WE MUST BREAK UP BIG TECH
Organization’s (“WHO”) narratives regarding COVID-19, removing any content that contradicts the WHO – despite the WHO being infamously wrong in January when it confidently asserted there was “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission” of the virus. The legality of content moderation is not itself the issue – but, rather, the profound impact these actions have on the nature of free thought and expression when done at the scale at which these companies exist. Most infamously, Twitter and Facebook suppressed circulation of a negative story about Hunter Biden, son of President-elect Joe Biden, in the weeks leading up to the election. This behavior, in conjunction with a near-total news blackout of the story by mainstream cable networks, ensured that many Americans did not get news directly related to a presidential candidate that could have informed their vote. Still, the Cato Institute defends behavior from the tech platforms – including behavior that limits the availability of medical information – as merely freedom of association for the tech platforms. The tech platforms, like you and me, are free to associate with or ignore whatever speech and ideas they want. But such arguments fall flat in the face of scale. The legality of content moderation is
not itself the issue – but, rather, the profound impact these actions have on the nature of free thought and expression when done at the scale at which these companies exist. Facebook is not merely speechifying on a single billboard in the northeast corridor. Google is not simply one corner of a multifaceted Internet search marketplace. These companies very much are our news aggregators and information dispersal sites. When Google decides what content to suppress or amplify, it does so for 90% of the global marketplace. Facebook, similarly, decides what 2.7 billion monthly active users will see – or not see. A single algorithmic decision made by a private corporation, accountable to no one, changes what kind of viewpoints and information are available to billions of people around the world. Corporations at this massive scale can distort and alter the marketplace of ideas in ways that impact behavior, free thought, and information gathering – foundational elements necessary for a free society to not only thrive but to exist at all. Ignoring the impact of this type of power – or denying that it exists at all – is a willful and one-sided ignorance reflecting an intentionally reductive version of liberty whose truest expression is freedom for the mid-level content manager at Google to reformulate the boundaries of our social order, unencumbered by the thoughts and opinions of the people and legislators who live in it. Meanwhile we, the ungrateful proles, are told
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January 2021
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