Posted on 05/14/2019 11:39:07 AM PDT by Louis Foxwell
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism
“But, it’s a private company.”
It’s a familiar argument. Bring up the problem of Google, Facebook and Twitter suppressing conservative speech and many conservatives will retort that it’s a free market. The big dot com monopolies created their own companies, didn’t they? And we wouldn’t want government regulation of business.
In a FOX Business editorial, Iain Murray writes that breaking up dot coms like Google would be "a repudiation of conservative principles". He argues that "Twitter is a private company" and that "there is no positive right to free speech on Twitter or any other private venue."
“The same goes for the president’s attacks on Google and the complaints of conservative censorship," Diane Katz writes at the Heritage Institute. "These private enterprises are not obligated to abide any sort of partisan fairness doctrine."
The talking point that Google, Facebook and Twitter are private companies that can discriminate as they please on their private platforms, and that the First Amendment doesn’t apply, is in the air everywhere.
But it overlooks two very simple facts.
The driving force behind the censorship of conservatives isn’t a handful of tech tycoons. It’s elected officials. Senator Kamala Harris offered an example of that in a recent speech where she declared that she would "hold social media platforms accountable" if they contained "hate" or "misinformation".
“Misinformation” is a well-known euphemism among Democrats and the media for conservative political content. It was originally known as “fake news” before President Trump hijacked the term to refer to the media. The recent Poynter list of “unreliable” sites was stacked with conservative sites. Lists like these aren’t hypothetical. Poynter runs the International Fact Checking Network which had been empowered by Facebook and other sites to deplatform conservative content through its ‘fact checks’.
All of this got underway in response to claims by Hillary Clinton and her allies that “fake news” had cost her the election and represented a grave attack on our democracy. The call was quickly taken up by Democrats in the House and the Senate. It’s been commented on supportively by powerful Clinton allies in the tech industry, like Eric Schmidt, the former chairman of Google.
Dot coms like Facebook are cracking down on conservatives as an explicit response to pressure from elected government officials. That’s not the voluntary behavior of private companies. When Facebook deletes conservatives in response to threats of regulatory action from Senate Democrats, its censors are acting as government agents while engaging in viewpoint discrimination.
Free market conservatives can argue that Facebook should have the right to discriminate against conservatives. But do they really want to argue that Senate Democrats should have the right to compel private companies to censor conservatives?
What’s the difference between that and a totalitarian state?
It might, arguably, be legal for your landlord to kick you out of your house because he doesn’t like the fact that you’re a Republican. But is it legal for him to do so on orders from Senator Kamala Harris?
Defending abusive behavior like that is a desecration of the free market.
The second fact is that the internet is not the work of a handful of aspiring entrepreneurs who built it out of thin air using nothing but their talent, brains and nimble fingers.
The internet was the work of DARPA. That stands for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. DARPA is part of the Department of Defense. DARPA had funded the creation of the core technologies that made the internet possible. The origins of the internet go back to DARPA's Arpanet.
Nor did the story end once the internet had entered every home.
Where did Google come from? "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine," the original paper by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the co-founders of Google, reveals support from the National Science Foundation, DARPA, and even NASA.
Harvard’s computer science department, where Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg learned to play with the toys that turned him into a billionaire, has also wallowed in DARPA cash. Not to mention funds from a variety of other DOD and Federal science agencies.
Taxpayer sank a fortune into developing a public marketplace where ideas are exchanged, and political advocacy and economic activity takes place. That marketplace doesn’t belong to Google, Amazon or Facebook. And when those monopolies take a stranglehold on the marketplace, squeezing out conservatives from being able to participate, they’re undermining our rights and freedoms.
"A right of free correspondence between citizen and citizen on their joint interests, whether public or private and under whatsoever laws these interests arise (to wit: of the State, of Congress, of France, Spain, or Turkey), is a natural right," Thomas Jefferson argued.
There should be a high barrier for any company seeking to interfere with the marketplace of ideas in which the right of free correspondence is practiced.
Critics of regulating dot com monopolies have made valid points.
Regulating Google or Facebook as a public utility is dangerous. And their argument that giving government the power to control content on these platforms would backfire is sensible.
Any solution to the problem should not be based on expanding government control.
But there are two answers.
First, companies that engage in viewpoint discrimination in response to government pressure are acting as government agents. When a pattern of viewpoint discrimination manifests itself on the platform controlled by a monopoly, a civil rights investigation should examine what role government officials played in instigating the suppression of a particular point of view.
Liberals have abandoned the Public Forum Doctrine, once a popular ACLU theme, while embracing censorship. But if the Doctrine could apply to a shopping mall, it certainly applies to the internet.
In Packingham v. North Carolina, the Supreme Court's decision found that, "A fundamental principle of the First Amendment is that all persons have access to places where they can speak and listen."
The Packingham case dealt with government interference, but when monopolies silence conservatives on behalf of government actors, they are fulfilling the same role as an ISP that suspends a customer in response to a law.
When dot com monopolies get so big that being banned from their platforms effectively neutralizes political activity, press activity and political speech, then they’re public forums.
Second, rights are threatened by any sufficiently large organization or entity, not just government. Government has traditionally been the most powerful such organization, but the natural rights that our country was founded on are equally immune to every organization. Governments, as the Declaration of Independence asserts, exist as part of a social contract to secure these rights for its citizens.
Government secures these rights, first and foremost, against itself. (Our system effectively exists to answer the question of who watches the watchers.) But it also secures them against foreign powers, a crisis that the Declaration of Independence was written to meet, and against domestic organizations, criminal or political, whether it’s the Communist Party or ISIS, that seek to rob Americans of their rights.
A country in which freedom of speech effectively did not exist, even though it remained a technical right, would not be America. A government that allowed such a thing would have no right to exist.
Only a government whose citizens enjoy the rights of free men legally justifies is existence.
If a private company took control of all the roads and closed them to conservatives every Election Day, elections would become a mockery and the resulting government would be an illegitimate tyranny.
That’s the crisis that conservatives face with the internet.
Protecting freedom of speech does not abandon conservative principles, it secures them. There are no conservative principles without freedom of speech. A free market nation without freedom of speech isn’t a conservative country. It’s an oligarchy. That’s the state of affairs on the internet.
Conservatives should beware of blindly enlisting in leftist efforts to take regulatory control of companies like Facebook. The result would be a deeper and more pervasive form of censorship than exists today. But neither should they imagine that the ‘free market side of history’ will automatically fix the problem.
As the internet has devolved from its origins in academia to a set of handheld devices controlled by one of two companies, and then to a set of smart assistants controlled by one of two companies, it has become far less open. Even if Google were to lose its monopoly, Silicon Valley hosts a politicized workforce which allies with the media to compel any rising new company to toe the same line.
And if that fails, there are always House and Senate hearings and harder laws coming out of Europe.
We have an existing useful toolset to draw on, from anti-trust laws to civil rights investigations to the Public Forum Doctrine. This will be a challenging process, but we must remember through it all, that we have a right to freedom of speech on the internet. Our tax dollars, invested over generations, built this system. It does not belong to the Left. Or, for that matter, the Right. It belongs to all of us.
Ever since the unanimous 1964 Sullivan decision by the Warren Court, Democrats have felt entitled, not only to their own opinions, but to their own facts.Sullivan says that government officials have a very high bar to pass in order to sue for libel. Since Democrats align themselves with the natural political tendency of journalism, Democrats never get libeled, and Republicans often do.
Sullivan did not consider the fact that wire services homogenize journalism and cause journalists to go along and get along with each other and with Democrat politicians, nor the fact that journalism which knows it is negative (“If it bleeds, it leads) but claims to be objective is cynical towards society and naive towards government.
IMHO, Sullivan is bad law.
“But, it’s a private company.”Aren’t they publicly owned?It is owned by shareholders. Shareholders are people, and they are not agents of the government.I quote that to you because you used the term “public” in an ambiguous sense. “Society” is a different thing than “government.” “Liberals” like to use “society” or “public” as euphemisms for government.SOME writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins.Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness;Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one . . .the former promotes our happiness POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices.
The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions.
The first is a patron, the last a punisher.
For were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver; but that not being the case, he finds it necessary to surrender up a part of his property to furnish means for the protection of the rest . . . — Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776)
The politicians FR are in bed with? Conservatives need to get over this fear of using the government to win. The Left has set the rules, as they are today, use them against them.
The Left no longer embodies the principal of “I disagree with they say, but will defend their right to say it”. They want any and all means to be used to destroy you, destroy this country, destroy Western Civilization. The Right is trying to play the chess game by the rules, while the Left makes their moves as if every piece is a Queen.
In any fascist, totalitarian government there is no distinction between society and government. Government controls society and adjudicates societal norms.
All totalitarian states are democratic. That is, they derive their power from the majority to the exclusion of the minority. In reality these majorities are comprised of smaller groups that are consistently oppressed by government oligarchs.
A republic guarantees the rights of the minority. No democracy does this. The US is not a democracy. It is a republic.
“If a private company took control of all the roads and closed them to conservatives every Election Day, elections would become a mockery and the resulting government would be an illegitimate tyranny.”
And military intelligence and the NSA and CIA have ties to some of the leading groups promoting Internet censorship, such as the Alliance for Securing Democracy and Hamilton 68. The intelligence community is using state-funded "private" tech companies to run an illegal psyop against the American people.
Very good point.
The article makes some valid points, but omits two fundamental points:
1. These are publicly-traded corporations, not private companies. (Try telling the SEC and IRS that they are private companies.) Operating in the private sector does not equal being a private company!
2. They are already regulated by the Communications Decency Act of 1996 Section 230: They are given content liability protection, as non-publishers, in exchange for not governing that content, as publishers!
We do not need new legislation; we need existing legislation enforced.
thanks for the clarifications.
Like all other areas in our free market economy, free enterprise systems and free press publications and services, it’s always buyer’s choice/buyer beware. If you don’t like the service or can’t tolerate the politics of the service, don’t subscribe, don’t read, don’t use it.
Amen! I could support anti-fraud requirements that they disclose their blocking policies; anything more is just plain socialism.
Abandoning our limited-government principles would be a bigger loss than anything we might hope to thereby "win".
Is that how creepy men were kept out of girls bathrooms?
Abandoning our limited-government principles would be a bigger loss than anything we might hope to thereby "win".
Is that how creepy men were kept out of girls bathrooms?
Limited government does not mean no government. Educate yourself.
your limited government hasn’t worked.
He’s going to have to make better arguments than this.
His entire first point is premised on the idea that the techs’ actions are solely the result of pressure from Democratic Senators. The only example he can scare up is Kamala Harris saying she would hold them accountable for spreading hate or misinformation. That’s it.
No political bias from the Silicon Valley owners and employees. No pressure from advertisers responding to boycotts. No snowflake PC behavior.
In fact, banning conservatives is “...not the voluntary behavior of private companies.”
See, it isn’t Zuckerberg or Google, it’s that freshman Senator who wields all the power. Never mind that Republicans in Congress have been more aggressive in hauling the tech lords into hearings and berating them for bias.
Why does Greenfield make such a transparently weak argument? Because he understands that the 1st Amendment applies only to government action so he has to pretend that it’s somehow the government suppressing the speech.
Even when he tries to invoke the Constitution with Packingham VS. N.C. he has to admit that the court only addressed what government could or couldn’t do, not the social media companies.
The second DARPA argument is even more desperate. By this logic the government can regulate any and everything on the internet.
Not only that, they can make your eye doctor give you LASIK therapy for free since NASA developed it.
I agree this is a hard problem but making unprincipled arguments of convenience doesn’t help.
I thought his examples of government officials threatening private companies with repercussions if they didn't deplatform people the government officials didn't like was a pretty D@mn good argument.
His entire first point is premised on the idea that the techs’ actions are solely the result of pressure from Democratic Senators. The only example he can scare up is Kamala Harris saying she would hold them accountable for spreading hate or misinformation. That’s it.
Did he mention China threatening Tech companies? Because they do. Wikipedia is now banned in China, by the way. Google falls all over itself to conform to whatever China tells it to do. So does Microsoft and other companies.
Other governments will use pressure to force American companies to comply if our Laws allow them to censor *ANY* speech. Turkey is already threatening legal repercussions if anyone violates their anti-blasphemy laws.
You do not grasp how big of a door you open when you allow the censorship of speech by communications companies.
Allow companies to be pressured by governments, and you will effectively destroy all free speech in America. Allowing the a choice to censor is what will create the pressure for them to censor from other countries, and indeed from our own government officials.
PING!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.