At first glance, defending the freedom to propagate falsehoods on the internet might seem juvenile, or reckless. With a little thought, however, it becomes clear that this odd-sounding liberty will be central to protecting democracy in the coming decades. As long as falsehood is freely permitted, the accusation of falsehood cannot be used as a means of supressing truth.
As with the aphorism it’s based on, placing freedom before truth might seem to clash with traditional progressive aims. Like equality, truth is a noble goal. However, in both cases, history warns that attempts to enforce these ideals can be deeply counterproductive. Enforced economic levelling has a track record of leaving everyone worse off – not the sort of equality we had in mind. Worse still, programs of supposed equalisation are often little more than revised structures of inequality. Like the pigs on Animal Farm, and their equivalents in the politburo, those framing the meaning of equality have a wearisome tendency to position themselves as more equal than the rest of us.
This takes us to the core problem of enforcing truth on the internet: Who decides what is true or not? Until recently this was a non-issue. For three hopeful decades censorship of any form was seen as heresy, an affront to founding principles. The pioneers of the internet recognised a unique and precious opportunity. For the first time since Gutenberg, common folk had a means of sharing ideas and expressing opinions without the sanction of commercial or state publishers, without the permission of the powerful. In the blink of an eye, editorial control has been normalised in the most politically significant arena – social media. As with mass media, this terrible power now lies in the hands of corporate capital. The right to define, identify and suppress ‘falsehood’ has been granted to the faceless mandarins of silicon valley. No surprise, like pigs in other spheres, corporate tech has been quick to assemble a version of truth that favours its own interests.
One might wonder how this retrograde leap was pulled-off with so little protest. On the one hand it is because a large and, frankly, older generation of media consumers remained unaware of the new freedom. Having never strayed from corporate newsfeed they never encountered the alternatives. Perhaps they took corporate media’s warnings at face value: The internet is a quagmire of conspiracy theorists, political cranks and relentless bullies. While perfectly true, clearly the assessor is blind to the beam in its own eye. If we rejected mainstream news on these grounds we’d never pick up another paper. Alternative news media is also highly subjective and politically motivated – just like mainstream media. Neither can provide a positive contribution to democracy unless an audience approaches them critically.
More proactively, and to their shame, this regression was begged for by certain progressives. Twenty-first-century sensitivities rendered certain ignorant words and idiot opinions simply too much for some to bear. Some web users reported feeling ‘unsafe’ and petitioned the invisible overlords to intervene (Father! Make them stop!). With equal naivety and recklessness, other more cynical operators sensed short-term political gains. By feigning ‘unsafe’ feelings they found a way to compromise the accounts of anyone whose political outlook differed from their own. In both cases there was little consideration of the blowback, once the censorship beast was out of its box. Inevitably, handing corporations the right to censor opinions you don’t like gives them the exact same power over those you do.
Mainstream journalists were delighted to join in with the histrionics. This was an opportunity to declare social media ‘unsafe’ and in need of the same corporate regulation they enjoyed. The real threat, of course, was never falsehood but truth, the political truths mainstream journalists must avoid. Independent outlets that genuinely speak truth to power are a huge embarrassment to corporate journalists who love to talk that talk, but whose wages compel them to avoid that walk. Here was a chance to throttle a growing threat to their professional credibility.
The corporate model of censorship swiftly became apparent. Firstly, it only applies to non-corporate media. CEOs need lose no sleep – this is decidedly a stick with which to beat the little guy. Secondly, the criterion of falsehood is transparently subjective, little more than a reflection of the political and business interests of the adjudicators. This matching pair of double-standards explains the lack of explanation given to those who are blacklisted: If the censorship criteria was published in detail we could pull it apart for its hypocrisy. Much of the targeting in fact arrives invisible and without warning. The first thing a YouTube politico may notice is a drop in viewers and visitors. It seems that focus on certain political subjects, and particularly alternative political narratives, feeds into the algorithm that decides the profile given to their channel. More overtly, but with an equal lack of transparency, they may find themselves demonetised, that is loose the advertising revenue generated by their videos. Like any other person trying to practice journalism for a living, no income, no practice.
It’s important to notice that you don’t need to consciously lie to get blacklisted. You only have to be judged to have propagated falsehood – exhibited poor journalistic judgement. By this standard, of course, every corporate media outlet should be blacklisted, a hundred violations a day. The suggestion that Jeremy Corbyn was an anti-Semite was an outrageous, baseless lie, ceaselessly pushed by much of the British media for transparent political reasons. The campaign of disinformation was nothing short of methodological, and it is no exaggeration to say that it swung the outcome of a general election. The BBC, for one, systematically offered a platform to anyone one prepared to voice that lie while screening out anyone countering it. By the zero-tolerance standards imposed on alternative media, BBC news should now be carrying a fake news warning and under consideration for an outright ban.
Such amnesties are not only granted to falsehoods weaponised against the left. An odious but elected president of the USA was subjected to arguably the largest and most influential fake news campaign since WMD, a relentless conspiracy theory sustained by a corporate media as much obsessed with ratings and revenue as it was with removing Trump. The key accusation (long-since swept under the rug) was that Trump had colluded with a (suitably vague) entity called “Russia” in bringing about his 2016 defeat of Hillary Clinton. After three years of combined efforts by state, deep state and mass media no shred of evidence has been unearthed to support this thesis. The consequences for CNN, NYT and MSNBC? Business as usual. Rather than fake news warnings, demonetisation and blanket bans, they proceed unimpeded, free to modify their conspiracy theory on a weekly basis, a vaccine endlessly re-tweaked to combat of new strains of reality.
Rather than a traditional left or right-wing bias, what we are witnessing is a notion of truth and falsehood cut to suit the political tastes and business aspirations of the adjudicators. This was underlined by the suspension of the Twitter account of an odious but nonetheless elected president of the USA, at the behest of unelected corporate bureaucrats. No doubt this observation will prompt incredulous howls defending Twitter’s decision. We will be told Trump was suspended because his lies were an incitement to violence. But this response shows just how politically partisan such interventions will always be. Show me the US president who didn’t lie as a means of instigating violence. Obama in Libya? Bush Jr in Iraq? Clinton in Sudan? Bush Sr in Iraq? Reagan in Nicaragua? Carter in Guatemala? Ford in East Timor? Nixon in….where do we start!? Historical factors adjusted, would all these Presidents have had their Tweeting-rights suspended?
As an exception to prove the rule, how about this barrage of fake-news Tweets, dispatched with the express goal of bringing violence and disorder to a neighbouring sovereign state? No injunctions were levelled at these perpetrators, even though they were serving members of the great evil one’s cabinet! Clearly the political outlook of the adjudicators caused them to view these lies as benign or even benevolent. And it’s no good countering that Trump’s ban was unique because he was inciting civil violence. That just begs the question: Where is it written that lying to incite violence only merits censorship if the violence takes place within the USA? That is political opinion, not a matter of truth and falsehood.
Censorship of social media is the latest in a sequence of puzzling amendments to the constitution of liberty. Much as democracy may need to be protected from excesses of democracy, ‘freedom of speech’ has now been recast as something that can only be achieved through corporate regulation of speech. This is quite a turn-around from the cold-war. Our boast then was that only Communists needed to ‘jam’ foreign radio stations. The Soviets were free to beam-back their hilarious propaganda, how could it harm us? We didn’t need sheltering. We were free thinking Westerners and that freedom gave us the acumen to tell truth from falsehood.
It now appears that such freedom was only tenable while the powerful had a monopoly on mass communication. When the internet broke that monopoly an excess of freedom escaped. This virulent new freedom endangered the more traditional forms, not least, the freedom for certain states to invade others, and the freedom for corporations to benefit from the spoils. Corporate media had always served as a reliable ally during such operations, helping to ensure that the required language of liberation and salvation shielded the public from the true motives. Social media compromised this freedom by providing a platform for common folk to collectively deconstruct the propaganda. The potential consequences were incalculable, and deeply disturbing for those in power. Suffice to say that in 2020 an outspoken critic of US foreign policy and Big-Tech damn-near ended-up in the White House, an outcome unthinkable without grassroots organisation facilitated by an unfettered alternative media.
It is not hyperbole to conclude that democracy is under attack. The Tech Giants have already used their powers of censorship to ease their preferred candidate into the White House. They are now enjoying their rewards – front seats in the administration and access to military and security contracts. Their power to decide truth and banish falsehood in public discourse has never been greater or more dangerous. Arms contracts need wars, and wars need propaganda. Our best defence has always been to call out that propaganda, spread the word and expose the lies. Now, however, the right to distinguish truth from falsehood is in the hands of the arms dealer’s business partner. We can expect the act of calling out propaganda to itself be portrayed as the spreading of falsehood, and censored.
Regardless of your political colours, if you care about liberty and democracy you should be concerned. The private ownership of these platforms is an irrelevance, a distraction. The town council may own the Agora but this does not give it the right to dictate the terms of the debates, not in a democracy. No one predicted that democratic discourse would drift onto platforms as fatuous in origin as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, but that is what has happened. It is no longer possible to avoid these platforms and still fully participate in politics. Big-tech’s right to censor them is an afront to democracy. We need a quick reversal, starting with the withdrawal of their most pernicious power – the right to identify and censor falsehood.
