The YouTube Ban Is Un-American, Wrong, and Will Backfire
Silicon Valley couldn't have designed a better way to further radicalize Trump
voters
Matt Taibbi
Dec 11
Start with the headline: Supporting the 2020 U.S. Election. YouTube in its
company blog can’t even say, “Banning Election Conspiracy Theories.” They have
to employ the Orwellian language of politicians — Healthy Forests, Clear Skies,
“Supported” Elections — because Google and YouTube are now political actors,
who can’t speak plainly any more than a drunk can walk in a straight line.
The company wrote Wednesday:
Yesterday was the safe-harbor deadline for the U.S. Presidential election and
enough states have certified their election results to determine a
President-elect. Given that, we will start removing any piece of content
uploaded today (or anytime after) that misleads people by alleging that
widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of the 2020 U.S. Presidential
election... For example, we will remove videos claiming that a Presidential
candidate won the election due to widespread software glitches or counting
errors.
This announcement came down at roughly the same time Hunter Biden was
announcing that his “tax affairs” were under investigation by the U.S. Attorney
in Delaware. Part of that investigation concerned whether or not he had
violated tax and money laundering laws in, as CNN put it, “foreign countries,
principally China.” Information suggestive of money-laundering and tax issues
in China and other countries was in the cache of emails reported in the New
York Post story blocked by Twitter and Facebook.
That news was denounced as Russian disinformation by virtually everyone in
“reputable” media, who often dismissed the story with an aristocratic snort, a
la Christiane Amanpour:
That tale was not Russian disinformation, however, and Biden’s announcement
this week strongly suggests Twitter and Facebook suppressed a real story of
legitimate public interest just before a presidential election.
How important was that Hunter Biden story? That’s debatable, but the fact that
tech companies blocked it, and professional journalists gleefully lied about
it, has a direct bearing on YouTube’s decision now to bar Trumpist freakouts
over the election results.
If you want a population of people to stop thinking an election was stolen from
them, it’s hard to think of a worse method than ordering a news blackout after
it’s just been demonstrated that the last major blackout was a fraud. Close
your eyes and imagine what would have happened if Facebook and Google had
banned 9/11 Truth on the advice of intelligence officials in the Bush years,
and it will start to make sense that Trump voters in Guy Fawkes masks are now
roaming the continent like buffalo.
The YouTube decision also came on the same day that former CIA officer Evan
McMullin tweeted this:
Evan McMullin 🇺🇸 @EvanMcMullin
One of the most critical to-do items for the American democracy movement over
the next four years will be to more effectively counter domestic anti-democracy
disinformation. If possible, it should be done on both the supply and demand
sides. We can't ignore this issue any longer.
December 10th 2020
526 Retweets3,014 Likes
McMullin was the Never-Trump conservative who ran for president in 2016 and
received glowing coverage from The Washington Post and other outlets as the man
who “stands a fair chance of stealing the red state of Utah from GOP nominee
Donald Trump.” The same outlet that blasted Jill Stein’s “fairy tale candidacy”
had Josh Rogin write a slobbering blowjob profile of McMullin just before the
2016 election, hailing his “steady personality, honesty, and work ethic” and
gushing at the possibility that he might become the first third-party candidate
to win a state since 1968. “That,” Rogin noted without irony, “might be his
most successful covert operation.”
Intelligence officers like McMullin have spent much of the last four years
conditioning the public to accept the idea that aggressive steps need to be
taken to stop “foreign disinformation” or “foreign interference,” in the media
landscape most of all. A move to stop “domestic anti-democracy disinformation”
on “both the supply and demand sides” (wtf!?) is a serious escalation of that
idea.
Signs pointed to this moment coming. This past August, the office of the
Director of National Intelligence released an assessment that foreign countries
were seeking to spread “disinformation” in the run-up to the election. In
October, Virginia Democrat (and former CIA official) Abigail Spanberger
piggybacked on that report and introduced a bill designed to cut down on
“foreign disinformation.”
The law among other things would require that political ads or content produced
by foreign governments be marked by disclaimers, and that companies should
remove any such content appearing without disclaimers. It would also expand
language in the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) requiring that any
content intended to influence U.S. citizens politically be reported to the
Department of Justice.
Stipulate that this is all above board, that there’s nothing odd about the
Department of Justice monitoring political ads, or registering content
creators, or permanent bureaucrats in intelligence agencies publishing their
takes on which presidential candidate is preferred by conniving foreign
adversary nations. The United States has survived a long time without such
procedures, but sure: an argument can be made that any country has an interest
in alerting its citizens to foreign messaging.
Where it gets weird is when the effort to stamp out “foreign interference” is
transferred to the domestic media landscape. Intelligence agencies, think
tanks, and mainstream news agencies have been preparing us for this concept for
years as well. This dates back to the infamous 2016 Washington Post story
hyping PropOrNot, a shadowy organization that identified a long list of
homegrown American news sites like Consortium, TruthDig, Naked Capitalism, and
Antiwar.Com as vehicles for “Russian propaganda.”
California Senator Richard Blumenthal two years ago insisted the Russians in
attempting to disrupt our lives “will use American voices. No longer the broken
English, no longer the payment in rubles. They will become ever more astute in
their attacks.” Think-tanks began hyping ideas about “domestic-origin
disinformation” and foreign countries “co-opting authentic American voices.”
As time passed in the Trump years, we started reading on a regular basis that
Russian propaganda efforts would be harder to detect, because they would be
routed through people appearing on the outside, like Nexus 6 replicants, to be
ordinary human Americans. In late February earlier this year, at the peak of
the preposterous campaign to depict Bernie Sanders as a favorite of the
Kremlin, David Sanger of the New York Times warned that Russians were
purposefully sending messages through “everyday Americans” because “it is much
harder to ban the words of real Americans.”
When The Bulwark, basically the reanimated corpse of Bill Kristol’s Weekly
Standard, wrote some weeks back about Donald Trump holding a “maskless
anti-democracy disinformation rally straight out of Vladimir Putin’s dreams,”
that language wasn’t accidental. This was part of a P.R. campaign, years in the
making, preparing us for the idea that domestic voices can be just as dangerous
as foreign ones, and similarly need to be stamped out.
The YouTube announcement is the latest salvo in the fight against “domestic
anti-democracy information,” and the first of many problems with it is its
hypocrisy. Do I personally believe the 2020 election was stolen from Donald
Trump? No. However, I also didn’t believe the election was stolen from Hillary
Clinton in 2016, when the Internet was bursting at the seams with conspiracy
theories nearly identical to the ones now being propagated by Trump fans:
Daniel Nazer @danielnazer
It's stunning how perfectly the Palmer Report's coverage in 2016 matches
today's MAGA conspiracies. But Democratic state AGs were not stupid enough to
submit it to the Supreme Court.
December 9th 2020
88 Retweets362 Likes
Unrestrained speculation about the illegitimacy of the 2016 election had a
major impact on the public. Surveys showed 50 percent of Clinton voters by
December of 2016 believed the Russians actually hacked vote tallies in states,
something no official agency ever alleged even at the peak of the Russiagate
madness. Two years later, one in three Americans believed a foreign power would
change vote tallies in the 2018 midterm elections.
These beliefs were turbo-charged by countless “reputable” news reports and
statements by politicians that were either factually incorrect or misleading,
from the notion that there was “more than circumstantial” evidence of collusion
to false alarms about Russians hacking everything from Vermont’s energy grid to
C-SPAN.
What makes the current situation particularly grotesque is that the DNI warning
about this summer stated plainly that a major goal of foreign disruptors was to
“undermine the public’s confidence in the Democratic process” by “calling into
question the validity of the election results.”
Our own domestic intelligence agencies have been doing exactly that for years
now. On nearly a daily basis in the leadup to this past Election Day, they were
issuing warnings in the corporate press that you might have reason to mistrust
the coming results:
Amazing how those stories vanished after Election Day! If you opened any of
those pre-vote reports, you’d find law enforcement and intelligence officials
warning that everything from state and local governments to “aviation networks”
was under attack.
In fact, go back across the last four years and you’ll find a consistent
feature of warnings about foreign or domestic “disinformation”: the stern scare
quote from a bona fide All-Star ex-spook or State official, from Clint Watts to
Victoria Nuland to Frank Figliuzzi to John Brennan to McMullan’s former boss
and buddy, ex-CIA chief Michael Hayden. A great many of these figures are now
paid contributors to major corporate news organizations.
What do we think the storylines would be right now if Trump had won? What would
those aforementioned figures be saying on channels like MSNBC and CNN, about
what would they be speculating? Does anyone for a moment imagine that YouTube,
Twitter, or Facebook would block efforts from those people to raise doubts
about that hypothetical election result?
We know the answer to that question, because all of those actors spent the last
four years questioning the legitimacy of Trump’s election without any
repercussions. The Atlantic, quoting the likes of Hayden, ran a piece weeks
after Trump’s election arguing that it was the duty of members of the Electoral
College to defy voters and elect Hillary Clinton on national security grounds.
Mass protests were held to disrupt the Electoral College vote in late December
2016, and YouTube cheerfully broadcast videos from those events. When Electoral
vote tallies were finally read out in congress, ironically by Joe Biden, House
members from at least six states balked, with people like Barbara Lee objecting
on the grounds of “overwhelming evidence of Russian interference in our
election.”
In sum, it’s okay to stoke public paranoia, encourage voters to protest legal
election results, spread conspiracy theories about stolen elections, refuse to
endorse legal election tallies, and even to file lawsuits challenging the
validity of presidential results, so long as all of this activity is sanctified
by officials in the right party, or by intelligence vets, or by friendlies at
CNN, NBC, the New York Times, etc.
If, however, the theories are coming from Donald Trump or some other
disreputable species of un-credentialed American, then it’s time for companies
like YouTube to move in and wipe out 8000+ videos and nudge people to channels
like CBS and NBC, as well as to the home page of the federal Cybersecurity and
Infrastructure Security Agency. This is a process YouTube calls “connecting
people to authoritative information.”
Cutting down the public’s ability to flip out removes one of the only real
checks on the most dangerous kind of fake news, the official lie. Imagine if
these mechanisms had been in place in the past. Would we disallow published
claims that the Missile Gap was a fake? That the Gulf of Tonkin incident was
staged? How about Watergate, a wild theory about cheating in a presidential
election that was universally disbelieved by “reputable” news agencies, until
it wasn’t? It’s not hard to imagine a future where authorities would ask tech
platforms to quell “conspiracy theories” about everything from poisoned water
systems to war crimes.
There’s no such thing as a technocratic approach to truth. There are official
truths, but those are political rather than scientific determinations, and
therefore almost always wrong on some level. The people who created the
American free press understood this, even knowing the tendency of newspapers to
be idiotic and full of lies. They weighed that against the larger potential
evil of a despotic government that relies upon what Thomas Jefferson called a
“standing army of newswriters” ready to print whatever ministers want, “without
any regard for truth.”
We allow freedom of religion not because we want people believing in silly
religions, but because it’s the only defense against someone establishing one
officially mandated silly religion. With the press, we put up with gossip and
errors and lies not because we think those things are socially beneficial, but
because we don’t want an aristocratic political establishment having a monopoly
on those abuses. By allowing some conspiracy theories but not others, that’s
exactly the system we’re building.
Most of blue-state America is looking aghast at news stories about 17 states
joining in a lawsuit to challenge the election results. Conventional wisdom
says that half the country has been taken over by a dangerous conspiracist
movement that must be tamed by any means necessary. Acts like the YouTube ban
not only don’t accomplish this, they’ll almost certainly further radicalize
this population. This is especially true in light of the ongoing implication
that Trump’s followers are either actual or unwitting confederates of foreign
enemies.
That insult is bad enough when it’s leveled in words only, but when it’s backed
up by concrete actions to change a group’s status, like reducing an ability to
air grievances, now you’re removing some of the last incentives to behave like
citizens. Do you want 70 million Trump voters in the streets with guns and
go-bags? Tell them you consider them the same as foreign enemies, and start
treating them accordingly. This is a stupid, dangerous, wrong policy,
guaranteed to make things worse.
