With the final---long, long, overdue---decision by both Facebook and Twitter to cut Donald Trump's ability to use their platforms I've heard a bit of the usual complaints about "censorship". At risk of repeating, I thought that I might devote an op-ed this week to explaining one more time the difference between "deplatforming" and "censorship".
First off, let's discuss an "opening act" before we get to the main event. A US senator by the name of Josh Hawley has had a book deal with Simon and Schuster cancelled because he was the "guy on the inside" spreading the false narrative that Joe Biden stole the election from Donald Trump while a howling mob attacked the building because they foolishly believed what people like him were saying.
This is being spun as an issue of free speech, but I think that it's extremely important to understand the difference between government attempts to limit speech and allowing publishers the right to decide what books they will or will not publish.
The first issue is that of the difference between the "width" of government versus editorial authority. If a government chooses to censor it's citizenry, the issue isn't whether or not a specific press publishes something, but rather the ideas contained in the book. If Simon and Schuster decides to cancel it's contract with Hawley, that has no bearing at all on whether or not some other business will decide to publish it. If no one at all is interested, Hawley can just go out and publish it himself---there are lots of different ways to do that now. (For example, I use Smashwords and Lulu. And I'm thinking about expanding to audio books using Bandcamp.)
In contrast, if Hawley really was suffering from censorship, it would be illegal to even share computer files or photocopies of his book with others. That's because the government has authority over an entire society, whereas all a publisher has control over is his or her own personal presses, servers, and, cheque book.
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So there are profound differences between cancelling a book deal and government censorship. But there's also the notion that people are losing book deals because folks just don't like their ideas. How can that be right?
Much as I personally might wish it to be different, the fact is that publishing is just a business like selling shoes or hiring someone to pave your driveway. If a company pays an advance, organizes a publicity campaign, and, prints off a million copies to only sell about 100 books---they've lost money instead of making a profit.
People won't buy an author's book if they don't like his ideas. That's because that is what they are buying when they buy a book. People also design different types of shoes (a different type of idea)---some get bought by lots of people, others end up being thrown out because no one wants to wear them. There are also different types of materials that you can use to pave your driveway, again some get bought and others don't. Books, shoes, asphalt---the same sort of market forces are at play.
Moreover, publishers aren't psychics. They can do research, but ultimately they don't really know if a book is or isn't going to make money. Like all businesses, people have to make decisions based on their "gut instincts". I strongly suspect that Hawley's book looked like a good idea when there was a chance of Trump getting elected to a second term, or at least keep some credibility with the Republican party. Unfortunately for Hawley, I would suspect that Simon and Schuster decided that the assault on Congress meant that Trump will eventually become totally disgraced and if so, Hawley's book would become yet another production run that ends up going straight to recycling. As a result, they cut their losses by cancelling the contract.
There's another side to this thing. Publishing houses like Simon and Schuster are run by human beings. And as such, they tend to have "skin in the game". This means that there are times when their personal beliefs get involved in the decisions they make. It might very well be that the relevant executives are so outraged by the recent events in Washington they decided that they don't care how much money they could make off Hawley's book, they simply refuse to be involved in promoting his odious ideas. People make decisions like this all the time, and as a result of this latest fiasco, some very surprising statements have been made by people that I'd never have believed would get so personally involved. For example, consider this statement from the National Association of Manufacturers (traditionally an industry group that supports Republicans):
“Armed violent protestors who support the baseless claim by outgoing president Trump that he somehow won an election that he overwhelmingly lost have stormed the U.S. Capitol today, attacking police officers and first responders, because Trump refused to accept defeat in a free and fair election. Throughout this whole disgusting episode, Trump has been cheered on by members of his own party, adding fuel to the distrust that has enflamed violent anger. This is not law and order. This is chaos. It is mob rule. It is dangerous. This is sedition and should be treated as such. The outgoing president incited violence in an attempt to retain power, and any elected leader defending him is violating their oath to the Constitution and rejecting democracy in favor of anarchy. Anyone indulging conspiracy theories to raise campaign dollars is complicit. Vice President Pence, who was evacuated from the Capitol, should seriously consider working with the Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment to preserve democracy."
I will draw reader's attention to one particular sentence in the above excerpt from a press release: "Anyone
indulging conspiracy theories to raise campaign dollars is complicit." I haven't read Hawley's manuscript, so I don't know what's in it, but if the editors have decided that it does spread "conspiracy theories" they have every right to sever their contract in order to avoid being "enablers" who add "fuel to the distrust that has enflamed violent anger".
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Wow, this one was hard to write. I've been listening to podcasts, reading papers, and, putting a lot of time into just thinking on this issue for over a month. Also some of the details that I found were hard to dig up. I got a crumb of the academic research on deplatforming from listening to a series of extremely long podcasts (about a dozen 2 or 3 hour long episodes) on conspiracy theories. With this in hand it took several hours to dig up that article on what happened when Britain First was kicked off Youtube.
This is difficult work. So if you can afford it, why not send me some money? It's easy to buy a subscription on Pay Pal and Patreon.
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When we move from book publishing to social media, things get a little more complex. I say that because social media has something of the look and feel of a utility---like a telephone system---instead of publishing. If Twitter and Facebook are more like the phone system than Simon and Schuster, then maybe kicking Trump off of them is sorta like cancelling phone service because you don't like what he says to the people he calls.
The difference comes down to the fact that each house only has one or two sets of communication wires going into it (phone plus cable). It would make no sense at all for any business to attempt to add another one because it would cost a fortune. This makes telephone service a monopoly, and as such kicking someone off it really does seem like something awful.
But those wires are increasingly used more for access to the Web than to call your sister or watch Fox News. This means that the legacy phone (and cable) companies have a practical monopoly over Internet Service Provision because they inherited the wired infrastructure from a previous business model.
As a result, the government (at least in Canada) has declared the Internet Service Provider business a "regulated monopoly", which means that it controls price increases and has forced the phone and cable companies to sell bandwidth at a "reasonable price" to other Internet Service Providers---like Teksavvy. If they didn't, Bell and Rogers would inevitably charge even more money for even worse service than they already do. This state of affairs was relatively easy to do, simply because phone and cable services were already regulated monopolies before the World Wide Web was anything more than a gleam in the eye of a European engineer.
The question arises, therefore, "Should the government force social media companies like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc, to follow regulations just like Bell and Rogers (in Canada)?" This could be a two-edged sword. Conservatives could put in regulations based on an absolutist interpretation of freedom of speech that would forbid companies from banning people because they lie and support violence against minorities. But by the same token, Liberals could put in rules that forbid things like hate speech, fake news, and, misleading advertising.
But the assumption that the above is based upon is that there are no practical alternatives to the biggest social media companies---which simply isn't true. There are other, smaller social media companies. Personally, I've tried to use MeWe, Pinterest, and, at one time had an account in Myspace (which is still going after all these years!). I looked at a bunch of others too, but now only use the following:
- Youtube
- Quora
And, to be honest, I really only use them mostly to do two things: market the Back-Grounder, and, to help come up with ideas for this blog.
The fact of the matter is that there are already a large number of already existing social media alternatives. If neo-Fascists, anti-maskers, white nationalists, etc, get pushed off one of them, it's not that hard to find another which is more friendly to nasty, conspiratorial ideas, like:
- Parler (more about it later)
- 4-Chan
- 8-Chan
- Gab
Beyond that, there are a fair number of others that I'd never heard of before I started researching this article. Here's a few with links:
Just yesterday it was announced that the alternative social media platform that has been embraced by neo-fascists and conspiracy theorists, Parler, had been effectively shut down by Apple and Google---who dropped the app for it from their stores, and, Amazon, which stopped hosting the system on their cloud service.
The wide variety of social media firms that already exist mean that there is nothing like a practical monopoly existing on social media---if you get tossed from one you can always go to another. And the wide number of different systems tells me that if all of them refuse to let you on them, people always have the option of making one of their own.
What that means to me is that the reason people like Trump and his henchmen are complaining is that they are being denied access to the large audience that is on the big systems. Conversely, it means that the people running these systems have a precious resource that they---as business people---want to preserve and protect: the customer base. If the social media giants allow their businesses to be tainted as being "hotbeds" of goofy racist, conspiracy-laden nonsense they will lose credibility and eventually their users will migrate to some other platform that uses better judgment about what they allow to be broadcast on their system. (Even worse, if they don't pull their socks up, they might end up with the government regulating their content.)
Really, it's exactly the same thing as when a venue---like a church or a concert hall---decides whether or not to allow a group like the Nazis to rent their space. The overwhelming majority won't do it because they realize that they could damage their brands. That's why most of the "deplatforming" controversies have raged around university lecture halls---because campuses are hotbeds of free speech absolutism. Often they have rules that say that any student group (no matter how small or unrepresentative) has a right to bring in any outside speaker to use a subsidized hall for a talk.
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What is the point of all this?
Well, as the entire world could see when thousands of nutcases stormed Congress, web-based lies actually do have consequences. And this might not---by a large margin---be the worst thing that can happen. We've already seen genocide against Muslims being spread by Facebook in Burma. And anti-vaxxer propaganda seems to be on the way to sabotaging vaccination efforts aimed at shutting down the Covid-19 pandemic.
And from what I've found out while researching this article, the most effective tool we have to prevent recruitment of "new believers" and to stop organizing "hard cores" into violence is to deplatform the people spreading the lies.
In support of this thesis, I'd draw people's attention to an interesting academic article titled Following the Whack-a-Mole: Britain First’s Visual Strategy from Facebook to Gab, by Lella Nouri, Nuria Lorenzo-Dus and Amy-Louise Watkin, and, published by the Royal United Services Institute (a UK think tank) and Swansea University.
Britain First is a nasty piece of work that found itself purged from both Facebook and Twitter because of the sorts of things it said on line. It then migrated to Gab, which didn't really care what it and it's members posted. The naive might be tempted to say "then what good was served by deplatforming the group on Facebook and Twitter?"
The difference came down to the fact that there are orders of magnitude more people on Facebook than there are on Gab. This dramatically reduces the ability of the group to recruit new members and spread their messages. In support of this thesis, I'd draw readers attention to the following two tables.
I've hi-lighted the most relevant figures that show the tremendous change between the amount of connection with the public that Britain First used to have through Facebook. It had over 100 times as many comments and reactions/up-votes on Facebook than Gab. And it had more than 300 times more shares/reposts. This has a tremendous impact on the ability of the group to recruit more new members and share it's poisonous ideas with the wider world.
It is true that the content of what gets published on Gab is more poisonous than what used to be published on Facebook. As the authors of the paper point out, it is important for intelligence services to keep an eye on what goes on in these marginal social media sites because they can still be very important both for radicalizing sympathizers and planning campaigns of violence. But this happens anyway even if mainstream platforms like Facebook are still being used. Deplatforming stops the pipeline of new sympathizers and recruits into the organization---and the migration of "new blood" onto Gab for even further radicalization.
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I did some research and it appears that the first person to opine about the different velocity of truth versus lies was Jonathan Swift, who wrote “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it.” Since he lived in the 18th century, it just goes to show that the issues we are facing have been around a long time. And it is not just a trivial witticism, but rather a finger pointing at a tremendously important moon. As I see it, there are two key issues involved here.
Telling a lie is a lot less work than digging up the information needed to refute it. What makes the job of refuting them far, far more difficult is the fact that different people process information in very different ways. A significant fraction of the public will get emotionally-engaged with a plausible lie and will fight against any attempt to show them evidence that goes against it. In these cases experts suggest that all you can do is continue to offer friendship, subtly plant the occasional seed of cognitive dissonance, and, hope that the person will eventually figure things out for themself.
In order to understand my next point, I think it is useful to take all of this out of the theoretical and put it back into the practical. Last night the
Youtube AI decided that I might want to listen to some Catholic Fascist
nonsense, so this program showed up on my feed. And, halfway through, the narrator says that a business that the show uses to manage it's social media---Buffer---had
cancelled their contract and that the company that they replaced it
with did the same thing the same day they signed onto it. So it can be said that John-Henry Westen and Lifesitenews are being "deplatformed"---but only in a very small way.
- Does he actually believe what he is saying?
- Does he know how bogus it is, but is so upset about abortion that he believes "the ends justify the means"?
- Is he simply a grifter who is manipulating the rubes to gain money/power off them?
Sadly, I'll never really know. That's because the opportunities that we are given in life to really, truly, get to have an honest conversation with another human being are really, really, limited. To a large extent this is simply because of practical considerations---most people's lives are too busy to really spend a lot of time talking through a complex issue with another person. Compounding this problem is the fact that we all use language in subtly different ways, which means that it takes long period of negotiation to really understand what a person means if we are talking about a difficult subject. Moreover, a lot of us (if not everyone) brings with them strong inhibitions that make it exceptionally hard to even say certain things.
Lies have none of these problems. A lie can be changed so it is short, snappy, and, easily remembered. It can be carefully pruned in order to remove all the complexities that might need explanation. But the truth is usually a gnarled, hard-to-explain, nest of complexities. It might be the case that many people "can't handle the truth", but I suspect that just as often people just don't have the time.
For these reasons lies are a lot like cancer or the Corona virus---an ounce of prevention is worth a ton of cure. And if that ounce is deplatforming a liar off social media it can prevent the necessity of spending a ton of time trying to convince a "true believer" that they've been had.
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