THE E-PLANTATION
It Not About Right or Left, Its About Neoliberalism. Mickey Huff on Big
Tech's Efforts To Purge Dissent
"If Republicans and conservatives are really concerned about money in
Silicon Valley and impacting elections," says Huff, "they should look in the
mirror."
by Raul Diego
November 04th, 2020
By Raul Diego
In mid-October, one day after Twitter and Facebook banned a story by the New
York Post about a laptop alleged to belong to Hunter Biden, YouTube
published a short announcement on its blog called "Managing harmful
conspiracy theories on YouTube" where new "efforts to curb hate and
harassment by removing more conspiracy theory content used to justify
real-world violence."
In the official statement, the Google subsidiary defined the terms of its
growing model of censorship:
Today we're further expanding both our hate and harassment policies to
prohibit content that targets an individual or group with conspiracy
theories that have been used to justify real-world violence. One example
would be content that threatens or harasses someone by suggesting they are
complicit in one of these harmful conspiracies, such as QAnon or Pizzagate."
The video streaming platform's recent expulsion of several popular channels
such as The Last American Vagabond, which provided political commentary on
controversial topics and had accrued a large following over the last few
years, were booted from the site in a purge that continues apace as the 2020
election saga unfolds. A week after the October 15 YouTube blog post,
Patreon followed suit, revealing their own plans to "address the QAnon
conspiracy theory" on the crowd-funding platform for content creators in a
move that underscores the economic consequences for people creating content
that runs afoul of establishment narratives.
The increasing boldness of private corporations to restrict speech that is
allowed on platforms that profit almost exclusively from the hard work,
creativity, and data of the users who sign up for them, is just one of the
important issues that Project Censored Director Mickey Huff has been
fighting to change for years. Huff joined MintPress to discuss the
increasing crackdown on free speech online and much more.
A fight that's just beginning
Huff describes Project Censored as a "critical media literacy education
organization," that supports "transparently-sourced, fact-based reporting in
the public interest" in both independent and so-called 'mainstream media' -
a term he takes exception to, -preferring the more accurate label of
'corporate media' to distinguish between the twin currents that drive our
post-Internet media landscape.
Founded in 1976 by Prof. Carl Jensen as a media research program at Sonoma
State University, the program has matured into one of the pillars of
watchdog activism in America, with hundreds of students across the country
participating and collaborating with judges and affiliates in other
universities to take on the daunting task of keeping the media honest and
committed to the exercise of a free press.
Ever since 1993, Project Censored has published an annual tome highlighting
the year's top censored news stories. Last year's book, titled "Censored
2020 - Through The Looking Glass," addressed the real agenda behind the
issue of 'fake news' and rampant disinformation campaigns, which serves the
most powerful interests in corporate media and are now at the center of the
partisan narratives being disseminated via federal agencies as we approach
the November 3.
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MintPress News | Raul Diego | Oct 27
MintPress asked Huff about what he called the "rank partisanship hypocrisy"
surrounding the present state of American media and the true nature of the
bias displayed by news outlets and social media platforms, like Twitter,
Facebook, and YouTube, in particular, which continue to come under increased
scrutiny over their intensified efforts to deplatform and censor along
seemingly partisan lines.
"There is a bias," states Huff. But, according to the head of Project
Censored, the bias leans "towards establishment politics, in general, and
what's best for Silicon Valley," as opposed to the common perception held by
many conservatives, that right-wing views are more likely to be nixed from
the endless stream of online content.
Huff concedes that the Brahmins of Big Tech are far more likely to gravitate
to neo-liberal ideas, but insists that censorship of left-wing voices has
not been mitigated by such factors, either; pointing to the
equally-influential role of right-wing billionaire networks and the
arch-conservative makeup of players in the military-industrial complex, who
have been going to far greater lengths to suppress left-wing ideas and
movements for decades. "If Republicans and conservatives are really
concerned about money in Silicon Valley and impacting elections," says Huff,
"they should look in the mirror."
Who's on first?
The Trump-Russia political cosmology that has dominated corporate media and
has lived rent-free in the minds of millions of Americans on social media
was a feature from the start of the 2016 presidential race. The Mueller
investigation solidified the state's intention to vilify Russia and other
perennial geopolitical targets of the U.S. by using its own bumbling Yeltsin
clone to manufacture a tenuous threat to American "democracy."
Social media platforms have played an essential role in circulating and
reinforcing the tales of Russian election interference. MintPress asked Huff
about these claims, as they are now being weaponized by the establishment to
justify a broad, yet selective, deplatforming policy of dissident voices in
collusion with the owners of the social networks, themselves.
"Are there foreign countries interested in manipulating or influencing U.S.
elections? Of course," Huff said. But, questioned "to what degree or net
effect" any such interference could possibly have considering what the data
shows.
"If you actually go and take a look at that election cycle for context,
Russian ads amounted to .0004% of the total content on Facebook and
represented only 1 of 23,000 Facebook newsfeed posts. Between 2015 and 2017,
Facebook blocked 33 trillion posts, and the Internet Research Agency
generated 80,000 of them."
As for the persistent cries from conservative circles about a liberal
conspiracy to shut down right-leaning social media channels, "it turns out
that right-wing propaganda and right-wing voices are actually louder on
Twitter and Facebook. They get retweeted more," Huff states.
The reality seems to reflect an equal opportunity approach to censorship
that Huff qualifies as "a bipartisan effort to control the public
narrative," and accounts for the fact "that people further to the right and
further to the left are marginalized and are kept out of the discussions and
debates."
Huff cuts social media companies some slack, but only in light of their
ability to incorporate so-called "community standards," which are vague and
open-ended notions of civility Big Tech has used to police user activity in
their TOS agreements. "There is some content, particularly on the far right
that is very xenophobic or racist and that's very problematic," he admitted.
"But, we need to talk about how to best handle those types of situations if
we want to protect free speech."
The E-plantation
"We are heading into a neoliberal dystopian morass ruled by technocrats and
plutocrats where data is the new currency like oil, and we are all being
used by these companies on their circuit board plantations."
Huff's use of the plantation model as an analogy for the
algorithmically-controlled digital ecosystem currently under construction is
more than apt, considering the exploitative dynamic that undergirds the
billions of dollars generated by these enormous concerns with, essentially,
free labor from millions upon millions of content creators.
"It's in the interest of the owners and investors of these companies to
control content to the degree to which it affects their profit margin," Huff
noted, but highlighted the deliberate intention to create "a group of
addicted users, so that they would willingly be used in 'Huxleyan' style to
grow to love our servitude through the telescreen."
"The people that designed these platforms knew what they were doing," he
continued, adding that the lopsided power dynamic represented by powerful
private corporations and millions of content (and data) slaves they profit
from is "a real conundrum," because "most of the general public has no idea
how these systems work and tech companies haven't exactly been forthcoming
about how their own [proprietary] algorithms and bots work."
Ultimately, Huff believes society "can't really get to the root of that
whole problem unless we look at the problem of global corporate capitalism
and racial capitalism, as it exists as a system of global oppression."
Break on through
Understanding the technical aspects of how these platforms and their
technology really work is vital to our ability to fight back against their
relentless encroachment into our lives and society, as a whole. Both the
expectation of privacy and freedom of expression are under simultaneous
attack by a burgeoning technocratic superstructure, which is being set up at
many levels of our material reality through 5G and related information
communications technologies.
The AI revolution being instigated by supranational organizations like the
World Economic Forum and their powerful partners demand a new censorship
paradigm that can restore the fourth estate to its former glory in a
hyper-communicated world by drowning out the inconvenient truths dug up by
pesky independent researchers, journalists or any individual with a mind of
their own and access to a treasure trove of online sources.
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tanks, but for Samantha Power and others, that is simply not enough.
MintPress News | Alan Macleod | Oct 26
Huff points out that "the kinds of censorship that take place online,
particularly in social media or in search engines is often algorithmically
driven." While this fact undermines a broader perception of the evil tech
CEO mastermind, such as the "idea that [Jack] Dorsey or [Mark] Zuckerberg
get out the red pen and start scratching names off of a list somewhere," the
"net result" is the same, according to Huff.
"It's not just the think tanks and hired guns that go and excise in their
confirmation bias fashion," he explains. But, on the other hand, moves at
the federal level to step in and regulate social networks - such as the
recent rumblings over Section 230 of the Communications Act - could be a
case of jumping from the fire into the frying pan.
"If we assume that, somehow, government is more of an objective observer,
with all the K-street money and lobbying and big tech sector money and
everything else that goes in there, it's almost like a shell game." Trying
not to come off as too cynical, Huff nevertheless believes that if we are to
assert our collective will over the interests pushing us into a dystopian
nightmare of perpetual surveillance and censorship, tweaks to a few lines in
the U.S. Code is not going to be enough.
Huff is unambiguous about his own particular vision about how we can solve
these modern riddles of power: "We need long term strategies for critical
media literacy education and civic engagement." Project Censored and its
parent, the Media Freedom Foundation, are carrying this vision forward by
edifying the general public about these problems "in a way that's not
indoctrinated, that's based on critical pedagogy to understand systems of
power and oppression and use media as a way of informing and teaching the
public to have our voice heard loudly enough in these oligarchic sectors."
Despite the daunting nature of such an endeavor, Mickey Huff is undeterred
and takes inspiration from Ralph Nader's words to forge ahead: "We need to
break through power and it's easier than we think."
Mickey Huff is the current director of Project Censored, founded in 1976,
and president of the nonprofit Media Freedom Foundation. He is a professor
of social science and history and executive producer and host of The Project
Censored Show on Pacifica Radio. He serves on the editorial board for the
journal Secrecy and Society, and is a board member of Behind the Headlines.
Project Censored's newest edition of the year's top censored news stories,
"State of the Free Press | 2021" is due out December 1st. It's latest
documentary, "United States of Distraction: Fighting the Fake News Invasion"
is available online.
