Brian Dellinger: Energy, Parler and the issue of Massive Tech
In the course of 2020, the previously smaller social media application Parler gained national fame. The website served Twitter as a smaller, right-hand mirror, drawing in an audience that included both U.S. Senators and QAnon conspiracy theorists (among others). While Twitter banned references to a transgender person by biological sex, Parler reportedly banned users from making fun of Republican Congressman Devin Nunes. By the end of the year, the app had reached almost 3 million users every day.
That changed after the January 6 attacks on the Capitol, on the charge that the app was a haven for insurgent feelings. The answers were quick and comprehensive. On January 8th, Google announced that Parler was being removed from its Google Play Store. Similar communications came quickly from Amazon, Apple, and other technology companies. The app was no longer able to access most mobile stores to download, authenticate their existing users, or even host actual content. All existing contributions were lost. In fact, it ceased to functionally exist within 48 hours.
It is sometimes difficult to evaluate conservative claims made by “big tech censorship”. On the one hand, Parler’s deletion came just a day after Facebook suspended President Donald Trump’s account and the same day Twitter joined that ban. On the flip side, the bans followed Trump’s defense of the Capitol attacks as “the things … that happen when a holy landslide election victory … is stripped”. Banning a seated president is a drastic move, but it is hardly less extreme for that president to praise thugs who stormed the Congress building. To the extent that Parler’s allegation of complicity in the attacks is justified, its deletion is justified.
However, these bans also come when technology giants tolerate or cut back deals with unfounded moral evils. Apple, for example, benefits from Uyghur labor camps, while Twitter continues to host the Ayatollah Khamenei. Meanwhile, other cases of content removal – like Amazon’s refusal to sell the transgenderism-wary book “When Harry Became Sally” while wearing, for example, “Mein Kampf” – seem far less defensible.
Perhaps the underlying question is not whether a particular case is warranted, but rather whether a handful of tech companies are inherently controlling too much of the flow of information. Even if the prohibitions outlined above are reasonable, the multi-company coordination that it has made possible could potentially target any new service with far less justification and no clear legal recourse. Indeed, the existing media giants arguably have a good incentive to curb the boom in this way: this is how they limit competition.
Such possibilities limit the strength of the usual free market reaction to corporate policy: “If you don’t like it, build an alternative.” Parler’s problems suggest that this solution is less practical than hoped. Developing a successful social media site is already a major challenge. Doing this and creating a new mobile storefront, authenticator, cloud service, etc. at the same time seems simply untenable.
Unfortunately, a solution to this problem remains difficult to find. Some Conservatives suggest that the above cases warrant repealing Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Pursuant to Section 230, websites do not risk liability for deletion of content even if that content is protected by the first change. Critics claim that the law should only target generally objectionable material with the expectation that tech companies would be politically neutral in what they removed; This expectation was clearly not met.
Such arguments are misleading and wrong. Section 230 specifically protects removal of content for any reason, not just a “reasonable person” standard of undesirability. Removing it would not prevent Twitter from providing tweets with “content-related” warnings (since such labels are Twitter’s own speech and are therefore protected by the first amendment). nor Amazon, like any retailer, simply refusing to sell certain products; nor google of stores with whom it pleases.
On the flip side, the repeal could weigh heavily on new social media competitors, which could explain Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s support for replacing Section 230 protections. Most importantly, it seems bizarrely short-sighted to Republicans to call for greater government interference in social media right now. One wonders if they expect the democratically controlled Congress and Presidency to be kinder to conservative speech than the status quo.
Perhaps the best of a number of bad options is to reconsider the role of antitrust laws. All of the above cases are about the ubiquity of big tech companies: decisions by a small group of companies can make information meaningfully inaccessible or invisible. Amazon is immediately a leading bookseller, accounting for more than half of all American book sales, as well as a general retailer with nearly $ 400 billion in annual sales and the provider of a full third of all cloud infrastructure services. Google’s parent company, Alphabet, may co-own the servers that host a website, the ads that appear on them, the browser that loads it, and the physical cables that carry it – and of course the search engine that found it . It controls a large number of markets in several of these areas. In fact, Google is already facing several anticompetitive behavior lawsuits.
A careful overhaul of antitrust law could allow these markets to reopen, with competition fostering a range of political and other positions. At least such changes seem less difficult than inviting the government to judge neutrality.
Brian Dellinger is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Grove City College.
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