Masters of the Universe: Big Tech vs. Free Speech and Privacy

... The purging of conservative Twitter accounts. Facebook's algorithmic "tweaks," designed to obscure and conceal news and ideas that challenge the narrative of the cultural left. Google's routine manipulations of search results, aimed at ensuring that wrongthink and inconvenient events for progressives are shoved down the digital memory hole....

As James D. Miller argues in a recent Quillette essay, there are compelling reasons to restrict Big Tech's viewpoint discrimination on economic grounds....

Big Tech's attempt to silence a constellation of voices that could be said to represent roughly half of the nation's political outlook is nothing short of an active attempt to eliminate this space of rhetorical contestation. If they succeed, America will have lost the very means by which we determine the course of the country....

The ancient Greek democracy had two complementary ideas that undergirded political life: parrhesia and isologia. Parrhesia shares much in common with our idea of free speech. Etymologically, parrhesia means "saying everything." This concept is developed in much of the writing from the ancient world, but in Fearless Speech, Michel Foucault (a hero of the academic left!) sums it up nicely: parrhesia means plainly speaking one's own notion of the truth (not Politico's fact checkers' notion of it). Further, parrhesia usually refers to a truth that is critical of dominant notions of truth and institutional exercises of power. Finally, the person who engages in parrhesia speaks these truths at some personal risk. Understood in this way, it is clear that Big Tech is hellbent on disabling parrhesiastic speech: the fact-checkers will arbitrate the truth, and the truths that are critical of the elite vision of society will be silenced....

Isologia means "equal speech," and in the Greek democracy it meant what we might call "equal access to the dialogue." Although Greece's requirements for citizenship were far more exclusive than Americans prefer, all citizens had the right to speak in the assembly, and the assembly was the locus of democratic deliberation....

Since text displaced speech as the privileged medium for democratic deliberation, most of the few democracies in the world have ignored the concept of isologia....

Those insisting that you don't have a right to a Facebook account are pushing a corrupt notion of parrhesia, and pretending that parrhesia defines the whole scope of free speech -- as if isologia isn't a consideration. But parrhesia (the right to voice critical truths in a blunt style) is meaningless if the only place you are allowed to speak your notion of truth is in your closet. By ignoring both parrhesia and isologia, Big Tech and their apologists justify not only their supposed ownership of the space of public dialogue -- they are asserting a right to dictate which ideas can be voiced in that space, which is functionally no different than decreeing who can and cannot participate in democratic life.....

...The intellectual dark web, such as it is, is indeed a collection of politically incorrect websites, videos, podcasts, and the personalities who fill them with content... the intellectual dark web is not immune to shadowbans, deboosts, detrends, demonetizing, throttling down, or expulsion....

Who are these censors? Not an oppressive government, but instead the private quasi monopolies that control all online communication - the social media and video platforms, the providers of membership services, and the payment processors....

The first line of attack is on the social media platforms. You can have a home website, but people have to find it....

Once the social media platforms determine your content is objectionable, they can throttle down your exposure. In some cases, you may not even know it's happening, you just have smaller audiences. This is called shadowbanning on Twitter or deboosting on Facebook. The next level of enforcement by social media platforms is to "demonetize" someone, which means they stop sending advertising to the viewers, and the content creator stops getting that revenue. On YouTube this can take the form of merely reducing the number of ads served, or completely eliminating them. The final step, of course, is expulsion, which happens all the time....

These are online services that facilitate content creators acquiring paying supporters or subscribers. These services have nearly the same level of monopoly power as the social media platforms, because a supporter has to have an account with the membership services platform before they can direct funds to any specific content creator. Some of the major membership services platforms out are Patreon, Kickstarter, IndiGoGo, GoFundMe, and, until recently, SubscribeStar....

If a content creator is expelled from one membership service platform, they can't just pick up the pieces with another one....

The ultimate link in the chain are the online payment processors, of which there are only two, PayPal and Stripe....

The crackdown on internet free speech, especially any free speech that attacks the Left, has been ongoing. Back in 2016 it was clear that, for example, search results were being manipulated, but overall the Right was able to creatively use online media and compete effectively against the Left despite big tech's left wing bias. That was the last time.

By 2018, biased search results were just one major element of online communications that were weaponized by the Left. Deboosting, demonitizing, and expulsion were now practiced by all the major platforms. With their sights on 2020, the Leftist assault on free speech has now moved into the realm of financial services, with payment processors and banks the new battlefield. The stakes are higher than ever....

The banking system itself is being co-opted by the Left. And even if his new platform accepts cyber currency from his fans, notwithstanding the still limited utility of those "currencies," the ISPs themselves might at that point step into the act, denying use of the internet itself to proscribed content creators....

The Right needs to form its own activist groups, specifically devoted to aggressively pressuring tech companies and financial institutions to respect the first amendment. Our civilization hangs in the balance.

President Trump hailed the trade agreement he signed with Mexico and Canada last week as "great for all our countries." Perhaps he doesn't know that the NAFTA-replacing trade agreement, USMCA, gives tech giants in Silicon Valley a special legal privilege to censor his own supporters - and anyone else they find "objectionable."

Facebook, Twitter, Google, and YouTube all engaged in pre-election censorship against Republicans and Trump supporters. Yet they've managed to sneak a liability protection into President Trump's trade bill that would make it even easier for them to censor their own users.

USMCA entrenches the tech giants' legal protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which grant them legal immunity for user-generated content. This is an important part of the law that allows tech platforms to host a wide variety of speech with light-touch moderation.

But USMCA also entrenches tech companies' right to censor without liability. Article 19.17 of the trade agreement gives tech companies immunity from any lawsuits arising from actions taken to "restrict material it considers to be harmful or objectionable."

Section 230 has a similarly problematic provision, which needs to be amended by the next Congress if the censorship of the internet is to be stopped. But the new, even broader censorship provision, will make it nearly impossible for the tech giants' privilege of legal immunity from any lawsuit that arises out of their censorship practices to be taken away....

"[U]nless it's revised, the agreement will thwart the president's explicit promises to address social media censorship. Article 19.17 of the USMCA stealthily removes seven words from Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act's 'Good Samaritan' provision, which would give Big Tech the statutory right to censor whatever content it finds'"objectionable...'"

According to The Times, Amazon has agreed to finance the Muslim Research and Development Foundation. ... The London-based Muslim entity advocates for stoning women to death, child marriage and female genital mutilation....

... psychologist Dr. Robert Epstein explained how Google reads everything that goes through Gmail - including deleted drafts and incoming emails from non-Google email clients.

"All gmails, outgoing, the ones you write, and incoming - no matter what email service they're coming from - they are all recorded, analyzed, every detail is put into your personal profile."

"Even those gmails that you type, and we've all done this - you type it and you go 'Oh no, I can't send this, that's insane, I'm not gonna send this' and you hit delete - that's already been recorded! That's part of your profile."

"This gets worse. This might be the scariest thing I can tell you this evening. I work a lot with reporters … I do what's called 'expanding the headers,' which means that when I get emails from editors at TIME magazine, the New York Times, the Guardian, I want to see what computers those emails have run through. Guess what?"

"These big news companies all use Google to run their email system! All those emails are running through Google servers. Google has full access - I'm talking about some of the top journalists in the world, who are investigating Google - they're sharing all of their communications, all of their work products, all of the drafts - they're sharing it all with Google!"...

"The Internet has been a disaster for the Left," Coulter pronounced. "The Left already controls all the institutions. They have all the networks. They have all the newspapers. They have the schools. They have the universities. They're teaching preschoolers 'white privilege.' They can't possibly gain anything from the Internet."

She said this is why the Left views the Internet as a problem to be solved, a wild frontier to be tamed. It used to be a matter of playing "games" with conservative sites and users, "but now it's just direct censorship, as is happening to Breitbart."

"Any attack on the Internet, on total free speech on the Internet, is a disaster for conservatives," Coulter warned. "It's absolutely shocking what is being done to Breitbart. This is a major threat."