Fall 2021
Dear Friends and Family,
Segment 5 of the Big Tech & AI series has four parts: (1) Controlling the Internet, (2) Censorship, (3) Surveillance, and (4) Communication Control.
My Takeaways:
Next: The next segment, “Challenging the Tyranny of Big Tech,” begins with excerpts detailing an alliance between Big Tech and Big Government and an explanation of Section 230. After answering the question of how did Big Government aid Big Tech to get so powerful it then addresses the question of is it possible to take the power back? The final question is do we want to take any power back given our dependency on Big Tech for Artificial Intelligence?
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
Segment 5 of the Big Tech & AI series has four parts: (1) Controlling the Internet, (2) Censorship, (3) Surveillance, and (4) Communication Control.
My Takeaways:
- Censorship: Much of Big Tech’s censorship is accomplished by “automatic flagging” of content by algorithms. Such content is defined as “misinformation” or “hate speech” which in reality leaves it up to the discretion of the algorithm programmers. In addition, censorship also occurs by human identification sometimes coordinated among other Big Tech firms.
- Surveillance: Facebook has a powerful tracking platform to spy on customer’s speech and activity called Centra. It can follow users practically wherever they went on any site that has a Facebook button or connection or plug-in. There is no oversight of how it is used.
- Communication Control: Big Tech has become the biggest news publisher in America. Pew Research reported in 2018 that fully 43% of Americans got their news from Facebook. Facebook and Google have become part of the essential communication infrastructure. As such they have leverage to bury publications by pushing down their relevance in feeds and searches. In doing so, Big Tech has no liability even if they post stories that are false because of a Federal Law referred to as Section 230.
Next: The next segment, “Challenging the Tyranny of Big Tech,” begins with excerpts detailing an alliance between Big Tech and Big Government and an explanation of Section 230. After answering the question of how did Big Government aid Big Tech to get so powerful it then addresses the question of is it possible to take the power back? The final question is do we want to take any power back given our dependency on Big Tech for Artificial Intelligence?
Happy Learning,
Harley
BIG TECH & AI – SEGMENT 5
CENSORSHIP, SURVEILLANCE, & COMMUNICATION CONTROL – EXCERPTS
CONTROLLING THE INTERNET: By the end of the 1990s, anyone with an internet connection could access a digital audience. The political establishment, accustomed to a world where access to information was controlled largely by big broadcast networks and national newspapers, was about to feel the world-shaking effects of the new technology. With just a fraction of the mainstream media’s resources, website owners on the internet could break stories that altered national politics. By the early 2010s it had become impossible to ignore. That was the web as it was meant to be. A free, open network that anyone could use to share consequential information, even if the political establishment would rather it never see the light of day. Much to the relief of the political establishment, corporations were about to reassert control over the flow of information. The corporate takeover of the web was about to begin.
There was one growing problem with the web: information overload. During this period, Google became a ubiquitous to navigate the complexity. The solutions they offered were so simple, we were happy to drink from their poisoned chalice on a massive scale – surrendering our digital independence in the process. Don’t bother setting your own blog, said Facebook – just make an account with us, and we’ll blast your thought out directly to all your friends. Why waste money hosting video on your personal website asked YouTube – we’ll do it for you and give you an audience and ad revenue. All for free! A few naysayers saw what was coming. They have no constitution to answer to. They're not elected. They have no constituents or voters. All of the protections we’ve built up to protect against government tyranny don’t exist for corporate tyranny.
Source: #Deleted by Allum Bokhari (2020)
THE CENSORS: Robot Censors: Algorithms may sound complicated, but they are quite simple. In the world of tech, an algorithm is a set of rules that tells a computer how to solve a problem or a set of problems. Written poorly, algorithms can make mistakes. Algorithms inherit the biases of their programmers. Facebook algorithms read every post you make and use them to determine your interests, before sending those determinations to Facebook’s advertising platform. But we don’t know how or by what criteria, those determinations are made.
As these companies have become increasingly influenced by political interests, the algorithms are asking more questions about users. Have they engaged in “hate speech?” Do they share links to websites engaged in “misinformation” and “conspiracy theories?” We now begin to see the true extent of Silicon Valley’s insidiousness. Not only did the massive expansion in terms of service violation on social media platforms make it easier to outright ban right-wingers and right-wing source; it also made it easier to covertly censor them. And, by using vague terms like “misinformation” and “hate speech,” they can also maintain deniability. Understanding algorithms – and the importance of the people who create them – couldn’t be more important, because it will be the algorithms, not humans, that will eventually govern Big Tech platforms. This is already happening. In YouTube’s 2019 “community guidelines enforcement report” the video-sharing platform credited “automatic flagging” for the censoring and removal of the majority of them.
It’s not just about the content removals. We are rapidly moving into a world in which Big Tech algorithms are involved in almost every aspect of our lives. Whether we’re approved for a loan, whether we’re allowed to rent an apartment, whether our business appears at the top of a Google search or whether it’s buried five pages down; even whom we’ll be matched with by online dating apps. Algorithms already have an outsize impact on our daily lives, and this trend is going to accelerate with Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Source: #Deleted by Allum Bokhari (2020)
Human Censors: Facebook and Twitter had plunged into the middle of the presidential campaign by actively censoring a major New York Post investigative report detailing Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine, including the potential involvement of his father, presidential candidate Joe Biden. Within hours of the story’s publication, Facebook announced it would “reduce distribution” of the report over its platform, meaning it would prevent users from sharing or, in some cases, seeing it altogether. The director of national intelligence confirmed publicly a few days later that the report was apparently authentic. By December, federal prosecutors would confirm that Hunter Biden was under federal investigation for wire fraud and tax crimes associated with his overseas dealings.
In the midst of this uproar, an individual who went by the name of Mike Gilgan made contact with my office. He offered to share what he knew about Facebook’s censorship and privacy practices. My office first worked to verify Mike Gilgan’s credibility. Gilgan confirmed that the company’s ability to track and monitor what its users were saying and doing was beyond anything yet publicly disclosed. There was more. Facebook didn’t censor by itself. No, the Big Tech platforms coordinated their censorship, which my team thought might help explain the simultaneous actions of Facebook and Twitter on the New York Post story. Big Tech was more than a group of monopolies; it was a movement.
Mike Gilgan knows Facebook’s censorship practices. He has seen them in action. Real, living humans at Facebook made scores of censorship decisions, including the most sensitive ones, working across the company’s various content moderation teams and a tool called Tasks. Tasks was not the only tool Facebook used for monitoring its users’ speech. Facebook has developed a powerful tracking platform to spy on customers’ speech and activity. It was called Centra. The information came just in time for a public hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee featuring none other than Mark Zuckerberg. So it was that on November 17, 2020, I again sat opposite Mark Zuckerberg and put to him the startling questions raised by “Mike Gilgan.” I asked if Zuckerberg would release the records from the Tasks platform detailing any contacts with Twitter or Google on censorship questions. Zuckerberg stammered, “Senator, let me get back to you. In other words, no.”
Mike Gilgan’s revelations confirmed a pattern. Big Tech censors now had the power to determine what information ordinary Americans had access to and what information would be directed to them. They were determined to enforce the social, cultural, and political biases of their class: the high-earning, coastally, enclaved liberal – corporatist class, firmly committed to the flow of labor and capital across the borders and to their profits, which were plentiful.
Source: The Tyranny of Big Tech by Senator Josh Hawley (2021)
Google Leadership: In August 2018, the Intercept, an investigative journalism website, reported that Google was considering working on a censored version of its search engine for China called Dragonfly. This came as an enormous shock not only to the general public, but to the vast majority of Google’s own workforce. The Dragonfly revelations made Washington furious, especially since the news broke around the same time that Google was refusing to work with the Pentagon officials on American artificial intelligence projects. Democratic senator Mark Warner and Republican senator Marco Rubio led a bipartisan group of senators in writing a letter on August 3, 2018, about the project.
How could a company that claimed it could not (or would not) police its platform in the United States, or in many other parts of the world, be willing to work with an autocratic state (China) with no assumptions of privacy or pressure from politicians, security hawks, and human rights advocates. Only when the company’s own engineers began arguing for Google to stop working on a censorship search engine for China did the company really sit up and listen.
Source: Don’t Be Evil: The Case Against Big Tech by Rana Foroohar
SURVEILLANCE: Facebook had developed a powerful tracking platform to spy on customer’s speech and activity. It was called Centra. Centra gave Facebook the power to follow its users practically wherever they went, to any site that had a Facebook button or connection or plug-in. And here was the kicker: there was no real oversight. A Facebook employee with access to Centra could track individuals anywhere, see every device ever associated with their Facebook accounts and every social media account ever connected to their personal devices. And all this without meaningful constraints or controls. Facebook had a political agenda, or more precisely, a social agenda, and it was determined to use its power to achieve it. User privacy and data security were treated as niceties to be rehearsed in public and then ignored.
And then we came to Centra. Zuckerberg was clearly surprised by my mention of the tracking platform. Zuckerberg initially said he knew of no such platform. I showed him the picture of the Centra platform Mike Gilgan had shared. I asked, are you denying it exists at all? Now Zuckerberg was in full damage control. “Senator, I – I’m saying that I’m not familiar with – and that I’d be happy to follow up and -- and get you and your team the information that – that you would like on this. But I – I’m limited what I can – what I’m familiar with and can share today.” Not one hour later, while Zuckerberg was still before the committee, Facebook headquarters issued a statement confirming that Centra did exist. But the company refused to answer whether it used the platform to track Americans in the domestic United States or provide any further details.
Source: The Tyranny of Big Tech by Senator Josh Hawley (2021).
Big Tech is taking on the role of Big Brother right here in the U.S. working with local, state, and national authorities to create what is starting to look a lot like a surveillance nation. Amazon sells facial recognition technology to the police. What else that data might be used for is anyone’s guess; the clandestine nature of it all makes it nearly impossible to track. But the result is that little by little, American democracy has ceded a bit more ground to Big Tech.
Source: Don’t Be Evil: The Case Against Big Tech by Rana Foroohar (2021)
COMMUNICATION CONTROL: Big Tech had gained powerful control over how we communicate in America. Big Tech has no interest in promoting deliberative debate or empowering the common man. Deliberative debate requires common sentiments and loyalties, a shared horizon of interests and purposes, all of which social media has undermined. For profit. And control. Then there was Big Tech’s control over the content of the news, over journalism itself. Big Tech had become the biggest news publisher in America.
News sites are dependent on advertising revenue, and by 2020 more than 60% of all digital advertising went to just three sources: Facebook, Google, and Amazon. Ad spending on print journalism plunged in the 2010s, reflecting a similarly precipitous drop in print readership. Digital ad spending, by contrast, boomed. People were still reading, still consuming news. But they were reading it in a different place. One survey from the Pew Research Center in 2018 showed that fully 43% of Americans got their news from Facebook, making the company “far and away the site Americans most commonly used for news". This new dispensation in news meant good money, very good money for Big Tech.
Big Tech’s growing power might undermine the average person’s control over his personal data, his daily life, his access to information, his ability to exercise any real social influence and political authority. And so, Big Tech went, the censors for a new generation, entrenching the social influence of the new corporate class, a society managed by the professional elite. And the tech barons were determined that this elite would be led by them.
Source: The Tyranny of Big Tech by Josh Hawley (2021)
Wikipedia: Whether it’s describing politicians, or new outlets, Wikipedia displays a bias that is blindingly obvious. Wikipedia, by a long shot, has the most powerful search engine ranking of any website in existence. On virtually any Google search for a major topic, you’re likely to see a Wikipedia link among the top three results, if not at the very top. A study of one thousand randomly generated Google search items in 2012 found that Wikipedia accounted for an astonishing 56% of top results, 24% of second results, and 9% of third results. Like most other sites, Wikipedia is at the mercy of Google. A single algorithm change could cause the encyclopedia to go the way of the dodo.
This has huge implications for our online reputations. For most internet-connected people, the first thing we’ll encounter when we look for information about a new topic is a set of Google results. And one of the first things we’ll see on those Google results is a Wikipedia link. Whether we’re an individual, an organization, or a political movement, we are all at the mercy of Wikipedia, its rules, its institutional biases, and its editors – almost all of whom are anonymous and unaccountable.
Source: #Deleted by Allum Bokhari
Controlling Publications: A newspaper can build up an entire business model based on one of Zuckerberg’s algorithms, only to have it shift a few months later. Blogger Josh Marshall writes that the journalist’s relationship to social media is like a serf’s relationship to a landowner. A few months from now, they could decide to bury the Boston Globe and to build up the Boston Herald. Overnight, Bostonians would find themselves in a new media landscape. Or Zuckerberg could decide that Boston doesn’t need a local paper at all.
There is nothing in our current system that would stop this from happening. In the Facebook model, there is no protection for publishers. There is also no protection for readers – or for those who are in the news itself. In American life, public judgement has never been swifter of more absolute. Today, if someone is accused of a crime, it can destroy their dignity and livelihood overnight. If a politician is falsely accused of taking a bribe, the accusation can instantly end her career. If Facebook’s America, there are no second thoughts. False stories about public figures and public policy matters because, in addition to damaging individual reputations, they led to terrible decision making in a democracy.
Unlike newspapers, Facebook and Google have become essential communications infrastructure. It can bury a publication by pushing down its relevance in feeds and searches. It controls the levers over much of the communication infrastructure of the country, and it has leverage that can control who make profits off those industries that rely on reaching people when they seek information. The structure of power has gotten worse, not better. When the Daily News ran the stories about the Catholic Church, they had to run every word by a tough team of lawyers. One wrong word, and they could be sued for hundreds of millions of dollars. But Facebook does not share this risk. No matter what stories are posted, and even if it knows a story is false Facebook lacks liability. This is because of a law passed in 1996, Section 230, that gives Facebook and Google and other platforms immunity from the content that is shared on their sites. [Note: There will be more on this in the next segment].
Source: Break’em Up by Zephyr Teachout (2020).
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
CENSORSHIP, SURVEILLANCE, & COMMUNICATION CONTROL – EXCERPTS
CONTROLLING THE INTERNET: By the end of the 1990s, anyone with an internet connection could access a digital audience. The political establishment, accustomed to a world where access to information was controlled largely by big broadcast networks and national newspapers, was about to feel the world-shaking effects of the new technology. With just a fraction of the mainstream media’s resources, website owners on the internet could break stories that altered national politics. By the early 2010s it had become impossible to ignore. That was the web as it was meant to be. A free, open network that anyone could use to share consequential information, even if the political establishment would rather it never see the light of day. Much to the relief of the political establishment, corporations were about to reassert control over the flow of information. The corporate takeover of the web was about to begin.
There was one growing problem with the web: information overload. During this period, Google became a ubiquitous to navigate the complexity. The solutions they offered were so simple, we were happy to drink from their poisoned chalice on a massive scale – surrendering our digital independence in the process. Don’t bother setting your own blog, said Facebook – just make an account with us, and we’ll blast your thought out directly to all your friends. Why waste money hosting video on your personal website asked YouTube – we’ll do it for you and give you an audience and ad revenue. All for free! A few naysayers saw what was coming. They have no constitution to answer to. They're not elected. They have no constituents or voters. All of the protections we’ve built up to protect against government tyranny don’t exist for corporate tyranny.
Source: #Deleted by Allum Bokhari (2020)
THE CENSORS: Robot Censors: Algorithms may sound complicated, but they are quite simple. In the world of tech, an algorithm is a set of rules that tells a computer how to solve a problem or a set of problems. Written poorly, algorithms can make mistakes. Algorithms inherit the biases of their programmers. Facebook algorithms read every post you make and use them to determine your interests, before sending those determinations to Facebook’s advertising platform. But we don’t know how or by what criteria, those determinations are made.
As these companies have become increasingly influenced by political interests, the algorithms are asking more questions about users. Have they engaged in “hate speech?” Do they share links to websites engaged in “misinformation” and “conspiracy theories?” We now begin to see the true extent of Silicon Valley’s insidiousness. Not only did the massive expansion in terms of service violation on social media platforms make it easier to outright ban right-wingers and right-wing source; it also made it easier to covertly censor them. And, by using vague terms like “misinformation” and “hate speech,” they can also maintain deniability. Understanding algorithms – and the importance of the people who create them – couldn’t be more important, because it will be the algorithms, not humans, that will eventually govern Big Tech platforms. This is already happening. In YouTube’s 2019 “community guidelines enforcement report” the video-sharing platform credited “automatic flagging” for the censoring and removal of the majority of them.
It’s not just about the content removals. We are rapidly moving into a world in which Big Tech algorithms are involved in almost every aspect of our lives. Whether we’re approved for a loan, whether we’re allowed to rent an apartment, whether our business appears at the top of a Google search or whether it’s buried five pages down; even whom we’ll be matched with by online dating apps. Algorithms already have an outsize impact on our daily lives, and this trend is going to accelerate with Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Source: #Deleted by Allum Bokhari (2020)
Human Censors: Facebook and Twitter had plunged into the middle of the presidential campaign by actively censoring a major New York Post investigative report detailing Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine, including the potential involvement of his father, presidential candidate Joe Biden. Within hours of the story’s publication, Facebook announced it would “reduce distribution” of the report over its platform, meaning it would prevent users from sharing or, in some cases, seeing it altogether. The director of national intelligence confirmed publicly a few days later that the report was apparently authentic. By December, federal prosecutors would confirm that Hunter Biden was under federal investigation for wire fraud and tax crimes associated with his overseas dealings.
In the midst of this uproar, an individual who went by the name of Mike Gilgan made contact with my office. He offered to share what he knew about Facebook’s censorship and privacy practices. My office first worked to verify Mike Gilgan’s credibility. Gilgan confirmed that the company’s ability to track and monitor what its users were saying and doing was beyond anything yet publicly disclosed. There was more. Facebook didn’t censor by itself. No, the Big Tech platforms coordinated their censorship, which my team thought might help explain the simultaneous actions of Facebook and Twitter on the New York Post story. Big Tech was more than a group of monopolies; it was a movement.
Mike Gilgan knows Facebook’s censorship practices. He has seen them in action. Real, living humans at Facebook made scores of censorship decisions, including the most sensitive ones, working across the company’s various content moderation teams and a tool called Tasks. Tasks was not the only tool Facebook used for monitoring its users’ speech. Facebook has developed a powerful tracking platform to spy on customers’ speech and activity. It was called Centra. The information came just in time for a public hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee featuring none other than Mark Zuckerberg. So it was that on November 17, 2020, I again sat opposite Mark Zuckerberg and put to him the startling questions raised by “Mike Gilgan.” I asked if Zuckerberg would release the records from the Tasks platform detailing any contacts with Twitter or Google on censorship questions. Zuckerberg stammered, “Senator, let me get back to you. In other words, no.”
Mike Gilgan’s revelations confirmed a pattern. Big Tech censors now had the power to determine what information ordinary Americans had access to and what information would be directed to them. They were determined to enforce the social, cultural, and political biases of their class: the high-earning, coastally, enclaved liberal – corporatist class, firmly committed to the flow of labor and capital across the borders and to their profits, which were plentiful.
Source: The Tyranny of Big Tech by Senator Josh Hawley (2021)
Google Leadership: In August 2018, the Intercept, an investigative journalism website, reported that Google was considering working on a censored version of its search engine for China called Dragonfly. This came as an enormous shock not only to the general public, but to the vast majority of Google’s own workforce. The Dragonfly revelations made Washington furious, especially since the news broke around the same time that Google was refusing to work with the Pentagon officials on American artificial intelligence projects. Democratic senator Mark Warner and Republican senator Marco Rubio led a bipartisan group of senators in writing a letter on August 3, 2018, about the project.
How could a company that claimed it could not (or would not) police its platform in the United States, or in many other parts of the world, be willing to work with an autocratic state (China) with no assumptions of privacy or pressure from politicians, security hawks, and human rights advocates. Only when the company’s own engineers began arguing for Google to stop working on a censorship search engine for China did the company really sit up and listen.
Source: Don’t Be Evil: The Case Against Big Tech by Rana Foroohar
SURVEILLANCE: Facebook had developed a powerful tracking platform to spy on customer’s speech and activity. It was called Centra. Centra gave Facebook the power to follow its users practically wherever they went, to any site that had a Facebook button or connection or plug-in. And here was the kicker: there was no real oversight. A Facebook employee with access to Centra could track individuals anywhere, see every device ever associated with their Facebook accounts and every social media account ever connected to their personal devices. And all this without meaningful constraints or controls. Facebook had a political agenda, or more precisely, a social agenda, and it was determined to use its power to achieve it. User privacy and data security were treated as niceties to be rehearsed in public and then ignored.
And then we came to Centra. Zuckerberg was clearly surprised by my mention of the tracking platform. Zuckerberg initially said he knew of no such platform. I showed him the picture of the Centra platform Mike Gilgan had shared. I asked, are you denying it exists at all? Now Zuckerberg was in full damage control. “Senator, I – I’m saying that I’m not familiar with – and that I’d be happy to follow up and -- and get you and your team the information that – that you would like on this. But I – I’m limited what I can – what I’m familiar with and can share today.” Not one hour later, while Zuckerberg was still before the committee, Facebook headquarters issued a statement confirming that Centra did exist. But the company refused to answer whether it used the platform to track Americans in the domestic United States or provide any further details.
Source: The Tyranny of Big Tech by Senator Josh Hawley (2021).
Big Tech is taking on the role of Big Brother right here in the U.S. working with local, state, and national authorities to create what is starting to look a lot like a surveillance nation. Amazon sells facial recognition technology to the police. What else that data might be used for is anyone’s guess; the clandestine nature of it all makes it nearly impossible to track. But the result is that little by little, American democracy has ceded a bit more ground to Big Tech.
Source: Don’t Be Evil: The Case Against Big Tech by Rana Foroohar (2021)
COMMUNICATION CONTROL: Big Tech had gained powerful control over how we communicate in America. Big Tech has no interest in promoting deliberative debate or empowering the common man. Deliberative debate requires common sentiments and loyalties, a shared horizon of interests and purposes, all of which social media has undermined. For profit. And control. Then there was Big Tech’s control over the content of the news, over journalism itself. Big Tech had become the biggest news publisher in America.
News sites are dependent on advertising revenue, and by 2020 more than 60% of all digital advertising went to just three sources: Facebook, Google, and Amazon. Ad spending on print journalism plunged in the 2010s, reflecting a similarly precipitous drop in print readership. Digital ad spending, by contrast, boomed. People were still reading, still consuming news. But they were reading it in a different place. One survey from the Pew Research Center in 2018 showed that fully 43% of Americans got their news from Facebook, making the company “far and away the site Americans most commonly used for news". This new dispensation in news meant good money, very good money for Big Tech.
Big Tech’s growing power might undermine the average person’s control over his personal data, his daily life, his access to information, his ability to exercise any real social influence and political authority. And so, Big Tech went, the censors for a new generation, entrenching the social influence of the new corporate class, a society managed by the professional elite. And the tech barons were determined that this elite would be led by them.
Source: The Tyranny of Big Tech by Josh Hawley (2021)
Wikipedia: Whether it’s describing politicians, or new outlets, Wikipedia displays a bias that is blindingly obvious. Wikipedia, by a long shot, has the most powerful search engine ranking of any website in existence. On virtually any Google search for a major topic, you’re likely to see a Wikipedia link among the top three results, if not at the very top. A study of one thousand randomly generated Google search items in 2012 found that Wikipedia accounted for an astonishing 56% of top results, 24% of second results, and 9% of third results. Like most other sites, Wikipedia is at the mercy of Google. A single algorithm change could cause the encyclopedia to go the way of the dodo.
This has huge implications for our online reputations. For most internet-connected people, the first thing we’ll encounter when we look for information about a new topic is a set of Google results. And one of the first things we’ll see on those Google results is a Wikipedia link. Whether we’re an individual, an organization, or a political movement, we are all at the mercy of Wikipedia, its rules, its institutional biases, and its editors – almost all of whom are anonymous and unaccountable.
Source: #Deleted by Allum Bokhari
Controlling Publications: A newspaper can build up an entire business model based on one of Zuckerberg’s algorithms, only to have it shift a few months later. Blogger Josh Marshall writes that the journalist’s relationship to social media is like a serf’s relationship to a landowner. A few months from now, they could decide to bury the Boston Globe and to build up the Boston Herald. Overnight, Bostonians would find themselves in a new media landscape. Or Zuckerberg could decide that Boston doesn’t need a local paper at all.
There is nothing in our current system that would stop this from happening. In the Facebook model, there is no protection for publishers. There is also no protection for readers – or for those who are in the news itself. In American life, public judgement has never been swifter of more absolute. Today, if someone is accused of a crime, it can destroy their dignity and livelihood overnight. If a politician is falsely accused of taking a bribe, the accusation can instantly end her career. If Facebook’s America, there are no second thoughts. False stories about public figures and public policy matters because, in addition to damaging individual reputations, they led to terrible decision making in a democracy.
Unlike newspapers, Facebook and Google have become essential communications infrastructure. It can bury a publication by pushing down its relevance in feeds and searches. It controls the levers over much of the communication infrastructure of the country, and it has leverage that can control who make profits off those industries that rely on reaching people when they seek information. The structure of power has gotten worse, not better. When the Daily News ran the stories about the Catholic Church, they had to run every word by a tough team of lawyers. One wrong word, and they could be sued for hundreds of millions of dollars. But Facebook does not share this risk. No matter what stories are posted, and even if it knows a story is false Facebook lacks liability. This is because of a law passed in 1996, Section 230, that gives Facebook and Google and other platforms immunity from the content that is shared on their sites. [Note: There will be more on this in the next segment].
Source: Break’em Up by Zephyr Teachout (2020).
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
| 5l_big_tech_5l_censorship_and_suveillance_--_segment_5.pdf |