Social media and the Washington Winter

When antigovernment protests started in Tunisia at the end of 2010 and quickly spread to other parts of the Middle East, it appeared as though the dreams of cypherpunks and crypto-anarchists were finally coming to fruition — namely, that the internet would enable the spread of information and foster democratic discourse, which would lead to the downfall of repressive regimes worldwide. The reality turned out to be much different.

The Arab Spring failed to bring democracy to the Middle East, and in the West, the internet, and particularly social media, has devolved into a cesspool of misinformation and hateful rhetoric. Perhaps it was somewhat apt, then, that last week saw the antithesis of the Arab Spring — let's call it the Washington Winter — take place at the United States Capitol.

A group of protesters, organized on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Parler, and fuelled by lies about the outcome of the recent presidential election, stormed the Capitol building, causing death and destruction. Afterward, the internet giants went on an unprecedented censorship spree that saw the sitting president of the United States booted off Twitter and Facebook, and an entire social network, Parler, taken off-line.

This was not a violation of their legal right to free speech, as the U.S. Constitution prevents government from limiting that right, not private companies. But social networks are the, admittedly flawed, medium in which many discussions take place, and if we can't protect the right of those we disagree with to speak their minds, then everyone's ability to express themselves freely is at risk.

Yet the big social networks were stuck between a rock and a hard place. In the U.S., a country that has become famous for having a population and two political parties that can't seem to agree on anything, the growing hatred of Big Tech firms is one of the few issues that seems to unite liberals and conservatives.

Liberals have grown to resent the internet giants because they make huge piles of money (and track our every move), and conservatives detest them because they believe they're using their power to discriminate against right-wing views (and track our every move).

Even before the Washington Winter, companies like Google and Facebook were facing increased scrutiny from governments around the world for engaging in anticompetitive behaviour, violating privacy rights, contributing to the downfall of journalism and undermining democratic elections by enabling foreign actors to spread misinformation.

If Facebook and Twitter had allowed the president and the rioters he incited to continue using their services, they would have faced an intense public backlash and hostility from the incoming Biden administration. They also knew that their crackdown would be seen as proof of their anti-conservative bias. That they chose the latter is understandable, but problematic nonetheless.

As has been pointed out many times in recent days, the social networks now appear to have a double standard, allowing some people who spout egregious views, such as Iran's anti-Semitic leader, to continue using their platforms, while kicking off others.

And herein lies the problem with censorship: no matter what, it is always going to be somewhat arbitrary, and there will always be a few people tasked with determining the limits of acceptable speech. They won't always get it right, and there will be no room for debate if those on the other side can't speak their minds.

As to how to make the internet a more civilized place and prevent the spread of conspiracy theories and false claims masquerading as news, there are no easy answers. But I find it hard to believe that censorship will do anything to solve these problems. What it will do is force those who have been abandoned by the mainstream social networks to move to other platforms.

Over the last couple years, many supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump switched to the upstart social network Parler, which saw its user base grow from 100,000 in May 2018, to 15 million before Amazon, whose servers were hosting the website, shut it down on Jan. 10. As a means of evading censorship, they had the right idea, but chose the wrong platform.

In Tuesday's National Post, columnist Rupa Subramanya suggested that, “Short of creating a new internet, there is not much that excluded voices can do to join the public square of social media, which, regardless of its faults, is now a vital part of modern democracies.”

Yet social media has proven to be a detriment to democracy rather than a “vital part” of it, and there's no reason we have to be beholden to firms like Facebook and Google.

Facebook, for example, recently angered a lot of people when it announced that it will start collecting data about users of its messaging app, WhatsApp. But after Elon Musk suggested people start using Signal, an open source messaging app that offers strong end-to-end encryption, many people switched. Last week, Signal was downloaded 7.5 million times, an increase of 4,200 per cent over the week before.

There are likewise a number of distributed social networking platforms that could allow groups to build censorship-resistant social networks. One of the initial requirements of the internet when it was being developed by the U.S. government was that it had to be decentralized in order to withstand a nuclear attack. This had the added benefit of making it harder to censor, because if one server were to be taken down, the others would still be able to communicate. This has not changed.

Distributed social networks essentially allow people to run their own private instances of Twitter or Facebook, and the individual networks consisting of, say, families, organizations or social groups, can be linked together to form larger ones. If one site is taken off-line, the rest of them keep functioning. And no one has the power to censor someone across the whole network.

The software, in other words, acts as the internet was designed to work from the start: as a decentralized network in which groups and individuals have control over their own servers, making it hard for a centralized authority to excerpt influence over any large section of the overall network.

It is within our power to break the control that the Big Tech firms exert over our lives. And for those who are not using the internet to plan a revolution, instead of tweeting about how much you hate Twitter or sharing Facebook's latest privacy violation with your Facebook friends, how about simply not using the services? I don't know, read a book or something. Argue over the phone. The world will probably end up being a better place.

IT IS IN OUR GRASP TO BREAK THE POWER BIG TECH WIELDS.