National Post (National Edition)
Censoring of media should concern us all
The biggest story in Canada over the past week should be Twitter and Facebook's unprecedented actions to censor the New York Post. But almost none of Canada's news outlets have covered the story, leaving the impression that our country's top journalists believe the threat posed to democracy by Big Tech stops at the border.
Last week, the New York Post published multiple stories about Joe Biden's son, Hunter, alleging that he leveraged his relationship with his father in business dealings with Ukrainian and Chinese companies, while his father was vice-president. The accuracy of the story about Biden family corruption has been challenged by other news outlets, since the information came from leaked emails provided to the New York Post by Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York and current adviser to U.S. President Donald Trump.
Whatever you make of the New York Post's reporting, Facebook and Twitter's decisions to censor the story are unparalleled uses of their power. Both companies stopped people from sharing the articles. Twitter went so far as to block the URLs altogether, making the story nearly impossible to share even in private messages, and even blocked the paper from accessing its own Twitter account.
Mainstream media in the United States largely failed to cover the story, but America's robust news media ecosystem did sound the appropriate alarms. The Intercept's Glenn Greenwald and the Daily Wire's Ben Shapiro, for example, both drew attention to the threat Big Tech poses to democracy when two of the largest social media companies censor one of the largest papers in the country, and do so in the service of their own political agenda. After all, censoring the New York Post clearly benefits one presidential candidate over another during the current election.
In Canada? Mostly crickets from our news media. Now, Canada's news producers and editors may argue that the story is controversial and its accuracy is in dispute, but that certainly didn't stop them from covering Trump's leaked tax returns or the Steele Dossier alleging Trump-Russian collusion.
Or perhaps our country's journalists will argue that this is mostly an American story. Well, the New York Post does publish Canadian writers. And Facebook and Twitter are far from just American companies. What's stopping Big Tech from taking the exact same censorious actions against a Canadian newspaper? Will Canadian journalists wait until they start to censor the Toronto Sun or National Post before saying something? Or might they be silent in that scenario, too?
Thankfully, many Canadians understand just how high the stakes are when it comes to censorship on the part of big technology firms. I'm fortunate to have heard from many of them in my job as a talk radio host. On Friday, for example, we took calls on this story.
One caller, Andrew, expressed his concerns about how politically biased social media companies are. Another caller, Luther, argued that social media platforms are a modern “town square” that should be protected by
TWITTER WENT SO FAR AS TO BLOCK
THE URLS ALTOGETHER.
government regulations that would stop Big Tech companies from censoring any of us. Other listeners pushed back, insisting that private companies should be free to allow or remove whatever content they'd like. One text message to the station argued that people gave Facebook and Twitter this power by becoming so reliant on these platforms, so the responsibility falls on consumers to make different decisions.
Each of these points is critical to the future of Canadian democracy. Ironically, Canadians are also having these discussions on the very social media platforms that censored the New York Post. But our news media lags behind, reminding the Canadian people that we must be the ones to challenge the power put in the hands of tech executives. If we don't take action, Big Tech will.