Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
“Be Evil”
About two years ago, I posted a comment suggesting Google and its Obama-supporting workforce and management might have the power to redirect searches and control information in a way that favored one political point of view. My point was it does not take very much to influence an election outcome. The tools and temptation are there.
As many are aware, Google’s management and staff helped put together the indomitable Obama big data, drill down, finite, targeted social media, voter mobilization effort in 2012. I proffered that Facebook might do the same. My thoughts were dismissed very quickly by some knowledgeable people on Ricochet as impossible given that Google so carefully controls its search algorithm and no such hanky-panky would be tolerated. Who believes this is not possible today?
Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks or downloading services are private. They are not subject to the First Amendment and therefore can arbitrate what is transmitted over their private networks. To police this and behave in a responsible way, they label any material which they deem inappropriate as “hate speech.” There is no way to know if they are limiting access, turning off the flow, or simply cutting out points of view that they deem “hate speech” unless they announce their intention to do so.
Republican politicians and conservatives have accused such companies of turning down the flow of Tweets, hits, and search results. There is clear evidence this has happened, whether this was intentional or not. If it happens at a critical moment in a campaign, in a particular locality, might it make a difference in the election outcome?
Removing or restricting “hate speech” seems like a good idea when applied to ISIS or pedophiles. But it gives those who censor some room to decide what users can say, publish, and indirectly, express or think. These companies are now exercising this power and doing so in concert. The protection of the herd confirms and diffuses criticism. Two weeks ago, Apple ostracized Alex Jones (I have never read anything he published), and the other internet content providers soon followed. Alex Jones may be a good example of someone who should be called to task. But censorship is a rough-edged tool. Was he advocating violence or acting like a provocateur to gain followers? Is he simply offering kooky interpretations of events to sell podcasts and coffee cups? And how far is it between Alex Jones and Rush Limbaugh, or … other outspoken Conservatives? If censorship had existed in 1989, would Rush Limbaugh have developed such large, wide, and loyal following? Censorship weeds out nonconformity.
And what about those like Bernie Sanders who might threaten the election of a more electable or “chosen” progressive candidate by sapping away votes or enthusiasm from a rightful heir? Should such voices be included under the ban of hate speech for giving speeches to rowdy crowds that might shout, “Throw her in Jail!” about an opponent? Crowds can scream awful things. If Bernie’s presence and ideas lead to such vehemence by supporters, should access to his ideas be restricted?
Now for those who are from Missouri, it was revealed just a few days ago that Google is actively creating a censored search engine that will comply with China’s requirements for “accurate” information. Google, the “Don’t Be Evil” company, is willing to help the Chinese regime be, well, evil. The list of human rights abuses against citizens in China is too numerous to mention — so the Chinese government makes sure they are not mentioned on the internet in China. The situation in China is far worse than Iran, simply because so much happens in darkness and there are so many points of contention inside the disparate Chinese nations, regions, ethnicities, and faiths that make up the Middle Kingdom.
It was reported that Google management even told lies or misrepresented their involvement in the software development project to create a censored search engine for China. They hid this from their “Co-Founder” Serge Brin who is a strong advocate of freedom of expression. And, they lied to their employees – you know, the smartest people on earth. Well, well, well. Now we see how the best intentions oft go awry. The Google fiasco is clearly worse than the incompetence of Mark Zuckerberg’s efforts to bring people together — provided they are the right people saying the right things. Zuckerberg has shown himself at times to be an unappealing, arrogant, and venal clown.
Here is how the great Google, Apple, Facebook, or Twitter formula is playing out: Create the most powerful connectors or locators of people or information the world has ever seen, turn it into a money machine by forcefeeding advertising or selling data, and add a dose of censorship to protect the franchise or advance its stakeholders’ interests. Of course some stakeholders hold a more important stake than others and therefore get more say about the network. China with its immense market is one such stakeholder. There is no telling what highly moral people will do for market share. And sooner or later, someone might see a way to tamper with the software to “Don’t do Evil” by helping evil be evil.
When massive internet companies get into the business of determining what is ‘hate speech’ and are willing to apply censorship or limit distribution, who will decide what is the hate speech to be censured? Silicon Valley, Facebook, liberal software engineers, the users, the Environmental Defense Council, pathetic Russian hackers, a new bureau in Washington, or the Chinese Communist Party? Pair these idea exchanges with the trove of data these companies have on their users’ (or can easily acquire) about their searches, purchases, travel, and lifestyle activity, and … presto. Monetize goes nuclear.
Thoughts may not need to be controlled, they might simply be “directed” with a gentle nudge, an occassionaly “check,” and some selective information feeding to make sure users Don’t Be Evil.
Published in Technology
The recent banning and shadow banning of PragerU is insidious.
The “reeducation camps” where millions of ethnic Muslims are being incarcerated is pure evil at a level that reminds you of Nazi concentration camps.
These are related. Google and FB, etal are complicit.
Thank you for airing this.
I have written my congressman, but short of this, what else can be done?
My fears are probably rooted in my ignorance about these matters, but I fear regulatory capture as much as I fear the private manipulators so there must be a way to restructure the laws to allow complete freedom while preventing either regulatory capture and empowering these companies to censure and gradually become political. We know they will because everything does. Early on. before these digital technologies got rolling, I remember a lecture by some media genius predicting much of this and suggesting that we’d have to move early on to copyrighted individual choice. His point was that the technology would also allow fractions of pennies to flow to copyright holders as individual consumers paid for everything they watched, with costs and volumes determining consumer prices. We don’t care how many really horrible magazines exist because we can choose not to buy them; they are a private good. We do care greatly about electronic signals because they come into our computers or homes whether we want them or not; they are a public good. I can see this with media, but not search engines. Is it even technically possible to completely separate delivery from content, like my energy supplier and my energy deliverer. I can choose the former but the company that delivers it is locked in.
Given the collusion among the tech giants and the coordinated Thursday editorial assault by nationwide newspapers (including our local paper, but they kept it very mild), can we at least agree the COC rules against conspiracy theory discussions can be lifted in this case? We’re not talking about the Air Force conspiring with UFOs to kidnap Elvis . . .
I think it would help a lot to demand that our governments quit participating in these practices but so far I haven’t run into anyone else who agrees.
Walk away. Unplug. DeFANG. Have a 401k or pension? Call the money managers and tell them to sell the shares of these companies. “Don’t finance evil.” Privately, buy a few individual shares and as a shareholder, make your voice heard to the board of directors. Call. Write. Vote the shares. Go to the meetings. Ricochet meetup at the Facebook shareholders meeting.
I think he meant doing something that will have an effect.
Baby steps.
About the only thing you can do is delete your accounts. If Facebook or Twitter ask why, tell them. They might promise things in the future, but walk away now.
Meanwhile, my tax dollars are supporting these partisan political activities aimed at marginalizing me.
They get tax dollars? Doesnt that obligate them to the same same First Amendment standards as the government?
No, they don’t get tax dollars directly. But tax dollars help support them.
If we made a fuss about govt use of these systems, it would help develop an ethical awareness. If government agencies, under pressure, and subject to a lawsuit or two, quit FB and Twitter, it would have an effect.
We should be supporting the recognition of property rights in personal information, specifically including online activity. Done right, this would actually grow economic activity. In the short run, it would invalidate much of the existing business models and technical infrastructure of the FAANGs.
(As an aside, if you are mostly investing in index funds, you can get much of the effect of dumping the FAANGs by moving to an equal weighted fund, rather than one that is capitalization weighted. This also has the possible benefit of shifting away from stocks that are at very high multiples just as they manage to outrage half the American users.)
We should push to revoke Section 230 protections from any ISP or platform that chooses to apply publishing standards to the content on their platform.
Do they want broad indemnification from libel suits or the ability to curate and define the acceptable content on their platform?
We shouldn’t permit them to have both. There’s no question which they will choose.
That and a deep pocketed fund which defends people against the libel and slander of the SPLC could be very effective.
At a less tactical level, conservatives should become free speech advocates and drop the 1st Amendment branding.
Republican and Democrat budget policies have ensured there will never be any such fund.
I only regret I have one like to give.
Andrew Klavan had Jeremy Boering on his podcast recently and gave a fantastic discussion about the issues that distinguish communication carriers and publishers. My recollection is the FB et al are carriers, and have no obligation to edit content other than the most egregious instances of violence or threats.
These carriers actually have no responsibility for Libel, according to their FCC charter, or whatever they have they makes them go, because they are not PUBLISHERS, they are carriers.
I’ll go look for which podcast it was. It was a great show on this issue.
I’ll stand corrected if I got the gist of the discussion wrong.
Andrew Klavan, Episode 556
http://ricochet.com/podcast/andrew-klavan-show/what-trump-has-wrought/
The discussion with Jeremy Boering begins at 3:44 on the podcast. (but buy Blue Apron!)
Worth listening to, to get a better understanding of how all these internet carrier and publishing issues work together.
@andrewklavan
This is a worthy concept and one that Europe is nudging towards, … but in Europe it always comes with baggage and a fancy new building in Frankfurt, Strasbourg or Brussels.
Concur with both ideas!
Didn’t I read somewhere the Pentagon was going to use someone’s cloud, Google maybe? If so, this is dangerous in my book. We might as well hire the Chinese to build our warships . . .
No new laws are needed. More speech is needed, all the time, everywhere. Anyone with a personal blog should put this on the masthead, or a “pinned” post at the top. Talk to all your friends and acquaintances. Write comments on media stories so the information gets around. Boycott Google Search-use something else like DuckDuckGo, which I do. Resign from Facebook and Twitter immediately (I never joined in the first place, and I am happier every day that I did not).
We have reached a very sad day in a free Republic, where we cannot trust the media, or on line search engines, and other social media products because they can’t keep their damn politics and personal opinions out of it. It is scary and I ask anyone to recall a time in our country’s history where information has been censored or redirected like we are seeing today.
In Obama’s White House, Google was a regular visitor – weekly? Eric Schmidt backed a start-up to help Hillary Clinton win the election – what does “backed” mean?
https://qz.com/520652/groundwork-eric-schmidt-startup-working-for-hillary-clinton-campaign/
When I pull up Fox News in a Google search, it says “unsecured”. This is a five alarm fire post folks – talk about a company becoming too big for its britches…. freedom of information was more secure under a butler called “Ask Jeeves”!
This is not a problem with Google, and where are you seeing the “unsecured” message? In the results or in the browser when go to the page? Different browsers display information about pages security differently. Even though you may open the page with https://www.foxnews.com, the advertising links on the site are unsecured, or http:// , links. For that reason it is not considered a secure site. As a web site, I have many complaints with the foxnews.com site, but this one is near the top in this day and age.
EDIT: corrected
This should be irrelevant to your larger point.
JM,
Just got back online. Nice post. Does the phrase ‘eternal vigilance’ ring a bell? These mega-platforms can tweak an algorithm and have a very real effect on information flow. They have multiple ways to camouflage these changes. The one thing that we have is that they desperately want to maintain that neutral platform status. Otherwise, they’ve got very serious liability problems.
Track em’, catch em’, expose em’. This must be done if we are going to keep the Liberty Bell ringing.
Regards,
Jim
“We should push to revoke Section 230 protections from any ISP or platform that chooses to apply publishing standards to the content on their platform.” Quake Voter
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects these ISP from liability of those that comment on their platform. This is far different from newspapers and other publishers of media that are not so protected. Section 230 was supposed to have allowed greater free speech for those online, yet we have these media giants taking advantage of their protections and clearly limited free speech of those they disagree. Now that these online media giants have chosen to act like publishers of any other media, isn’t it time to revoke their special Section 230 protections?
This is not an argument that these online media giants don’t have property rights that allow them to censor. It is an argument that these online media giants should no longer have special rights granting them protection from lawsuits because their are now clearly acting like “publishers” of media and should be treated as any other publisher is.
MasterCard apparently has joined in the fascist censorship fun. It now has blacklisted Robert Spencer apparently at the request of some muslim clients.
Here is Robert Spencer’s response:
“This Breitbart article is a good summary of what happened between Patreon, MasterCard and me, but the key element is in the update: “A Mastercard spokesperson responded to a Breitbart News request for comment with the following statement. ‘As part of our normal process, we share information about websites that may have illegal content with the acquirer – or merchant’s bank – that connects them to our network to accept card payments. The acquirer would then review the site for compliance with legal requirements and our standards. They would then determine what action to take. In this case, the acquirer advised us that they decided to terminate acceptance.’”
“Illegal content”? What illegal content? Which website — Patreon or Jihad Watch? All I had at Patreon was a video stating my hopes to build a studio for videos, and a notice about an upcoming livestream. And at Jihad Watch, all we have are news articles, almost all from mainstream news sources, with commentary. So to what “illegal content” is MasterCard referring? It is not (yet) illegal in the United States to criticize Islam and oppose jihad mass murder and the Sharia oppression of women, gays, and others. It is, however, illegal to do so under Sharia. Is MasterCard operating according to Sharia blasphemy laws now?”
Some here at Ricochet have said Spencer is an extremist. He is indeed an extremist at publishing the truth. If we are to be commercially censored now for our political views there is a huge problem.
This alone should be a wake-up call for all of us. And we need to create a new Internet that is under the control of our laws and our country. The worst thing Obama did, in my opinion, is give control over the Internet to an international regulatory body.
Excellent post. Thank you.
I believe QV’s point is that if you want to be treated as a carrier, you need to take everything, except the “most egregious instances of violence and threats,” but if you want to start selecting out the stuff that you think is bad for people to see, or is “fake news” or false, then you are behaving like a publisher and not a carrier and should be treated like one.
That at least would save money.