RAMESH SRINIVASAN: Yeah, absolutely, Amy. It's great to be back with you.
Yeah, I think it's really important to note that as we sit through this pandemic, we are more technologically reliant than ever before. Our lives are mediated by private corporations, right? And so, big technology companies have had to take a stand in recent days about their relationships, which, quite frankly, are highly symbiotic with President Trump and this is something we've discussed before because many big technology companies thrive around the amplification of spectacle, meaning their goal, like pretty much any media network, is to keep you on there as much as possible, to keep your attention glued. And there is no one better at disorienting, polarizing, inflaming and stirring people up than President Trump. So they have been strange bedfellows and, in many cases, on an economic level, allies for many years.
I think, you know, quite belatedly, honestly, there were decisions made, after the horrific events of last week, where there were clear linkages between President Trump's behavior, both online and offline, and the domestic white supremacist terror incident that we saw last week. I think these companies have realized they needed to cut bait at some point. But, in my opinion, they have never taken a stand in the public interest. And for us to praise them at this point is not really getting at the whole picture.
AMY GOODMAN: And before we go to our debate, explain what Parler is.
RAMESH SRINIVASAN: Yeah, Parler it's very important to note the connections, actually, between Parler and Cambridge Analytica, which I know you and many networks have done a lot of reporting on. Rebekah Mercer, as you mentioned earlier, is one of the founders of Parler. Her and her father, Robert Mercer, were the founders, along with Steve Bannon, who was intimately involved with Cambridge Analytica. Parler was set up rhetorically almost and has grown and boomed as a sort of alternative social media platform for the conservative and "alt-right" and, unfortunately, even more kind of right-wing, Neo-Nazi, white supremacist-type movements.
Trump, despite his incredibly positive and symbiotic relationship with Big Tech on every level, has railed against Big Tech over the last several months and has falsely claimed that it is responsible for his election loss and the losses for Republicans in the past. Parler was set up as an alternative for people on the right to flock to. But, very importantly, content that might start or bubble up on Parler tends to translate across different technology platforms by what I call a media ecology. So stuff might start on Parler, just like it started on 4chan or Reddit or other kinds of platforms, but then it becomes the new normal on platforms that are much more mainstream, like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
AMY GOODMAN: So, to debate Big Tech's response to the Capitol insurrection and whether social media should be banning President Trump for life or until he's out of office, we're joined by Chris Hedges, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, award-winning author and activist. He is a regular columnist for Scheerpost. His latest article is headlined "The Empire Is Not Done with Julian Assange." He's written numerous books, including, most recently, America: The Farewell Tour. Still with us, Ramesh Srinivasan, professor of information studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, UCLA, where he also directs the Digital Cultures Lab.
Chris, can you start off by responding to Twitter permanently banning Donald Trump?
CHRIS HEDGES: Well, Twitter, all of these digital platforms are not neutral arbiters. In fact, they're, of course, for-profit corporations with close ties to the security state. And if you look back over the past few years, they have imposed heavy forms of censorship and interference, primarily on the left, and in particularly on WikiLeaks. So, they blocked the ability for WikiLeaks to accept donations on PayPal and every other platform. Every time WikiLeaks would hold a press conference, there would be interference, electronic interference. People couldn't get in the room. They've used algorithms. And then we saw, again, their very partisan activity during the campaign when they locked the New York Post out of its own Twitter account because it had published stories about the revelations found on the discarded or abandoned laptop from Hunter Biden, which, in retrospect, have proven quite serious. Glenn Greenwald took a very heroic stance on this, and The Intercept wouldn't publish his story.
So, to allow these opaque and remember, these companies know everything about us; we know nothing about them. To allow these companies to essentially function as de facto platforms for censorship and manipulation I'm not in any way minimizing what happened last week harkens back to the way civil liberties were eviscerated in the wake of 9/11 the PATRIOT Act, which the great civil rights attorney Michael Ratner called a coup d'e'tat, the 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force Act. So, responding to a crisis and I think we do live in a crisis. I have written about this right-wing, nativist fascist. My book, American Fascist, came out in 2006, so I'm very cognizant of the very real threat that we face. But to respond by, in essence, empowering these private corporations to function as censors over billions of people will come back to haunt us. And we see that, because it's not just Trump they target. It's always, in the end, the left that pays for this kind of censorship.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Srinivasan, if you can respond to this? And also, let's just point out that Twitter's move didn't start with the leadership. It started with 300 Twitter employees signing a petition calling for him, Trump, to be permanently banned, saying, "We must examine Twitter's complicity in what President-Elect Biden has rightly termed insurrection. Those acts jeopardize the wellbeing of the United States, our company, and our employees."
RAMESH SRINIVASAN: I mean, that itself is a great example of how publicly unaccountable a company like Twitter is. And that is true across the board when it comes to Big Tech companies. Big Tech companies have become are private corporations, that we're talking about some of the wealthiest corporations in the history of the world. During this pandemic alone, hundreds of billions of dollars have been made primarily by tech magnates. That is really important to point out. And that's only going to be the new normal as we head toward, you know, climate crises, possible future pandemics and so on.
But I very much agree with the point that was made by Mr. Hedges. Twitter is self-serving. These Big Tech companies are self-serving. There are many right-wing trolls who are going viral, as we speak, on Twitter right now. All of these technology platforms, powered by their hidden algorithms, that are indeed opaque, thrive on the amplification of polarization, the amplification of attention. They are able to computationally predict what will grab our eyeballs. And the disorienting, propagandist, hateful kinds of content that comes out of President Trump on Twitter makes him an incredible ally.
And that is why it's extremely important for us to take note of the much larger issue, which is our public lives, our economic lives, our political lives, even our intimate lives, our behavioral lives, are all governed by private technology companies that know far more about us than we will ever know about them. And that's why I believe we really need to transform and regulate technology companies in the image of justice and balance and compassion.
AMY GOODMAN: But what about Chris Hedges' concern that, yes, they're turning on Trump right now, who they have enormously profited from over the years, but next it may well be you?
RAMESH SRINIVASAN: Oh, absolutely. There is no public governance. There is no public accountability. It could be any of us, Amy. It was with WikiLeaks, as Chris Hedges pointed out. Yeah, it is incredible how much power we have given to a very small number of people, who are essentially mediating pretty much every aspect of our lives.
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