws and regulation that guarantee privacy more concretely as a foundational right.
By letting its foreign policy wonder into grey area by playing overtures with regimes of all kind without any reservations, it allowed for norms, and boundaries to be blurred, and resolve of its camp blunted.
What is happening now, is that the whole Western camp have descended into whataboutism with relation to what rogue regime each bloc member is playing ball with, without no authority left in the bloc "clean enough" to police it.
What rogue regimes made to the West in the last 20 years, is nothing, but a gang initiation in reverse.
First they lured the West into playing their dirty games, and when Western countries thoroughly dirtied their hands, then come and say "your hands are as dirty as mine, what's the point fighting now?"
Make no mistake, I think that facebook and social media have chilling effects on discourse and are, on the whole, very negative, but I can still get on any forum and call my national leader a clown (aka Xi = Winnie the Poo) and not risk going to jail.
I'm not making a comparison – I'm simply arguing against something.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/159184620X?psc=1&ref=ppx_pop_...
And Argentina is kept in line via WHO loans and regular scourging through economic means.
I am very curious when exactly you imagine a period where "The West"'s hands weren't dirty. Both before and after WW2 ended, for example, many European nations still had colonial empires where unspeakable atrocities were happening under their direct rule (not as abhorrent as the Holocaust, but still extraordinarily disgusting). In the period that followed, "the West", just as much as Russia and China, immediately started supporting favorable dictators wherever there was some conflict - like the military anti-communist dictatorship in Greece with Allied backing, and many far-right regimes in South America and Asia.
During this same time, gay people were legally persecuted across "the West" just as much as elsewhere (though, oddly enough, with a short reprieve in early communist Russia - before WW2, before Stalin) - including, famously, war heroes like Alan Turing. Lynchings were still happening in the USA. In fact, the USA at this time had a system of first class and second class citizens with explicitly racist laws.
And in the years that followed, while civil rights movements grew in power in Europe and the US (with strong opposition from the government, for a very long time), "the West" only escalated its fight against democracy in the rest of the world - either by supporting brutal dictatorships established by others (Indonesia, South Vietnam, a lot of South America, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, even in communist bloc countries such as Romania), or by orchestrating their own coups to install loyal dictators in place of elected leaders (with initial success in Iran or Nicaragua, or ending in failure in Cuba, North Vietnam). Other European countries supported horrible regimes in their former colonies, usually supporting white or loyalist people against revolutionary or "brown" people - such as Swiss, UK and US support of the apartheid state in South Africa in the 1980s.
How does that saying go? "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it". Thank you Google.