Censorship Does Not End Well
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
15 August 18
How America learned to stop worrying and put Mark Zuckerberg in charge of
everything
Silicon Valley is changing its mind about censorship.
Two weeks ago, we learned about a new campaign against inauthentic
content, conducted by Facebook in consultation with Congress and the
secretive think tank Atlantic Council whose board includes an array of
ex-CIA and Homeland Security officials in the name of cracking down on
alleged Russian disinformation efforts. As part of the bizarre alliance of
Internet news distributors and quasi-government censors, the social network
zapped 32 accounts and pages, including an ad for a real No Unite the Right
2 anti-racist counter-rally in D.C. this past weekend.
This is a real protest in Washington, D.C. It is not George Soros. It is
not Russia. It is just us, said the events organizers, a coalition of
easily located Americans, in a statement.
Last week, we saw another flurry of censorship news. Facebook apparently
suspended VenezuelaAnalysis.com, a site critical of U.S. policy toward
Venezuela. (It was reinstated Thursday.) Twitter suspended a pair of
libertarians, including @DanielLMcAdams of the Ron Paul Institute and
@ScottHortonShow of Antiwar.com, for using the word bitch (directed toward
a man) in a silly political argument. They, too, were later re-instated.
More significantly: Googles former head of free expression issues in Asia,
Lokman Tsui, blasted the tech giants plan to develop a search engine that
would help the Chinese government censor content.
First reported by The Intercept, the plan was called a stupid, stupid move
by Tsui, who added: I cant see a way to operate Google search in China
without violating widely held international human rights standards. This
came on the heels of news that the Israeli Knesset passed a second reading
of a Facebook bill, authorizing courts to delete content on security
grounds.
Few Americans heard these stories, because the big censorship news last
week surrounded the widely hated Alex Jones. After surviving halting actions
by Facebook and YouTube the week before, the screeching InfoWars lunatic was
hit decisively, removed from Apple, Facebook, Google and Spotify.
Jones is the media equivalent of a trench-coated stalker who jumps out from
from behind a mailbox and starts whacking it in an intersection. His
speech is on that level: less an idea than a gross physical provocation.
InfoWars defines everything reporters are taught not to do.
Were I Alex Jones, I would think Alex Jones was a false-flag operation,
cooked up to discredit the idea of a free press.
Moreover, Jones probably does violate all of those platforms Terms of
Service. I personally dont believe his Sandy Hook rants in which he
accused grieving parents of being actors in an anti-gun conspiracy are
protected speech, at least not according to current libel and defamation
law. Even some conservative speech activists seem to agree.
And yet: I didnt celebrate when Jones was banned. Collectively, all these
stories represent a revolutionary moment in media. Jones is an incidental
player in a much larger narrative.
Both the Jones situation and the Facebook-Atlantic Council deletions seem an
effort to fulfill a request made last year by the Senate Judiciary
Committee. Last October, Facebook, Google and Twitter were asked by Hawaii
Senator Mazie Hizono to draw up a mission statement to prevent the foment
of discord.
Companies like Facebook might have balked before. They have long taken a
position thats very Star Trek, very Prime-Directive: We do not interfere.
Mark Zuckerberg, as late as 2016, was saying, editing content
thats not
us.
Part of this reluctance was probably ideological, but the main thing was the
sheer logistical quandary of monitoring published content on the scale of a
firm like Facebook. The company now has 2.23 billion users, and experts
estimate thats more than a billion new entries to monitor daily.
Although it might have seemed minor, undertaking what Facebook did prior to
2016 keeping porn and beheading videos out of your news feed was an
extraordinarily involved technical process.
This was underscored by fiascoes like the Napalm Girl incident in 2016,
when the firm deleted a picture of Kim Phúc, the nine-year-old Vietnamese
girl photographed running from napalm in 1972. The iconic picture helped
reverse global opinion about the Vietnam War.
Facebook ultimately put the photo back up after being ripped for abusing
its power. This was absurd: The photo had been flagged by mostly automated
processes, designed to keep naked pictures of pre-teens off the site.
As a former Facebook exec tells Rolling Stone: Knowing that Napalm Girl
is one of the icons of international journalism isnt part of the fucking
algo.
It would seem like madness to ask companies to expand that vast automated
process to make far more difficult intellectual distinctions about
journalistic quality. But that has happened.
After Trumps shocking win in 2016, everyone turned to Facebook and Google
to fix fake news. But nobody had a coherent definition of what constitutes
it.
Many on the left lamented the Wikileaks releases of Democratic Party emails,
but those documents were real news, and the complaint there was more about
the motives of sources, and editorial emphasis, rather than accuracy.
When Google announced it was tightening its algorithm to push more
authoritative content last April, it defined fake news as
blatantly
misleading, low quality, offensive or downright false information.
Soviet-era author Isaac Babel once said the only right Stalin had taken away
was writing badly. He was joking. Google was apparently serious about
targeting low quality. What exactly does that mean?
It isnt clear, but within short order, a whole range of alternative sites
(from Alternet to Truthdig to the World Socialist Website) started
complaining about significant drops in traffic, apparently thanks to changed
search processes.
Within a year, Google bragged that it had deleted 8 million videos from
YouTube. A full 6.7 million videos were caught by machines, 1.1 million by
YouTubes own trusted flaggers (were pre-writing the lexicon of the next
dystopian novels), and 400,000 by normal users.
Subsequently, we heard that Facebook was partnering with the Atlantic
Council which, incidentally, accepts donations from at least 25 different
foreign countries, including United Arab Emirates and the king of Bahrain,
in addition to firms like weapons manufacturer Raytheon and my old pals at
HSBC to identify potential abuse.
Now that weve opened the door for ordinary users, politicians,
ex-security-state creeps, foreign governments and companies like Raytheon to
influence the removal of content, the future is obvious: an endless
merry-go-round of political tattling, in which each tribe will push for bans
of political enemies.
In about 10 minutes, someone will start arguing that Alex Jones is not so
different from, say, millennial conservative Ben Shapiro, and demand his
removal. That will be followed by calls from furious conservatives to wipe
out the Torch Network or Anti-Fascist News, with Jacobin on the way.
Weve already seen Facebook overcompensate when faced with complaints of
anti-conservative bias. Assuming this continues, community standards will
turn into a ceaseless parody of Cold War spy trades: one of ours for one of
yours.
This is the nuance people are missing. Its not that people like Jones
shouldnt be punished; its the means of punishment that has changed
radically.
For more than half a century, we had an effective, if slow, litigation-based
remedy for speech violations. The standards laid out in cases like New York
Times v. Sullivan were designed to protect legitimate reporting while
directly remunerating people harmed by bad speech. Sooner or later, people
like Alex Jones would always crash under crippling settlements. Meanwhile,
young reporters learned to steer clear of libel and defamation. Knowing
exactly what we could and could not get away with empowered us to do our
jobs, confident that the law had our backs.
If the line of defense had not been a judge and jury but a giant
transnational corporation working with the state, journalists taking on
banks or tech companies or the wrong politicians would have been playing
intellectual Russian roulette. In my own career, Id have thought twice
before taking on a company like Goldman Sachs. Any reporter would.
Now the line is gone. Depending on the platform, one can be banned for
glorifying violence, sowing division, hateful conduct or even low
quality, with those terms defined by nameless, unaccountable executives,
working with God Knows Whom.
The platforms will win popular support for removals by deleting jackasses
like Jones. Meanwhile, the more dangerous censorship will go on in the
margins with fringe opposition sites and in the minds of reporters and
editors, who will unconsciously start retreating from wherever their idea of
the line is.
The most ominous development involves countries asking for direct cleansing
of opposition movements, a la Chinas search engine, or Tel Avivs demands
that Facebook and Google delete pages belonging to Palestinian activists.
(This happened: Israels justice minister said last year that Facebook
granted 95 percent of such requests.)
Google and Facebook have long wrestled with the question of how to operate
in politically repressive markets Google launched a censored Chinese
search engine in 2006, before changing its mind in 2010 but it seems were
seeing a kind of mass surrender on that front.
The apparent efforts to comply with government requests to help prevent the
foment of discord suggest the platforms are moving toward a similar
surrender even in the United States. The duopolistic firms seem anxious to
stay out of headlines, protect share prices and placate people like
Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, who just said deleting Jones was only a
good first step.
Americans are not freaking out about this because most of us have lost the
ability to distinguish between general principles and political outcomes. So
long as the right people are being zapped, no one cares.
But we should care. Censorship is one of modern mans great temptations.
Giving in to it hasnt provided many happy stories.
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