‘Is this the Day the Internet Dies?’National ReviewURL: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/45 ... ernet-diesCategory: Politics
Published: August 18, 2017
Description: When I wrote my recent article for NRO arguing that we must regulate Internet monopolies as public utilities, I had no idea how timely it would become. I submitted it to NR on Friday afternoon (The day before Charlottesville) with the plans to run it on Monday. The news out of Virginia kicked everything back a bit and it ended up running on Tuesday. By Tuesday night, perhaps coincidentally, Tucker Carlson was making the same argument on his popular TV show. A bit later in the week, the big Internet companies began undertaking an orgy of censorship far beyond that even described in my article–kicking dozens of sites from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, PayPal, and numerous hosting providers. I’ve been on the web for a long time—When I started using the web, there were about one hundred web sites in the entire world. Even in those early days, the Internet’s greatest strength has always been freedom—It’s a place you can promote, great ideas, terrible ideas, silly ideas, or just display your collection of thousands of vintage beer cans to the world. But right now that freedom is under threat like never before. Let’s be clear, I am sure most of the people who are getting kicked off of various platforms are bad, bad guys. But in America, we even let the bad guys speak—and we counter their bad speech with better speech. Of course, I understand people get offended at the hate speech such as we heard at the Charlottesville rally: “Separation. We don’t want to integrate with these people. We’re tired of being with them. We want to be with ourselves in a land of our own.†Oh no wait, that wasn’t the Charlottesville rally, that was posted by Louis Farrakhan on his Facebook Page the day after Charlottesville. Two days later he posted a picture of himself with Carlos Santana. Should Amazon stop selling Carlos Santana’s racist music? Will Facebook not take down this Santana’s hateful pages? Or Farrakhan’s? One laughs at the thought of it– that’s the power of liberal privilege. Contrast the free hand given to left-wing offensive speech to the strict controls put on right-wing speech. As just one of many examples, Gab— a free-speech social network that has grown rapidly to almost a quarter million users since its public launch just a few months ago, was just yesterday kicked off the Android app store (it has already been repeatedly denied at Apple) for “hate speech.†To be clear, not all the voices on Gab are mellifluous, they have accepted a number of folks, often from the far right, who have been banned from other social networks (though this is a small portion of Gab’s user base) But Gab is content neutral, describing itself in a recent successful crowdfunding campaign as “an ad-free social network for creators who believe in free speech, individual liberty, and the free flow of information online. Gab stands for bringing folks together of all races, religions, and creeds who share in the common ideals of Western values, individual liberty, and the free exchange of ideas.†Wow—I mean, that sounds like literally Hitler. If Google and Apple are banning Gab, mainstream conservatives are crazy to think they are safe. Ironically one of the Internet’s worst sites provides one of the best examples of the dangers of our current moment. Daily Stormer, a vile Neo-Nazi site, was kicked off the Internet entirely this week when numerous infrastructure entities refused to host it and when finally CloudFlare, which prevented the web site from being attacked by hackers, refused to proxy for it or protect it anymore. Daily Stormer is as racist and anti-Semitic as anything I’ve ever seen on the Internet. But they also had, prominently placed on the front of their site, a statement disclaiming violence and indicating that anyone threatening violence anywhere on their site would be banned. If being vile is grounds for not being able to speak, the Internet would be a much smaller place. There need to be both strong protections for free speech, and as CloudFlare’s CEO noted for due process. The decision of CloudFlare to ban Daily Stormer explained in a private company email and then subsequently largely reproduced in a public blogpost. is actually remarkable for its honesty. Mathew Prince, Cloudflare’s CEO, wrote that “Let me be clear that this was an arbitrary decision. . . I woke up in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet. . . It was a decision I could make because I’m the CEO of a major Internet infrastructure company. No one should have that power.†According to Prince one of his employees, understanding the full import the banning, asked him: “ Is this the day the Internet dies?†I don’t know. But I do know that the threats to free expression, particularly threats to speech from the right, on the Internet have never been greater. Conservatives, and more importantly, Republicans in Congress, need to speak up and put a stop to the censoring, speech-stifling madness of the Silicon Valley mafia. If we don’t stand up, even for speakers we loathe, the leftists will just increase their demands for censorship until they come to our own doorstep. If you think people who want to blow up Mount Rushmore and demolish the Jefferson Memorial are going to be happy just going after going after neo-Nazis, then I’ve got some land on the National Mall I’d love to sell you. I think there may be some prime-location building space there soon.
How to Break Silicon Valley’s Anti-Free-Speech MonopolyNational ReviewURL: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/4 ... -utilitiesCategory: Politics
Published: August 15, 2017
Description: It’s time to treat Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter like public utilities.
In the wake of the outrageous and possibly illegal firing of James Damore for writing a memo that pushed back against Google’s “politically correct monoculture that maintains its hold by shaming dissenters into silence,†the company has been the focus of an eminently deserved torrent of criticism. A fair bit of this critique has gone beyond the particular situation of Mr. Damore to look at the general hostility of the technology industry to conservatives and conservative thought. Unfortunately, what has been lacking from almost all of these cris de coeur is a strategy regarding what to do about it. Fortunately, there are some things we can do that could turn the tables on Silicon Valley’s leftist censorship and restore free speech to the Internet. But first, some background. The evidence of Silicon Valley’s hostility to the Right is everywhere. Prominent conservatives from Michelle Malkin to William Jacobson to Dennis Prager (just to name a few NRO contributors) — and an even greater proportion of those whose politics lean farther to the right, many of whom do not have access to mainstream media and rely on social media to fund their work — have seen themselves banned from major Internet platforms or had their content censored or demonetized. In most cases they are not even given grounds for their punishment or means of appealing it. While some more “mainstream†conservatives may not feel excessively troubled by the banning of more provocative voices farther to the right, in taking this attitude they make a tactical, strategic, and moral mistake. They do not understand how the Left operates. When voices farther to the right are removed, mainstream conservatives become the new “far-right extremists†— and they will be banned with equal alacrity. In my scholarly work, I write primarily about energy policy, in which electric utilities are usually referred to as “natural monopolies.†Government regulation of these utilities has traditionally been justified to avoid having multiple companies building redundant and costly infrastructure and distribution assets. For conservatives, the time has begun to think of some major Web services — in particular Facebook, Google, YouTube, and Twitter — in the same way. Yes, they are private companies, just as many utilities are. And yes, these Internet monopolies do not have the same physical-infrastructure advantages that electric-utility monopolies have. But because of their network effects, their dominance and monopoly power are in many ways even starker. If I don’t like my utility I can put solar panels on my roof and an inverter and battery in my garage, and I can still get power. But if I can’t get access to the 2 billion people on Facebook because Facebook doesn’t like my politics, my rights of free expression are greatly curtailed. And despite the fact that these are private companies, they may be violating free-speech law, as Internet-law professor Mark Grabowski has detailed in the Washington Examiner. In Packingham v. North Carolina last month, the Supreme Court unanimously struck down a North Carolina law barring sex offenders from accessing social-media platforms, with the Court repeatedly and strongly emphasizing that social media are now a crucial part of the public square. As Grabowski notes, California’s state constitution protects free speech in some privately owned spaces, such as shopping malls. Arguably, that protection should now extend to social media — and all the major tech companies are headquartered in California. But even if such arguments are not brought before the courts, the market-dominance or monopoly issue still remains a potent justification for regulation. The value of a social network such as Facebook grows proportionally with the square of the number of people connected to it (a finding known as Metcalfe’s law, promulgated by networking pioneer Bob Metcalfe almost 40 years ago). Eighty-nine percent of U.S. Internet users are on Facebook. Twitter has more than 300 million users and plays a critical gatekeeper and distribution role in the high-speed promulgation of content and news. Google owns 88 percent of total U.S. search revenue. YouTube is similarly dominant in video. Given their market-dominant positions, these companies control a substantial share of the information that Americans consume and therefore should be run in a politically neutral fashion. Instead, they have doubled down on politically motivated censorship — demonetizing right-wing content providers (unilaterally declaring their content to be unfit to have commercials) or even banning them while doing nothing about politically favored ones. But there are solutions to this abuse of monopolistic power. These solutions need not be excessively burdensome or intrusive. They could focus on creating a simple regulatory regime that would ensure these monopolistic companies:
1, Do not censor any content that is compliant with the First Amendment to the United States Constitution; and
2, Do not fully demonetize any user’s content, pulling ads from posts only when the advertiser has requested such action be taken.
In addition, going forward, these companies’ records should be liable to be subpoenaed by the appropriate congressional committees to ensure that they have not abused their monopoly powers in ways that disfavor relevant content for political reasons, which they almost certainly do today. In the electric-utility industry, laws and regulatory bodies exist to ensure that the owners of transmission and distribution networks cannot arbitrarily discriminate against certain generators. The same if not greater standards should apply to speech. Such a proposal is hardly pie-in-the-sky — in fact, a version of this idea has reportedly been pushed privately by the White House’s Steve Bannon, who, not coincidentally, has been among the most Internet-savvy voices on the right. Even before the Damore firing there were plenty of ominous signs. YouTube had promised “tougher treatment to videos that aren’t illegal but have been flagged by users as potential violations of our policies on hate speech and violent extremism.†The supposed focus of this effort was videos promoting terrorism, but right-wing content providers were immediately affected, with their channels banned or demonetized in many instances.
What is needed is not regulation to restrict speech but regulation specifically to allow speech.
The stakes of inaction are clear. In a major profile in the The New York Times Magazine earlier this month, YouTube was referred to as “The New Talk Radio†providing right-wing and conservative content not available in mainstream sources and as a result serving as a rallying point for those on the right. The Times highlights Lauren Southern, Paul Joseph Watson, Ezra Levant, and Stephen Crowder as among the dangerous rightists on YouTube. Sophisticated watchers of the Right will recognize that these individuals belong to very different groups with different relationships to the conservative mainstream. But they should all be able to speak freely. While I understand and share the concern about allowing government interference in private businesses, even those with monopoly power, we should not allow the conservative ship to be wrecked on the shoals of philosophical abstraction. What is needed is not regulation to restrict speech but regulation specifically to allow speech — regulation put on monopolist and market-dominant companies that have abused their positions repeatedly. Regulating these monopolies for the purpose of protecting free speech is a far different matter than regulating them to restrict free speech. To argue otherwise, to quote William F. Buckley in a different context, “is the equivalent of saying that the man who pushes an old lady into the path of a hurtling bus is not to be distinguished from the man who pushes an old lady out of the path of a hurtling bus: on the grounds that, after all, in both cases someone is pushing old ladies around.†As bans and financial threats have become increasingly frequent, some on the right have moved from Facebook and Twitter to new platforms such as Gab. But while I wish Gab well and think it is vital that the Right build its own social-media ecosystem outside of leftist control, that is no substitute for the ability to speak to and interact with the mainstream — where people who might not be exposed to the ideas of the Right can be engaged with and persuaded. We need to be able to tweet to the unconverted, not just the choir. YouTube promotes its “Creators for Change†program by writing that “no matter what kind of videos we make, we all have the power to help create the world we want.†But if Silicon Valley has its way, that won’t be true for conservatives. I personally know some executives at these companies who are politically open-minded. But taken as a whole, I don’t trust them to offer a free, open, and politically unbiased platform. And neither should anyone else. That’s why we need to make sure that these monopolies and platforms — which have been shielded with their privileges, such as the Safe Harbor provisions of the 1998 Digital Millenium Copyright Act — respect the free speech of all Americans, not just those who agree with them. This administration can drain the Silicon Valley swamp and create change. To do it is going to require investigations from conservative journalists, legislation from Congress, regulation from appropriate regulatory bodies, and ultimately the support of President Trump. The notion that social-media companies are utilities (and therefore might be regulated like utilities) did not originate in the fevered minds of right-wing policy analysts. For many years Mark Zuckerberg described Facebook as “a social utility†made up of “lots of separate networks.†He also described Facebook as “more like a government than a traditional company.†“What we’re trying to do is just make it really efficient for people to communicate, get information, and share information. We always try to emphasize the utility component,†Zuckerberg said. But increasingly these platforms are making it as hard as possible for those on the right to communicate and share information. Facebook, Google, and their ilk are indeed utilities, utilities that deliver public benefits and not just private ones. It’s time for Congress and the Trump administration to start treating them that way.
In banning white-supremacist websites, progressive tech giants set a dangerous precedent.National ReviewURL: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/4 ... -precedentCategory: Politics
Published: August 21, 2017
Description: Last week, multiple major Internet corporations essentially cooperated to kick a hate site, The Daily Stormer, off the Internet. Cloudflare, GoDaddy, Google, and various other companies withdrew their services, and now one of the Internet’s most odious sites lives mainly on the “dark web,†largely inaccessible to the casual user. This was an ominous development for free speech — and not because there is anything at all valuable about The Daily Stormer’s message. It’s an evil site. Its message is vile. Instead, The Daily Stormer’s demise is a reminder that a few major corporations now have far more power than the government to regulate and restrict free speech, and they’re hardly neutral or unbiased actors. They have a point of view, and they’re under immense pressure to use that point of view to influence public debate. It’s a simple reality that the lines of Internet communication are in progressive political hands, these progressive corporations look to left-wing activists to define hate, and a large number of leftists believe to the core of their beings that “hateful†speech should be censored and suppressed whenever possible. For example, just this week ProPublica, a respected journalism outlet, decided to study “how leading tech companies monetize hate.†The article begins by highlighting not the Klan or a white-supremacist militia but instead Jihadwatch.org. And how did it choose Jihad Watch? It relied on the Southern Poverty Law Center, a group that is notorious for supplementing its lists of white-supremacist hate groups with its own ideological enemies list, one that a university radical would love. It singles out mainstream Christian organizations like the Family Research Council and the Alliance Defending Freedom as hate groups because they defend and support orthodox Christian beliefs on marriage, sexuality, and gender identity. It challenges Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch because he argues that “traditional Islam itself is not moderate or peaceful.†That’s a highly debatable proposition (indeed, there are Muslims who agree with Spencer), but is it akin to white supremacy? After all, enormous numbers of people in the Muslim world believe in the death penalty for, among other things, blasphemy or apostasy. Those are mainstream Muslim views. Are those views “moderate?†Are those views “peaceful?†The SPLC even calls American Enterprise Institute scholar Charles Murray — Charles Murray — a “white nationalist.†Does that mean ProPublica is going to call out corporations that help AEI process its online donations? ProPublica does at least acknowledge the controversy over the SPLC’s rankings but then waves it away by arguing that the SPLC “documents its decision†about the Family Research Council by “citing the evangelical lobbying group’s promotion of discredited science and unsubstantiated attacks on gay and lesbian people.†But did ProPublica do its own research on the FRC? What about the many other mainstream groups the SPLC labels as hateful? From its story, it looked like ProPublica simply accepted the SPLC list and ran its analysis. In fact, the SPLC’s language about the FRC is so inflammatory and one-sided that in 2012 it inspired a man named Floyd Lee Corkins to attempt to massacre as many FRC employees as he could and stuff Chick-fil-A sandwiches in their dead mouths. In 2016, the SPLC inspired a violent attack on Charles Murray when he tried to speak at Middlebury College. A number of the protesters reported that they hadn’t read Murray’s work. They relied entirely on the SPLC’s inaccurate summary of his views.
No one weeps for The Daily Stormer, but censors often start with the easy targets.
None of this is happening in a free-speech vacuum. In some progressive enclaves even the most ordinary and mainstream of assertions cause meltdowns. The examples are too numerous to mention, but who can forget the physical threats on Evergreen State College professor Bret Weinstein when he objected to a plan to exclude white students and professors from campus for a day? Who can forget the incredible, overheated response at Yale University to the suggestion that adult students should be free to choose their own Halloween costumes? And let’s remember that it was just days ago that Google — a company that claims to value free expression — summarily fired an employee for making good-faith arguments about sex differences that are “well-supported by large volumes of research across species, cultures, and history.†When Cloudflare terminated its relationship with The Daily Stormer, its CEO sounded a word of warning. In an e-mail to company employees, he said, “Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the Internet. No one should have that power.†In fact, he explicitly hoped that his actions would “not set a precedent.†But he has set a precedent. So has Google. So has GoDaddy. It’s a precedent that activists will cite time and again — it’s a precedent that ProPublica just cited — to try to force the most powerful communications companies in the world to use their immense reach to restrict debate on the most consequential issues in public life. Americans by default and without any meaningful choice are putting their trust in a collection of companies that are largely ideological monocultures disproportionately influenced by the social-justice Left. No one weeps for The Daily Stormer, but censors often start with the easy targets, and even a cynic like me was surprised at how quickly ProPublica started probing tech companies’ relationships with far more mainstream organizations. The move from The Daily Stormer to the Family Research Council isn’t a slippery slope, it’s a plunge off a cliff of reason and rationality, yet it’s a plunge that all too many Americans are willing to take. They see no distinction between orthodox Christians and the Klan, and they’ll pressure corporations to see the world the same way. There are no easy answers to our cultural drift away from free speech, but the first line of defense is persuasion. There are people of goodwill at companies such as Google, Cloudflare, and GoDaddy — people who understand the high cost of censorship and the dangers of ideological uniformity. They understand that the proper cure for bad speech is better speech. Indeed, they remain powerful enough that our online culture is still vibrant and largely free. They cannot and must not fall for the activism and hectoring of ideological opportunists.