Category: Fourth Estate

I know I shouldn’t waste time discussing Newt Gingrich — the cut-throat GOP hack who bears a huge responsibility for the divisiveness of American politics today, almost a quarter century after he became Speaker of the House — but his commentary in Newsweek about the so-called war by the big tech giants on poor little conservatives distills down a bunch of current diatribes on the subject in a way that is, at least, illustrative.

When Twitter and Facebook decided to ban President Donald Trump, censor The New York Post and start erasing other people and institutions from their platforms, they started down a path which will have enormous consequences for them and for America.

When Google, Amazon and Apple joined in taking down Parler, a conservative social media platform, they reached critical mass in proving that an oligarchical cabal was potentially seeking to control public dialogue for all Americans.

Except it proves no such thing. It demonstrates, perhaps, that social media is largely concentrated in a few, most popular platforms — something encouraged, but not dictated, by those companies (something something free market something, isn’t that what you’re usually on about, Newt?) — but going from there to “seeking to control public dialog,” let alone “erasing people and institutions,” is a huge step.

Let’s start with a fundamental question, shall we? Or let’s make it two:

1. Are social media companies (and their providers) required to give me an account so that I can use their tools?
2. Are there any limits to what I can use that account to say?

We’ll get back to the first one shortly, because the second one is the key. And that brings us to Parler.

On one level, I’m sorry to see Parler go, because I kept hoping it would drive the serious whackadoodles off of Twitter, rather than me having to block them or, when they go over the rails, report them. (Of course, what actually happened was those folk created Parler accounts, and then kept getting onto Twitter to talk about how horrible Twitter was, post their Parler account name in their profile, and continue to spew their normal nonsense.)

But nobody “took down” Parler because conservatives were “flocking” to it.

I could post, all day long, “Abortion is murder of a baby” or “Donald Trump is the greatest President ever,” and Twitter would never do a darned thing about it. I would expect to draw a lot of criticism, but those posts can be found all over Twitter (and, presumably, Facebook, a platform whose privacy policies I finally rid myself of months ago).

Why did Amazon (and Google and Apple) all get in the way of Parler’s operations by refusing to enable it? Because Parler refused to do anything about, quite literally, violent language and death threats on its own platform, and those companies didn’t want to be a part of that.

Here’s a page from the filing Amazon made in Parler’s lawsuit. It’s part of a list of comments Amazon presented to Parler over the course of months, complaining that Parler was in breach of the agreement with Amazon not to use its AWS servers to host violent content:

Does Newt consider that “conservative speech” that needs protection?

Should Amazon be required to host it? Does Amazon’s own brand (let alone whatever corporate mission and vision it holds) take damage from such material being “powered by Amazon”?

Amazon repeatedly went back to Parler with these complaints. Parler showed an inability / unwillingness to do anything about it.

I would suggest Amazon (who was providing the virtual file servers) and Apple and Google (who were providing the optional but commonly used tools to install the Parler application) were fully within their right, under their terms of service, to no longer do business with Parler.

The same case can be made, with a bit more fuzz, in the case of Twitter and Facebook vs. Donald Trump and his enablers. In Twitter’s case, they have allowed Trump to say whatever the hell he wanted to — true, false, or outright crazy — up until after the election. When he started, post-election, started asserting as fact items that were untrue, up to and including the certification of the results of the election, they started flagging his comments as untrue.

And when he started making inflammatory comments that had already, demonstrably, led to violence — and, in fact, was defending the violence and the people who had caused it …

… they decided he had too egregiously violated their terms of service, and chose to cut off their (free) service to him. And they did the same for others who were actively plotting, or supporting plots, of violence against the nation’s political system and, in fact, politicians.

Newt considers this “seeking to control public dialogue for all Americans.”

People noticed that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey had claimed the right to silence President Trump, who earned more than 74 million votes for reelection. The idea that a few oligarch billionaires could control the political discourse of America began to really worry people.

So there are two falsehoods in this statement.

First, nothing has been done to “silence President Trump.” Donald Trump remains one of the most powerful people in America. When he snaps his fingers, reporters gather, and the highest-rated cable “news” network in America hangs on and echoes his every word. His political operatives bury his potential supporters with blizzards of email sharing his opinions (and soliciting their money).

And as a private citizen, Donald Trump will remain (by his own claims) fabulously wealthy. He could buy or build whatever social media firm he put his mind to.

That two social media companies — two big ones, to be sure, but by no means the only way to communicate out there — have decided (accurately) that his actions violate the terms of using their service, they same as they would moderate any other individual, is by no means “silencing” him.

Heck, Donald — have someone rig up a server, connect it to the Internet, install WordPress on it, and build your own blog. Millions will flock to it. Zuckerberg and Dorsey aren’t obliged to do the work for you, any more than if Trump calls up Rachel Maddow during her show that she’s obliged to put him live on the air, or if Trump demands to have an opinion piece of his printed on the front page of the New York Times that they are obliged to do so.

Back when I was a kid, I can remember people saying that the Freedom of Speech didn’t mean that the government had to buy you a printing press.

(The Right has pressed forward for many years the idea that companies can have political and religious rights, and that companies with religious freedom should be able to not do business with whomever they want. Maybe if Twitter said it was about Jack Dorsey’s religious freedom, rather than about the company’s Terms of Service, Newt would back off.)

The second falsehood is that this “controls the political discourse of America.” The commentariat on the Right have long mocked the Left as being in an echo chamber on places like Twitter, and that the majority fo folk outside of Twitter think very differently. If so … then Trump not being on Twitter to give his opinion shouldn’t matter, should it?

Regardless, these take-downs were not about political opinion. Trump claiming he’s mastered China in foreign policy, or has been the best president possible about COVID-19, or that Joe Biden is a communist … none of that is what got him kicked off of Twitter.

This process of squeezing people out of the public square is inherently dangerous. As President Harry Truman warned, “Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.”

George Orwell’s 1984 (which was about a Western democracy devouring itself and its citizens in a totalitarian nightmare) captured this terrifying concept of the technological management of memory and opinion.

Except, of course, Twitter and Facebook and Google and Apple and Amazon aren’t the government. Their actions also have nothing to do with “silencing the voice of opposition,” just not being part of enabling that voice.

The cancel culture and social media erasure movements are strikingly like Orwell’s vision of a “memory hole,” in which ideas that those in power no longer deem valid are destroyed so people can no longer access them.

As an amateur historian, I certainly have concern over knowledge and history being lost. But that’s more a problem with our digital society as a whole. If the “failing” New York Times went out of business and took its archives with it, that would be a horrible loss of history and opinion — though I suspect Newt would not be as passionate about it.

But, then, invoking “cancel culture” as a bogey-man is problematic in itself. Did Newt flock to the defense of the Dixie Chicks when they were “canceled” by so many in the country music world for speaking out against George W Bush and the impending Iraq War? “Cancel culture” is, at its heart, a matter of consumer choice in a free marketplace of ideas, something one would assume Newt favors. If I find a media personality’s opinions on something (for example) particularly objectionable, I’m within my rights to avoid that personality. I’m within my rights to share my opinion about it with others. Heck, I might even feel like that the companies that continue to do business with that personality are enabling their message, and complain to them about it — and those companies may, in turn, reevaluate their relationship with that personality either on its own merit or with how it affects their bottom line, and are within their rights to act on that reevaluation.

The results may not be pleasant, or “fair,” or something that Newt (or I) would agree with, but society is messy, and there’s really nowhere in that process where you can demand that it be stopped without infringing on other, just as important rights.

And none of that involves the government, so the First Amendment has nothing to do with it.

The House Democrats’ new rules (adopted Jan. 3 with 217 Democrats voting in favor), which eliminate “mother,” “father,” “son,” “daughter” and more than a dozen other “inappropriate” gender-specific words from the Rules of the House of Representatives is another Orwellian example of retraining us to only think “appropriate” thoughts and use “appropriate” language. Truman’s fears are beginning to come true.

If the House Democrats suggested that official House business refrain from using a racial or religious epithet in reference to members of those groups, would that be Orwellian, Newt?

In this particular case, it’s even more limited than that: a single rules document has had a whole range of gendered language changed (e.g., “seafarer” for “seaman”). In the same set of changes, references to “he or she” were changed to more specific, but ungendered, language. (Was the original change from “he” to “he or she” Orwellian?). And, finally, in that one document, words like “mother” or “father” were replaced by “parent,” and “son” or “daughter” were replaced by “child.”

Eek.

It’s not that words don’t mean things — in fact, the very reason for doing it is because words mean things — but this is less prescriptive than descriptive, reflecting how language and understanding of sex and gender roles as a society is changing. That may make Newt uncomfortable, but it’s not exactly Winston Smith time.

Some have argued that the protections of Section 230 make them indirect agents of the government. The Supreme Court has ruled consistently that private corporations acting as government agents are bound by the U.S. Constitution. Cutting off free speech is a violation of the First Amendment guarantee of liberties, and therefore the companies might be subject to fines and penalties for violating the constitutional rights of their customers.

If Newt is suggesting that businesses that have specific protections under law are arguably agents of the government, that opens a can of worms far bigger than I think Newt wants to go.

That said, I’m pretty sure you could get fired from your government job by posting on a government website, “White people need to ignite their racial identity and rain down suffering and death like a hurricane upon zionists,” First Amendment or not.

The guarantee against lawsuits made sense when we passed it in 1996 (while I was speaker), because it was an effort to grow what were then tiny, fragile companies. Those guarantees no longer make sense when you are dealing with gigantic worldwide institutions of enormous power and wealth.

One can argue whether having deep pockets magically changes whether a company should be sued for doing something or not (tort reform supporters — like, I believe, Newt, have argued the contrary for years, claiming that we need to change such laws because the allow frivolous lawsuits against big companies). But Newt is, intentionally or inadvertently, suggesting making the situation worse.

Because, yeah, in theory Google and Facebook and Twitter might change some of their moderation policies if they had a flood of lawsuits coming in. But, as noted, they are not the extent of social media. Would Parler have been able to stand up to the massive wave of litigation? Would WordPress.org, which hosts an array of blogs?

Heck, if I flag as spam or trash a comment as inappropriate or unpleasant or violent on this very blog, would Newt suggest that I should be a target of a lawsuit? (I mean, yeah, he might suggest it, but would he have an intellectually coherent basis for doing so?)

Third—and the approach I most favor—conservatives should simply create alternative communications systems to provide access for everyone who disagrees with the Left.

Well, duh. I think that’s the best solution, too.

It still backs into the problems that Parler had (and which other “we’re never going to moderate our forums, so come over here, conservative type” sites have had as well): without moderation, any social media site (left, right, or center) becomes a cess pit (see the Amazon material about Parler, above), and, legally, some moderation must, by law, take place, because not all “speech” is legal. Death threats and incitement to violence is not legal. Child pornography is not legal. Conspiracy to commit crimes is not legal.

Ironically, the genius behind the rise of Fox into the dominant news channel, Roger Ailes, had been driven out of political consulting by the Left because it feared and hated him.

That’s kind of a bizarro world interpretation of why Ailes voluntarily left political consulting to move into the media world.

Now, we have the latest effort by the left to rig the game, smother dissent, and dictate what we can think, say, and believe.

Weirdly enough, attempts to “smother dissent, and dictate what we can think, say, and believe” are more associated with conservative politics and religion, due to their inherent interest in preserving the status quo. Just saying there might be a little projection going on here.

(Yes, Leftists can be authoritarian as much as Rightists.)

Competition will destroy this left-wing groupthink machine much more quickly, decisively and safely than any effort to regulate or supervise the big internet giants, which will take massive time and effort to defeat their lobbying machines.

Go for it. Though I’d suggest that Facebook and Amazon, trivial evidence to the contrary, epitomize the Right-wing, big business, profit-at-all-costs model than anything the Right is liable to put in its place. But if Newt thinks that a conservative-focused social media / hosting company can (a) compete against Facebook and Twitter and Google and Apple and Amazon, and (b) not become a “big internet giant” and “groupthink machine,” any more than Fox News did not take on the worst aspects of being a big media giant and groupthink machine … there’s nothing stopping him from plowing his money into such an investment.

It’s a free country.

More than 74 million Americans voted for President Trump. At least half of them would be a potential market for an alternative social media-web hosting system. That would be a market of 37 million Americans. If only a small share of non-conservatives came to the new system, that would give it a potential market of more than 40 million Americans.

And over 81 million Americans voted for Biden. Given that only a  fraction of the US is on social media, Newt’s numbers here are kind of goofy. Twitter has 36 million active users in the US. Facebook has 190 million users (active or not) in the US — but most of them aren’t there for the politics (left, right, or center), but because their high school friends and family are there. The idea that a specifically conservative-driven social media / web hosting system would draw 40 million users seems … dubious.

But, hey, I’m not a media mogul. Again, go for it. Maybe Donald will invest, too.

I am convinced we Americans will reject domination by oligarchs and insist on our right to be free. We will not be thrown into the “memory hole” by a handful of rich liberals.

Newt never really does explain how banning violent accounts is somehow throwing Americans — even pro-Trump Americans — into the “memory hole,” but it sure sounds impressive.

But, then, Newt’s big into impressive, performative statements, like saying that 2020 is going to be a GOP blow-out like 2016, and like proclaiming he won’t accept Biden as President because, um, he’s angry about Biden. And that he and all the other people who are angry about Biden will mean a massive Republican win in 2022.

Of course, he also said that people angry about Clinton would mean a massive GOP win in 1998 — when the GOP ended up losing House seats, and Gingrich ended up losing his House Speaker job.

And so it goes.

Do you want to know more?

• Internet Giants Can’t Send 74 Million Americans Down a ‘Memory Hole’ | Opinion
• Pity Parler 3: Amazon Brings the Receipts in Lawsuit Filing – Ordinary Times
• Did Nancy Pelosi Force Congress to Use Gender-Neutral Language?