Two weeks ago, Matt Taibbi warned in Rolling Stone that social networks are too big and broken to properly function, and any “fixes” will only create more problems.
Since then, amid more permanent and temporary bans and ‘timeouts’, things have got worse and Taibbi is back to warn America that censorship does not end well…
How America learned to stop worrying and put Mark Zuckerberg in charge of everything…
Last week, we saw another flurry of censorship news. Facebook apparently suspended VenezuelaAnalysis.com, a site critical of U.S. policy toward Venezuela. (It was reinstated Thursday.) Twitter suspended a pair of libertarians, including @DanielLMcAdams of the Ron Paul Institute and @ScottHortonShow of Antiwar.com, for using the word “bitch” (directed toward a man) in a silly political argument. They, too, were later re-instated.
More significantly: Google’s former head of free expression issues in Asia, Lokman Tsui, blasted the tech giant’s plan to develop a search engine that would help the Chinese government censor content.
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Few Americans heard these stories, because the big “censorship” news last week surrounded the widely hated Alex Jones. After surviving halting actions by Facebook and YouTube the week before, the screeching InfoWars lunatic was hit decisively, removed from Apple, Facebook, Google and Spotify.
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Collectively, all these stories represent a revolutionary moment in media. Jones is an incidental player in a much larger narrative.
Both the Jones situation and the Facebook-Atlantic Council deletions seem an effort to fulfill a request made last year by the Senate Judiciary Committee. Last October, Facebook, Google and Twitter were asked by Hawaii Senator Mazie Hizono to draw up a “mission statement” to “prevent the foment of discord.”
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After Trump’s shocking win in 2016, everyone turned to Facebook and Google to fix “fake news.” But nobody had a coherent definition of what constitutes it.
Many on the left lamented the Wikileaks releases of Democratic Party emails, but those documents were real news, and the complaint there was more about the motives of sources, and editorial emphasis, rather than accuracy.
When Google announced it was tightening its algorithm to push “more authoritative content” last April, it defined “fake news” as “…blatantly misleading, low quality, offensive or downright false information.”
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It isn’t clear, but within short order, a whole range of alternative sites (from Alternet to Truthdig to the World Socialist Website) started complaining about significant drops in traffic, apparently thanks to changed search processes.
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Now that we’ve opened the door for ordinary users, politicians, ex-security-state creeps, foreign governments and companies like Raytheon to influence the removal of content, the future is obvious: an endless merry-go-round of political tattling, in which each tribe will push for bans of political enemies.
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The most ominous development involves countries asking for direct cleansing of opposition movements, a la China’s search engine, or Tel Aviv’s demands that Facebook and Google delete pages belonging to Palestinian activists. (This happened: Israel’s justice minister said last year that Facebook granted 95 percent of such requests.)
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Americans are not freaking out about this because most of us have lost the ability to distinguish between general principles and political outcomes. So long as the “right” people are being zapped, no one cares.
But we should care. Censorship is one of modern man’s great temptations. Giving in to it hasn’t provided many happy stories.
Read the full detailed story here…
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