'Conservatives Will Cease to Exist Online' Speakers Fret About the Tech Bogeyman
reason.com
reason.com
But why is this the minority opinion at a conservative conference:
I can't believe I'm doing this, because I'm here to convince you at a conservative conference that government shouldn't regulate speech,"
People use Facebook/Whatsapp/Twitter/Reddit for many of the same things they used to use email and personal blogs to do in 2005. But with centralized control and the ability to shape what messages get broadcast to whom, it's far too great of a concentration of power.
Google is probably the most extreme. Consider the "Evil Larry" thought experiment. If Larry Page woke up one day in 2016 while he was still CEO and decided to use Google and YouTube purely to further his own goals, how many national elections could he tilt while maintaining plausible deniability from the outside?
My guess is, it would be quite a few. It wouldn't have to look that different. Counter-narrative results would still show up in search. They'd just be down-regulated. Links and videos supporting EL's preferred candidates and positions would be up-regulated and be shown up perhaps 10% more often than previously. With plausible deniability, election after election could be tipped by a few percentage points. That's often enough to change the outcome.
There are almost certainly some internal company safeguards that would have made this kind of crime a difficult, uncertain proposition and I do NOT think the real Larry Page would ever have done this. But being completely unconcerned would be a grave mistake. Giant tech companies already lobby extensively in nations all over the world and do not have goals perfectly aligned with each of those nations—e.g., Free Basics in India.
It's naive to dismiss concerns about such extreme concentrations of power being wielded to suppress speech along political lines simply because we're currently benefactors of the action.
Now we have a situation where the same conservatives are getting cut out, and it's no longer the free market speaking, and the government is supposed to step in to protect and affirm a particular set of opinions.
I don't think this is a particularly consistent viewpoint, and it makes me wonder how much the free market had to do with ditching the fairness doctrine and the less conservative radio and TV voices.
They don't seem to be interested in keeping 230 protections so companies can host content without having to be immediately responsible for every word they host.
They are either incompetent defenseless dolts. Or maliciously picking at platforms. They certainly aren't doing anything to safeguard & protect hosting speech online.
Also see how drugs became a “disease” and not a “moral failing of culture” the minute it start hitting “rural America”.
A key tenet of conservatism is free speech. All together competing in the market of ideas. The first amendment came from this tradition and implicitly makes the assumption that only governments are big and powerful enough to control speech. It dates from a time when pamphlets and newsletters were the dominant form of political communication. That assumption is no longer valid.
What happens if your opponents systematically attack anyone who speaks ideas they don't like in an organised way, but they aren't the government? Then they win because they aren't forced backwards to pamphlets and paper newsletters. Being tolerant of this kind of intolerance means losing.
The simplest fix is probably to extend the first amendment to large, dominant providers of communication services. But that's unsatisfying because it's so unclear what a dominant service is, and anyway, can't fundamentally force providers to do things they don't want to do.
The core problem is the culture war itself, in which the extreme left see the right as an evil to be wiped out by whatever means necessary. Fixing that will require a much more complex set of legislative and cultural changes. These companies didn't used to be in the grip of leftist hated. Google and Twitter both used to have strong free speech cultures, which degraded over time.
On the contrary, the First Amendment makes the opposite assumption, that only the Federal government should be prohibited from controlling speech, implying that the power to do so organically devolves (as do all powers not explicitly granted to the Federal government by the Constitution) to the states, the people, and by extension any private enterprise created by the people.
>What happens if your opponents systematically attack anyone who speaks ideas they don't like in an organised way, but they aren't the government?
That's what free speech is. If you don't like that, fair enough, but people being able to organize and oppose ideas they don't like, as well as exercising their freedom of association both to choose with whom they will and will not associate, is the way a marketplace of ideas in a democracy is supposed to work.
A lot of the content you're including in "banned behavior" doesn't come from mainstream conservatives simply expressing their political views, but from egregious behavior defended as being conservative in order to strengthen the narrative of liberal media persecution. Roseanne Barr, for instance (literally because it's early and she's first example I can come up with off the top of my head) wasn't banned merely for being conservative but for going on a racist tirade on Twitter.
Gab and 8Chan weren't deplatformed for expressing conservative views, but because their cultures encouraged and exploited racial violence for entertainment. You can disagree with the validity of that versus those sites' free speech rights, or their responsibilities for the second-order effect of their "memes," but the fact remains they weren't a victim of anti-conservative persecution. T_D's treatment isn't due to their conservative views, but their violations of Reddit's TOS.
Even the case of Carpe Donktum in the article appears to have been banned due to violent threats, not merely conservative views.
Yet conservatives refuse to even concede that the courtship by the Republican party and NRA of the extremist right and the shifting of the Overton Window of conservative activism in the direction of neo-reactionary hatred post Trumpism is even a problem, much less a relevant factor in this specific debate. The only thing conservatives seem willing to do is state that exactly the same phenomenon exists on the left, then proceed to ignore the issue completely, as if somehow they were proving "the left" hypocritical, and thus invalid. But even if the left were hypocritical, being hypocritical doesn't make them wrong... conservatism has a problem with its lunatic fringe regardless, and in most cases, an unwillingness to clean their own house is why they're getting banned, deplatformed, etc.
As far as trying to get people fired goes, employment in the US has almost always been at the sole discretion of the employer. That is due to conservative efforts and conservative belief in the free market, and they have fought tooth and nail against unions, labor rights, minimum wage increases, maternity leave, protected classes, environmental regulations, anything that would prove an encumbrance to employers' ability to fire at will or do business as they choose. I'm sorry but I have to play the world's tiniest violin for them in this case.
The premise that "conservatives will cease to exist online" is FUD and hyperbole. It's a conspiracy theory. It's not true. I have plenty of social media accounts, and I see plenty of conservative speech online. The typical conservative answer to this problem, if it exists, should be the free market - if it is the case that most or all conservative speech is under threat, then that presents a clear market opportunity for platforms to serve conservative speech.
And in fact, that's been done. And those platforms tend to fail because they're unnecessary, and because they get brigaded by Nazis and trolls. The marketplace of ideas has decided that it doesn't want to tolerate the sort of views that conservatives refuse to disassociate themselves from.