Meet the Censored: Andre Damon
Increased content moderation has been sold as a tool to control the far
right, but the World Socialist Web Site was among the first to sound the
alarm
Matt Taibbi
Nov 25
On November 15th, weeks after news that a New York Post article about Hunter
Biden had been blocked by prominent social media platforms, Pink Floyd lead
singer Roger Waters ripped Twitter for a less-publicized incident:
Roger Waters @rogerwaters
Twitter has banned the International Youth and Students for Social Equality
[IYSSE]. wsws.org/en/articles/20. It is critical that people are informed
of this effort to censor them. WHAT ARE YOU AFRAID of @jack?
November 15th 2020
1,050 Retweets3,350 Likes
The IYSSE, a student movement affiliated with international Socialist
parties, was suspended over an obscure technical violation (see explanation
below). It was reinstated after nine days, which in a period of increasingly
draconian tech penalties might have been a small surprise.
Less surprising was that yet another organization associated with the World
Socialist Web Site had been hit with a punitive content moderation decision.
For much of the last four years, the WSWS has been a bit of a canary in the
coal mine, when it comes to new forms of censorship and speech restrictions.
Many Americans didn't pay attention to new forms of content moderation until
May, 2019, when a group of prominent tech platforms banned figures like Alex
Jones and Milo Yiannopolis. A legend quickly spread that such campaigns
exclusively target the right. Long before then, however, the WSWS had been
trying to sound the alarm about the impact of corporate speech moderation on
dissenting voices on the progressive left. As far back as August of 2017,
the WSWS sent an open letter to Google, demanding that it stop the
"political blacklisting" of their site, as well as others.
Like many alternative news sites, WSWS noticed a steep decline in traffic in
2016-2017, after Donald Trump was elected and we began to hear calls for
more regulation of "fake news." Determined to search out the reason, the
site conducted a series of analyses that proved crucial in helping convince
outlets like the New York Times to cover the issue. In its open letter to
Google, the WSWS described inexplicable changes to search results in their
political bailiwick:
Google searches for "Leon Trotsky" yielded 5,893 impressions (appearances of
the WSWS in search results) in May of this year. In July, the same search
yielded exactly zero impressions for the WSWS, which is the Internet
publication of the international movement founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938.
The WSWS connected the change to Project Owl, a plan announced by Google in
April of 2017 designed to "surface more authoritative content." When I
called Google about a year later for a story on a related subject, they
explained the concept of "authority" as an exercise in weighting some
credentials over others. So, I was told, an old search for "baseball" might
first return a page for your local little league, while a new one would send
you to the site for Major League Baseball.
The rub was that Google was now pushing viewers away from alternative
sources, such that an article in the New York Times about Trotskyism might
be ranked ahead of the world's leading Trotskyite media organ. Queries had
to be right on the nose to call up a whole host of alternative sites, all of
which had seen sharp drops in their Google search results.
The WSWS listed many of them: Alternet down 63 percent, Common Dreams down
37 percent, Democracy Now! down 36 percent, TruthOut, down 25 percent, etc.
Even Wikileaks, in the middle of an international furor over Russiagate, was
down 30 percent.
In the years since, the WSWS has been one of the only major media outlets in
the U.S. to regularly focus on tech censorship issues, frequently showing an
interest in constitutional principles curiously absent in traditionally
"liberal" publications. This has won the site an unpleasant brand of
notoriety with tech platforms. In a recent Senate hearing, Google CEO Sundar
Pichai referenced the WSWS when challenged by Utah Republican Mike Lee to
name one left-wing "high profile person or entity" it had censored.
TK reached out to Andre Damon, writer and editor for the WSWS, to ask about
the site's experiences:
TK: There was recently an incident involving the Twitter presence of
International Youth and Students for Social Equality. Can you explain what
happened? Has the WSWS had any other issues with Twitter over the years?
Damon: On November 11, Twitter suspended the account of the International
Youth and Students for Social Equality (US) without explanation. The IYSSE
is the student movement of the Socialist Equality Parties around the world,
which are affiliated with the World Socialist Web Site.
When we wrote to Twitter to demand the reinstatement of the account, Twitter
replied vaguely, hinting that the IYSSE was operating multiple accounts. We
responded that the IYSSE has chapters all over the world, which are
officially recognized on dozens of campuses, including New York University,
the University of Michigan, and Berlin's Humboldt University, where the
IYSSE holds multiple seats in the student parliament. Each of these
chapters, legitimately, has its own social media presence.
Twitter's stated justification for suspending the IYSSE's account was a
ridiculous pretext, and this act of censorship triggered statements of
opposition. Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters and model Andrea Pejić made
statements opposing it, as did dozens of other people. Nine days after the
account was suspended, Twitter reinstated it, again without any serious
explanation.
TK: When did the WSWS first become interested in the issue of platform
censorship, content moderation, or whatever you want to call it? Actually,
what do you call it? Is what's going on with increased content moderation a
first amendment/free speech issue?
Damon: It's censorship, and it absolutely is a First Amendment issue.
In July 2017, we noticed that traffic to our site from Google fell by more
than 75 percent. After reaching out to other sites and SEO experts we
realized that the WSWS was one of over a dozen left-wing websites whose
search traffic had also plunged.
As we sought an explanation, we discovered a blog post by Ben Gomes, at the
time Google's VP of engineering, announcing that Google was making changes
in its algorithm to demote what it called "fake news." It explained that
Google would be hiring a small army of people to review search results and
score them. The reviewers were told that if a search returned "alternative
viewpoints," that search should be scored poorly. This system was internally
called 'Project Owl,' and later came to be known as such publicly.
It was obvious that the drop in search traffic to the WSWS and other
left-wing sites was caused by this change in Google's algorithm.
The actions by Google were the outcome of a campaign, largely bipartisan but
led by the Democrats and their affiliated news outlets, to claim that
domestic social opposition was the product of interference by foreign
countries, particularly Russia. To stop this alleged interference, it was
necessary to censor domestic political opposition, which the Russians
allegedly sought to "amplify."
At repeated hearings in Washington, figures like Mark Warner and Adam Schiff
would demand over and over again that Google, Facebook, and Twitter censor
left-wing content. It was all a clear and flagrant violation of the First
Amendment, which says that Congress does not have the power to limit the
freedom of expression. But here was Congress instigating private companies
to do exactly that, and threatening to regulate or fine them if they did not
comply.
In August 2017, the WSWS sent Google executives an open letter demanding
"that the anti-democratic changes to the Google search result rankings and
its search algorithm since April be reversed." In January 2018, we called
for the formation of an "international coalition to fight Internet
censorship."
In response to our letters, Google flatly denied it was carrying out
political censorship. But this makes its admission this month that it is
censoring the WSWS so significant.
When Senator Mike Lee asked Google CEO Sundar Pichai, "Can you name for me
one high profile person or entity from a liberal ideology who you have
censored," Pichai replied that "We have had compliance issues with the World
Socialist Review [sic], which is a left-leaning publication."
This was a confirmation of every claim made by the WSWS in its campaign
against internet censorship.
TK: What other private platforms have tried to regulate your content?
Damon: The World Socialist Web Site is banned, without any justification,
from R/Politics on Reddit, as well as R/Coronavirus. The latter is
particularly egregious, since we have been the most consistent proponent of
the position of the WHO - that COVID-19 can be contained - of any news
outlet. The New York Times has published over a dozen articles by Thomas
Friedman arguing for herd immunity - that is, for letting COVID-19 spread
throughout the population - based on irresponsible quack pseudo-science.
Facebook has repeatedly prevented us from holding events. In the latest
incident, it prevented the IYSSE from holding an event entitled "Trump's
Electoral Coup and the Threat of Dictatorship." But when we changed the name
of the event to a generic placeholder, we were allowed to set it up.
TK: Why did the WSWS decide to focus on the New York Times Magazine's 1619
Project, and what was the response of the platforms to this work?
Damon: The WSWS took a stand against the 1619 Project for two main reasons:
Because it was a work of historical falsification, which denigrated the two
great democratic revolutions - the struggle for independence between 1775
and 1783 and the Civil War of 1861 to 1865 - which rank among the most
progressive events in world history; and because its political purpose was
to promote the politics of racial communalism.
The 1619 Project falsely claimed that the revolution that established the
United States aimed at preserving and extending slavery. This is a blatant
falsification of the historical record.
Moreover, the 1619 Project's political purpose, in falsely claiming that
blacks in America "fought alone" for their liberation, was to weaken the
bonds of class solidarity between black and white workers. It is a
fundamental and undeniable fact that hundreds of thousands of Northern
whites, many of them artisans, farmers and craftsmen, sacrificed their lives
in the Civil War under the banner of the battle hymn of the republic: "let
us die to make men free."
This fact shows that it is possible to create a multi-racial,
multi-religious, and multinational movement of the working class. The slogan
of Marxists, going back to the Communist Manifesto, is "workers of the
world, unite!" not, "races of the world, divide."
Working in collaboration with the world's leading historians of the American
revolution and Civil War, the WSWS exposed the central premise of the 1619
Project to be utterly false.
In November and October of last year, the World Socialist Web Site published
interviews with Gordon Wood, James McPherson, James Oakes, Victoria Bynum,
and Clayborne Carson. These historians demolished the series' central
premise that the American Revolution was an insurrection to defend slavery.
Moreover, they made clear that neither they nor any of their leading
colleagues were ever consulted in the production of the 1619 Project.
Our coverage of the 1619 Project exposes the true role of internet
censorship. Google claims that its censorship regime is aimed at promoting
"authoritative" and "original" content, while demoting what it calls
"alternative" viewpoints.
There exist no more "authoritative" documents on the 1619 Project than the
interviews published by the WSWS with these historians. Wood and McPherson
are universally regarded as the best authorities on American history, and
their interviews on the WSWS are what led to thousands of other articles
being written on the 1619 Project - for and against.
By contrast, the 1619 Project was based on a rejection of these
"authoritative" sources, who were never consulted in its writing or
publication.
So the obvious question is, why do you have to scroll to the third page of
Google results for a search for "1619 Project" to see a single article from
the WSWS on the 1619 Project? Why don't the interviews with Wood and
McPherson show up?
The answer is that Google's censorship has nothing to do with helping users
find "authoritative" content. Its sole aim is to demote content to which the
US political establishment objects, and promote content that it wants to
promote.
TK: A lot of the more high-profile targets of deletions and suspensions have
been conservatives like Alex Jones, or the followers of the Q movement.
You've said that you believe the real goal of content moderation is to
suppress left critiques of capitalism. Is it possible going after high
profile conservatives is a way of selling the concept to liberals? Or is
there another motive that you see?
Damon: The World Socialist Web Site does not believe that censoring fascists
is an effective way to fight fascism. It lends credence to their false
claims to oppose the political establishment. The fascists receive
high-level support from the financial oligarchy, from within the state, the
police, and the military. Censorship only strengthens them.
At Berlin's Humboldt University, the IYSSE has been leading a campaign by
students to oppose the far-right professors that play a leading role at the
university, such as Jörg Baberowski, who told Der Spiegel that "Hitler was
not vicious." The right-wing press in Germany has attacked us for trying to
"censor" Baberowski and others. No, we have been waging this fight by
telling students and the broader population what these figures actually do,
say, and advocate! We fight fascism by telling the truth about the fascists
and exposing their high-level connections to the state.
The real target of censorship is always the left.
TK: Do you see a connection in all of this to the long tradition of
suppression of leftist speech in America (dating back to the "red flag"
laws, the "criminal syndicalism" standard, etc.), or is this something
different, inspired by different motives?
Damon: There is a long tradition of anticommunism in America. Most of the
arguments for internet censorship are lifted straight from the arguments of
the McCarthyites and Birchites, as well as the Southern segregationists, who
claimed that blacks in America would be happy with Jim Crow if only "outside
agitators" would stop stirring up trouble.
TK: What do you say to people whose response to this issue is that private
companies have the right to do what they want on their own platforms?
Well, legally speaking, private companies do not have the right to do what
they want. A restaurant owner can't throw a patron out of his restaurant
because of the color of his skin. UPS can't say they won't deliver your
packages because they don't agree with your political views. Technology
companies provide a vital social service, just like private municipal waste
collection companies and private package handling companies. They do not
have the right to discriminate against people based on their political
views.
TK: Have you observed changes in American attitudes toward speech recently?
How about changes within the political left on this issue?
Damon: In my experience, the American working class is fiercely committed to
the principles of freedom of expression.
With the affluent upper-middle class, it is a different story. For years,
the parties and organizations of what we call the pseudo-left have been
promoting sexual witch-hunts against cultural and intellectual figures,
equating an accusation with a conviction, and calling for the destruction of
their careers. You can see the right-wing character of such campaigns in the
witch-hunt of Roman Polanski, whose brilliant film on the Dreyfus Affair has
been condemned equally by bourgeois feminists and by anti-Semites.
Your readers who are unfamiliar with the record of the WSWS will be relieved
to learn that we opposed the #metoo campaign from the start, and have
defended figures such as Polanski, Louis CK and Kevin Spacey.
TK: Does the "content moderation" era already have a political legacy?
Damon: The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that the suppression of information
is a matter of life and death. Bob Woodward's interview with Donald Trump,
in which the president said he sought to "play down" the threat of the
virus, even as his cabinet and members of congress were getting dire
briefings about the looming disaster points to a far-reaching conspiracy to
suppress information about the pandemic.
Every workplace is a microcosm of this nationwide conspiracy. In the auto
plants, workers are not being told when their coworkers fall ill, making
contact tracing impossible.
We have tried to make the WSWS the antipode to this conspiracy of silence.
The WSWS is a hub for workers to learn about the threat posed by the
disease, to track outbreaks at their factories and coordinate their
response. There exists no comparable resource for manufacturing workers,
particularly in the American Midwest.
The decision of what is true and false, what can and cannot be said, is not
for self-interested corporations to decide. Working people need to know the
truth. And the only way to get there is for them to be able to read whatever
they please and to make up their own minds.
C 2020 Matt Taibbi Unsubscribe
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