What Happened Today: February 10, 2023
Mr. Roth Goes to Washington; Two murdered in Jerusalem; $24,000 a day says Bank of England; Sugarcubes on Triangle of Sadness
The Big Story
Gathering before a House Oversight Committee investigating government interference in social media platforms, former Twitter executives on Wednesday reiterated that censoring a New York Post article about President Joe Biden’s son Hunter before the 2020 election was a mistake, though they said the decision was not a surrender to pressure from Democrats or federal law enforcement agents. Despite an ongoing collaboration at that time with FBI agents regarding election disinformation, Twitter executives said they had received a tip of a forthcoming “hack and leak” operation featuring the younger Biden’s son from a “peer” company, raising questions that the House panel did not pursue about collaboration between platforms in coordinated censorship before the election.
Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former global head of trust and safety, was forgetful when Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) asked him if Twitter “shadowbanned” her account. “Not to the best of my recollection,” Roth said. Boebert then revealed that on Tuesday, current Twitter employees confirmed that she had in fact had her account “visibility filtered” for 90 days in early 2021.
An exchange with congressional Democrats revealed that Twitter has run interference in both directions, citing a 2019 request by the Trump White House to take down a post by celebrity Chrissy Teigen calling Trump a string of expletives.
But perhaps the most important revelation came from Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL), who presented evidence that Twitter was among a network of social media companies, federal agencies including the Department of Homeland Security, and NGOs communicating about the 2020 campaign on a private cloud network, though Roth could not definitively recall if he had personally exchanged messages with federal employees on the private network. Mike Benz, head of the Foundation for Freedom Online, told The Scroll that he feels this was the most significant revelation from the hearings: “Mr. Roth appeared stunned that Congress even knew of that channel’s existence, and appeared to panic before saying, ‘I can’t give you a yes or no’ about it. Those communications are where the censorship was coordinated. Rep. Luna’s shovel hit pay-dirt, and that’s exactly where Congress should keep digging.” And while grilling the executives at Twitter isn’t totally useless, Robby Soave pointed out on Wednesday in Reason, “If Congress wants to protect speech from government interference, it should summon representatives of the FBI, the CDC, and other agencies to these hearings.”
In the Back Pages: America’s Censored Speech Platforms
The Rest
→ An Israeli Arab citizen and resident of East Jerusalem murdered two people, including a 6-year-old boy, and injured five in a car-ramming attack on Friday at a bus stop in Jerusalem’s Ramot neighborhood. He was subsequently shot dead at the scene. One of the victims, six-year-old Yaakov Yisrael Paley, was buried immediately prior to Shabbat; the other, 20-year-old yeshiva student Alter Shlomo Lederman, was rushed to Shaare Zedek Medical Center, where he was later pronounced dead. While a senior Israeli official said the attacker was recently released from a psychiatric hospital, the attack is being treated as an act of terror, in line with an accelerating string of attacks around Jerusalem. The office of the new minister of national security released a statement previewing a response: “[Itamar] Ben Gvir instructed the police to ready and prepare plans for Operation Defensive Shield 2 in East Jerusalem starting this coming Sunday, to deal with the terror nests in East Jerusalem.” Prime Minister Netanyahu has already ordered the attacker’s home demolished.
→ On Tuesday, Bank of England Deputy Governor Jon Cunliffe said that if the country fulfills its plan to bring in a Central Bank Digital Currency, citizens would have digital spending accounts limited to $24,000 and be able to keep separate accounts for savings with larger balances. The whole idea smells like rotten cabbage to the Poles, who were recently polled on the topic: 66.5% said they were “strongly against” moving away from cash, and in fact, younger Poles were even more strongly against the proposed change than older ones. Perhaps the children of the children of the former Warsaw Pact don’t feel warmly about the potential invasion of privacy this system could create. Last year, during protests in Canada, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau instructed his government to freeze the bank accounts of certain protestors, demonstrating the ease with which governments are already able to use finance to punish dissent.
→ One of the world’s major contemporary art festivals, Documenta, held in Germany since 1955, was turned upside down last year due to allegations of antisemitism in the artworks presented. On Monday, a committee convened to examine the allegations released its final 133-page report, which concluded that Documenta 15 was “an echo chamber for Israel-related anti-Semitism, and sometimes for pure anti-Semitism.” Several works were cited as having anti-Israel or antisemitic undertones, especially pieces from Indonesian art group Taring Padi and Mohammed Al-Hawajri’s “Guernica Gaza”—works that paid homage to Picasso’s “Guernica” through depictions of a war-torn Gaza Strip. The committee wrote that these artworks “propagate the Manichaean notion that Jews are deeply evil and their victims thoroughly innocent.”
→ Quote of the Day:
Why has publishing grown so doctrinally uniform and gutless? I’ll make a stab. Cowardice is contagious, courage rare. Most people are conformists, really, and hewing to a rigid set of progressive orthodoxies while shunning even faintly conservative writers has become the norm in this industry.
This zinger is from novelist Lionel Shriver’s new column in The Spectator on the cowed state of the publishing industry and how its self-imposed diktats are hurting it financially, as the rare publisher who does take a chance on controversial material, like HarperCollins, seems to be doing quite well. Shriver doesn’t hold back on her fellow females either, saying she believes that the feminine desire to favor consensus in the increasingly female-dominated sphere has “diminished the industry’s boldness.”
Read More: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-publishers-are-such-cowards/
→ While China has been the most pro-active superpower to infiltrate and build alliances across the African continent, it’s apparent that the Russians aren’t far behind. The Russians have been using relatively small investments of money, and significant use of their paramilitary Wagner Group, to gain influence in some of Africa’s weakest states. The nations Russia has targeted are mostly a part of “Francophone” Africa, where France as a colonial power built tremendous influence. But that influence is waning, perhaps partially due to an antiquated French-African currency arrangement that Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has described as exploitative. In the Central African Republic, Russia has used soft power to establish dominance, selling arms to the government and bringing in Wagner mercenaries to help fight insurgency and establish order. The Wagner hessians even provide personal security for the CAR’s president, Faustin Archange Touadéra, who has now added Russian to the compulsory languages in the nations’ universities.
Read More: https://www.ft.com/content/0c459575-5c72-4558-821e-b495c9db9b6f?shareType=nongift
→ Number of the Day: 13,000
That’s the number of times master electrician Alan Lampel has seen The Phantom of the Opera in his 35-year position caring for the lighting and scenic effects of Broadway’s longest-running show. Lampel is 66, and The Wall Street Journal calculates that that means he’s spent 5% of his life watching Phantom, but the man still adores his work. “I’ve been in love with this show since the beginning,” he said. As the show heads for its final performance on April 16, and Lampel heads for retirement, he can bask in the praise of creator Andrew Lloyd Webber, who told the Journal, “‘Phantom’ has shone brighter on Broadway for 35 years because of the work of Alan Lampel.”
Read it here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/phantom-of-the-opera-broadway-closing-electrician-11675888437
→ A few weeks ago, Gautam Adani was the third richest man on earth, but now he’s number 22, due to a Jan. 24 report by New York-based Hindenburg Research that claimed that his Adani Group has engaged in a “brazen stock manipulation and accounting fraud scheme over the course of decades” that led to several sell-offs of stock. The Adani Group responded to the report, saying it was “a calculated attack on India, the independence, integrity and quality of Indian institutions, and the growth story and ambition of India,” articulating the unspoken truth about the company’s success, which is that its directly tied to the close relationship between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and CEO Adani. Now, a major emerging markets index, MSCI, is cutting the size of Adani stocks in their composition, which doesn’t bode well for the conglomerate. “A more nuanced version of the Adani story is that the family group has exploited the seams and weakest links in the India story, to its advantage,” wrote NYU Stern School of Business professor Aswath Damodaran on his blog. “There are lessons for the nation as a whole, as it looks towards what it hopes will be its decade of growth.”
→ Breaking! The White House confirmed Friday afternoon that it had taken action to shoot down a “high-altitude object” about the size of a small car, which appeared over Alaska. “It came in, inside our territorial waters, those waters right now are frozen, but inside territorial airspace and over territorial waters. Fighter aircraft assigned to U.S. Northern command took down the object within the last hour,” said Pentagon spokesman John Kirby. “A recovery effort will be made, and we’re hopeful that it will be successful and then we can learn a little bit more about it.”
Triangle of Sadness
Directed by Ruben Östlund
In Triangle of Sadness, Ruben Östlund’s Palme d’Or-winning film, the tempest kicked up by capitalism is depicted as just that: a “low-pressure system” tossing a high-end cruise ship about, the passengers seasick and sliding across the deck as the boat’s captain and owner drunkenly argue the merits of socialism and capitalism. If this all sounds a bit broad, it’s because it is. Östlund offers a spectacle of degradation, with barons who made their fortunes selling manure now slipping about in their own shit, and arms dealers dying at the hands of their own grenades; surely this sort of thing is not for everyone.
But as far as capturing the state of things, in which our current systems keep churning up calamities, the film is compelling. There is no exit from the ship—beyond the boat is the sea. While those at the helm debate the benefits of various systems (and “debate” here is generous: They read quotes off their phones at one another, as if they’re tweeting), many of us are seasick and barely holding on, or else we’re already drowning in the spectacles that deluge our streaming platforms and social media.
But the squall eventually subsides, clearing the deck for more metaphors: Third-world pirates sink the boat and shipwreck a handful of survivors on a nearby island. There, for the final third of the film (an awesome hour), the yacht’s guests and crew are shorn of their previous class positions, leveled by the loss of all the old markers of wealth and status. The group becomes reliant on the downed ship’s toilet scrubber, a woman who knows how to fish and start a fire and thus dominates the island like a king, or at least like a manure baron.
TODAY IN TABLET:
Who’s Afraid of Vladimir Putin? by Bernard-Henri Lévy
Westerners who seek only to be left in peace are courting an even more deadly war
The Anne Frank Album by Susannah Samuels
On the 25th anniversary of Jeff Mangum’s indie rock classic ‘In the Aeroplane Over the Sea’
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
This piece was originally published in Tablet Magazine, June 2021
America’s Censored Speech Platforms
How to make our public commons accountable to more than a few controlling shareholders
As someone committed to robust freedom of speech for all—including for those who own communications platforms, and those who communicate on them—I am vexed by the monopolistic dominance of Google, Facebook, and Twitter, and their increasing restrictions on controversial speech and speakers.
On the one hand, I am wary of government interference with the platforms’ editorial judgments, including any government compulsion to carry content that they don’t want. As the Supreme Court has held in analogous cases, a government requirement that a platform must include speech that it prefers to exclude constitutes a First Amendment violation that is at least as bad as—and maybe even worse than—a government requirement that the platform must exclude speech.
On the other hand, I am wary of the unbridled censorial powers that the social media giants have been wielding at an almost unfathomable scale, dwarfing the censorship powers that even some tyrannical governments have exercised. Facebook’s most recent quarterly “Community Standards Enforcement Report” reported that each day it removed or restricted (through measures such as warning labels or downranking) approximately 462,000 Facebook and Instagram posts that it considered hate speech.
Recognizing that the subjective concept of “hate speech” vests any enforcing authority with essentially unfettered discretion to punish unpopular speech and speakers, all U.S. Supreme Court justices in modern history have concurred that government censorship of such expression—based solely on its hateful content—would violate the First Amendment. As for when government may censor hateful messages, the Supreme Court has concurred on the legality of doing so only in particular circumstances: when hate speech poses direct, specific, and serious dangers, such as intentional incitement of imminent violence.
By contrast, most of the 4,000 communications removed or otherwise suppressed in one day, on one platform, under just one of many content moderation standards, were presumably constitutionally protected forms of speech. Worse yet, this subjective hate speech standard has been enforced to suppress all manner of valuable speech about matters of public concern from social justice activists in the United States, to human rights activists in foreign countries, to political candidates and government officials around the world.
The reason the tech giants may suppress any speech—even speech that is constitutionally protected against government restrictions and widely considered important—is that the First Amendment’s ban on government actions “abridging the freedom of speech” almost never applies to nongovernment actors. Thus, Twitter’s Terms of Service can declare: “We may suspend or terminate your account or cease providing you with [services] at any time for any or no reason.” It is only the government, the Supreme Court has affirmed, that may never do the same.
Conservative politicians and media outlets have garnered a lot of attention for how social media censorship has impacted their side in particular, but there are abundant examples of how it has suppressed voices on the other side too, including Black Lives Matter activists. To convey frustration with being unjustifiably restricted on Facebook, members and supporters of such groups often refer to “Facebooking while Black” and “Getting Zucked.” A 2020 piece in The Intercept accused Facebook of “equat[ing] violent white supremacist militias with antiracist organizing” in its purge of both. No matter where we fall on the political spectrum, all of us should be concerned that private corporations are censoring what has become a public commons in ways that would be blatantly illegal if done by the state.
My free speech ideal, which the Supreme Court has largely enforced in the context of government regulation, is that all mature individuals could make their own choices about what speech they do and do not convey or receive (parents could make these choices on behalf of their young children). In other words, they would not be consigned to conveying or receiving only the speech deemed fit for them by any central gatekeepers, whether governmental Big Brother or Silicon Valley tycoons.
The unique promise of the internet flows precisely from its decentralized character, which theoretically enables everyone to communicate with everyone else on a peer-to-peer basis. In the internet’s early days, the Supreme Court celebrated and protected this promise in its landmark 1997 Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) decision, striking down government restrictions on online speech that would have been unconstitutional in print or other media. Congress also sought to further this promise through the law that is now widely known as Section 230, whose liability shield for most third-party content encouraged platforms to avoid the strict screening and gatekeeping approaches of traditional media. By providing a liability shield for any content restrictions that platforms did choose to enforce, Section 230 sought to encourage a multiplicity of content moderation policies, thus enhancing users’ freedom of choice. The goal of promoting user empowerment was signaled by Section 230’s title in the U.S. House of Representatives: The Internet Freedom and Family Empowerment Act (1995-1996).
Alas, the user empowerment ideal has been foiled by the increasing “platformization” of the internet since 2010, with the result that a tiny number of tech titans now control such a vast flow of online communications that, for all practical purposes, anyone who seeks to influence public opinion or policy must communicate on their platforms. The Supreme Court recognized as much when it declared in Packingham v. North Carolina (2017): “While in the past there may have been difficulty in identifying the most important places … for the exchange of views, today the answer is clear. It is cyberspace … and social media in particular.”
The unparalleled speech-suppressive powers of the dominant online platforms endanger not only individual liberty, but also self-government in our democratic republic, which depends on robust exchanges of ideas and information. As the Supreme Court stated in Garrison v. Louisiana (1964), “Speech concerning public affairs is more than [individual] self-expression; it is the essence of self-government.” Regardless of one’s views about former President Donald Trump or the content of his social media posts, the Twitter and Facebook bans on him are therefore alarming. The person duly elected to the most powerful office in the world was summarily exiled from platforms essential to the dissemination and discussion of his ideas by megacompanies accountable only to a few controlling shareholders. In that significant sense, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey continue to wield more unchecked power than Trump ever did or could; among the three, only Trump could be voted out of office, impeached, and sued for violating the First Amendment.
The ACLU’s Senior Legislative Counsel Kate Ruane summed it up in a statement following Trump’s deplatforming in January:
[I]t should concern everyone when [these] companies wield the unchecked power to remove people from platforms that have become indispensable for the speech of billions. . . . President Trump can turn to his press team or Fox News to communicate with the public, but others will not have that luxury—including many Black, Brown, and LGTBQ activists who have been censored by social media companies.
The key question for free speech advocates now is how to facilitate the user empowerment ideal on dominant platforms without undermining the platforms’ own right to design and enforce their preferred content moderation policies. This challenge has provoked an outpouring of brainstorming among academics and activists. These experts have not come to a consensus, however, or even firmly endorsed specific approaches.
Some experts have argued that perhaps the giant platforms should be treated as government actors, bound to honor users’ First Amendment rights because, in effect, they are performing governmental functions. Others maintain that the pertinent Supreme Court precedents weigh against this argument. Moreover, some free speech advocates have argued that requiring all online platforms to uniformly adhere to the First Amendment would undermine the ultimate goal of facilitating user empowerment and choice. For example, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a leading digital rights group, has advocated for user freedom to choose among platforms with a range of content moderation policies, including policies that restrict certain constitutionally protected speech, such as graphic nudity or violence. For users who find such speech personally objectionable, being exposed to it could impair their online experience, perhaps to the point of deterring them from using these platforms at all. In short, platforms’ current freedom of choice regarding content moderation policies, which follows from their status as private companies, also contributes to users’ freedom of choice.
A related approach is to avoid treating the dominant social media platforms as government actors, but instead subject them to one or more nonconstitutional doctrines that apply to certain private sector entities providing essential public services. For example, the longstanding common law concept of a “common carrier,” which has been embodied in statutes, requires certain transportation and communications networks considered essential infrastructure to be equally open to all. Likewise, the old common law concept of “public accommodations”—which has also been incorporated into anti-discrimination statutes—has long prohibited private places generally open to the public, like hotels and restaurants, from discriminating against particular members of the public.
In a recent concurring opinion, Associate Justice Clarence Thomas raised these concepts as potentially warranting limits on the dominant platforms’ content moderation policies. Although Thomas did not conclusively endorse a particular regulatory approach, he did conclude that “There is a fair argument that some digital platforms are sufficiently akin to common carriers or places of public accommodation” to be subject to regulations limiting their rights to exclude would-be users.
Any regulations of the type Thomas suggested would have to survive First Amendment review. Again, First Amendment rights include protection against government compulsion to host expression, and the Supreme Court has struck down requirements that certain platforms—including newspapers and parades—must host expression they would prefer not to. That said, the court has upheld such requirements when imposed on other platforms, including cable TV networks and shopping malls.
Constitutional law experts have offered plausible arguments for and against the idea that the platforms’ First Amendment rights would be violated by imposing some “must carry” duties, on the logic that they should be deemed common carriers or public accommodations. As with every potential approach, the devil here is also in the details. Even if it were conclusively determined that dominant platforms should—and constitutionally could—be subject to speech regulation, that would still leave open challenging questions about the precise nature of the regulations and how they would be enforced.
Because freedom of speech entails each individual’s right to decide for themselves what information to convey or receive, we should limit platform practices that undermine this freedom. Perhaps our greatest concern should be the fact that the dominant platforms engage in pervasive surveillance of our online communications and actions, which they then use to “micro-target” advertisements, and to rank and curate the content we receive in order to maintain our undivided attention. In addition to subverting users’ free speech, this nonconsensual surveillance also violates the privacy right not to share information about our communications or other aspects of our personal lives without informed consent.
Without directly regulating the platforms’ content moderation or curation policies, government could impose procedural-type requirements to ensure that they abide by basic consumer protection and privacy principles in carrying out their moderation and curatorial functions. Key concepts here are transparency, notice, and consent. Companies must be fully transparent about the terms and implementation of their content policies. User consent should be a prerequisite for platform surveillance of online communications, and for any algorithmically determined content curation. If a user’s expression is deemed subject to restriction, they should receive prompt and detailed notice of the specific policy they allegedly violated, and an opportunity to appeal the decision. In addition, the platforms should provide users with detailed reports about the aggregate enforcement of their content moderation policies.
As the old adage goes, sunshine is the best disinfectant. Imposing transparency requirements on tech giants’ moderation and curation practices could have a substantive impact. After all, as service-business entities, the dominant platforms have financial incentives to respond to pressures from their customers, their employees, the media, and the people’s political representatives. In fact, when particular content moderation policies or decisions have come to light, the platforms in question have revised them in response to user critiques. They have even restored previously removed expression and speakers after facing a critical mass of popular objection.
User empowerment would likewise be enhanced if each platform provided a range of options. Platforms could offer their users various filtering alternatives, permitting users to make choices about such matters as categories of content they do not wish to see, criteria for determining the ranking of their content feed, and preferred privacy settings.
Additional technological approaches for promoting user control are “interoperability,” whereby the dominant platforms enable other software providers to interoperate with their key features, and “delegability,” whereby users could enable other software providers to act on their behalf—for example, by implementing content moderation and curation alternatives to those that the platform offers. Another type of interoperability, which is often called “data portability,” permits users to take their data and their social networks to competing platforms. Such data portability is often required in the telecommunications industry. Because interoperability facilitates competition, it is regularly included among the remedies for antitrust violations.
Determining whether a company has undue market power or otherwise violates antitrust law—and if so, what the appropriate remedies should be—involves complex legal issues. Multiple aspects of the tech sector are consistent with monopoly power, which inhibits fair competition: increased concentration, rising profit margins, declining entry, and low investment relative to profits. Whatever the ultimate conclusions might be, there is certainly ample basis for subjecting the dominant companies to close antitrust scrutiny.
Section 230 has become central to debates about social media regulation, but there seems to be some confusion about how impactful repeal would actually be. To repeat, platforms have no First Amendment duty to host any speech at all, and forcing them to host any speech they don’t want would violate their own First Amendment rights—unless they are deemed to be government actors or common carriers. Therefore, even if Section 230 were repealed—so that platforms no longer had statutory immunity from user lawsuits challenging their speech restrictions—platforms would nonetheless remain immune from claims that their speech restrictions violate users’ First Amendment rights.
As the great journalist H.L. Mencken observed, “There is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.” Mencken’s insight certainly applies to the serious problem of enforcing free speech rights on social media platforms. That is why I recommend a cautious approach, encouraging the critical examination of various potential strategies over time to foster freedom of speech for platforms and users alike. I recognize the downside of acting “with all deliberate speed,” but the contrasting approach—to move fast and break things—is what created our current plight. We should entrust free speech and democratic discourse with pointing us toward appropriate controls over both government and big tech, not the other way around.
In response to Nadine Strossen's Feb 10 article on America's Censored Speech Platforms. Why not make it simple, like a library, and post title pages with What, When, Where, Who, Why and (maybe How) so our choice is merely a click away--Delete or Read? w.d.