March 15, 2022
Dear Friends and Family,
Leviathan is defined as: a totalitarian state having a vast bureaucracy; something large or formidable. This epilogue is about Silicon Valley companies. The excerpts are from Woke, Inc. Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam by Vivek Ramaswamy (2021).
In the original Big Tech & AI Series, we learned about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 and with it how Congress conferred a broad shield of legal immunity to Silicon Valley which legally allows Big Tech to censor it platforms, surveil on Facebook and other platform users, plus control news content.
This epilogue expanded my learning on this piece of legislation relative to censorship, in part through the examples provided. These include: not disclosing medical profession reports that lockdowns were excessive or unnecessary; censoring doctors’ Senate testimony about the benefits of ivermectin but not censoring CDC advocacy for remdesivir which WHO (the world health organization) reported offered little to no medical benefit; and censoring a report by the New York Post about Hunter Biden just before the 2020 election. Two CEOs of the censoring Big Tech companies later said in a U.S. Senate hearing that the censoring was a “screw-up.”
The text excerpts contain four examples while the PDF attachment at the end of the text contains seven examples.
Next: Epilogue 2 focuses on expanded learning about artificial intelligence, specifically about critical policy issues that we will face as AI is rolled out into society.
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
Leviathan is defined as: a totalitarian state having a vast bureaucracy; something large or formidable. This epilogue is about Silicon Valley companies. The excerpts are from Woke, Inc. Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam by Vivek Ramaswamy (2021).
In the original Big Tech & AI Series, we learned about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 and with it how Congress conferred a broad shield of legal immunity to Silicon Valley which legally allows Big Tech to censor it platforms, surveil on Facebook and other platform users, plus control news content.
This epilogue expanded my learning on this piece of legislation relative to censorship, in part through the examples provided. These include: not disclosing medical profession reports that lockdowns were excessive or unnecessary; censoring doctors’ Senate testimony about the benefits of ivermectin but not censoring CDC advocacy for remdesivir which WHO (the world health organization) reported offered little to no medical benefit; and censoring a report by the New York Post about Hunter Biden just before the 2020 election. Two CEOs of the censoring Big Tech companies later said in a U.S. Senate hearing that the censoring was a “screw-up.”
The text excerpts contain four examples while the PDF attachment at the end of the text contains seven examples.
Next: Epilogue 2 focuses on expanded learning about artificial intelligence, specifically about critical policy issues that we will face as AI is rolled out into society.
Happy Learning,
Harley
BIG TECH AND AI EPILOGUES – EPILOGUE 1
THE SILICON LEVIATHAN -- EXCERPTS
All the excerpts in this epilogue are from Woke Inc. by Vivek Ramaswamy (2021)
INTRODUCTION: The Silicon Leviathan is a threat to America. The culprit is Congress. Our federal laws continue to aid and abet the rise of the Silicon Valley’s behemoths – in the form of unique “corporate privileges” enjoyed by internet companies that have successfully lobbied our lawmakers for competitive advantages that wrongly favored Silicon Valley over the rest of America. The emergence of these corporate monsters isn’t a product of capitalism but instead the laws and regulations that are vestiges of crony capitalism. The most important of these laws is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 – which confers a broad shield of legal immunity specifically to Silicon Valley titans. Notably, this is a tremendous benefit that ordinary publishers of content don’t enjoy.
The law has two key provisions. Section 230(c) (1) says that platforms are not to be “treated as the publisher or speaker” of any information provided by their users. This means that if someone tweets something disparaging about you on Twitter, you can sue that person, but you can’t sue Twitter. Section 230(c) (2) is the so-called “Good Samaritan” provision, which immunizes platforms from liability for “any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected. In a nutshell, it’s this second part that gives social media companies the power to censor material on their sites.
It’s a shield that Silicon Valley’s titans use today to regulate content on their websites in ways that go far beyond the scope of what Congress envisioned when it passed the Good Samaritan provision of the statute. The intent of the law was to empower social media companies to do things like prevent children from accessing pornography on the internet. Yet companies like Facebook and Twitter have used that same protection to prevent American adults from reading or sending certain articles in major newspapers that were critical of a leading candidate for president of the United States in the weeks preceding an election. The key problem with Section 230 isn’t just the stature itself but the abuse of the statute by companies.
This should be our greatest learning of all: we would have never had behemoth corporate monsters in Silicon Valley wielding the power that they do without laws that were a product of Silicon Valley’s own lobbying efforts.
THE GENERAL PROBLEM – CENSORSHIP: Here’s how the game was played. First, Congress endowed Big Tech with the special corporate privilege of Section 230 that immunizes technology companies from any liability in state court for censoring or otherwise regulating user content. Second, liberal congressmen threaten those same companies at hearings in 2020, saying that if they fail to remove “hate speech” from white nationalist, they would be punished. Third, liberal lawmakers congratulate social media companies after they go on to censor content that Democrats don’t like. Fourth, tech titans manage to take their most aggressive actions of all just as Democrats are poised to take control of the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives for the first time in over a decade. And fifth – of course – Silicon Valley billionaires made staggeringly one-sided campaign contributions to those same Democratic candidates as a token of appeasement. We’ve devolved from a three-branch federal government to one with a headquarters in Silicon Valley and a branch office in Washington, D.C. – each doing precisely the work that the other can’t. That’s the backroom bargain that defines our country.
COVID CENSORSHIP EXAMPLE ONE: During widespread state-imposed lockdowns during the pandemic, YouTube banned videos that were critical of COVID -19 related policies, including content posted by medical professionals arguing that lockdowns were excessive or unnecessary. Its stated justification? To remove “medically unsubstantiated” content in favor of facts from “authoritative” sources. According to YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, “anything that would go against the World Health Organization (WHO) recommendations would be a violation of our policy.” In early 2021, YouTube did the same thing by censoring the Senate testimony of a doctor who made the medical case for ivermectin, a little-known tropical medicine, the threat severe COVID – 19 patients, with no explanation other to say it violated its misinformation policy. Apparently, it was good enough for the US Senate to hear but not for the American people to hear. This list of examples of YouTube’s censorship continues to grow each day.
COVID CENSORSHIP EXAMPLE TWO: In the spring of 2020, the FDA approved a drug called remdesivir, which it says shortens the duration of hospital stays for patients with severe COVID. – 19. Tens of millions of patients hospitalized in the United States went on to receive remdesivir. Yet, the WHO conducted its own analysis and found that remdesivir offered little to no medical benefit. Does this mean that YouTube would ban advertisements for remdesivir from Gilead Sciences, the pharmaceutical company that markets it? Its decisions to censor doctors testifying about ivermectin while permitting presentations about remdesivir seem arbitrary at best. YouTube is hardly alone in its transgressions. Last summer, Facebook banned anti-vaccination advertisements and posts that were critical of lockdowns and mandatory mask orders.
POLITICAL CENSORSHIP EXAMPLE ONE: Having already censored users and websites with impunity, social media giants then took the next major leap – censoring articles published by major newspapers. In the weeks leading up to the 2020 presidential election, the New York Post ran an article featuring Hunter Biden, son of Joe Biden. Contrary to reports that Joe Biden wasn’t involved in Hunter Biden’s business dealings, Tony Bobulinski, a former business associate of Hunter Biden, eventually stepped forward. In a live TV interview Bobulinski presented text messages that appeared to refer to Joe Biden as the “Chairman” and suggested that he often weighed in on business transactions. When asked to comment on the New York Post story, the Biden campaign declined to deny the accuracy of the story. The Biden campaign and family also didn’t dispute Tony Bobulinski’s allegations. It is noteworthy that after Biden has won the election, the news quietly came out that the DOJ had been investigating Hunter Biden.
Factual disputes like these are a feature of modern politics. The general public weighs different pieces of information from various sources, listens to the candidates, and then makes an electoral decision. That’s how democracy works. Yet in 2020 that process was corrupted. Big Tech quickly stepped in to suppress the Hunter Biden story and muzzled anyone who dared to probe further. Shockingly, Twitter decided to ban any of its users from sharing even a link to that article on its platform. It prevented individual users from sending that link to one another via private messages, taking the dramatic step of intervening even in nonpublic one-on-one communications. Worst of all, Twitter froze the entire account of the New York Post altogether. A 21st century Silicon Valley giant, run by a multibillionaire bearded self-fashioned Buddhist guru, singlehandedly censored America’s fourth largest paper by circulation, an institution that had been founded over two centuries ago by Alexander Hamilton.
Facebook quickly followed suit and also decided to limit the distribution of the Hunter Biden article. Together, Facebook and Twitter comprise the two biggest social media platforms – and both of them effectively decided what information was made available to the American electorate in advance of the election. That’s particularly arresting when it involved a story about one of the two candidates in the election – and, in retrospect, the one who emerged as the winner.
During Senate testimony in response to a probe surrounding these issues, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey feigned humility, effectively saying “we screwed up” with respect to the company’s handling of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden story. Mark Zuckerberg was similarly self-critical. But don’t be fooled by their practiced vulnerability. Was it merely a coincidence that Facebook and Twitter adopted the exact same policies with the exact same political effect at the exact same time? Nope. This wasn’t a case of two bumbling gentle giants that simply couldn’t get out of their own way. It was a case of nefarious coordination. The issue today centers on companies abusing their market power to beget greater social, cultural, and political power. The main victim isn’t the consumer in the market; it’s the citizen in our democracy.
The rise of Wokenomics consummates Silicon Valley’s coup over our democracy. Censorship becomes rebranded as social responsibility. Refusing to run ads is praised as a form of corporate restraint. Yet the stakeholder cheerleaders miss the bigger point: companies like Facebook and Google have effectively assumed the role of the state itself and have further expanded that role to regulating and censoring public opinions in ways that no governmental actor can. Their exercise of power over the content of public discourse is without precedent in human history.
POLITICAL CENSORSHIP EXAMPLE TWO:
Consider what happened in January 2021 in the aftermath of the Capitol riot. Based on tenuous charges of “incitement to violence” and “hate speech,” Facebook and Twitter banned, suspended, and removed accounts associated with Donald Trump, the sitting US president, including the official White House and the official POTUS Twitter accounts. To top it off, Facebook enacted a new policy in March 2021 that it would not only block President Trump from accessing his own account but also prohibit anyone from posting a video “in the voice of President Trump” – more reminiscent of Orwellian fiction that American reality.
In an embarrassing public display of conformity, YouTube, Snapchat, Stripe, PayPal, Shopify, and other platforms quickly followed suit with their own Trump bans. Of course, there was no hope for the Trump supporters or sympathizers if the 45th president himself wasn’t immune to this brazen censorship. Naturally, the accounts of tens of thousands of conservatives also disappeared into the ether – all at the behest of technocratic autocrats Zuckerberg and Dorsey.
While Americans are supposed to enjoy due process and the presumption of innocence in everyday life, they enjoy no such luxury in their online lives. Today’s technology tyrants deploy a censor-first mentality and operate under the principle that certain people are probably guilty, that they are probably violating the everchanging “terms and conditions.” This approach gives them the license to silence voices with whom they do not agree with. So conveniently, whenever they’re caught red-handed or the uproar risks being too costly, today’s social media giants now have a new refrain: oops, we just made a “mistake.”
A SOLUTION: All theoretical considerations aside, there’s something obviously undemocratic about winning political arguments through censorship. Punishments for saying the wrong thing and associating with the wrong people are a special threat to the fundamental American rights to freedom of speech and association. These rights are the bedrock of our democracy, which is why the First Amendment protects them from federal and state governments.
Right after Biden’s victory, Representative Ocasio-Cortez tweeted. “Is anyone archiving these Trump sycophants for when they try to downplay or deny their complicity in the future? Immediately after her call to arms, a group calling itself the Trump Accountability project sprang up, aiming to prevent people who’d worked for or donated to Trump from gaining future employment. As an article in Politico drily noted, these types of enemy lists are “rarely a healthy sign in any democracy.”
Part of what it is to be American is to reason with those who disagree with you and beat them at the ballot box, not to attempt to legally deprive them of food and shelter. Citizens of a liberal democracy do not attempt to dominate their political opponents.
Source: Woke, Inc. Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam by Vivek Ramaswamy (2021)
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
THE SILICON LEVIATHAN -- EXCERPTS
All the excerpts in this epilogue are from Woke Inc. by Vivek Ramaswamy (2021)
INTRODUCTION: The Silicon Leviathan is a threat to America. The culprit is Congress. Our federal laws continue to aid and abet the rise of the Silicon Valley’s behemoths – in the form of unique “corporate privileges” enjoyed by internet companies that have successfully lobbied our lawmakers for competitive advantages that wrongly favored Silicon Valley over the rest of America. The emergence of these corporate monsters isn’t a product of capitalism but instead the laws and regulations that are vestiges of crony capitalism. The most important of these laws is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 – which confers a broad shield of legal immunity specifically to Silicon Valley titans. Notably, this is a tremendous benefit that ordinary publishers of content don’t enjoy.
The law has two key provisions. Section 230(c) (1) says that platforms are not to be “treated as the publisher or speaker” of any information provided by their users. This means that if someone tweets something disparaging about you on Twitter, you can sue that person, but you can’t sue Twitter. Section 230(c) (2) is the so-called “Good Samaritan” provision, which immunizes platforms from liability for “any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected. In a nutshell, it’s this second part that gives social media companies the power to censor material on their sites.
It’s a shield that Silicon Valley’s titans use today to regulate content on their websites in ways that go far beyond the scope of what Congress envisioned when it passed the Good Samaritan provision of the statute. The intent of the law was to empower social media companies to do things like prevent children from accessing pornography on the internet. Yet companies like Facebook and Twitter have used that same protection to prevent American adults from reading or sending certain articles in major newspapers that were critical of a leading candidate for president of the United States in the weeks preceding an election. The key problem with Section 230 isn’t just the stature itself but the abuse of the statute by companies.
This should be our greatest learning of all: we would have never had behemoth corporate monsters in Silicon Valley wielding the power that they do without laws that were a product of Silicon Valley’s own lobbying efforts.
THE GENERAL PROBLEM – CENSORSHIP: Here’s how the game was played. First, Congress endowed Big Tech with the special corporate privilege of Section 230 that immunizes technology companies from any liability in state court for censoring or otherwise regulating user content. Second, liberal congressmen threaten those same companies at hearings in 2020, saying that if they fail to remove “hate speech” from white nationalist, they would be punished. Third, liberal lawmakers congratulate social media companies after they go on to censor content that Democrats don’t like. Fourth, tech titans manage to take their most aggressive actions of all just as Democrats are poised to take control of the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives for the first time in over a decade. And fifth – of course – Silicon Valley billionaires made staggeringly one-sided campaign contributions to those same Democratic candidates as a token of appeasement. We’ve devolved from a three-branch federal government to one with a headquarters in Silicon Valley and a branch office in Washington, D.C. – each doing precisely the work that the other can’t. That’s the backroom bargain that defines our country.
COVID CENSORSHIP EXAMPLE ONE: During widespread state-imposed lockdowns during the pandemic, YouTube banned videos that were critical of COVID -19 related policies, including content posted by medical professionals arguing that lockdowns were excessive or unnecessary. Its stated justification? To remove “medically unsubstantiated” content in favor of facts from “authoritative” sources. According to YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, “anything that would go against the World Health Organization (WHO) recommendations would be a violation of our policy.” In early 2021, YouTube did the same thing by censoring the Senate testimony of a doctor who made the medical case for ivermectin, a little-known tropical medicine, the threat severe COVID – 19 patients, with no explanation other to say it violated its misinformation policy. Apparently, it was good enough for the US Senate to hear but not for the American people to hear. This list of examples of YouTube’s censorship continues to grow each day.
COVID CENSORSHIP EXAMPLE TWO: In the spring of 2020, the FDA approved a drug called remdesivir, which it says shortens the duration of hospital stays for patients with severe COVID. – 19. Tens of millions of patients hospitalized in the United States went on to receive remdesivir. Yet, the WHO conducted its own analysis and found that remdesivir offered little to no medical benefit. Does this mean that YouTube would ban advertisements for remdesivir from Gilead Sciences, the pharmaceutical company that markets it? Its decisions to censor doctors testifying about ivermectin while permitting presentations about remdesivir seem arbitrary at best. YouTube is hardly alone in its transgressions. Last summer, Facebook banned anti-vaccination advertisements and posts that were critical of lockdowns and mandatory mask orders.
POLITICAL CENSORSHIP EXAMPLE ONE: Having already censored users and websites with impunity, social media giants then took the next major leap – censoring articles published by major newspapers. In the weeks leading up to the 2020 presidential election, the New York Post ran an article featuring Hunter Biden, son of Joe Biden. Contrary to reports that Joe Biden wasn’t involved in Hunter Biden’s business dealings, Tony Bobulinski, a former business associate of Hunter Biden, eventually stepped forward. In a live TV interview Bobulinski presented text messages that appeared to refer to Joe Biden as the “Chairman” and suggested that he often weighed in on business transactions. When asked to comment on the New York Post story, the Biden campaign declined to deny the accuracy of the story. The Biden campaign and family also didn’t dispute Tony Bobulinski’s allegations. It is noteworthy that after Biden has won the election, the news quietly came out that the DOJ had been investigating Hunter Biden.
Factual disputes like these are a feature of modern politics. The general public weighs different pieces of information from various sources, listens to the candidates, and then makes an electoral decision. That’s how democracy works. Yet in 2020 that process was corrupted. Big Tech quickly stepped in to suppress the Hunter Biden story and muzzled anyone who dared to probe further. Shockingly, Twitter decided to ban any of its users from sharing even a link to that article on its platform. It prevented individual users from sending that link to one another via private messages, taking the dramatic step of intervening even in nonpublic one-on-one communications. Worst of all, Twitter froze the entire account of the New York Post altogether. A 21st century Silicon Valley giant, run by a multibillionaire bearded self-fashioned Buddhist guru, singlehandedly censored America’s fourth largest paper by circulation, an institution that had been founded over two centuries ago by Alexander Hamilton.
Facebook quickly followed suit and also decided to limit the distribution of the Hunter Biden article. Together, Facebook and Twitter comprise the two biggest social media platforms – and both of them effectively decided what information was made available to the American electorate in advance of the election. That’s particularly arresting when it involved a story about one of the two candidates in the election – and, in retrospect, the one who emerged as the winner.
During Senate testimony in response to a probe surrounding these issues, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey feigned humility, effectively saying “we screwed up” with respect to the company’s handling of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden story. Mark Zuckerberg was similarly self-critical. But don’t be fooled by their practiced vulnerability. Was it merely a coincidence that Facebook and Twitter adopted the exact same policies with the exact same political effect at the exact same time? Nope. This wasn’t a case of two bumbling gentle giants that simply couldn’t get out of their own way. It was a case of nefarious coordination. The issue today centers on companies abusing their market power to beget greater social, cultural, and political power. The main victim isn’t the consumer in the market; it’s the citizen in our democracy.
The rise of Wokenomics consummates Silicon Valley’s coup over our democracy. Censorship becomes rebranded as social responsibility. Refusing to run ads is praised as a form of corporate restraint. Yet the stakeholder cheerleaders miss the bigger point: companies like Facebook and Google have effectively assumed the role of the state itself and have further expanded that role to regulating and censoring public opinions in ways that no governmental actor can. Their exercise of power over the content of public discourse is without precedent in human history.
POLITICAL CENSORSHIP EXAMPLE TWO:
Consider what happened in January 2021 in the aftermath of the Capitol riot. Based on tenuous charges of “incitement to violence” and “hate speech,” Facebook and Twitter banned, suspended, and removed accounts associated with Donald Trump, the sitting US president, including the official White House and the official POTUS Twitter accounts. To top it off, Facebook enacted a new policy in March 2021 that it would not only block President Trump from accessing his own account but also prohibit anyone from posting a video “in the voice of President Trump” – more reminiscent of Orwellian fiction that American reality.
In an embarrassing public display of conformity, YouTube, Snapchat, Stripe, PayPal, Shopify, and other platforms quickly followed suit with their own Trump bans. Of course, there was no hope for the Trump supporters or sympathizers if the 45th president himself wasn’t immune to this brazen censorship. Naturally, the accounts of tens of thousands of conservatives also disappeared into the ether – all at the behest of technocratic autocrats Zuckerberg and Dorsey.
While Americans are supposed to enjoy due process and the presumption of innocence in everyday life, they enjoy no such luxury in their online lives. Today’s technology tyrants deploy a censor-first mentality and operate under the principle that certain people are probably guilty, that they are probably violating the everchanging “terms and conditions.” This approach gives them the license to silence voices with whom they do not agree with. So conveniently, whenever they’re caught red-handed or the uproar risks being too costly, today’s social media giants now have a new refrain: oops, we just made a “mistake.”
A SOLUTION: All theoretical considerations aside, there’s something obviously undemocratic about winning political arguments through censorship. Punishments for saying the wrong thing and associating with the wrong people are a special threat to the fundamental American rights to freedom of speech and association. These rights are the bedrock of our democracy, which is why the First Amendment protects them from federal and state governments.
Right after Biden’s victory, Representative Ocasio-Cortez tweeted. “Is anyone archiving these Trump sycophants for when they try to downplay or deny their complicity in the future? Immediately after her call to arms, a group calling itself the Trump Accountability project sprang up, aiming to prevent people who’d worked for or donated to Trump from gaining future employment. As an article in Politico drily noted, these types of enemy lists are “rarely a healthy sign in any democracy.”
Part of what it is to be American is to reason with those who disagree with you and beat them at the ballot box, not to attempt to legally deprive them of food and shelter. Citizens of a liberal democracy do not attempt to dominate their political opponents.
Source: Woke, Inc. Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam by Vivek Ramaswamy (2021)
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
| big_tech_e1l_silicon_leviathan_--_epilogue_1.pdf |