Big Tech takes sides
In the aftermath of the attack on the United States Capitol building on Jan. 6 that was led by a mob of supporters of President Donald Trump, some Big Tech firms responded with an unprecedented and aggressive crackdown. On Jan. 7, Facebook suspended Trump’s account indefinitely, and the next day, Twitter banned him permanently.
Fa c e b o o k CEO Ma r k Zuckerberg claimed that
Trump intended to use the duration of his time in office “to undermine the peaceful and lawful transition of power” to president- elect Joe Biden. In its explanation for banning Trump, Twitter claimed that his two last tweets — one of which referred to his supporters as “great American Patriots,” the other announcing that he would not be attending Biden’s inauguration — were found to have violated the platform’s policy against “the glorification of violence.”
It was Twitter’s view that given what had happened on Jan. 6, Trump’s comments might be seen as a further incitement to violence and a continued insistence that the election result was fraudulent. That same day, the company removed his tweets from the official presidential account, as they were seen as an attempt to circumvent Twitter’s rules against suspended users resorting to secondary accounts.
In the following days, Trump supporters and other conservatives rushed to sign up for an account on Parler, a Twitter alternative that has built a significant following among the American right. In reaction, both Apple and Google removed its app from their app stores and Amazon, whose servers hosted the site, shut it down completely. It is alleged that Parler was one of the sites used to organize the attack on the Capitol, although verifying such claims is difficult given that the site is no longer functional.
While widely lauded by prominent liberal voices and Democratic politicians, including former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, there are several troubling aspects about what transpired. First is the obvious collusion among Big Tech firms. This was nothing less than a purge of Trump and other conservative voices from their platforms, and a naked attempt to cripple a competitor.
Those liberals who are applauding these moves should be reminded that the Big Tech firms function as an oligopoly, reaping huge profits and creating almost insurmountable barriers for new entrants. 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.
Second, there is a self- serving and hypocritical selectivity to when social media giants like Facebook and Twitter choose to remove content. Both platforms attempted to limit access to a legitimate New York Post expose on alleged corruption by Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, during the election campaign. Their action was blatantly partisan and political.
The two platforms have also been loath to remove content that incites hatred in overseas markets. Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, who has Twitter accounts in five languages, often refers to Israel as a “malignant tumour” and calls for its “eradication.” Similarly, in a series of tweets, former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad recently claimed that “Muslims have a right to be angry and to kill millions of French people for the massacres of the past.”
Neither of these individuals, whose tweets are far more reprehensible than anything Trump has ever said, have been suspended.
Meanwhile, Facebook routinely tolerates hateful content in many countries in which it operates, often modifying its rules to bend to local requirements. For example, in Singapore, Facebook agreed to put a “correction notice” on any posts that the country’s government finds objectionable.
In India, Facebook has been reluctant to suspend the accounts of politicians from the ruling party, some of whom have called for the killing of the country’s Muslim minority on the platform. And in Ethiopia, posts inciting violence on Facebook, after the assassination of a prominent singer- activist, are widely blamed for the sectarian violence that led to hundreds of deaths.
The truth is that social media moguls like Zuckerberg and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey — whether driven by commercial interests, their personal ideologies or a combination of both — wield more power to shape discourse around the world than most elected political leaders, yet they are not accountable to voters anywhere.
What enables this power is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in the United States, which essentially gives these firms carte blanche to either allow or remove content at their will without legal sanction. This unique legal protection, coupled with their oligopolistic market power, enables Big Tech firms to censor views and “cancel” individuals and competitors at will.
The uncomfortable truth is that social media giants often work hand in glove with governments and even political parties and are not impartial arbiters by any stretch of the imagination. Social media was meant to expand the market of ideas and the free flow of discussion across ideologies and political affiliations, but has instead turned into an enabler of favoured ideologies and political elites.