The anti-Trump purge planned for months: social media becomes censors, but watch out for who (and how) wants to regulate them
In the night between Friday and Saturday (Friday evening in the United States), the trap of censorship was taken on thousands, perhaps millions of conservative and right-wing accounts, including that of Donald Trump, on Twitter , Facebook and Instagram (and many other social networks , such as YouTube ). In one night, in my small way, I lost over a hundred followers , but there are those who report the disappearance of hundreds and thousands of "followers". A real digital roundup, which on Twitter could have covered millions of profiles. At the same time, Play Store , Google 's app store for Android phones, removed Parler , one of the social media competitors of Twitter and Facebook , from its "store". And the next day, the Apple Store also made the same decision, after a 24-hour ultimatum within which the app would have to align itself with the censorship policies of its best-known competitors. Incidentally, Google and Apple control over 90 percent of the operating system market on smartphones , so in fact Parler is no longer downloadable on almost all phones. Yesterday, Amazon also decided to revoke the use of its servers.
A real purge, but it was announced. The first thing to say, in fact, to frame the situation in all its gravity, is that it had been in Big Tech's plans for months, and therefore it was not a direct consequence of the assault on Congress on Wednesday 6 January and of President Trump's alleged role in inciting protesters ("I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard").
The latest in a long series, on January 7, the official request of none other than former First Lady Michelle Obama, an opponent of President Trump, to "permanently ban this man" (Trump) had reached Big Tech . Said and done: it was therefore an act of political obedience to the Democrats, although it had been planned for some time: the assault on Congress offered only the pretext to bring forward the purge by a few days.
In fact, we recall that last November, in a congressional hearing, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey explained that, once he left his position, Trump would no longer benefit from the "special attention" granted by the platform to heads of state. and government, so after the third "incorrect" tweet it would have been permanently banned ( "three strikes and you are out" ). And since last spring, Twitter had decided to censor its tweets and label them as disinformation or incitement to violence – a treatment never reserved for other world leaders whose accounts flow propaganda and incitement to hatred, violence and even genocide.
Starting from November 4-5, social media implemented another policy that had been announced months before the presidential election, namely that of tackling post-vote disinformation, in two senses: by hindering the circulation of both premature declarations. of victory, and of any disputes regarding the regularity of the vote. But the operation would have taken place in any case only against Trump. In fact, Biden's declaration of victory on the night of November 3 and in the following days was not labeled as "misleading" , with counts still in progress. In the event of Trump's narrow victory, the Biden Campaign and the Democratic Committee were also well prepared to contest the outcome of the vote, as evidenced by the mobilization of 500 lawyers and Hillary Clinton's suggestion to Biden not to "concede, under no circumstances " . But in that case, vice versa, the censorship of social media would not have come down on the disputes and legal initiatives of the Democrats, but on the president's claims of victory.
One of the main arguments of those who approve or underestimate the anti-Trump censorship of social media is that Twitter and Facebook are ultimately private companies: if you don't like their policy , if they censor, you can always transmit to alternative platforms, c 'is the market. Too bad that in these days one of the responses of the "market" on which users were converging, Parler , has been expelled from the Google and Apple stores, which control 99 percent of the app market, and from the Amazon servers.
Apart from the fact that to develop social media able to compete with Twitter and Facebook , with a comparable diffusion, it would take many years and enormous capital, the problem has been solved at the root: in the ugly, any competitor can be expelled from the app stores and then make it undownloadable on phones.
As liberals, we will always be in favor of the freedom of individuals and against regulatory excesses. But all companies still operate within a framework of rules, depending on the type of business. A restaurateur will never be responsible for the speeches of his customers at the table, while a publisher is responsible for what is published in his newspaper. By banning Trump or anyone else, and by tagging user content, social media makes editorial choices, implicitly admitting that they are legally responsible for what they do not ban. If you delete or label a tweet because it is "fake", it follows that those you do not delete and do not label you believe to be true or at least reliable, assuming responsibility for it.
So yes, they are private. Twitter and Facebook are free to adopt the policies they deem appropriate, to ban and censor. But in doing so they change the type of business: from platforms to publishers. And publishers are legally responsible for what they publish, while up to now, precisely because of their neutrality, platforms have been kept away from legal responsibility for the content uploaded by their users.
Without this "immunity" – which in the United States is provided for by Section 230 of the communications law – social media could not even have developed, coming to have not say billions but not even millions of users, because they would have been legally exposed to every written bullshit. by users. Just think about the defamation lawsuit.
They have long since begun to make editorial choices. They label content as "false" or "misleading", even when it comes to free opinions and arguments. They suspend and close accounts on the basis of policies that go well beyond the legal requirements, and on the basis of clearly politically oriented assessments.
How else to explain the fact that the accounts of Islamic extremists are not closed, that the tweets celebrating the attacks are not deleted or tagged, the propaganda tweets of the official accounts of the Beijing regime, the incendiary tweets of leaders such as the Iranian Supreme Guide Khamenei?
And how to explain the censorship, in the middle of the electoral campaign, of the journalistic investigation of the New York Post on Hunter Biden, the son of the new president, also at the center of a federal investigation, therefore not at all far-fetched?
Just think of the undisturbed use of social media by Antifa and Black Lives Matter , the tweets of justification and even incitement to riots. To give just one example, last summer, former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick expressed his appreciation for the ongoing riots: "When civility leads to death, revolting is the only logical reaction … We have the right to fight back!" . Riots that resulted in dozens of deaths, occupation of federal buildings, fires and looting, damage worth two billion dollars. Well, not only was his tweet not deleted or tagged, but Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey himself rewarded Kaepernick by paying a $ 3 million check to his association.
And again, as proof of the political bias of Twitter , two days ago Kathy Griffin, "comedian" of CNN , re-published her infamous photo with Trump's severed and bloody head by retweeting a tweet from the president. Well, Trump's tweet is no longer available, but the photo is still there, evidently considered a model of satire …
In motivating its decision to permanently ban Trump, Twitter did not claim that his tweets were "incitements to violence", but it shielded itself from a more subtle and even more slippery hypocrisy: "We had to acknowledge the fact that many people he was interpreting them as incitements to violence ”.
Who doesn't buy it is the Russian dissident Alexey Navalny, who is also a fierce critic of President Trump: “Don't tell me that Trump has violated the rules of Twitter . I have been receiving death threats every day for years and Twitter has never banned anyone ”. We refer you to Marco Faraci 's article for Navalny's full comment.
Federico Fubini, columnist for Corriere della Sera also underlined: after all this, “how can they claim to be mere platforms, without editorial responsibilities? If social media accepts an editorial role and responsibility in exceptional circumstances, such as in the last few days, who decides when circumstances are exceptional? Who made the decision? After what trial? ".
And why didn't they block Trump earlier? Why did they fear retaliation when he was at the height of his powers? While now that the Democrats are back in the White House, do they fear being punished with new legislation restricting their interests?
There is ideological affinity, of course, between Big Tech and the left, but Twitter and Facebook succumbed to Democrats' demands to ban Trump when Biden's victory was certified and the Republicans lost a majority in the Senate. As already observed by our Stefano Magni some time ago, it is the political power that has forced social media to change policies . Blamed by the Democrats for Trump's victory in 2016, they are atoning for their sins.
But in doing so, they become censors on behalf of political power, precisely on the Chinese model. "We have seen so many examples in Russia and China of private companies becoming the best friends of the state and implementers of censorship policies," is one of Navalny's observations.
By banning Trump they have communicated to Democratic Washington that they will follow orders and therefore there will be no need for them to be regulated and their business model to be destroyed. Will it be enough to save them?
Many in these hours are surprised to see old media reporters cheering over the censorship of Trump and Trumpian accounts. Shouldn't they by definition be against censorship? Surely, they approve of it in this case for political bias. But also because they see the loss of a fearsome competitor in social media that take editorial responsibility.
One of the functions of traditional media journalism, fortunately not the only one, is precisely "censoring", in the sense of discriminating between opinions and different voices, conveying and often distorting the positions of politicians. Due to social media , their power has shrunk. Politicians can reach out to the public and communicate directly with it, bypassing journalistic mediation. If social networks begin to censor and ban, political leaders will be forced to return to the old media , accepting journalistic mediation, to communicate with voters.
The problem of social media , as historian Niall Ferguson has repeatedly pointed out, is not even the political bias or their monopolistic position, it is more simply the legal protection they enjoy, that "immunity" obtained at the dawn of the Internet by reason of their being neutral platforms, thanks to which in all these years they have obtained enormous advantages and profits: billions of users worth billions of dollars.
They are very free to change business, but in this case Section 230 and similar protections in other countries must be revoked, so that social media that make editorial choices, such as Twitter and Facebook , are legally responsible for the content like publishers, while those who they intend to remain neutral platforms to gain market share.
As our Italians4Brexit explained, this is a position not to be confused with the ambiguous slogan “Regulate Big Tech” . For the Democrats who now rule in Washington, for the Soros galaxy, and for the left in general, Twitter and Facebook must be downsized not because they ban Trump and censor, but because they are guilty of making Brexit and Trump's victory in 2016 possible, through Cambridge Analytica and microtargeting for political advertising, and for not having censored and banned those who told them when they told them.
Attention, therefore, to the upcoming regulation, which risks finding the support of some useful idiot on the right, because it will not have the aim of protecting freedom of expression and opening up market spaces, but on the contrary that of formalizing the status of social media as censors on behalf of the left.
On the other hand, as Daniele Capezzone recently observed, “censorship is the great love story of the left. Yesterday, the communist one. Today, of the politically correct one. The others (liberals, right, conservatives) choose: wrong to submit and wrong to make own goal. But even more wrong to delude oneself of being accepted “.
The so-called "moderates", unfortunately, faced with this absolute danger that we are running, seem to divide into two groups of useful idiots: those who, knowing how it will end, prefer to do nothing out of opportunism, to be invited – they delude themselves – to dinner , admitted to the living room, minority but "accepted"; and those who try to convince themselves that it is only a passing phase, that it will never go that far, are only exaggerations by populists to attract votes but it will only be up to the extremists.
The post The anti-Trump purge planned for months: social media become censors, but beware of who (and how) wants to regulate them appeared first on Atlantico Quotidiano .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/la-purga-anti-trump-programmata-da-mesi-i-social-media-si-fanno-censori-ma-occhio-a-chi-e-come-vuole-regolarli/ on Mon, 11 Jan 2021 04:59:45 +0000.