On Censorship, or Hiding Actualities from Others
Originally published on www.denverlibertarian.com
Recently, several social media sites have conducted a flurry of suspensions and removals of a handful of prominent accounts under the guise of hate speech violations and interfering with the pristine and unblemished U.S. election process. Many have applauded these actions and vociferously demanded further interventions, ignoring the dangerous implications to free speech.
In it’s publicly issued justification for the purging of accounts, Facebook claimed that many of the accounts were established solely to “inflame social and political tensions in the United States, and said their activity was similar — and in some cases connected — to that of Russian accounts during the 2016 election.” Far be it from me to emphasize the obvious: private companies can do this, but they do not operate outside the realm of criticism.
It’s no revelation that many social media companies are intertwined with government surveillance and tracking operations. Given this combination, the possibilities for the trampling of free expression are endless. There are current examples of internet censorship in Tanzania, Uganda, Iran and China, where the ruling government has suppressed dissenting or alternative voices in the run up to elections. This is nothing new and silencing dissenters is an age old practice in every country. What is different now is that today’s myriad social media platforms offer anyone the ability to quickly and instantly offer up critical and less than starry eyed coverage of the standard government narrative, which has the potential to dismantle the establishment politicians’ grasp on control. The elimination of critical voices is a tremendous asset to any ruling authority and when it is done under the guise of the public good for a government by a private company, it is a dystopian nightmare.
The number of news and commentary sources is ever expanding and it falls on the individual to analyze the content and sourcing of the information and make a judgement call for themselves. This is a good thing. Every platform includes options to block, mute, unfollow or other methods to control what content can be seen in a particular feed. It’s far better for an individual to do this versus a private company, or worst case, a government bureaucrat. However, this ability for an individual to control what is seen is a problem for mainstream media outlets and their closest sponsor, government. Almost in real time, the lowly plebes now have the ability to dispute, refute and counter the official narrative. Social media has leveled the playing field and has taken away the mainstream media’s once mighty and unchecked status of Official News Provider™.
The public has grown weary of a media establishment that is complicit in the lies and manipulations that exist solely to parrot the official predetermined narratives. The examples are numerous and multi-faceted, with the run up to the Iraq War after 9/11 being the flagship example of a willfully misleading media apparatus. During the 2016 election cycle, CNN leaked debate questions to Hillary Clinton before a debate with Bernie Sanders and intentionally showed hours upon hours of empty podium coverage from then candidate Trump’s rallies instead of covering Bernie’s rallies with their near Obama style number of attendees. At the time, many on the left were driven to shout that “CNN Sucks!” while attending those Bernie rallies because they saw exactly what was happening: CNN was willfully participating in the DNC’s plan to silence him. Admittedly, the DNC is not the government, but it exemplifies the media’s willingness to go along with whoever offers the best deal - truth be damned, we have an agenda to sell! Contrast that with the reaction from mainstream progressive pundits when a crowd at a Trump rally began chanting the exact same thing: it was presented as an inciteful, violent and unacceptable act. The hypocrisy game continues and many are so quick to fall back into the left-right paradigm of, “it’s only bad when the other guy does it!” More recently, consider the over the top media coverage of the Alt-Right earlier this month, coverage which only served to establish a narrative that there were evil and racist folks all around us and government MUST step in and control them! Meanwhile, the reality on the ground was that a mere two dozen people showed up to the Unite the Right rally in Washington, DC. This was not quite the taking-over-the world numbers one would expect based on the news coverage.
Without a doubt, all media outlets will present biased information, but of grave importance is the very real possibility of private companies stamping out alternative voices at the behest of government. Once the door to censoring so-called hate speech is open, something that is so variable and fungible from person to person, when, where or how do you stop? It’s quite the end-around the beloved Constitution: government can’t limit free speech, but if private companies, who are completely ingrained within the government apparatus can do their dirty work, then the First Amendment isn’t needed.
Comedian Tommy Smothers once said that the ultimate censorship is the flick of the dial. This fits nicely within libertarian philosophy writ large: don’t like Company A, just take your business to Company B. However, what can be done when government embeds itself so deeply within the architecture of the internet that the modern day equivalent of “flicking the dial” only gets you to another government approved search result? Or, what happens if a particular website mysteriously falls to the twentieth page of the search results effectively removing it from existence? There is no recourse, that entity has been disappeared, no gulag needed. This may seem far fetched and polemic, but a recent and prescient example is that of Google providing China with the technology to control the internet (code named Dragonfly Project). According to a recent article by The Intercept, this project includes an app that, “has been designed to filter out content deemed undesirable by China’s ruling Communist Party regime, such as information about political opponents, free speech, democracy, human rights, and peaceful protest. The censored search will “blacklist sensitive queries” so that “no results will be shown” at all when people enter certain words or phrases.” Google has been tight lipped regarding any details and has offered no official statement on the matter.
Fear not! The textbooks assure us that it can’t happen here because we have democracy, free speech, the Constitution and infallible Congress Critters looking out for us. Senator Marco Rubio tweeted that he wanted to “learn more” about Google’s plans, which he said appeared “very disturbing.” That sounds like the right thing to say but there is no doubt that the U.S. government is hard at work on something very similar for deployment here in the U.S. (or in any country who may be on an invade-next list). Think on that for a minute: it is entirely conceivable to control and frame the narrative of an entire population by controlling which websites and articles can be seen prior to an invasion. It’s the modern day equivalent of dropping leaflets or broadcasting Voice of America special reports over the airwaves, only far more effective.
Despite all of this, a truly bipartisan (that’s when you really need to worry) effort is underway at the state house in Colorado, where lawmakers are eager to hand out millions of dollars via Senate Bill SB18-002, which is set to finance broadband deployment to rural areas. Sounds great, right? Of course, this is framed under the guise of “helping small businesses,” in this modern workplace environment and to allow for healthcare providers to remotely communicate with patients. Subsidies in the rural telephone/internet service and installation industry is nothing new, but with a new crop of money being allocated, it brings up a whole new concern. It stands to reason that eventually it will be deemed critically important that these subsidized installations only run a government browser to prevent it from being used for nefarious purposes, since the state now has a vested interest in the operation. The rationales for the government browser requirement will be endless: to prevent the transmission of malicious viruses, track criminal activity, reduce sex trafficking, eliminate porn, prevent those bitcoin drug purchases, heck, eliminate all manner of vice! The morality police were unsuccessful during the Prohibition Era and they will be unsuccessful now, but a whole lot of people will be thrown behind bars in the process. Another example of government attempting to legislate morality is the recent smoking ban for residents living in subsidized housing, but let’s save that for another day.
I can hear the arguments, it will just be a little bit of regulation here and there and it will never grow beyond this limited scope of preventing illicit activities. History tells us otherwise, just like the Constitution has not been able to keep an ever expanding government at bey, a whole new cadre of internet policemen and oversight entities will be deployed to keep the internet safe for the good of the people. Charles Bukowski opined that, “Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and from others. ” It’s always about control regardless of how it is framed and what is desperately needed is decentralization and individual control. It’s not all doom and gloom though, have faith in the glorious, messy free market of ideas, the infant and expanding blockchain and the persistence of individuals acting in their own best interest. Even if pushed underground, independent actors and markets will find a way, they always have, always will.