The Authoritarian Moment

by Ben Shapiro

  That allegiance to free speech principles—principles commonly held by the tech bros at the launch of their companies—didn’t extend to other tech leaders. These tech leaders suggested that the very basis for their companies—free access to speech platforms—had to be reversed. Their companies would no longer be about free speech, but about free speech for the approved members of the New Ruling Class. Jack Dorsey, the new darling of the media establishment, slammed Zuckerberg for pledging himself to traditional liberalism: “We talk a lot about speech and expression and we don’t talk about reach enough, and we don’t talk about amplification,” said Dorsey. The tech companies, Dorsey suggested, should decide which posts deserved amplification.28 (Dorsey, it should be noted, is no critic of authoritarian wokeness—in fact, he’s one of its biggest proponents. In 2020, Dorsey cut a $10 million donation to Ibram X. Kendi’s “Center for Antiracism Research,”29 which has to date presented no actual research. Kendi’s website explains, “Our work, like our center, is in the process of being developed.”)

  This angle—free speech is not free reach—has become the new standard in establishment media, of course: Kara Swisher, the activist masquerading as a tech reporter for The New York Times, says, “Congress shall make no law. There’s no mention of Facebook, or any other company.”30 That’s easy for her to say, considering she’s paid to write repetitive, censorious garbage by an establishment media company given favorable treatment by the social media companies.

  This perspective, not coincidentally, mirrored the prevailing view in the Democratic Party: the tech companies should simply censor the views of political opponents. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) browbeat Zuckerberg about even meeting with conservative figures, labeling them “far-right” and calling the Daily Caller “white supremacist.” Representative Maxine Waters (D-CA) lambasted Zuckerberg’s commitment to open discourse, stating that he was “willing to step on or over anyone, including your competitors, women, people of color, your own users, and even our democracy to get what you want.”31 In January 2020, Joe Biden personally ripped Zuckerberg, stating, “I’ve never been a big Zuckerberg fan. I think he’s a real problem.” In June 2020, the Biden campaign circulated a petition and open letter to Mark Zuckerberg, calling for “real changes to Facebook’s policies for their platform and how they enforce them” in order to “protect against a repeat of the role that disinformation played in the 2016 election and that continues to threaten our democracy today.”32

  The social media companies have increasingly taken heed.

  And they’ve moved right along with the clever switch made over the course of the past several years from “fighting disinformation” to “fighting misinformation.” After 2016, the argument went, Russian “disinformation” had spammed social media, actively undermining truth in favor of a narrative detrimental to Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

  There was some evidence of this—although the amount of actual Russian disinformation on Facebook, for example, wasn’t overwhelming in the grand scheme of things. According to a Senate report in 2018, for example, the last month of the 2016 campaign generated 1.1 billion likes, posts, comments, and shares related to Donald Trump, and another 934 million related to Hillary Clinton.33 In total, according to a report from New Knowledge, of Russian-created posts from 2015 to 2017, 61,500 posts from the Russian influence operation garnered a grand total of 76.5 million engagements. Total. Over two years. That’s an average of 1,243 engagements per post—an extremely low total.34

  But put aside the relative success or unsuccess of the Russian manipulation. We can all agree that Russian disinformation—typically meaning overtly false information put out by a foreign source, designed to mislead domestic audiences—is worth censoring. Democrats and media, however, shifted their objection from Russian disinformation to “misinformation”—a term of art that encompasses everything from actual, outright falsehood to narratives you dislike. To declare something “misinformation” should require showing its falsity, at the least.

  No longer.

  In December 2019, according to Time, Zuckerberg met with nine civil rights leaders at his home to discuss how to combat “misinformation.” Vanita Gupta, CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights—and now associate attorney general of the United States for Joe Biden—later bragged that she had cudgeled Facebook into changing informational standards. “It took pushing, urging, conversations, brainstorming, all of that to get to a place where we ended up with more rigorous rules and enforcement,” she later told Time.35

  The result: our social media now do precisely what government could not—act in contravention of free speech, with members of the Democratic Party and the media cheering them on. They follow no consistent policy, but react with precipitous and collusive haste in group-banning those who fall afoul of the ever-shifting standards of appropriate speech. That’s what happened with the domino effect of banning the Hunter Biden story, for example.

  Section 230, designed to protect open discourse by allowing platforms to prune the hedges without killing the free speech tree, has been completely turned upside down: a government privilege granted to social media has now become a mandate from the government and its media allies to take an ax to the tree. The iron triangle of informational restriction has slammed into place: a media, desperate to maintain its monopoly, uses its power to cudgel social media into doing its bidding; the Democratic Party, desperate to uphold its allied media as the sole informational source for Americans, uses threats to cudgel social media into doing its bidding; and social media companies, generally headed by leaders who align politically with members of the media and the Democratic Party, acquiesce.

  COVERING FOR CENSORSHIP

  So, how is material removed from these platforms—the platforms that were originally designed to foster free exchange of ideas? In the main, algorithms are designed to spot particular types of content. Some of the content to be removed is uncontroversially bad, and should come down—material that explicitly calls for violence, or pornographic material, or, say, actual Russian disinformation. But more and more, social media companies have decided that their job is not merely to police the boundaries of free speech while leaving the core untouched—more and more, they have decided that their job is to foster “positive conversation,” to encourage people to click on videos they wouldn’t normally click on, to quiet “misinformation.”

  In the first instance, this can be done via algorithmic changes.

  Those changes are largely designed to reestablish a monopoly on informational distribution by establishment media. The internet broke the establishment media’s model; just as cable wrecked network television, the internet wrecked cable and print news. Originally, consumers went directly to websites in order to view the news—they’d bookmark Drudge Report or FoxNews.com, and go straight there. But then, as social media began to aggregate billions of eyeballs, people began to use social media as their gateway to those news sources. By 2019, according to the Pew Research Center, 55 percent of adults got their news from social media either “sometimes” or “often,” including a plurality of young people.36

  Establishment media saw an opportunity. By targeting the means of distribution—by going after the social media companies and getting them to down-rank alternative media—they could reestablish the monopoly they had lost.

  And so the establishment media went to work. As we’ve already discussed, it’s rare to find a voice in the establishment media dedicated to the proposition that dissemination of information on social media ought to be more open.

  Social media companies have complied. So, for example, in 2019, in response to media reports blaming YouTube for violent acts supposedly inspired by viral videos—the media actually went further, blaming nonviolent, non-extremist videos for creating a “pipeline” to more violent and extremist content, all based on the flimsiest of conjecture37—YouTube changed its algorithm. As CBS News reported, “YouTube started re-programming it
s algorithms in the U.S. to recommend questionable videos much less and point users who search for that kind of material to authoritative sources, like news clips.”38 Facebook infamously did the same, demoting “borderline content” that supposedly trafficked in “sensationalist and provocative content.” The goal was to manipulate what people could click on by deliberately making it more difficult to click on clickable stories.39 The month after the 2020 election, in an attempt to tamp down speculation about voter fraud and irregularity, Facebook gave more algorithmic weight to sources that had higher “news ecosystem quality” scores.

  Who were these mystical “authoritative sources” that ranked highly in terms of “news ecosystem quality”? Why, establishment media sources, of course—the same exact outlets attempting to browbeat social media platforms into censoring their competitors. As The New York Times reported, “The change was part of the ‘break glass’ plans Facebook had spent months developing for the aftermath of a contested election. It resulted in a spike in visibility for big, mainstream publishers like CNN, The New York Times and NPR, while posts from highly engaged hyperpartisan pages . . . became less visible.” And, added the Very Authoritative New York Times, all this was a “vision of what a calmer, less divisive Facebook might look like.” The Times also reported that Facebook’s “idealist” employees wanted Facebook to maintain the system; only its presumably corrupt, greedy “pragmatists” wanted to maintain an open standard in terms of informational dissemination. And, lamented the Times, if the pragmatists continued to win, “morale” within the company would continue to drop.40

  In establishing which sources ought to be “trusted,” social media have outsourced their judgment to left-wing pseudo-fact-checkers. In December 2016, Facebook announced that it would partner with a slate of fact-checkers to determine which sources were most trustworthy. According to BuzzFeed, Facebook would verify “participating partners”; those participating partners would then have access to a “special online queue that will show links Facebook determined may be suitable for a fact-check.” How do links end up in the queue? Users report them as false, or the link goes viral. It’s easy to see how such a system can be gamed: just put together an action response team, email them to spam Facebook’s system, and then refer conservative links to fact-checks by left-wing organizations.

  And that’s precisely how the fact-checking business works. Facebook’s original “participating partners”: the Associated Press, PolitiFact, FactCheck.org, Snopes, The Washington Post, and ABC News. That would be three mainstream media outlets, and three left-wing fact-checking organizations. These pseudo-fact-checkers spent most of their time checking “misinformation”—which means, in many cases, declaring claims false based on “lack of context,” even if the claims are overtly true. PolitiFact, for example, rated President Obama’s lies about keeping your health-care plan if you like your health-care plan “half-true” twice before labeling it their “lie of the year.”41 Snopes.com recently rated “Mostly False” the claim that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) exaggerated “the danger she was in during the January 6, 2021, Capitol Riot, in that she ‘wasn’t even in the Capitol building’ when the rioting occurred.” That fact-check included the astonishing acknowledgment that it was true that Ocasio-Cortez “wasn’t in the main Capitol building.” Which, as it turns out, was the basis for the statement they were also calling “mostly false.”42

  The fact-checkers are certainly not unbiased. “When it comes to partisan fact-checking about complex issues—which describes much of the fact-checking that takes place in the context of political news—the truth as stated is often the subjective opinion of people with shared political views,” says Professor Stephen Ceci of Cornell University.43 And social media companies know that. They just happen to agree with the political leanings of the fact-checkers to whom they outsource their responsibilities.

  Algorithmic censorship doesn’t stop there. According to The Washington Post in December, Facebook made the decision to begin policing anti-black hate differently than anti-white hate. Race-blind practices would now be discarded, and instead, the algorithm would allow hate speech directed against white users to remain. Only the “worst of the worst” content would be automatically deleted—“Slurs directed at Blacks, Muslims, people of more than one race, the LGBTQ community and Jews, according to the documents.” Slurs directed at whites, men, and Americans would be “deprioritized.” The goal: to allow people to “combat systemic racism” by using vicious language.

  Facebook would now apply its algorithmic standards differently “based on their perceived harm.” Thus, woke standards of intersectional victimhood would be utilized, rather than an objective standard rooted in the nature of the language used. “We know that hate speech targeted toward underrepresented groups can be the most harmful,” explained Facebook spokeswoman Sally Aldous, “which is why we have focused our technology on finding the hate speech that users and experts tell us is the most serious.”44 All hate speech is bad, except for the hate speech the experts say is nondamaging.

  The so-called community standards put forward by the tech companies follow the same pattern: originally designed to protect more speech, they have been gradually ratcheted tighter and tighter in order to allow broader discretion to companies to ban dissenting material. As Susan Wojcicki, the head of YouTube, explained in June 2019, “We keep tightening and tightening the policies.”45 The ratchet only works one way.

  These policies are often vague and contradictory. Facebook’s “hate speech” policy, for example, bans any “direct attack” against people on the “basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, disability, religious affiliation, caste, sexual orientation, sex, gender identity and serious disease.” What, exactly, constitutes an “attack”? Any “expression of . . . dismissal,” or any “harmful stereotypes,” for example.46 So, would Facebook ban members for the factually true statement that biological men are men? How about the factually true statement that women generally do not throw baseballs as hard as men? Are these “stereotypes” or biological truths? What about jokes, which often traffic in stereotypes? How about quoting the Bible, which is not silent on matters of religion or sexuality? Facebook is silent on such questions.

  And that’s the point. The purpose of these standards isn’t to provide clarity, so much as to grant cover when banning someone for not violating the rules. That’s why it’s so unbelievably easy for big tech’s critics to point to inconsistencies in application of the “community standards”—Alex Jones gets banned, while Louis Farrakhan is welcomed; President Trump gets banned, while Ayatollah Khamenei is welcome.

  When President Trump was banned from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube in the aftermath of January 6, none of the companies could explain precisely what policy Trump had breached to trigger his excision. Zuckerberg simply stated, “We believe the risks of allowing the President to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great.”47 Twitter explained that it had banned Trump “due to the risk of further incitement of violence.” The tweets that supposedly created additional danger: “The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!” and “To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.” Twitter did provide a strained explanation of how those two rather benign tweets would incite further violence. It remains unconvincing.48

  For the authoritarian Left, none of this goes far enough. The goal is to remake the constituency of companies themselves, so that the authoritarians can completely remake the algorithms in their own image. When Turing Award winner and Facebook chief AI scientist Yann LeCun pointed out that machine learning systems are racially biased only if their inputs are biased, and suggested that inputs could be corrected to present an opposite racial bias, the authoritarian woke critics attacked: Timnit Gebru, techn
ical co-lead of the Ethical Artificial Intelligence Team at Google, accused LeCun of “marginalization” and called for solving “social and structural problems.” The answer, said Gebru, was to hire members of marginalized groups, not to change the data set used by machine learning.49

  CROWDSOURCING THE REVOLUTION

  For most Americans, the true dangers of social media don’t even lie in the censorship of news itself: the largest danger lies in the roving mobs social media represent. The sad truth is that the media, in their ever-present quest for authoritarian rule, use social media as both their tip line and their action arm. They dig through the social media histories of those they despise, or receive tips from bad actors about “bad old tweets,” and proceed to whip the mob into a frenzy. Then they cover the frenzy. The same media that declaim their hatred for misinformation and bullying engage in them regularly when it comes to mobbing random citizens with the help of social media.