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<\/picture><\/a><\/p>\nLast week provided a near-perfect analogy.\u00a0For years before the 2020 election, nearly all American conservatives were in favour of standing up to big tech<\/strong>: the majority of them were also against changing the laws and regulations enough to make such a stand effective. The difference is that, unlike the German threat, which was geographically remote, the threat from Silicon Valley was literally in front of our noses, day and night: on our mobile phones, our tablets and our laptops.<\/p>\nWriting in this magazine more than three years ago, I warned of a coming collision between Donald Trump and Silicon Valley.<\/strong>\u00a0\u2018Social media helped Donald Trump take the White House,\u2019 I wrote. \u2018Silicon Valley won\u2019t let it happen again.\u2019 The conclusion of my book\u00a0The Square and the Tower<\/em>\u00a0was that the new online network platforms represented a new kind of power that posed a fundamental challenge to the traditional hierarchical power of the state.<\/p>\nBy the network platforms, I mean Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, Google and Apple, or FATGA for short \u2014\u00a0companies that have established a dominance over the public sphere not seen since the heyday of the pre-Reformation Catholic Church<\/strong>. FATGA had humble enough origins in garages and dorm rooms. As recently as 2008, not one of them could be found among the world\u2019s largest companies by market capitalisation. Today, they occupy first, third, fourth and fifth places in the market cap league table, just above their Chinese counterparts, Tencent and Alibaba.<\/p>\nWhat happened was that the network platforms turned the originally decentralised worldwide web into an oligarchically organised and hierarchical public sphere from which they made money and to which they controlled access.<\/strong>\u00a0That the original, superficially libertarian inclinations of these companies\u2019 founders would rapidly crumble under political pressure from the left was also perfectly obvious, if one bothered to look a little beyond one\u2019s proboscis.<\/p>\nFollowing the violent far-right rally at Charlottesville in August 2017, Matthew Prince, chief executive of the internet service provider Cloudflare, described how he had responded: \u2018Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn\u2019t be allowed on the internet.\u2019 On the basis that \u2018the people behind the [white supremacist magazine]\u00a0Daily Stormer<\/em>\u00a0are assholes\u2019, he denied their website access to the internet. \u2018No one should have that power,\u2019 he admitted. \u2018We need to have a discussion around this with clear rules and clear frameworks. My whims and those of Jeff [Bezos] and Larry [Page] and \u2026 Mark [Zuckerberg] shouldn\u2019t be what determines what should be online.\u2019<\/p>\nBut that discussion had barely begun in 2017. Indeed, many Republicans at that time still believed the notion that FATGA were champions of the free market that required only the lightest regulation. They know better now. After last year\u2019s election Twitter attached health warnings to Trump\u2019s tweets when he claimed that he had in fact beaten Joe Biden. Then, in the wake of the storming of the Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters, Twitter and Facebook began shutting down multiple accounts \u2014 including that of the President himself, now \u2018permanently suspended\u2019 from tweeting. When Trump loyalists declared their intention to move their conversations from Twitter to rival Parler \u2014 in effect, Twitter with minimal content moderation \u2014 Google and Apple deleted Parler from their app stores. Then Amazon kicked Parler off its \u2018cloud\u2019 service, effectively deleting it from the internet altogether. It was a stunning demonstration of power.<\/p>\n
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It is only a slight overstatement to say that, while the mob\u2019s coup against Congress ignominiously failed, big tech\u2019s coup against Trump triumphantly succeeded.<\/strong>\u00a0It is not merely that Trump has been abruptly denied access to the channels he has used throughout his presidency to communicate with voters. It is the fact that he is being excluded from a domain the courts have for some time recognised as a public forum.<\/p>\nVarious lawsuits over the years have conferred on big tech an unusual status: a public good, held in private hands.<\/strong>\u00a0In 2018 the Southern District of New York ruled that the right to reply to Trump\u2019s tweets is protected \u2018under the \u201cpublic forum\u201d doctrines set forth by the Supreme Court\u2019. So it was wrong for the President to \u2018block\u2019 people \u2014 i.e. stop them reading his tweets \u2014 because they were critical of him. Censoring Twitter users \u2018because of their expressed political views\u2019 represents \u2018viewpoint discrimination [that] violates the First Amendment\u2019.<\/p>\nIn Packingham vs North Carolina (2017), Justice Anthony Kennedy likened internet platforms to \u2018the modern public square\u2019, arguing that it was therefore unconstitutional to prevent sex offenders from accessing, and expressing opinions on, social network platforms. \u2018While in the past there may have been difficulty in identifying the most important places (in a spatial sense) for the exchange of views,\u2019 Justice Kennedy wrote, \u2018today the answer is clear. It is cyberspace \u2014the \u201cvast democratic forums of the internet\u201d in general \u2026 and social media in particular.\u2019<\/p>\n
In other words, as President of the United States, Trump could not block Twitter users from seeing his tweets, but Twitter is apparently within its rights to delete the President\u2019s account altogether. Sex offenders have a right of access to online social networks; but the President does not.<\/strong><\/p>\nThis is not to condone Trump\u2019s increasingly deranged attempts to overturn November\u2019s election result. Before last week\u2019s riots, he egged on the mob; he later said he \u2018loved\u2019 them, despite what they had done. Nor is there any denying that a number of Trump\u2019s most fervent supporters pose a threat of further violence. Considering the bombs and firearms some of them brought to Washington, the marvel is how few people lost their lives during the occupation of the Capitol.<\/p>\n
Yet the correct response to that threat is not to delegate to Facebook\u2019s Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter\u2019s Jack Dorsey and their peers the power to remove from the public square anyone they deem to be sympathetic to insurrection or otherwise suspect.\u00a0The correct response is for the FBI and the relevant police departments to pursue any would-be Trumpist terrorists, just as they have quite successfully pursued would-be Islamist terrorists over the past two decades.<\/strong><\/p>\nThe key to understanding what has happened lies in an obscure piece of legislation, almost a quarter of a century old, enacted after a New York court held online service provider Prodigy liable for a user\u2019s defamatory posts. Congress then stepped in with the 1996 Telecommunications Act and in particular Section 230, which was written to encourage nascent firms to protect users and prevent illegal activity without incurring massive content management costs. It states:<\/p>\n
1. No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.<\/p>\n
2. No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of \u2026 any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
In essence, Section 230 gives websites immunity from liability for what their users post if it is in any way harmful, but also entitles websites to take down with equal impunity any content that they don\u2019t like the look of.\u00a0The surely unintended result of this legislation, drafted for a fledgling internet, is that some of the biggest companies in the world enjoy a protection reminiscent of Joseph Heller\u2019s\u00a0Catch-22<\/em>. Try to hold them responsible as publishers, and they will say they are platforms. Demand access to their platforms and they will insist that they are publishers.<\/strong><\/p>\nThis might have been a tolerable state of affairs if America\u2019s network platforms had been subject to something like the old Fairness Doctrine, which required the big three terrestrial TV networks to give airtime to opposing views. But that was something the Republican party killed off in the 1980s, seeing the potential of allowing more slanted coverage on cable news. What goes around comes around. The network platforms long ago abandoned any pretence of being neutral. Even before Charlottesville, their senior executives and many of their employees had made it clear that they were appalled by Trump\u2019s election victory (especially as both Facebook and Twitter had facilitated it). Increasingly, they interpreted the words \u2018otherwise objectionable\u2019 in Section 230 to mean \u2018objectionable to liberals\u2019.<\/p>\n
Throughout the summer of last year, numerous supporters of Black Lives Matter used social media, as well as mainstream liberal media, to express their support for protests that in many places escalated into violence and destruction considerably worse than occurred in the Capitol last week. One looked in vain for health warnings, much less account suspensions, though Facebook says it has removed accounts that promote violence.<\/strong><\/p>\nCompare, for example, the language Trump used in his 6 January speech and the language Kamala Harris used in support of BLM on Stephen Colbert\u2019s show on 18 June. Neither explicitly condoned violence. Trump exhorted the crowd to march to the Capitol, but he told them to \u2018peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard\u2019. Harris condemned \u2018looting and\u2026 acts of violence\u2019, but said of the BLM protestors: \u2018They\u2019re not going to stop. They\u2019re not. This is a movement. I\u2019m telling you. They\u2019re not going to stop, and everyone, beware. Because they\u2019re not going to stop. They\u2019re not going to stop before election day in November, and they are not going to stop after election day. And everyone should take note of that on both levels.\u2019 What exactly was the significance of that \u2018beware\u2019?<\/p>\n
Earlier, on 1 June, Harris had used Twitter to solicit donations to the Minnesota Freedom Fund, which posted bail for people charged with rioting in Minneapolis after the death of George Floyd. It would be easy to cite other examples. \u2018Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence,\u2019 Nikole Hannah-Jones of the\u00a0New York Times\u00a0<\/em>told CBS in early June, at a time when multiple cities were being swept by arson and vandalism. Her Twitter account is still going strong.<\/p>\nThe double standard was equally apparent when the\u00a0New York Post<\/em>\u00a0broke the story of Biden\u2019s son Hunter\u2019s dubious business dealings in China. Both Twitter and Facebook immediately prevented users from posting links to the article \u2014 something they had never done with stories damaging to Trump.<\/strong><\/p>\nYou don\u2019t need to be a Trump supporter to find all this alarming. Conservatives of many different stripes \u2014 and indeed some bemused liberals \u2014 have experienced the new censorship for themselves, especially as the Covid-19 pandemic has emboldened tech companies to police content more overtly. In the UK, TalkRadio briefly vanished from YouTube for airing anti–lockdown views that violated the company\u2019s \u2018community guidelines\u2019. A recording of Lionel Shriver reading one of her\u00a0Spectator<\/em>\u00a0columns on the pandemic was taken down for similar reasons. Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson, two Oxford academics, fell foul of Facebook\u2019s censors when they wrote for this magazine about a briefly controversial paper on the efficacy of masks in Denmark.<\/p>\nYou might think that FATGA have finally gone too far with their fatwa against a sitting president of the United States. You might think a red line really has been crossed when both Alexei Navalny and Angela Merkel express disquiet at big tech\u2019s overreach. But no. To an extent that is remarkable, American liberals have mostly welcomed (and in some cases encouraged) this surge of censorship \u2014 with the honourable exception of the American Civil Liberties Union.<\/p>\n
True, during last year\u2019s campaign the Biden team occasionally talked tough, especially about Facebook. However, it is increasingly clear that the most big tech has to fear from the Biden-Harris administration is protracted antitrust actions focused on their alleged undermining of competition which, if history is any guide, will likely end with whimpers rather than bangs. Either way, the issue of censorship will not be addressed by antitrust lawsuits.<\/strong><\/p>\nIt is tempting to complain that Democrats are hypocrites \u2014 that they would be screaming blue murder if the boot were on the other foot and it was Kamala Harris whose Twitter account had been cancelled. But if that were the case, how many Republicans would now be complaining? Not many. No, the correct conclusion to be drawn is that the Republicans had their chance to address the problem of over-mighty big tech and completely flunked it.<\/p>\n
Only too late did they realise that Section 230 was Silicon Valley\u2019s Achilles heel. Only too late did they begin drafting legislation to repeal or modify it. Only too late did Section 230 start to feature in Trump\u2019s speeches. Even now it seems to me that very few Republicans really understand that, by itself, repealing 230 would not have sufficed. Without some kind of First Amendment for the internet, repeal would probably just have restricted free speech further.<\/p>\n
As Orwell rightly observed, \u2018we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality.\u2019<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\nThose words sum up quite a lot that has gone on inside the Republican party over the past four years. There it was, right in front of their noses: Trump would lead the party to defeat. And he would behave in the most discreditable way when beaten. Those things were predictable. But what was also foreseeable was that FATGA \u2014 the \u2018new governors\u2019, as a 2018\u00a0Harvard Law Review<\/em>\u00a0article called them \u2014 would be the true victors of the 2020 election.<\/p>\n___
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