I never thought I would see a day when German President Angela Merkel would defend Donald Trump (archive). But, she gets it. Social media is now a key way people discuss politics. So, when a person is banned for their opinions, it is like the phone company saying you cannot talk on their phones, because they do not like what you say. That is not to say some measure of control is important – terrorism is illegal on an old fashioned phone and it should be illegal on social media. However, it is not for Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey to be deciding what is acceptable speech.
Social media censors the speech of vulnerable groups but frequently fails to censor child pornography and extremist anti-Semitism.
Imagine you are a politician. You observe, in the middle of a US Election, a group of powerful companies undermine a candidate’s campaign then ban them on contentious grounds. That candidate is the incumbent President of the United States of America. Regardless of party or nation, a chill would hit your stomach. Because, if it can happen to the most powerful politician on Earth, it can happen to you. Boris Johnson here in the UK gets it. He got it in November, according to the Daily Mail (archive). Merkel gets it. the French get it. It is now a priority in nearly every Western Nation. Trump’s ban hit them where they live.
The ban of Parler too was crass. It was as if Dorsey, Jeff Bezos, Zuckerberg put on tutus and, “We am r hav oligarchy an’ monopoly iz sexi” t-shirts before doing a high-kicking song and dance routine about their excessive market power on the front page of YouTube. In the short term it revealed their power. In the long term it all but guaranteed that power will be taken away.
The problem is that Zuckerberg and Dorsey are not politicians. They had a metallic fist that they had hidden in a velvet glove behind impenetrable walls of complexity such as post ranking algorithms. Their soft power, had they kept it soft, would have been hard to challenge and could have stayed obfuscated – at least enough to deter politicians and keep it a lower priority issue. Instead, they made the fatal, politically maladroit decision to take off that glove and reveal the stainless steel cyborg fist by starting banning mainstream commentators and politicians. They had the power but not the wisdom as to use it discreetly.
Big Tech are alleged to have sought to influence elections not just in the United States but in other countries such as Uganda, which has banned them until at least after the election. North Dakota already has legislative proposals (archive).
Every politician in the world now agrees there needs to be regulation to protect speech. In the UK and US this favours the right. Because, as soon as the government becomes the arbiter of who and what the social media companies can ban the 1st Amendment applies. In the UK, whilst our free speech laws are weaker they are still more permissive than Twitter. In a December judgement, British judges held that mis-gendering was protected speech (archive). In the UK, when a private institution is carrying out a public function, it is subject to the Human Rights Act 1998 (which includes the UK equivalent of the 1st Amendment).
Another group likely to benefit is #GamerGate. For years, they complained of social media censorship. Now, nearly every government in the world has rushed it to near the top of their agenda. The politicians have been hit where they live. Suddenly, the arguments of the likes of Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian seem immeasurably less convincing. Even in defeat, Trump may end up winning one of the most important fights in the free world today.
