Free Speech In the Age of Government-Influenced Facebook

 

Mark Zuckerberg, the founder, chairman, and CEO of MetaPlatforms, which includes Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, recently sent a letter to Jim Jordan, Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.  Zuckerberg is a busy man, and this was no bread-and-butter socializing note, but more along the lines of a confession. 

 

In the note, Zuckerberg admitted that in 2021, Facebook had caved in to government pressure, specifically from the Biden White House, concerning certain posts relating to COVID-19, "including humor and satire."  The company was also guilty of "demoting" stories about Hunter Biden's laptop when it chose to believe the FBI's claim that it was Russian disinformation in 2020.  In both cases, Zuckerberg says basically we were wrong and we won't do it again.

 

The most generous interpretation of this letter is that here is an upstanding citizen, who also happens to be the fourth richest person in the world, admitting that he and his people did some things that in retrospect might not have been the best choice, given what he knows now.  But hey, he's learned from his mistakes, and we should all feel better that Zuckerberg and his companies have admitted they messed up in what were understandably hard circumstances. 

 

Ranged against this rather anodyne letter are some cherished U. S. traditions such as freedom of speech and the rule of law.  Let's talk about the rule of law first.

 

In a recent issue of Touchstone magazine, professor of law Adam J. MacLeod outlines how the idea of rule by law rather than men arose during the reign of the Emperor Justinian (485-565).  Justinian caused twelve ivory tablets to be placed on public display, tablets that contained a concise summary of the laws of the land.  All disputes were to be decided on the basis of reasoning from what the tablets said, not from what somebody in power said.

 

In placing reason above power, the rule of law placed everyone on a much more equitable footing.  The peasant who could reason out law was now able to defend himself against a powerful lord who wanted to take his land, if the peasant could show what the lord was trying to do was against the law.  MacLeod admits that since the late 1800s, jurisprudence has largely abandoned the fundamentals that supported the rule of law, but in practice, vestiges of it remain.  No thanks to Zuckerberg, however, for those vestiges.

 

Although Facebook is not a branch of government, in bowing to White House pressure it acted as a government agent.  And its near-monopoly on social media channels makes it a powerful player in its ability to censor unfavored speech, such as people making fun of Anthony Fauci or other prominent players in the COVID-19 follies.  So where was the ivory tablet to which a satirical outfit such as the Babylon Bee could appeal when its posts disappeared?  Their only option was to mount a lawsuit that might take years, would certainly cost tons of money, and might in the end amount to nothing.  So much for the rule of law.

 

Some counter the claim that the principle of freedom of speech does not apply to private companies such as Facebook, because a private entity can allow or disallow anything it likes and be as capricious about it as they want.  If Facebook had the reach of my town paper, the San Marcos Daily Record, this argument would carry weight.  One little outlet being arbitrary about what it publishes is no big deal.  But Facebook, although not the only social-media show in town, is by far one of the largest, and its censorship, or lack thereof, hugely influences public discourse in the republic that is the United States, as it does in many other countries of the world with less of a tradition of free speech. 

 

Once again, while Facebook is not a government entity, when it takes actions that the government pressures it to do (either through legal means or simply jawboning), it becomes an agent of that government.  And while it is perhaps true that Facebook did not violate the letter of the First Amendment which prohibits only Congress from making a law that abridges the freedom of speech, the spirit of the law is that the Federal government as a whole—executive, judicial, or legislative—should refrain from suppressing the freedom of the people to express themselves in any way that is not comparable to yelling "Fire!" falsely in a crowded theater. 

 

There are two extremes to which we might go in this situation, at opposite ends from the muddled middle in which we presently find ourselves.  One extreme would be to treat near-monopolies such as Facebook as "common carriers" like the old Ma Bell used to be.  With very few exceptions, nobody regulated what you could say over the telephone, and in the common-carrier model, Facebook would fire all its moderators and only retain the engineers who would keep hackers from crashing the entire system.  Other than that, anybody could say anything about anything.  Zuckerberg wouldn't censor anything, and I bet he'd be relieved to be rid of that little chore.

 

The other extreme would be to regulate the gazoo out of all social media and set up explicit "twelve-tablet"-like rules as to what can and can't be said on it.  We have something like this model in the way the Federal Communications Commission regulates what can be said or shown over the (public) airwaves (not cable).  The FCC is mostly concerned with obscene or indecent content, but that's just a historical fluke.  In a republic you can vote to regulate anything you want.  This would be a return to the pre-deregulation days of inefficient but reliable airline and phone service.  It would be duller and more predictable, but there are worse things than dull.

 

Neither of these extremes will come to pass, but the present near-total governmental inaction in either direction leaves a political vacuum in which Mark Zuckerberg, emperor of social media, will continue to do what he thinks best, and the rest of us simply have to deal with it.  And the rule of law and freedom of speech will continue to suffer.

 

Sources:  I referred to an Associated Press article "Zuckerberg says the White House pressured Facebook over some COVID-19 content during the pandemic," at https://apnews.com/article/meta-platforms-mark-zuckerberg-biden-facebook-covid19-463ac6e125b0d004b16c7943633673fc.  Zuckerberg's letter to Congress is at

https://x.com/JudiciaryGOP/status/1828201780544504064/photo/1, and I also referred to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World%27s_Billionaires.  Adam J. MacLeod's "How Law Lost Its Way" appeared on pp. 22-28 of the Sept/Oct 2024 issue of Touchstone.

 

TikTok: Divest or Ban?

 

The online platform TikTok is once again in the news, this time the target of proposed U. S. legislation.  One of the most popular and innovative social-media outlets, the Chinese-originated and Chinese-controlled app's infinite-scrolling videos have been imitated by Facebook and YouTube, and 170 million Americans use it, many of them under 30.  So why is Congress once more considering legislation that would either force ByteDance, the Chinese parent company, to divest itself of the U. S. division of TikTok, or else face a total ban of the app?

 

The ostensible reason is that despite TikTok's public protestations to the contrary, it appears that user data garnered by the U. S. division of TikTok can be accessed by its masters in China, as I noted in a December 2022 blogpost here.  Whether ByteDance actually exploits this capability is not clear, but adding that to the fact that TikTok has engaged in a certain amount of censorship on subjects sensitive to the Chinese Communist Party's sensibilities provides enough rationale to consider legislative action.

 

In a recent essay in Time, reporter Scott Nover describes the bill that the U. S. House of Representatives passed on March 13.  If passed by the Senate and signed by President Biden, it would present TikTok with a choice:  either totally divest the U. S. division so that it is completely independent of the rest of the Chinese-based organization, or face a total ban on selling and using the app in the U. S.  Although the bill theoretically gives the firm a choice, several sources say that the true intent is to enact a ban, not just to force divestiture. 

 

As the only major social-media app not developed in the U. S., TikTok excites the envy of Facebook and YouTube, and U. S.-based social-media firms would be more than happy to see a major competitor eat the dust, so they could rush in with their replacement apps and fill the void. 

 

Never having used TikTok, I have only a dim idea of how essential it must seem to some teenagers.  In a clumsy attempt to prevent the bill's passage, TikTok urged its users to phone their congressperson to protest the bill.  Representatives were flooded with phone calls, some of which carried the caller's intent to commit suicide if TikTok were banned.  Many of the callers were below voting age and presumably unable to vote against anyone who favors the ban, but the campaign apparently backfired, as it demonstrated TikTok's overwhelming influence with its users more than a principled regard for free speech on their part. 

 

Nover, for his part, thinks that even if the bill becomes law, it will quickly become entangled in court cases, and the record for similar bans at the state level in the courts is not good.  Former President Trump's attempt to ban TikTok by executive action was thwarted by a court, which said there were other ways to achieve the same ends.  So just passing Federal legislation that would effectively ban TikTok won't necessarily mean an uptick in teen suicides, although that possibility can't be discounted.

 

The U. S. government has decidedly mixed motives in its move to ban TikTok, as it would be a big favor to U. S.-based social media firms.  To that extent, the proposed law smells of crony capitalism, which uses government influence to suppress competition.  There are those who take the view that as long as users get better, cheaper services, it doesn't matter whether those services come from a multitude of small firms or from one giant firm.  In other words, bigness isn't a sin, just incompetence or exploitation.  That is an economic debate for another day, but it can't be ignored in the mix of motives that gave rise to the proposed TikTok ban.

 

It's still a theoretical possibility that TikTok would actually divest itself of its U. S. division, but as I said in previous blogs, such things can be mainly on paper rather than in reality.  One thinks of the breakup of Ma Bell, which cut the nationwide giant phone company into regional Baby Bells.  But a few years after the telecommunications landscape opened up to competition, AT&T found few obstacles on its way to reuniting itself, and continues to be a major player in that field today. 

 

Another problem with the proposed bill is that we don't have a smoking gun.  No one has come up with hard evidence that China is definitely exploiting its ability to suck data on its U. S. users into Beijing for nefarious purposes.  But the Chinese are very skillful at concealing their espionage activities and their consequences—that is what good spies do. 

 

To give a completely undocumented but likely example I'm personally familiar with, a few years ago a student employee of mine wanted to get a circuit board design he had developed turned into an actual circuit board.  This is done by sending a digital file to a circuit-board-fab company, which etches and drills the board and sends it back to you.  He looked around to find various prices from different vendors.  An outfit in Colorado wanted $50, another one here in Texas wanted $40 or along there—and a place based in China offered three-day turnaround for something ridiculously cheap, like $12.  I let him use the Chinese $12 vendor, but not without wondering whether that firm and others like it were deeply subsidized by the Chinese government for the purposes of obtaining the raw circuit-board files from thousands of U. S. firms, all without sending a single spy to the U. S.  Maybe all this is a fantasy of mine, but I don't think so.  It was all perfectly legal and probably very effective for the Chinese too.

 

To my mind, the best outcome of the anti-TikTok legislation would be divestiture rather than a total ban. If the federal government shuts down a social-media app with 170 million U. S. users, that is truly a heavy hand placed on First Amendment rights of ordinary citizens to express their opinions.  But even if the ban is attempted, the courts may well have something to say about the matter, so we will just have to stay tuned. 

 

Sources:  I referred to the article "The Grim Reality of Banning TikTok" on the Time website at https://time.com/6952889/tiktok-ban-freedom-of-speech-essay/ and an article in National Review at https://www.nationalreview.com/the-weekend-jolt/what-it-took-for-republicans-to-break-with-trump/.  My previous blogs on TikTok are at https://engineeringethicsblog.blogspot.com/2022/12/time-is-running-out-on-tiktok-in-u-s.html

and

https://engineeringethicsblog.blogspot.com/2022/09/tiktok-and-chinese-connection.html.

 

Is Twitter a Wholly Owned Subsidiary of the FBI?

 

When Elon Musk took over Twitter last October, he made available to reporters a large number of internal company emails relating to content moderation, deplatforming, and other interventions that the firm has done at the request of, or under the influence of, the U. S. government.  Like most people, I was dimly aware of these revelations, but the news coverage of them was intermittent and depended greatly on the political orientation of the media outlet reporting it.  And I'm sure that remains the case today.

 

But recently I came across one report that summarizes the facts in a chilling and alarming way.  If what this report says is true, we indeed have a major problem that involves not only electronic social media, but the government and fundamental constitutional issues. 

 

In all such cases, one should consider the source.  The source of this report is John Daniel Davidson, a senior editor at The Federalist, a conservative website which Wikipedia says has carried false and misleading information at times.  The particular report I refer to did not appear in that website, but in a newsletter called Imprimis issued by Hillsdale College, a private college that is one of the few serious colleges in the U. S. that refuses to take federal funds on principle.  Adapted from a talk Davidson gave at the college, the report is entitled "The Twitter Files Reveal an Existential Threat."

 

Davidson details three examples of how the FBI, working both on its own behalf and as a liaison between a number of other federal agencies and Twitter, directed the firm to flag, suppress, or suspend numerous accounts such as those of the New York Post, whose offense was to break the news of the Hunter Biden laptop; President Trump, whose suspension after the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot was sui generis in its disregard for internal suspension policies; and during the COVID-19 epidemic, in which Twitter was asked to, and did, squelch information that did not follow the official line on the pandemic that prevailed at the time.

 

The main point of Davidson's article is summed up in these words toward the end of the piece:  ". . . the entire concept of 'content moderation' is a euphemism for censorship by social media companies that falsely claim to be neutral and unbiased."  Davidson presents evidence that in 2017, Twitter publicly announced that all content moderation took place "at [Twitter's] sole discretion," but internally, they would censor anything that "U. S. intelligence identified as a state-sponsored entity conducting cyber-operations," whether the intelligence community was right or not.  As later events proved, the suspected Russian influence on U. S. elections was largely a smokescreen for allowing the federal government to suppress a wide variety of actors, most of which were not sponsored by any state, in direct violation of the First Amendment.

 

Currently, the U. S. Supreme Court is considering two cases that involve Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.  The basic thrust of the section is to allow social-media companies to claim immunity from prosecution regarding material posted on their sites by third parties—namely, anybody but the company itself.  It also exempts the companies from lawsuits involving content moderation as long as the company can show such moderation was a good-faith effort to remove "objectionable" material. 

 

This law was passed in the very early days of social media, when it was not at all clear that internet-based systems such as Facebook and Twitter would ever make money.  Those days are long gone, and the pipsqueak upstarts of the 1990s have become the 900-pound gorillas of the 2020s. 

 

Far from being a minor sideshow in the ways the public learns what their elected officials and the rest of the government are up to, Twitter is arguably the primary source of breaking news from officialdom, equivalent to the Associated Press wire service of the long-ago day when news really traveled mainly over copper wires to teletype machines.  As publishers, the newspapers, radio, and TV outlets of yore (yore being anytime before about 1980) knew that they were legally responsible for what they printed or broadcast, and made careful distinctions between what was news and what was analysis or opinion.  They had the freedom to print what they wanted to print, courtesy of the First Amendment, which prohibits the federal government from "abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press."  But they also had the responsibility of standing behind what they printed as facts, and so they stressed fact-checking and accuracy, plus an effort to present all the significant news and suppress none of it, no matter how far it strayed from the newspaper's own political position.

 

Granted, this was an ideal that was only approached in practice.  But if you transpose what Twitter has done in the last few years to the register of how news was produced in, say, 1970, the results can be shocking.

 

Suppose the 1970s Watergate break-in, Deep Throat's revelations, and the secretly recorded Nixon White House tapes had been systematically expunged from all newspaper, radio, and TV coverage through the intervention of the FBI, saying that it was all a plot by the Russians?  After Nixon told the news media that they wouldn't have him to kick around anymore following his 1962 loss to Pat Brown in the California governor's race, suppose all the networks agreed to ban him from ever appearing on radio or television again, again at the behest of the federal government? 

 

I am no fan of Richard Nixon.  But my point is that none of these acts of censorship happened back then, because the reigning media companies kept their distance from the government, no matter who was running it.

 

Needless to say, the situation is different now.  Davidson's summary of the Twitter Files is an indictment of the hand-in-glove way that the federal government, using the channel of the FBI, has succeeded in manipulating the media landscape to suit its purposes, and not the best interests of the American people at large.  It is far past time to restore a responsible distance between social media and the government, but doing that will require a well-informed public, and the media we have may not be up to the job.

 

Sources:  John Daniel Davidson's article "The Twitter Files Reveal an Existential Threat" appeared in Vol. 62, No. 1 (Jan. 2023) of Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College.  I also referred to a report on the Supreme Court Section 230 cases at https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/21/supreme-court-justices-in-google-case-hesitate-to-upend-section-230.html and Wikipedia articles on The Federalist and Richard Nixon's November 1962 news conference. 

What? Twitter Neutral?

 

Back when I started this blog in 2006, the phrase "social media" was hardly used by anybody, according to Google Trends.  It began to climb above 1% of its current frequency of use around 2008, possibly in connection with the elections of that year, and has been climbing ever since. 

 

Twitter, the social-media format that has become the default medium of choice for announcements by Presidents on down, was also founded in 2006.  From an obscure techie-speak term, it has turned into a routine and near-universal medium of expression that its leadership has claimed is as neutral as they can make it.  But a recent article by political scientist Wilfred Reilly details how the medium's claim of neutrality is false. 

 

Specifically, in 2018, Twitter's CEO Jack Dorsey said, in response to accusations that the firm was silently suppressing or banning certain conservatives, that "We don’t shadow-ban conservatives — period."  Similar assertions were made by company officials testifying before Congress and in other public venues.

 

Then along comes reporter Bari Weiss, who used Elon Musk's recently released Twitter files last month to demonstrate dozens of examples in which Twitter silenced or suppressed certain accounts. 

 

Weiss found a variety of ways Twitter can cripple the reach of a given account.  One way is by making the person unsearchable, which is more effective these days than the class of untouchables maintained in some cultures.  Encumbering tweets with warnings, suppressing the sharing of certain tweets—the list of technical means goes on and on.

 

As wonky as I am about engineering details, I'd like to pull back to examine a broader question:  has Twitter behaved unethically in (a) saying they don't "shadow-ban" while clearly doing so, and (b) favoring some tweets and suppressing others?

 

We can dispense with (a) pretty quickly.  Unless Dorsey wants to play a Clintonesque definition game with the phrase "shadow-ban" ("It depends on what you mean by 'shadow-ban.'"), it's obvious that he and his corporate minions have lied repeatedly about how they treat certain accounts.  Companies lie about what they do for a variety of reasons.  Sometimes it's simple ignorance—nobody told the boss what was going on.  That seems hardly likely in this case.  Sometimes it's a deliberate strategy to avoid public embarrassment and financial loss.  That would explain Dorsey's behavior, certainly, and imagining what would have happened if he'd said, "Well, yes, we think we have a duty to the public to protect it from some opinions, and so we do shadow-ban," I can see why a lie would be appealing. 

 

Reilly makes the point that we shouldn't be surprised when we find that Twitter or any other social-media outlet shapes its content to suit its own purposes, whether those be profit, a desire to shape the political landscape, or other things perceived as of more value than telling the truth about what one is up to.  What is disappointing, if not surprising, is the ease and frequency with which Twitter lied about it, and the gullibility of much of the dominant media to believe them, and to criticize so-called conspiracy theorists for claiming that certain stories and outlets—the Hunter Biden laptop episode comes to mind—were intentionally suppressed.  Musk's revelations of internal Twitter documents basically confirm many of these claims that were so scornfully dismissed before.

 

What about (b)?  Regardless of whether they are honest about it, should Twitter mold and shape their content by hyping some tweets and squashing others?  And we shouldn't limit the scope of the question to Twitter.  Facebook, search engines such as Google, and the whole megillah of social media and the way we look for information these days should be included in this question.

 

Most people would agree on certain outer limits to stuff that people post or tweet.  Blackmail, bullying, the lowest dregs of the human imagination—these things should not be allowed into the public arena.  The problem comes when you ask about the rest of what comes into a place like Twitter for potential publication. 

 

Strictly speaking, Twitter and virtually all other social media are private companies which are, and probably should remain, in control of what they publish.  Twitter is not like a public park, paid for with taxes and therefore available to any taxpayer who follows some basic rules.  It's more like a private estate in that sense, where once you are allowed in on the owner's terms, almost anything goes that doesn't break the law.  There is no intrinsic right to express yourself on Twitter or any other private platform.

 

The practical problem is that in replacing the old-fashioned print and one-way electronic media, social media have become the default public square.  Stuff that used to be announced in press conferences before cameras and reporters now gets tweeted routinely first, and press conferences come later, if at all. 

 

The legacy media repressed things silently too.  I can't recall the details, but I remember reading about some reporters who showed up at the house of a prominent public official to ask him something.  His wife came to the door drunk as a skunk, and the code of behavior back then (this was in the early 1960s, I think) made them ignore her state and behavior, and they went away without any story at all.  These days, of course, a live video of her would go viral from the reporter's phone, likely as not.

 

So the news that Twitter shapes tweets to suit itself isn't really news in the sense of a radical new thing happening.  What needs to happen is that people who use social media—and for most of us, that means readers rather than the relatively few producers of viral tweets—need to be aware that everything is biased:  Twitter, Facebook, Google, the newspapers, and even emails from your friends. 

 

With your friends, you probably know them well enough to allow for whatever biases they bring to the table.  And with Musk's revelations about Twitter, we are effectively learning more about Twitter's personality—what things it likes and what things you aren't likely to hear from it.  The bad part of this is that if you want to says something that Twitter doesn't like, you are going to have to find another way to say it.  And that's a problem, but as Reilly pointed out at the end of his article, there's always dictionaries and encyclopedias, and I'd add snail-mail to that, too.

 

Sources:  Wilfred Reilly's article "The Conspiracy Theories Were Real, and Other Revelations" appeared on the National Review website on Dec. 30, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/12/the-conspiracy-theories-were-real-and-other-revelations/. 

Texas Moves to Ban Social Media Banning

 

On Sept. 9, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed HB 20, a law designed to keep social media companies with more than 50 million subscribers from blocking users whose viewpoints the company disapproves of.  Scheduled to take effect in December, the law has already attracted controversy and threats of lawsuits to keep it from going into effect.

 

Currently, if a user is de-platformed from a large site such as Facebook, there are not a lot of alternatives.  The overarching law in the U. S. pertaining to such situations is Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act, which prevails if there is a conflict between it and a state law.  However, there is wiggle room that Section 230 leaves, at least according to State Rep. Briscoe Cain, who authored the Texas statute.  Cain regards social media in the same light as telephone companies—that is, "common carriers" whose business it is to take on any and all comers and not discriminate among them based on content. 

 

Such discrimination happens all the time, as one unconfirmed incident I heard of recently attests.  A man at the church I attend volunteers at a local pregnancy resource center, which is holding an online fundraising event in a few weeks.  He told me that the center has found that some of their emails sent to supporters have mysteriously disappeared, implying that the internet service providers' spam filters had been adjusted to block emails from the center. 

 

Another example taken at random from a web search concerns Ryan Moore, a self-described writer and advertising broker, who tried to advertise a video he made in the spring of 2019 in which he was wearing a red "MAGA" (Make America Great Again) hat.  While I have not viewed the video (I checked the link and it is now "unavailable") his description of it sounds mild enough—criticism of the Christchurch, New Zealand terrorist bombing, good wishes for a nice St. Patrick's Day, and so on.  Not only did Google refuse his ad to promote his video, it permanently banned him from ever having a Google ad account again, and confirmed this decision when Moore inquired, saying "Since this decision is final, the account will not be reinstated." 

 

I could multiply such instances that range everywhere from a single post being blocked to the wholesale destruction of an entire business when the Parler app and website were de-platformed by Google and Apple in 2019. 

 

Not everyone who gets de-platformed is defensible, and even Rep. Cain probably does not want to allow hard-core child pornography to go unrestricted on the Internet (although it probably does if you look hard enough).  But HB 20 is an attempt to redress the huge power imbalance that happens when an individual or small organization has its access to social media blocked by a giant well-funded firm that exercises essentially monopoly powers.

 

Either the Texas attorney general or the wronged entity could sue under the new bill, and this may be a point of vulnerability, in that opponents of the bill claim it may interfere with the ability of social media companies to regulate their own content.  Of course it will.  NetChoice, a trade association which counts Google, PayPal, and Facebook among its members, issued a statement condemning the passage of HB 20 and saying that it will probably be blocked by a federal court once it goes into effect.  NetChoice's position is that social media firms, as private entities, are entitled to carry only content that they choose, and by using their facilities, users put themselves at the mercy of the firm's discretion. 

 

This reminds me of a scene out of the 1940 Disney animated film "Fantasia," which set to music cartoon characters both familiar and otherwise.  In time with the famous ballet music "Dance of the Hours," viewers are greeted by a company of baby hippopotamuses, each with a frilly pink lace tu-tu encircling her waist.

 

The analogy is clear—we have a troop of baby-hippo Big Tech giants stomping over the public stage, asking us to believe that their private-firm tu-tus, which might have been appropriate in the very early days when legacy media such as TV and newspapers overshadowed them, mean that whatever they decide about their content is their own business because it affects so few people. 

 

The tu-tus no longer fit, if they ever did.  Big Tech now operates a lot of 900-pound gorillas, to mix the animal metaphor, who do exactly as they please with regard to content that currently will not gain attention any other way than being filtered through the social-media monopoly.  The Texas legislation is one state's attempt to make dealing with social media a little less unfair.

 

I note a disturbing trend of which this controversy is only one example.  A nation, to be a nation, must share a common pool of underlying principles or philosophies, in order to endure.  By their behavior in China, for example, Big Tech firms such as Apple, Google, and Facebook make it clear that nations mean little or nothing to them when it comes to the bottom line.  Of course they need to stay within the law, but "the law" is a slippery and many-faceted thing, especially when you have deep enough pockets to hire enough lawyers to keep even states busy for years just trying to keep from being overwhelmed with lawsuits. 

 

In past controversies involving freedom of speech in this country, opposing sides could at least agree on the statement, "Well, at least we're all Americans."  But I have a hard time picturing the leaders of Big Tech freely admitting such a thing even in public, let alone in private.  Great wealth confers great power, and as Lord Acton said, power corrupts.  It is not yet time to despair that the systems of government that the founders deeded to us can overcome the exercise of raw power with the rule of law, which is all we have to guard ourselves against despotism.  But the upcoming battle over the implementation of HB 20 will be yet another skirmish in the war that is currently being fought over the right of free speech, which Big Tech increasingly wants to define for itself. 

 

Sources:  I referred to a Texas Tribune article "Social media companies can’t ban Texans over political viewpoints under new law" at https://www.texastribune.org/2021/09/02/texas-social-media-censorship-legislature/ and an article from The Verge at https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/9/22661626/texas-social-media-law-hb-20-signed-greg-abbott..  Ryan Moore described his permanent ban from Google advertising in the Des Moines Register on Sept. 26, 2019 at https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/opinion/columnists/2019/09/26/one-many-conservatives-banned-social-media/3773954002/.

Facebook Is Watching Your Friends

 

Suppose you went to a party with a group of friends, one of whom is a rather outspoken person we'll call Ms. A.  After an hour or so, someone you never met before comes up to you and says, "I couldn't help noticing that you came here with Ms. A.  Aren't you concerned that her views are a little extreme?  I can give you the number of somebody who can help her." 

 

How would you react?

 

I don't know about you, but my first thought would be, "Who the — are you to be judging my friend?"  The whole thing smacks of authoritarian control and monitoring on the part of the snoop who expressed concern about Ms. A.  Yet in early July, Facebook announced that it was going to do a trial of a system that essentially does that very thing.  And I know someone it's already happened to.

 

Here is the way Facebook explains what it's doing, as reported by Reuters on July 1:  "This test is part of our larger work to assess ways to provide resources and support to people on Facebook who may have engaged with or were exposed to extremist content, or may know someone who is at risk."  That sounds reasonable—after all, groups such as Al Qaeda used platforms like Facebook to recruit U. S. citizens to their cause, and if there's something Facebook can do to keep that from happening again, it sounds like it's worth doing.

 

I'm involved in a group that meets monthly to discuss an article from the journal of religion and public life called First Things.  Most of us are over 50, and a more harmless group of non-radicals is hard to imagine.  For a time, a woman attended who later joined the Roman Catholic Church.  From my limited interactions with her, I would say she was conservative, but not radically so, and unusually articulate about various social problems, including abortion. She no longer attends our discussion group, but some of us still follow her on Facebook.

 

Her Facebook followers were surprised the other day when Facebook asked them if they thought the Catholic woman was becoming an extremist.  I don't use Facebook and so I can't say what material she might have posted which inspired Facebook to ask this question.  But based on what I know about the woman, at the very least Facebook is wasting its time.  And more seriously, this anonymous action on the part of a powerful corporation exerts a chilling effect on the tattered, bedraggled thing we once called free speech.

 

The fly in this otherwise admirable-sounding ointment of extremism prevention is the question of just what counts as "extremist."  One person's extremist is another's enthusiast.  Also on July 1, Fox News reported the comments of several people who had received such warnings, which typically read  "Are you concerned that someone you know is becoming an extremist?" followed by an option to "Get Help" which leads to an organization called "Life After Hate."  One user who received this type of notice neatly summed up the dilemma that Facebook faces: "'Confidential help is available?' Who do they think they are? Either they’re a publisher and a political platform legally liable for every bit of content they host, or they need to STAY OUT OF THE WAY."

 

The reason Facebook isn't liable for every bit of content they host, as a conventional newspaper publisher would be, is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which exempts platform hosts from being liable for what third parties place on their platforms.  Perhaps in the early days of the Internet, this protection was needed in order to encourage investment in the young, struggling things that were Google and Facebook.  But now that social media constitute a major, if not the primary, source of political and cultural news in the U. S., the pretense that they are insignificant people-connectors who just barely make enough money from ads to stay in business and need special protection from the government is looking more ridiculous every day. 

 

Not only is Facebook deciding who is an extremist, it's getting help deciding what truth is from the White House.  Biden Administration press secretary Jen Psaki said on July 15 that they are "identifying 'problematic' posts for Facebook to censor because they contain 'misinformation' about COVID-19."

 

Again, this sounds reasonable at first glance.  Some things that people are saying on Facebook about COVID-19 and vaccinations for it are ludicrous and harmful.  But what happened to the old saying "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"?  According to Wikipedia, this quotation comes from a biography of Voltaire by one Evelyn Beatrice Hall, writing as S. G. Tallentyre. 

 

Hall was trying to illustrate one of Voltaire's principles, which was a radical (there's that word again) belief in free speech, which is one of the pillars of what should now be called classical liberalism, along with democratic governance and freedom of religion.  The American Civil Liberties Union adhered to radical free-speech principles until a few decades ago, even defending such scurrilous extremists as a neo-Nazi group that wanted to stage a march in a Chicago suburb where many Holocaust survivors lived.   This was in 1978, and although the ACLU itself has a page on its website describing this episode, I think it's fair to say that the current ACLU is finding other things to do with its time.

 

Facebook wants to have things both ways.  They want to receive plaudits as the platform for the little guy where a thousand free-speech flowers bloom, and they also want to avoid opprobrium (and lawsuits, and fines) for hosting material that is illegal, libelous, or harmful in someone's eyes.  But as the gentleman quoted above implied, you can't have freedom without responsibility.  Editing or censoring one thing on Facebook means the whole thing is now an edited entity.  You can't be just a little bit pregnant, and you can't pretend a platform is free if parts of it aren't—especially when the parts that aren't change from day to day, or from White House instruction to embarrassing news report. 

 

Sources:  The Reuters report describing Facebook's test program advising about extremism was published on July 1, 2021 at https://www.reuters.com/technology/facebook-asks-are-your-friends-becoming-extremists-2021-07-01/.  I also consulted a Fox News report at https://www.foxnews.com/media/facebook-warns-users-have-been-exposed-harmful-extremists.  The New York Post reported on Jen Psaki's comment about the White House advising Facebook on COVID-19 "misinformation" at https://nypost.com/2021/07/15/white-house-flagging-posts-for-facebook-to-censor-due-to-covid-19-misinformation/.  I also referred to Wikipedia articles on Evelyn Beatrice Hall and Voltaire.

Can Democracy in America Survive Big Tech?

 

Two articles I came across recently raise the question in the headline of today's column.  One is by a journalist named Allum Bokhari, who gave a speech last November at Hillsdale College, one of the very small number of U. S. colleges that does not accept Federal grants, loans, or other funding.  The other is by Robert D. Kaplan, a geopolitics specialist at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.  Both gentlemen are deeply concerned that social media, as it now works, constitute an existential threat to American small-d democratic government.

 

Kaplan is concerned that social media may create conditions in which the "fragile, perhaps even ephemeral" experiment called American democracy cannot survive.  His studies of nation-states range widely over time and geography.  The old USSR, he points out, was not defeated from without by nuclear or conventional warfare.  Rather, it was destroyed by internal weaknesses and a crisis of purpose that led to its disintegration.  Regarding the present rivalry between the U. S. and China, he sees social media playing radically different roles in the two countries.

 

In China, the authoritarian government ensures that everything on social media reinforces the "blood-and-soil nationalism" of the dominant Han cultural matrix.  Traces of dissent are ruthlessly stamped out, and ethnic minorities such as Tibetans and Uighurs are suppressed and even locked up in concentration camps.  There is basically one political story available in China, and social media reinforce it.

 

In the U. S., on the other hand, Big Tech effectively control social media, and recent events emphasize the subtle but increasingly effective control they exert.  The dominant vision embraced by those who inhabit the upper reaches of corporate and cultural America is a transnational one which, when it looks at American history at all, sees a story of exploitation and shame, exemplified by the New York Times's "1619 Project" that attempted to show that the founders based America on slavery, not on anything noble.  Even worse, the economics of social media have come to embrace the divide-and-conquer principle that feeding different kinds of people what they most want to hear means cutting up the citizenry into "racial, gender, political, or sexual" identity groups that are often pitted against each other, to the great loss of the basic unity that any nation needs to survive.

 

Allum Bokhari brings his experience with Breitbart News to the table.  While I am no fan of Breitbart News, the old principle of free speech (much abused lately) says that every voice deserves to be heard, if not believed.  And he brings some indisputable facts to the table that are worth considering.

 

Unlike the early days of the Internet when no single social-media platform was dominant and everybody had more or less equal access to everybody else's website, today's Internet is a creature of the Google-Facebook-Amazon complex of corporate control.  And control is the right word.  The velvet glove of free apps and fun-looking websites conceals an iron hand of manipulation that is so subtle and complex, powered by advanced AI software, that the vast majority of users have little or no idea that they are being manipulated.  But they are.  

 

Cadres of software engineers spend countless hours devising complex algorithms to change behavior, not only to the benefit of advertisers on Big Tech's media, but for other reasons as well.  One quote that Bokhari reports from a source he interviewed at Facebook says it all:  “We have thousands of people on the platform who have gone from far right to center in the past year, so we can build a model from those people and try to make everyone else on the right follow the same path.”  If this isn't manipulation, I don't know what is.

 

In recent months, the manipulation and control has come above ground for everyone to see.  Bokhari cites the actions of Facebook, Twitter, and other Big Tech firms in de-platforming President Trump, and of Amazon and Apple in kicking the upstart social-media platform Parler off their equipment (or in the case of Apple, off the privately owned phones of millions of users).  One can argue about the motivations for such actions.  But the bare fact of the actions remain:  privately owned companies, largely unhindered and in fact protected by government regulation from lawsuits that private individuals can be subject to (that is what Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act does), unilaterally censored an entire social-media network regardless of who or what was on it, and also censored the sitting President of the United States. 

 

For those who can remember the old days of only three television networks, the only analogous action I can imagine would be if the President decided to make a speech one day, and in the middle of his words spoken to the "pool" camera that all three networks were taking their video feed from, executives decided to pull the switch and return to their regular programming of the Beverly Hillbillies or whatever.  Nothing like that ever happened, but if it had, the roars of outrage from common citizens of every political viewpoint would have been deafening. 

 

Today, roars—or anything else—can't be heard unless Big Tech approves of the roar.  The dominant progressive political views of the transnational cultural elite who are in charge are squeezing out the wide spectrum of views that, no matter how annoying some of the extremes are, turn out to be vital to the survival of democracy.  To those who deplore disagreement and debate, I would say this:  disagreement and debate are features of democracy, not bugs.  Cut them off and you are left with a softer form of what China has:  a homogenized, uniform, expert-driven technocracy that maintains the form of democracy, perhaps, but denies its power.  If this nation, which has endured for 245 years, is to preserve government "of the people, by the people, for the people," the malignant effects of social media and corporate control must be dealt with.  And soon, before it is too late.

 

Sources:  Allum Bokhari's post, based on a modified version of his Nov. 8, 2020 speech at Hillsdale College, is available at https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/control-need-rein-big-tech/.  Robert D. Kaplan's article "How We Lose Against China" appeared in the Feb. 8, 2021 issue of National Review on pp. 27-29.

Our Unelected Big-Tech Overlords

 

Last week I blogged about how Twitter kicked off @realDonaldTrump, and how decisions like that give the lie to Twitter's claim of common-carrier-like protection against lawsuits granted by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.  Normally I like to change topics every week, but this week is an exception. 

 

A week ago today, on Jan. 10, Amazon Web Services shut down its web-hosting services for the social-media network Parler, taking it off the Internet and capping a series of moves by Amazon, Apple, and Google that effectively ended the company's ability to serve its customers.  It was an extraordinary and united show of the power that large tech companies have to censor social-media speech.  Leaving aside for the moment the question of whether the action was justified, it now appears that not only can Big Tech edit content on its own sites as it pleases, it can exert the same editorial power on supposedly independent companies like Parler.

 

The background of this incident is informative.  As Twitter and other mainstream social-media outlets began ramping up their removal and suspension policies, Parler began to attract many of the users who left Twitter for that reason.  The New York Times reported that by Jan. 9, the day before Parler disappeared, it was the No. 1 free app for Apple's iPhones.

 

No matter.  Some things are more important than money.  Last week, Apple and Google announced that they were no longer going to allow Parler to be downloaded to phones with their proprietary operating systems, which meant that while existing customers could still use the service (at least till Jan. 10), nobody new could join.  But when Amazon pulled Parler's plug Sunday, even those apps became useless.

 

The reason given by Apple, Google, and Amazon is that in their view, Parler was not sufficiently monitoring the content of their posts for incitements to violence and crime.  I have no way of judging that, being a non-user of social media myself, but reports that Parler was used to coordinate the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol in Washington seem credible.  So we will allow that this was a problem. 

 

Reportedly, Apple gave Parler 24 hours on Friday, Jan. 8, to "clean up its act" and remove offending posts, but Parler's efforts were deemed inadequate, and Apple removed Parler from its app store on Saturday. 

 

In a piece in National Review, Wesley J. Smith points out that Big Tech—Apple, Google, Amazon, etc.—are now behaving more like a fourth branch of government than ever.  However tenuously, the three constitutional branches of the federal government—the legislative, the executive, and the judiciary—are beholden to the citizenry of the United States.  But no one elected the leaders of the media giants who can, unilaterally and without breaking any laws, decide that a competing social-media service that is growing rapidly and under the protection of the same Section 230 that allowed them to become what they are today, decide to kill a competitor like Parler in a matter of days. 

 

Historically, the United States has been a haven for freedom of speech.  It was a bedrock principle in the philosophical discussions which led to the founding of the country.  In 1798, seven years after the Bill of Rights was added to the U. S. Constitution, Congress passed and President John Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which made it a crime to make false statements critical of the federal government.  These acts proved very unpopular, contributing to Thomas Jefferson's victory in the presidential election of 1800, and the acts limiting free speech were allowed to expire by 1801. 

 

Jay Cost points out that tolerating a certain amount of offensive speech is the price of allowing freedom of speech, which is vitally necessary to a self-governed people.  He quotes Madison as saying, "Our First Amendment freedoms give us the right to think what we like and say what we please.  And if we the people are to govern ourselves, we must have these rights, even if they are misused by a minority."

 

The excessive restrictions of the Alien and Sedition Acts were duly removed in keeping with the idea that any significant restriction of free speech is inimical to the free exchange of views that a free citizenry needs in order to govern itself.  Madison realized that certain people would abuse that right, but he regarded it as the price we had to pay in order to avoid suppression of thoughts that the powerful in government disapproved of.

 

I am personally appalled by the execrable and deadly riot at the Capitol, and by anyone who uses the Internet to encourage violence.  But for some time now we have been trying to have our social-media cake and eat it too.  The vaunted freedom of social-media speech is no longer free if those who run the media empires can squash, not only speech on their own systems, but speech on rival companies by shutting them down.

 

One choice is to accept the fact that in order to use social media at all, we will be subject to the consensus censorship of the powerful few who run the "private" sevice providers, and we will simply have to accept whatever they think is right as far as what can be posted and can't be.  This is the direction we are heading.  And it looks to me no different than the regime imposed by the Alien and Sedition Acts, a situation in which anyone who wants to post anything that the powerful firms think goes too far is simply out of luck and can't do it, with no appeal.  Yes, we might agree that letting people organize an attack on the Capitol is not a good idea, but in killing Parler, Apple/Google/Amazon are acting as legislators (making their rules), executives (imposing the rules) and judges (deciding where the rules apply).  And if you don't agree with what they decide, which many of the millions of users of Parler who didn't post objectionable material didn't, well, you are just out of luck.

 

Another alternative is to take Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act seriously, and go only after the individuals responsible for objectionable speech if they violate any laws, or prompt such violation of laws.  That is what Parler more or less tried to do, and you see what happened to them.  As deplorable as much of the material they carried on their system was, Parler was much more in the spirit of Madison's attitude toward free speech.

 

China shows that huge successful economies can thrive under a repressive government that makes people watch everything they say and hauls them off to a concentration camp if they say the wrong thing.  But, as I said, some things are more important than money.

 

Sources:  The New York Times report on the squelching of Parler appeared at https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/09/technology/apple-google-parler.html.  Wesley J. Smith's editorial on Big Tech appeared in National Review at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/big-tech-now-the-fourth-branch-of-government/.  Jay Cost's essay on James Madison and freedom of speech appeared in the same journal at https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/09/james-madison-free-speech-rights-must-be-absolute-nearly/.  I also referred to the Wikipedia articles on Parler and the Alien and Sedition Acts.