“Facebook, Twitter, Google, and YouTube are not monopolies, but disruptive technologies: they shattered the monopoly on methods of delivering information to the public, once previously enjoyed by the mainstream media.” – Tech Panic
Following months of unprecedented purging of Republican accounts, and amid continuing claims of conservative censorship, billionaire businessman Elon Musk took ownership of Twitter in October 2022. Almost immediately, Musk began providing internal documents to a handful of independent journalists for their review and assessment. Then, beginning in December, Project “Twitter Files” began to be released to the public revealing the depth of federal involvement in the silencing of conservative voices. Federal officials from nearly a dozen agencies, including the State Department, the Pentagon, the FBI, and the CIA, were implicated for their role in removing individuals from platforms for views they deemed unsuitable. Based on their ideological interpretation of misinformation, they mislabeled content, helping to secure the prevailing narrative on several stories and events including election interference, Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop, and COVID.
Yet, where traditional partisan media acted as a gatekeeper of information that only they controlled, Big Tech provided a new avenue for alternative sources, offering a much-needed balance of content. A net benefit for all, where users, for the first time, could easily post unvetted content with little oversight or moderation.
The phenomenon of social media which began in 1997, caught fire following the entry of Facebook in 2004, the biggest social media platform in the world. Over time a network of websites and applications enabled creators to digitally interact and share a diversity of thoughts and products. With nearly three billion users worldwide, Facebook leads the pack, followed by YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. Twitter, with just 400 million users, is also the most divisive, based on a Morning Consult poll from January 2021 of 2116 social media users. With 59 percent identifying as liberal and just 35 percent conservative, Twitter produced the largest gap in ideology. Yet, three social media users out of five indicated their interest in seeing a wide variety of opinions on sites they visit.
In Robby Soave’s 2021 book, “Tech Panic” Soave addresses the bipartisan concerns that Big Tech has become too big and must be regulated, if not broken apart. Yet, as Soave reveals, micromanaging Big Tech will result in more censorship, not less. Big Tech firms are independent private businesses that have no legal responsibility to be neutral, any more than any other business. With this in mind, Soave cautions readers about blaming technology, a mostly 21st-century innovation, for every social ill. Instead, much credit should be given to the enormous benefits of social media in the digital age.
One of the most pursued and least understood solutions to the censorship concerns of Big Tech are calls to repeal Section 230, a 1996 law that shields tech companies from liability from content posted on their platforms. Initially drafted to make it a federal crime to send online porn to minors, Section 230 allows tech companies to perform some moderation of content without losing their liability shield altogether. Republicans, normally wary of government, must not abandon their skepticism too quickly. Any revision to Section 230 would likely end with greater suppression of alternative views, as every entry would have to be pre-screened and pre-approved, creating the potential for more interventions against conservatives. Even so, displeasure with Big Tech is largely bipartisan as conservatives presume that their speech is being suppressed, while progressives believe that unchecked alt-right ideology is allowed to run rampant.
Social media is the new public square and an invaluable place to meet and exchange ideas. It provides easy access to friends and family, as well as a means for like-minded individuals to meet, organize, and validate beliefs that may fall outside of acceptable opinion. Social media helped to grow and distribute alternative media by giving the user the ability to consume disparate views while becoming better informed. While occasional censorship has suppressed conservative accounts disproportionately, its net value has increased the overall opportunity for free speech exponentially.
Many employees of Big Tech, sited in California, do have a particular political bias and intent to censor ideas since they are the ones, in fact, that create the algorithms that curate content. In the 2020 election cycle, a report from the Center for Responsive Politics revealed that 98 percent of political contributions from Big Tech went to Democrats, where a whopping 120 million dollars was spent on lobbying and campaign donations. But censorship is not a new problem, it existed long before social media, and silencing speech is only one small blip of the overall good it has created.
But among the worst problems of social media are pornography and its variants. While most sites attempt some level of restrictions, parents must intervene and limit access to social media for their younger children. If we must focus our attention anywhere, it is the practice of doxing (publicly revealing one’s identity) and swatting (sending law enforcement to someone’s home or business after wrongly suggesting a crime is being committed), that tech companies should be addressing.
Free speech is a unique right outlined in the Constitution that is not protected in the same way anywhere else. As such, curtailment of speech by the government is strictly prohibited under the First Amendment. Censorship, when administered by private social media companies, not only often backfires, but pales in comparison to the level of suppression from traditional media sources. It may not be a perfect system, but the expansion of alternative voices has never been greater.
The real danger to Americans is the bipartisan agreement emerging in Washington promising to manage Big Tech through onerous regulations. But throwing the baby out with the bathwater will only result in discarding the best opportunity for speech the world has ever known while placing more power into a political arena that will likely do more damage than good. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good. Voices are being heard.
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