How Silicon Valley, in a Show of Monopolistic Force, Destroyed Parler
In the last three months, tech giants have censored political speech and
journalism to manipulate U.S. politics, while liberals, with virtual unanimity,
have cheered.
Glenn Greenwald
Jan 12
Users of the social media platform Parler encountered this error message as of
Jan. 11, 2021, after Apple, Google and Amazon united to remove them from app
stores and hosting services (Photo by Lorenzo Di Cola/NurPhoto via Getty
Images).
Critics of Silicon Valley censorship for years heard the same refrain: tech
platforms like Facebook, Google and Twitter are private corporations and can
host or ban whoever they want. If you don’t like what they are doing, the
solution is not to complain or to regulate them. Instead, go create your own
social media platform that operates the way you think it should.
The founders of Parler heard that suggestion and tried. In August, 2018, they
created a social media platform similar to Twitter but which promised far
greater privacy protections, including a refusal to aggregate user data in
order to monetize them to advertisers or algorithmically evaluate their
interests in order to promote content or products to them. They also promised
far greater free speech rights, rejecting the increasingly repressive content
policing of Silicon Valley giants.
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Over the last year, Parler encountered immense success. Millions of people who
objected to increasing repression of speech on the largest platforms or who had
themselves been banned signed up for the new social media company.
As Silicon Valley censorship radically escalated over the past several months —
banning pre-election reporting by The New York Post about the Biden family,
denouncing and deleting multiple posts from the U.S. President and then
terminating his access altogether, mass-removal of right-wing accounts — so
many people migrated to Parler that it was catapulted to the number one spot on
the list of most-downloaded apps on the Apple Play Store, the sole and
exclusive means which iPhone users have to download apps. “Overall, the app was
the 10th most downloaded social media app in 2020 with 8.1 million new
installs,” reported TechCrunch.
It looked as if Parler had proven critics of Silicon Valley monopolistic power
wrong. Their success showed that it was possible after all to create a new
social media platform to compete with Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. And they
did so by doing exactly what Silicon Valley defenders long insisted should be
done: if you don’t like the rules imposed by tech giants, go create your own
platform with different rules.
List of most-downloaded apps on Apple Store, Jan. 8, 2021
But today, if you want to download, sign up for, or use Parler, you will be
unable to do so. That is because three Silicon Valley monopolies — Amazon,
Google and Apple — abruptly united to remove Parler from the internet, exactly
at the moment when it became the most-downloaded app in the country.
If one were looking for evidence to demonstrate that these tech behemoths are,
in fact, monopolies that engage in anti-competitive behavior in violation of
antitrust laws, and will obliterate any attempt to compete with them in the
marketplace, it would be difficult to imagine anything more compelling than how
they just used their unconstrained power to utterly destroy a rising competitor.
________________________________________
The united Silicon Valley attack began on January 8, when Apple emailed Parler
and gave them 24 hours to prove they had changed their moderation practices or
else face removal from their App Store. The letter claimed: “We have received
numerous complaints regarding objectionable content in your Parler service,
accusations that the Parler app was used to plan, coordinate, and facilitate
the illegal activities in Washington D.C. on January 6, 2021 that led (among
other things) to loss of life, numerous injuries, and the destruction of
property.” It ended with this warning:
To ensure there is no interruption of the availability of your app on the App
Store, please submit an update and the requested moderation improvement plan
within 24 hours of the date of this message. If we do not receive an update
compliant with the App Store Review Guidelines and the requested moderation
improvement plan in writing within 24 hours, your app will be removed from the
App Store.
The 24-hour letter was an obvious pretext and purely performative. Removal was
a fait accompli no matter what Parler did. To begin with, the letter was
immediately leaked to Buzzfeed, which published it in full. A Parler executive
detailed the company’s unsuccessful attempts to communicate with Apple. “They
basically ghosted us,” he told me. The next day, Apple notified Parler of its
removal from App Store. “We won’t distribute apps that present dangerous and
harmful content,” said the world’s richest company, and thus: “We have now
rejected your app for the App Store.”
It is hard to overstate the harm to a platform from being removed from the App
Store. Users of iPhones are barred from downloading apps onto their devices
from the internet. If an app is not on the App Store, it cannot be used on the
iPhone. Even iPhone users who have already downloaded Parler will lose the
ability to receive updates, which will shortly render the platform both
unmanageable and unsafe.
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In October, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and
Administrative Law issued a 425-page report concluding that Amazon, Apple,
Facebook and Google all possess monopoly power and are using that power
anti-competitively. For Apple, they emphasized the company’s control over
iPhones through its control of access to the App Store. As Ars Technica put it
when highlighting the report’s key findings:
Apple controls about 45 percent of the US smartphone market and 20 percent of
the global smartphone market, the committee found, and is projected to sell its
2 billionth iPhone in 2021. It is correct that, in the smartphone handset
market, Apple is not a monopoly. Instead, iOS and Android hold an effective
duopoly in mobile operating systems.
However, the report concludes, Apple does have a monopolistic hold over what
you can do with an iPhone. You can only put apps on your phone through the
Apple App Store, and Apple has total gatekeeper control over that App
Store—that's what Epic is suing the company over. . . .
The committee found internal documents showing that company leadership,
including former CEO Steve Jobs, "acknowledged that IAP requirement would
stifle competition and limit the apps available to Apple's customers." The
report concludes that Apple has also unfairly used its control over APIs,
search rankings, and default apps to limit competitors' access to iPhone users.
Shortly thereafter, Parler learned that Google, without warning, had also
“suspended” it from its Play Store, severely limiting the ability of users to
download Parler onto Android phones. Google’s actions also meant that those
using Parler on their Android phones would no longer receive necessary
functionality and security updates.
It was precisely Google’s abuse of its power to control its app device that was
at issue “when the European Commission deemed Google LLC as the dominant
undertaking in the app stores for the Android mobile operating system (i.e.
Google Play Store) and hit the online search and advertisement giant with €4.34
billion for its anti-competitive practices to strengthen its position in
various of other markets through its dominance in the app store market.”
The day after a united Apple and Google acted against Parler, Amazon delivered
the fatal blow. The company founded and run by the world’s richest man, Jeff
Bezos, used virtually identical language as Apple to inform Parler that its web
hosting service (AWS) was terminating Parler’s ability to have AWS host its
site: “Because Parler cannot comply with our terms of service and poses a very
real risk to public safety, we plan to suspend Parler’s account effective
Sunday, January 10th, at 11:59PM PST.” Because Amazon is such a dominant force
in web hosting, Parler has thus far not found a hosting service for its
platform, which is why it has disappeared not only from app stores and phones
but also from the internet.
On Thursday, Parler was the most popular app in the United States. By Monday,
three of the four Silicon Valley monopolies united to destroy it.
________________________________________
With virtual unanimity, leading U.S. liberals celebrated this use of Silicon
Valley monopoly power to shut down Parler, just as they overwhelmingly cheered
the prior two extraordinary assertions of tech power to control U.S. political
discourse: censorship of The New York Post’s reporting on the contents of
Hunter Biden’s laptop, and the banning of the U.S. President from major
platforms. Indeed, one would be hard-pressed to find a single national
liberal-left politician even expressing concerns about any of this, let alone
opposing it.
Not only did leading left-wing politicians not object but some of them were the
ones who pleaded with Silicon Valley to use their power this way. After the
internet-policing site Sleeping Giants flagged several Parler posts that called
for violence, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez asked: “What are @Apple and
@GooglePlay doing about this?” Once Apple responded by removing Parler from its
App Store — a move that House Democrats just three months earlier warned was
dangerous anti-trust behavior — she praised Apple and then demanded to know:
“Good to see this development from @Apple. @GooglePlay what are you going to do
about apps being used to organize violence on your platform?”
The liberal New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg pronounced herself
“disturbed by just how awesome [tech giants’] power is” and added that “it’s
dangerous to have a handful of callow young tech titans in charge of who has a
megaphone and who does not.” She nonetheless praised these “young tech titans”
for using their “dangerous” power to ban Trump and destroy Parler. In other
words, liberals like Goldberg are concerned only that Silicon Valley censorship
powers might one day be used against people like them, but are perfectly happy
as long as it is their adversaries being deplatformed and silenced (Facebook
and other platforms have for years banned marginalized people like Palestinians
at Israel’s behest, but that is of no concern to U.S. liberals).
That is because the dominant strain of American liberalism is not economic
socialism but political authoritarianism. Liberals now want to use the force of
corporate power to silence those with different ideologies. They are eager for
tech monopolies not just to ban accounts they dislike but to remove entire
platforms from the internet. They want to imprison people they believe helped
their party lose elections, such as Julian Assange, even if it means creating
precedents to criminalize journalism.
World leaders have vocally condemned the power Silicon Valley has amassed to
police political discourse, and were particularly indignant over the banning of
the U.S. President. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, various French ministers,
and especially Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador all denounced the
banning of Trump and other acts of censorship by tech monopolies on the ground
that they were anointing themselves “a world media power.” The warnings from
López Obrador were particularly eloquent:
Even the ACLU — which has rapidly transformed from a civil liberties
organization into a liberal activist group since Trump’s election — found the
assertion of Silicon Valley’s power to destroy Parler deeply alarming. One of
that organization’s most stalwart defenders of civil liberties, lawyer Ben
Wizner, told The New York Times that the destruction of Parler was more
“troubling” than the deletion of posts or whole accounts: “I think we should
recognize the importance of neutrality when we’re talking about the
infrastructure of the internet.”
Yet American liberals swoon for this authoritarianism. And they are now calling
for the use of the most repressive War on Terror measures against their
domestic opponents. On Tuesday, House Homeland Security Chair Bennie Thompson
(D-MS) urged that GOP Sens. Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley “be put on the no-fly
list,” while The Wall Street Journal reported that “Biden has said he plans to
make a priority of passing a law against domestic terrorism, and he has been
urged to create a White House post overseeing the fight against ideologically
inspired violent extremists and increasing funding to combat them.”
So much of this liberal support for the attempted destruction of Parler is
based in utter ignorance about that platform, and about basic principles of
free speech. I’d be very surprised if more than a tiny fraction of liberals
cheering Parler’s removal from the internet have ever used the platform or know
anything about it other than the snippets they have been shown by those seeking
to justify its destruction and to depict it as some neo-Nazi stronghold.
Parler was not founded, nor is it run, by pro-Trump, MAGA supporters. The
platform was created based in libertarian values of privacy, anti-surveillance,
anti-data collection, and free speech. Most of the key executives are more
associated with the politics of Ron Paul and the CATO Institute than Steve
Bannon or the Trump family. One is a Never Trump Republican, while another is
the former campaign manager of Ron Paul and Rand Paul. Among the few
MAGA-affiliated figures is Dan Bongino, an investor. One of the key original
investors was Rebekah Mercer.
The platform’s design is intended to foster privacy and free speech, not a
particular ideology. They minimize the amount of data they collect on users to
prevent advertiser monetization or algorithmic targeting. Unlike Facebook and
Twitter, they do not assess a user’s preferences in order to decide what they
should see. And they were principally borne out of a reaction to increasingly
restrictive rules on the major Silicon Valley platforms regarding what could
and could not be said.
Of course large numbers of Trump supporters ended up on Parler. That’s not
because Parler is a pro-Trump outlet, but because those are among the people
who were censored by the tech monopolies or who were angered enough by that
censorship to seek refuge elsewhere.
It is true that one can find postings on Parler that explicitly advocate
violence or are otherwise grotesque. But that is even more true of Facebook,
Google-owned YouTube, and Twitter. And contrary to what many have been led to
believe, Parler’s Terms of Service includes a ban on explicit advocacy of
violence, and they employ a team of paid, trained moderators who delete such
postings. Those deletions do not happen perfectly or instantaneously — which is
why one can find postings that violate those rules — but the same is true of
every major Silicon Valley platform.
Indeed, a Parler executive told me that of the thirteen people arrested as of
Monday for the breach at the Capitol, none appear to be active users of Parler.
The Capitol breach was planned far more on Facebook and YouTube. As Recode
reported, while some protesters participated in both Parler and Gab, many of
the calls to attend the Capitol were from YouTube videos, while many of the key
planners “have continued to use mainstream platforms like Twitter, Facebook,
and YouTube.” The article quoted Fadi Quran, campaign director at the human
rights group Avaaz, as saying: “In DC, we saw QAnon conspiracists and other
militias that would never have grown to this size without being turbo-charged
by Facebook and Twitter.”
And that’s to say nothing of the endless number of hypocrisies with Silicon
Valley giants feigning opposition to violent rhetoric or political extremism.
Amazon, for instance, is one of the CIA’s most profitable partners, with a $600
million contract to provide services to the agency, and it is constantly
bidding for more. On Facebook and Twitter, one finds official accounts from the
most repressive and violent regimes on earth, including Saudi Arabia, and pages
devoted to propaganda on behalf of the Egyptian regime. Does anyone think these
tech giants have a genuine concern about violence and extremism?
Official Facebook page of the Saudi Justice Ministry
So why did Democratic politicians and journalists focus on Parler rather than
Facebook and YouTube? Why did Amazon, Google and Apple make a flamboyant
showing of removing Parler from the internet while leaving much larger
platforms with far more extremism and advocacy of violence flowing on a daily
basis?
In part it is because these Silicon Valley giants — Google, Facebook, Amazon,
Apple — donate enormous sums of money to the Democratic Party and their
leaders, so of course Democrats will cheer them rather than call for punishment
or their removal from the internet. Part of it is because Parler is an upstart,
a much easier target to try to destroy than Facebook or Google. And in part it
is because the Democrats are about to control the Executive Branch and both
houses of Congress, leaving Silicon Valley giants eager to please them by
silencing their adversaries. This corrupt motive was made expressly clear by
long-time Clinton operative Jennifer Palmieri:
Jennifer Palmieri @jmpalmieri
It has not escaped my attention that the day social media companies decided
there actually IS more they could do to police Trump’s destructive behavior was
the same day they learned Democrats would chair all the congressional
committees that oversee them.
January 7th 2021
33,003 Retweets158,450 Likes
The nature of monopolistic power is that anti-competitive entities engage in
anti-trust illegalities to destroy rising competitors. Parler is associated
with the wrong political ideology. It is a small and new enough platform such
that it can be made an example of. Its head can be placed on a pike to make
clear that no attempt to compete with existing Silicon Valley monopolies is
possible. And its destruction preserves the unchallengeable power of a tiny
handful of tech oligarchs over the political discourse not just of the United
States but democracies worldwide (which is why Germany, France and Mexico are
raising their voices in protest).
No authoritarians believe they are authoritarians. No matter how repressive are
the measures they support — censorship, monopoly power, no-fly lists for
American citizens without due process — they tell themselves that those they
are silencing and attacking are so evil, are terrorists, that anything done
against them is noble and benevolent, not despotic and repressive. That is how
American liberals currently think, as they fortify the control of Silicon
Valley monopolies over our political lives, exemplified by the overnight
destruction of a new and popular competitor.
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