I’m back a bit sooner than I anticipated, but I couldn’t stop thinking about last week’s events, and people have been asking me about it, and oh, it’s all just such a mess. I also know I’m posting off-schedule (i.e., on Monday instead of my usual Sunday), but I promise I’ll be back on track sometime soon.
Anyways, in case you missed it, on January 6, the U.S. Capitol was stormed by hundreds of right-wing Trump supporters. Shortly afterwards, Facebook banned Trump indefinitely, Twitter banned Trump permanently, Apple and Google removed Parler (a largely unmoderated social media network that largely attracts conservatives) from their app stores, and Amazon AWS terminated service to Parler.
Here are a series of short reflections on tech, Trump, and Parler. Many of the reflections pull in opposite directions, and I’m having trouble making sense of whether I agree or disagree with big tech’s decisions. Like viewing an ambiguous image, where your mind constantly toggles between two interpretations of the same picture, I can’t make up my mind. I’m seeing double. Hopefully, these reflections can provide a a jumping-off-point for further discussion and reasoning about tech.
“Step by step, private companies incorporate state businesses; even the most stubborn vestige of the old work of governing . . . will ultimately be taken care of by private contractors” — Friedrich Nietzsche
“If you can silence a king, you are the king.” — Naval Ravikant
If Apple/Google/Amazon/Facebook/Twitter are the new kings, should they be treated as government actors? I’ve previously argued that huge tech companies are becoming “corporate nation-states” and that we should impose government-like friction on them.
Indeed, dominant tech companies are each able to influence billions of people with virtually no accountability or transparency. Facebook and its subsidiaries comprise the most far-reaching media apparatus in history, and the whole thing is under the control of one dude.
Under CDA Section 230, platforms like Facebook and Twitter are free to take down content that they find “otherwise objectionable.” Trump played a non-negligible role in inciting the violence on the Capitol on January 6. And it’s not unreasonable for Twitter/Facebook to believe that Trump might continue to incite violence in the coming weeks. Therefore, the platforms are within their legal rights to take down Trump content (and even ban Trump entirely) because it is “otherwise objectionable.”
But other violence-prone despots (think Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey or Ayatollah Khameini of Iran) still exist on social media. The tech companies seem like they have a vendetta against Trump specifically rather than a general principle around incitement to violence on the platform. The ban, though legal, just seems a bit intellectually dishonest.
As a general matter, I’ve come to believe that content moderation is inherently and unfortunately an un-principled affair. Platforms make the rules up as they go along, and it’s impossible to apply them objectively in every case.
What about the First Amendment? Remember that the First Amendment only applies to government restrictions on speech, and big tech is not a state actor. The closest SCOTUS has come to classifying social media platforms as anything remotely close to a state actor was in Packingham v. North Carolina (2017), when Justice Kennedy called social media the “modern public square.” But no SCOTUS decision since then has elaborated on that.
What about incitement to violence under the Constitution? First Amendment jurisprudence holds that advocacy of force or criminal activity does not receive First Amendment protection if (1) the advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action, and (2) is likely to incite or produce such action. Therefore, if Twitter were a government actor, it might be able to remove some of Trump’s tweets, but a wholesale, permanent ban would be unconstitutionally broad.
It’s not like Trump can no longer speak at all. From Techdirt: “At any moment of any day (certainly for the next two weeks, and likely beyond) [Donald Trump] can walk out of his office and have every major TV news channel (and every internet streaming platform) broadcast whatever he wants to say, and people will see it.”
The Paradox of Tolerance: “Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.” — Karl Popper
Apple and Google booting Parler off their app stores silences not only one person, but an entire avenue of communication. The Apple/Google duopoly over mobile operating systems means that people essentially can’t access Parler anymore on mobile phones. It’s not like Parler can build a new mobile OS.
Parler users could still access Parler in the browser… until, well, Amazon AWS kicked Parler. Now, nobody can access Parler anywhere until it migrates to a different cloud company or hosts its own servers. According to Parler’s CEO, Parler may be out for a week as it rebuilds its infrastructure from scratch.
I’m more amenable to the Apple/Google ban than the AWS ban for a few reasons (all related to one another): (1) Apple/Google seem more like “speakers” in regulating the apps on their app stores while AWS seems more like a “utility” that should be open; (2) AWS is the wrong part of the Internet stack for content regulation. The closer you are to the end consumer, the more freedom you should have to regulate content. The closer you are to the infrastructural layer, the more neutral you should be; (3) The AWS ban essentially completely, albeit temporarily, silences Parler from the entire Internet.
I wonder if Apple/Google/Amazon/Facebook/Twitter met behind closed doors to discuss what to do about Trump / Parler. If they had all conspired to raise prices, that’d be a clear antitrust violation. But if they had all conspired to silence voices, is that illegal? Or at least ill-advised? It’s well known that big-tech often form “content cartels” to moderate unsavory content like child pornography, but is the Trump / Parler ban different, and if so, how different?
I can’t help but think cynically that big tech might just be acting in their own, political self-interests. The Democrats now control the presidency and both houses of Congress. Banning Trump right after Biden was officially certified as the next President might just be tech cozying up to the left for more favorable treatment. Would tech have brought down the ban-hammers if Ossoff and Warnock had not won the Georgia special elections, if Republicans still held the majority in the Senate?
I think an interesting thought experiment here might be whether a platform like AWS would stop servicing a social media site like Twitter during an event like the 2011 Arab Spring. Suppose another Arab Spring were to happen in 2021, and hundreds of thousands of people in the Middle East were leveraging Twitter to start armed insurrection against repressive regimes. Also suppose Twitter doesn’t moderate the insurrectionists’ content, as it didn’t back in 2011, but rather, amplifies it. Could those ruling regimes claim that Twitter, like Parler today, is “inciting violence?” Would AWS agree to stop servicing Twitter?
Apple, Google, and Amazon de-platformed Parler because Parler’s content moderation policies apparently weren’t enforced to a satisfactory degree to clamp down on certain content. Private platforms setting the rules on permissible content moderation could suffocate innovative start-ups that don’t have the capital for robust content moderation.
📚 What I’m reading
Bitcoin for the open-minded skeptic. (Matt Huang)
DALL-E: Creating images from text. (OpenAI)
Google gets organized: The Alphabet Workers Union and the future of labor in Silicon Valley. (Platformer)
Who will win the self-driving car race? The clues lie in elevator history. (Ground Truth)
Not easy, not reasonable, not censorship: The decision to ban Trump from Twitter. (TechDirt)
What happened in 2020. (AVC)