The Manipulators

by Peter J. Hasson

  Big Tech Won’t Save You

  Communist China is a totalitarian regime that controls information and expression and tracks every aspect of its citizens lives. A vast network of security cameras outfitted with facial recognition technology, allows the state to identify virtually anyone walking the streets within minutes.35 The government carefully tracks and meticulously documents everything from internet usage to credit card purchases, and feeds all this data into an algorithm that determines a “citizen score.” Those with high citizenship marks are eligible to travel abroad and receive other benefits; low scores can result in even further restrictions on an individual’s freedom.

  But the Communist regime doesn’t do it all on its own. The Chinese government uses social media companies as an arm of the surveillance state and pressures them to silence political dissidents. In August 2017, for example, Chinese authorities cracked down on three of the most widely used social media companies in the country: WeChat, Weibo, and Baidu Tieba.36 The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) said that the tech companies had allowed forbidden content, including “obscenity” and “false rumors,” to proliferate on their platforms.37 All three companies responded to this public reprimand by immediately hiring additional “content moderators” to increase censorship on their platforms.38 As one story noted, while the app WeChat “is an all-encompassing system that does indeed make everyday life easier, it’s also a powerful tool of government surveillance and control,” that has even led to the arrest of users.39

  Chinese authorities targeted the China-based news application Toutiao in a similar manner, because it allegedly wasn’t doing enough to police content on its platform and was “causing a negative impact on public opinion online.”40 Abacus, the tech arm of the South China Morning Post, reported:

  For years, Toutiao maintained that it was just a platform, and said it wouldn’t edit any content on the site—but that may be changing. State media criticised Toutiao for its reliance on algorithms to control what it shows users. And in December of 2017, authorities shut down Toutiao for 24 hours, accusing it of spreading “pornographic and vulgar content.” Several days later, the company started recruiting 2000 content reviewers—saying “Communist Party members would be considered first.”

  Toutiao should have called it a “trusted flaggers” program. In addition to bringing in new speech monitors, the tech company also banned or suspended 1,100 bloggers accused of spreading “low-quality content.”41

  * * *

  America’s tech giants have signaled their willingness to cooperate with the Chinese Communist government when it comes to censorship. Google had secretly planned to build a Chinese search engine that met the regime’s standards and would blacklist certain phrases like “human rights.”42 It only scuttled the agreement after details leaked to the public (though they haven’t ruled out bringing it back).43 In hindsight, when Google removed its signature motto “Don’t be evil” from its code of conduct in April 2018, observers should have seen the writing on the wall.44

  Facebook has not yet sold its corporate soul to the extent that Google has—but it’s only a matter of time before it does. Facebook has already done underhanded things like trying to trick children into spending their parents’ money. A January 2019 report from the Center for Investigative Reporting revealed that “Facebook orchestrated a multi-year effort that duped children and their parents out of money, in some cases hundreds or even thousands of dollars, and then often refused to give the money back.”45 Facebook also “encouraged game developers to let children spend money without their parents’ permission—something the social media giant called ‘friendly fraud’—in an effort to maximize revenues, according to a document detailing the company’s game strategy,” the report added. Perhaps the worst part of the incident, however, is that when Facebook employees discovered that some children were unwittingly spending their parents’ money and created a fix for the problem, company executives shut it down.46 Facebook is all about profit margins, and that’s why it’s open to doing business in China.

  In an October 26, 2018, letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee, Facebook declined to rule out doing business with China, despite the Communist regime’s totalitarian policies. Instead, Facebook promised that “rigorous human rights due diligence and careful consideration of free expression and privacy implications would constitute important components of any decision on entering China.” The key phrase in the letter was that “no decisions have been made around the conditions under which any possible future service might be offered in China.” In other words, Facebook was keeping its options open. Google and Facebook’s willingness to do business with China’s totalitarian regime makes a mockery of anyone who thinks that those companies will protect free speech in America. Google and Facebook won’t protect you from pro-censorship politicians; they’ll work with pro-censorship politicians to make sure they can keep profiting from your patronage. They’re doing exactly that in Europe. And in the United States they have all too willingly caved to left-wing activists and their own left-wing employees who demand censorship.

  America

  The United States is different, of course, because our Constitution guarantees freedom of speech. While the First Amendment is undoubtedly threatened by “hate speech” laws and other progressive legislation, for now the major threat to free speech in the United States comes not from government-imposed censorship, but from left-wing activists, the liberal media that promotes them, and the corporate advertisers that fear them.

  That censorship is already happening, and it doesn’t just restrict what you see on social media. Virtually every medium for communicating information is subject to left-wing censorship. Spotify, for instance, recently banned PragerU from purchasing advertisements on its channels. The ban came six months after the music-streaming service announced that it was partnering with the SPLC to keep “hateful content” off its platform, a ban that apparently did not extend to popular rappers on Spotify. Microsoft provides yet another example. The Seattle-based software giant built a news tracker into the latest edition of its browser, Microsoft Edge.47 The tracker, operated by start-up company NewsGuard, rates online news sources and their trustworthiness. Trustworthy sources get a green badge, untrustworthy news outlets’ stories a get a red badge. NewsGuard’s rating of right-wing news sites is split—the Daily Mail and Breitbart didn’t make the “trustworthy” list, while the Daily Caller and National Review did—but the organization cleared almost every left-wing news source. HuffPost and Salon both received green ratings, as did Raw Story. ThinkProgress and Media Matters, which exist solely to push left-wing propaganda, also received green ratings.48 Microsoft’s left-leaning news monitor is an example of the future of digital news. It or something like it will inevitably be adapted by Google and Mozilla with fact-check apps and context bars to advance “smart browsing” and marginalize conservative voices.

  In October 2018, the SPLC and Center for American Progress spearheaded a coalition of left-wing organizations demanding that all tech companies establish an advisory group of “trusted flaggers” to flag controversial individuals, organizations, and statements and promise to punish individual users for both on-platform and off-platform behavior that failed to meet their standards of acceptable speech. In other words, the left wants to decide who can use tech platforms and who can’t. By making anything that breaks with progressive orthodoxy a de facto “controversy,” progressives are seeking to create a digital environment where conservatives keep their views to themselves. That’s taking censorship to a new level, but it’s not unprecedented.

  Adrian Chen, writing in the New Yorker, noted that conservatives have long felt excluded from the mainstream media. In the 1950s and 1960s when conservatives tried to establish their own radio stations, “their main obstacle was the F.C.C.’s Fairness Doctrine, which sought to protect public discourse by requiring controversial opinions to be balanced by opposing viewpoints. Since attacks on the mid-century liberal co
nsensus were inherently controversial, conservatives found themselves constantly in regulators’ sights.”

  He continued, “the Fairness Doctrine really was used by liberal groups to silence conservatives, typically by flooding stations with complaints and requests for airtime to respond. This created a chilling effect, with stations often choosing to avoid controversial material.” Today, he adds, “The technical fixes implemented by Google and Facebook in the rush to fight fake news seem equally open to abuse, dependent, as they are, on user-generated reports.”49

  The strategy of the left-wing groups is obvious. They label conservative ideas as “hate speech,”demand that Bisg Tech get on the right side of history and ban “hate speech,” and make it a litmus test for advertisers (“is your company supporting hate speech?”). Sympathetic journalists describe these requests as reasonable instead of the naked political power grabs they are. And once a tech company caves to the pressure, it essentially deputizes the SPLC and other leftist groups to decide who can stay on its platform. And left-leaning employees at the tech companies will gladly be the internal enforcers of censorship. Just as college campuses have been overwhelmingly turned into giant “safe spaces” for leftists, free of disconcerting ideas or challenging arguments, the vast majority of tech platforms will likewise transform into digital safe spaces for progressive orthodoxy.

  Democratic politicians have eagerly joined the left-wing campaign for censorship. The Democrat-dominated California state legislature passed a bill in August 2018 ordering the state attorney general to establish an advisory committee to combat “fake news” on social media. The bill, SB 1424, tasked the committee with two objectives: “a) Study the problem of the spread of false information through Internet-based social media platforms; and b) Draft a model strategic plan for Internet-based social media platforms to use to mitigate the spread of false information through their platforms.” One California legislator even proposed an amendment to SB 1424 that would have instructed the government-sponsored committee to draft “potential legislation for mitigating the spread of false information through social media, if the advisory group deems it appropriate.”50

  The bill was so extreme that even liberal watchdogs expressed alarm. “Government recommendations about how to discriminate among Internet speakers are harmful in and of themselves,” the left-leaning Electronic Frontier Foundation warned.51

  Governor Jerry Brown—a Democrat and a liberal, but more moderate than the leftists in the legislature—vetoed the bill on the grounds that he didn’t think the committee was necessary. But Brown is now out of office, and the Democrats obtained a veto-proof legislative supermajority in the 2018 midterms, so bills reining in free speech online will likely make their way back through California’s legislature.52 Federal courts are all that stand in the way of bills like SB 1424 going into effect, and if Democrats eventually “pack the court,” as progressive activists have demanded, the courts might not be enough. SB 1424 is not unique. One Democratic state assemblyman in California proposed legislation in 2017 to require public schools to teach students how to differentiate “fake news” from “real news.”53 That is, the state, perhaps advised by the likes of Media Matters and the SPLC, would instruct students on acceptable and legitimate news sources.

  At the federal level, Democrats have already shown that they’re willing to use government power to pressure Facebook into taking the steps they want. Democrats have used their majority in the House of Representatives to drag tech companies into committee hearings about “hate speech” and “misinformation” on their platforms. Even without passing any legislation, House Democrats can make life painful for tech companies who stand up for free speech online. As Matt Taibbi observed in Rolling Stone, “politicians are more interested in using than curtailing the power of these companies. The platforms, for their part, will cave rather than be regulated.”54

  Of course, the Democrats are willing to pass legislation, too, and liberal columnists are already laying the groundwork for Democrats to regulate Facebook, on the grounds that the company isn’t doing enough to police speech on its platform.55 One op-ed in the Washington Post argued that because Facebook had allegedly dropped the ball on “hate speech” too many times, Democrats had little other choice but to step in and solve the problem.56

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  “What concerns me is that major technology platforms today have the power to redefine the four corners of acceptable debate in the country,” Florida congressman Matt Gaetz told me in a January 2019 phone interview. Gaetz has been one of the more vocal Republicans to express concern about online censorship trends. “I think that the marketplace of ideas should accommodate a wide range of views, including offensive views. And you know, I’m a libertarian by nature. I don’t want Washington running my life, but I especially don’t want Silicon Valley running my life,” said Gaetz. “And, if you look at our politics today, we’re a fifty-fifty country, Donald Trump is the president because he won three rust belt states by a point each. And so, if Silicon Valley can alter the debate even slightly, if they can, you know, they don’t have to be able to mute conservative voices, they just have to be able to turn down the volume a hair, and it could have a substantial impact on the future of the world,” he added.

  Christians are especially vulnerable to censorship from big tech, said Gaetz. “I think the people that could be most at risk are people of faith. I think there is a movement within this country to label doctrinal elements of the Christian faith as hate speech. You would literally see a de-platforming of Christianity in the digital age if there is not greater transparency as to how content is treated online.”

  Left-wing activists aren’t just coming for free speech—they’re coming for religious freedom as well, and using Big Tech to do it.

  CHAPTER TEN What to Do

  In the last decade, and particularly since the 2016 election, the digital landscape in America has lurched away from free speech and towards censorship, with left-wing partisans exercising an outsized role over who gets censored. Tech companies are transitioning from open platforms into tiered platforms, with different privileges for different speakers, with left-wing opinions and the liberal media establishment artificially elevated, and conservative opinions and alternative media outlets artificially minimized.

  “There’s always going to be one rule for the establishment and one rule for everybody else on social media now,” tech reporter Allum Bokhari told me. “We see this with stuff like hate speech and harassment as well. Look at all the harassment and actual threats of violence we saw directed at the Covington kids on Twitter—nobody got banned, a few people had to delete tweets, nobody lost their blue checkmark, and then a few weeks later we saw mass bans against people telling journalists to learn how to code.”1 He added: “There’s been this general power grab by elites who recognize that the Internet is a fundamental threat to their power because it decentralizes communications and gives everyone a massive platform and they want to do something about it.”

  Despite censorship and pressure from the establishment media, Bokhari thinks that decentralization will continue “because there’s no really turning back the clock to a pre-digital era.” Today, he says, “anybody can get a social media account and reach an audience of millions and progressives are right to be afraid of it because it totally takes away the power of the mainstream media organizations.” That explains, he concluded, the “fear-mongering about fake news” and the demands that tech giants give preferential treatment to left-wing media. “I think we’re going to see that continue up through 2020.”

  By undercutting and suppressing dominant right-of-center information sources—as tech companies have done—Big Tech is trying to put its thumb on the scales of public opinion. The question is: how much further—and how fast—will Big Tech go to manipulate the national discourse? Conservatives and other proponents of free speech are running out of time, but they do have ways to push back.

  Make It Hurt

  At their
core, Facebook, Google, and Twitter are about one thing: making money. Tech giants silence conservatives not just because they want to, but because the left has made it financially painful for them not to crackdown on “hate speech” and “fake news.” If conservatives want equal treatment from Facebook, Google, and Twitter they’ll need to adopt the left’s tactics and make the censorship of conservative voices costly to Big Tech. Conservatives are at a disadvantage because of the establishment media’s and Big Tech’s left-wing bias, but if conservatives are going to have any success in the future digital era, they will need to win this battle. That begins with making it embarrassing for Big Tech to censor conservative media. My email is at the end of this chapter—shoot me a tip anytime about cases of unfair digital censorship. I’m happy to help you make some noise.

  And conservatives need to make noise. As Allum Bokhari said, decentralization in communication really can’t be stopped—and conservatives need to take advantage of that. In this battle every conservative needs to be a citizen activist, and a citizen journalist. We need to defend first principles, like the First Amendment to the Constitution, and not let the left dismantle them with stalking horses about “hate speech.” Conservatives need to stay—or get—involved on social media and support conservative news sites so that our voices will continue to be heard.

  What conservatives should not do is abandon Big Tech platforms. That is simply surrendering—and conservatives do that far too often, which is why institution after institution, most egregiously in our colleges and universities, falls to the left. Nor should conservatives look to government for a solution. Certainly there are some benefits to threatening government action in order to win concessions from Big Tech. But it would be short-sighted for conservatives to support any law granting the government more influence over content-policing on social media, because what we need is less regulation of political speech, not more.