"This Will Be Remembered as a Turning Point": Snowden Warns Against Trump
Social Media Ban
While many breathed a collective sigh of relief when Trump's social media
bans were announced, Edward Snowden and other internet freedom advocates
warned that the move sets a dangerous precedent.
by Alan Macleod
January 08th, 2021
By Alan Macleod
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NSA whistleblower and internet freedom advocate Edward Snowden has cautioned
the public against celebrating President Trump's recent social media ban. "I
know a lot of folks in the comments [who] read this are like 'YAAAAS,'
which, like - I get it. But imagine for a moment a world that exists for
more than the next 13 days, and this becomes a milestone that will endure,"
he wrote on Twitter.
Both Facebook and Twitter announced they would prevent the president from
using their services in the light of his incitement of the storming of the
Capitol Building on Wednesday. Twitter has since reversed its decision.
However, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was adamant that Trump would not be
allowed to use his platform. "The shocking events of the last 24 hours
clearly demonstrate that President Donald Trump intends to use his remaining
time in office to undermine the peaceful and lawful transition of power," he
announced, adding that his company,
Believe[s] the risks of allowing the President to continue to use our
service during this period are simply too great. Therefore, we are extending
the block we have placed on his Facebook and Instagram accounts indefinitely
and for at least the next two weeks until the peaceful transition of power
is complete."
Many were elated at the news of the decision, while still others urged big
tech companies to go further. "Ban Donald Trump's Twitter account - for
good," wrote Sarah Manavis in The New Statesman. Former First Lady Michelle
Obama was of a similar opinion, stating that,
Now is the time for Silicon Valley companies to stop enabling this monstrous
behavior - and go even further than they have already by permanently banning
this man from their platforms and putting in place policies to prevent their
technology from being used by the nation's leaders to fuel insurrection."
Of course, senior U.S. government figures use social media all the time to
incite insurrection - against enemy countries like Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, or
China, but these do not trigger calls for deplatforming. Indeed, many
government figures (including President Maduro of Venezuela and Ayatollah
Khamenei of Iran) in those countries have their accounts suspended or
removed, not for incitement, but for simply existing. Last year, Facebook
also announced that it would also delete any posts that presented
recently-slain Iranian general Qassem Soleimani in a positive light.
Journalist and press freedom proponent Glenn Greenwald strongly opposed
Obama's call for social media giants to get tough on Trump, warning of the
consequences of such an action.
A handful of Silicon Valley oligarchs decide who can and cannot be heard,
including the President of the United States. They exert this power
unilaterally, with no standards, accountability or appeal. Politics now is
begging them to silence adversaries or permit allies to speak," he wrote.
Unfortunately, "after yesterday, that tech oligarchs should police our
discourse is a virtual consensus," the co-founding editor of The Intercept
lamented.
The latest edition of the Reuters Institute Digital News Report notes that
63% of Americans (over 200 million people) use Facebook, and 29% use Twitter
(95 million people). Both platforms have become key gateways and
distributors of news around the world. Facebook in particular is by far and
away the most widely used news source in the United States. And both have
extensive and deepening ties to the U.S. government, relying on
semi-governmental organizations to curate news feeds, deciding what sources
to promote and what to de-rank, de-list or even delete.
It is doubtful that any new bans will stop at only the president, however.
Indeed, after the 2016 election and the dubious accusations that Russia had
taken over social media, swinging the result for Trump, big tech platforms
such as Google, Facebook, Twitter and Bing changed their algorithms,
supposedly to promote more trustworthy sources and demote unreliable ones.
The instant effect, however, was a collapse in traffic for high-quality
alternative media sites. Overnight, Consortium News' Google traffic fell by
47%, Common Dreams' by 37%, Democracy Now! By 36% and The Intercept by 19%.
MintPress News suffered similar, unrecoverable losses.
Late last year, it was also revealed that Facebook had intentionally choked
traffic to the left-leaning magazine Mother Jones because of its political
orientation, despite personal assurances to its bosses that it was doing no
such thing. Partially as a result, conservatives and the far-right dominate
Facebook, with figures like Ben Shapiro amassing fortunes and massive
followings, despite his well-known and well-documented constant violation of
the platform's terms of service. Perhaps his personal relationship with
Zuckerberg, who reportedly enjoys listening and debating with him, helps. In
contrast, anti-war voices are constantly throttled far more aggressively
than even Mother Jones, if not banned outright.
Big tech representatives have argued that they cannot hold the right to the
same hate-speech standards as the left, because, as one Twitter employee
told Motherboard, many Republican politicians would immediately have to be
banned for spreading white supremacist hate. "Content from Republican
politicians could get swept up by algorithms aggressively removing white
supremacist material. Banning politicians wouldn't be accepted by society as
a trade-off for flagging all of the white supremacist propaganda," he
reportedly said.
In 2013, Snowden was employed by NSA contractor Booz Allen Hamilton but
became increasingly disillusioned with his job after trying to report to
management his grave concerns about what the NSA was doing. He took the
decision to blow the whistle on the NSA's enormous spying operation,
collecting data on virtually every U.S. citizen while eavesdropping on
foreign leaders. Greenwald published his revelations in The Guardian. Since
then, Snowden has been trapped in Russia, unable to return to his country of
birth for fear of meeting a similar fate to incarcerated whistleblowers
Chelsea Manning or Reality Winner. There had been growing calls from both
left and right for President Trump to pardon him. However, Trump instead
decided to continue his tradition of pardoning military members convicted of
gross war crimes.
"For better or worse, this [Trump's social media ban] will be remembered as
a turning point in the battle for control over digital speech," Snowden
warned.
