State censorship is not the only kind of censorship. Private-sector repression of speech and thought, particularly in the internet era, can be as dangerous and consequential. Imagine, for instance, if these two Silicon Valley giants united with Google to declare: henceforth we will ban all content that is critical of President Trump and/or the Republican Party, but will actively promote criticisms of Joe Biden and the Democrats.
Would anyone encounter difficultly understanding why such a decree would constitute dangerous corporate censorship? Would Democrats respond to such a policy by simply shrugging it off on the radical libertarian ground that private corporations have the right to do whatever they want? To ask that question is to answer it.
To begin with, Twitter and particularly Facebook are no ordinary companies. Facebook, as the owner not just of its massive social media platform but also other key communication services it has gobbled up such as Instagram and WhatsApp, is one of the most powerful companies ever to exist, if not the most powerful. In June, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law launched an investigation into the consolidated power of Facebook and three other companies Google, Amazon and Apple and just last week issued a sweeping report which, as Ars Technica explained, found:
Facebook outright "has monopoly power in the market for social networking," and that power is "firmly entrenched and unlikely to be eroded by competitive pressure" from anyone at all due to "high entry barriersincluding strong network effects, high switching costs, and Facebook's significant data advantagethat discourage direct competition by other firms to offer new products and services."
In his New York Times op-ed last October, the left-wingexpert on monopoly power Matt Stoller described Facebook and Google as "global monopolies sitting astride public discourse," and recounted how bipartisan policy and legal changes designed to whittle away antitrust protections have bestowed the two tech giants with "a radical centralization of power over the flow of information." And he warns that this unprecedented consolidation of control over our discourse is close to triggering "the collapse of journalism and democracy."
It has been astonishing to watch Democrats over the last twenty-four hours justify this censorship on the grounds that private corporations are entitled to do whatever they want. Not even radical free-market libertarians espouse such a pro-corporate view. Even the most ardent capitalist recognizes that companies that wield monopoly or quasi-monopoly power have an obligation to act in the public interest, and are answerable to the public regarding whether they are doing so.
That is why in both the EU and increasingly the U.S., there are calls from across the political spectrum to either break up Facebook on antitrust and monopoly grounds or regulate it as a public utility, the way electric and water companies and AT&T have been. Almost nobody in the democratic world believes that Facebook is just some ordinary company that should be permitted to exercise unfettered power and act without constraints of any kind. Indeed, Facebook's monumental political and economic power greater than most if not all the governments of nation-states is the major impediment to such reforms.
Beyond that, both Facebook and Twitter receive substantial, unique legal benefits from federal law, further negating the claim that they are free to do whatever they want as private companies. Just as is true of Major League Baseball which is subject to regulation by Congress as a result of the antitrust exemption they enjoy under the law these social media companies receive a very valuable and particularized legal benefit in the form of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields them from any liability for content published on their platforms, including defamatory material or other legally proscribed communications.
No company can claim such massive, unique legal exemptions from the federal law and then simultaneously claim they owe no duties to the public interest and are not answerable to anyone. To advocate that is a form of authoritarian corporatism: simultaneously allowing tech giants to claim legally conferred privileges and exemptions while insisting that they can act without constraints of any kind.
Then there is the practical impact of Twitter and Facebook uniting to block content published by a major newspaper. It is true in theory that one can still read the suppressed article by visiting the New York Post website directly, but the stranglehold that these companies exert over our discourse is so dominant that their censorship amounts to effective suppression of the reporting.
In 2018, Pew Research found that "about two-thirds of U.S. adults (68%) get news on social media sites. One-in-five get news there often." The combination of Facebook, Google and Twitter controls the information received by huge numbers of Americans, Pew found. "Facebook is still far and away the site Americans most commonly use for news. About four-in-ten Americans (43%) get news on Facebook. The next most commonly used site for news is YouTube [owned by Google], with 21% getting news there, followed by Twitter at 12%."
While Twitter still falls short of Facebook in terms of number of users, a 2019 report found that "Twitter remains the leading social network among journalists at 83%." Censoring a story from Twitter thus has disproportionate impact by hiding it from the people who determine and shape the news.
THE GRAVE DANGERS posed by the censorship actions of yesterday should be self-evident. Just over two weeks before a presidential election, Silicon Valley giants whose industry leaders and workforce overwhelmingly favor the Democratic candidate took extraordinary steps to block millions, perhaps tens of millions, of American voters from being exposed to what purports to be a major expose' by one of the country's oldest and largest newspapers.
As the New York Times put it in an article in March about the political preferences of tech leaders: "Silicon Valley has long leaned blue." Large numbers of tech executives, including Facebook's second-in-command Sheryl Sandberg, were also vocally supportive of Hillary Clinton in 2016. At the very least, the perception, if not the reality, has been created that these tech giants are using their unprecedented power over political and election-related information to prevent the dissemination of negative reporting about the presidential candidate they favor. Whatever that is, it is not democratic or something to cheer.
The rationale offered by both Twitter and Facebook to justify this censorship makes it more alarming, not less. Twitter claimed that the Post article violates its so-called "Hacked Materials Policy," which it says permits "commentary on or discussion about hacked materials, such as articles that cover them but do not include or link to the materials themselves"; in other words, Twitter allows links to articles about hacked materials but bans "links to or images of hacked material themselves."
The company added that their policy "prohibits the use of our service to distribute content obtained without authorization" because, they said, they "don't want to incentivize hacking by allowing Twitter to be used as distribution for possibly illegally obtained materials."
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