Big Tech doesn’t care about your political party. They only care about themselves.
President Donald Trump has been deplatformed and Parlor is offline. But don't be fooled: Big Tech is only acting with their own interests in mind.
The interesting thing about Big Tech is that people on both sides of the political spectrum believe it is out to get them.
After President Donald Trump used his social media platforms to incite violence one time too many by telling his supporters to march on Washington D.C. and take back their country, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and Youtube banned his accounts until at least after Inauguration Day. Next, Google and Apple dropped the “free speech” social networking platform Parlor from their app stores — where many right-wing extremists had gone to freely use hate speech and potentially plan the next attack — and Amazon followed suit by dropping the app from its cloud computing services.
The resulting victim playing has been fascinating to witness. On one side are conservatives who think this was an abuse of power and clear-cut censorship against Trump because of his politics. On the other side are progressives who think these actions to deplatform Trump and take down Parlor are too little, too late.
But Big Tech doesn’t care about the political left or right. They care only about themselves.
At first, Trump appeared to be a blessing for Big Tech. He purchased advertisements on Facebook and Google on an unprecedented scale, completely changing the nature of political advertising and the power of social media in politics, and brought millions of new users to Twitter. Trump drove their profits up, and because of this, he got more leeway than the average citizen when it came to disobeying their terms of service. But leeway is a slippery slope, because once you help someone as self-involved and lacking in sympathy as Trump come to feel invincible, you become responsible for removing his cape when he has gone too far.
Unfortunately, Big Tech failed in that respect. They did not take responsibility until it was too late; until Trump’s supporters had stormed the Capitol and left five people dead. Only then did the consequences come, and while it’s nice to think that this was some sort of moral stance on behalf of the tech companies on the basis of Trump “inciting violence,” it was much more self-serving than that.
After all, Trump had used these platforms to incite violence before — he did it throughout his political career, most notably in May 2020 when he Tweeted “When the looting starts, the shooting starts” in response to Black Lives Matters protests. Three months later, Trump supporter Kyle Rittenhouse shot three protestors and killed two of them in Kenosha, Wisconsin during a protest (and if you needed another example of how white privilege manifests itself in America tdaoy, Rittenhouse was recently seen out on bail drinking in a bar without a mask while wearing a “free as fuck” t-shirt).
“The decision to ban him now is purely arbitrary, an assertion of raw corporate power rather than a principled stance. Motivated by purely business concerns, the social media crackdown is completely capricious,” Jeet Heer writes in The Nation.
“As the writer Anand Giridharadas likes to say, the social media crackdown on Trump is a case where arsonists are allowed to recast themselves as firefighters.”
Big Tech helped Trump win the presidency and do a ton of damage once he was in the White House. What has changed is not that Trump went too far — it’s that they no longer need him. In fact, Trump has become a deterrent to the growth of their businesses. And while the deplatforming of Trump appears to be the right decision, it should also serve as a reminder of what kind of power Big Tech has over public debate.
Over the past few years, as our public sphere has shifted online towards social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, the arbiters of free speech have shifted from elected officials to elite technocrats like Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, and Jeff Bezos. These are now the people who write the rules and dole out the consequences to those who break them.
“Ultimately, the decision to deplatform Trump reveals the tremendous power that companies like Twitter and Facebook possess over our public debate,” Sonja West and Genevieve Lakier write in Slate. “Do these companies have the constitutional right to censor Trump? Sure. Should their stunning collective show of force still concern us? Absolutely.”
The problem is that these companies are only acting with their own interests in mind. At the risk of simplifying an extremely complicated topic, this has not always been the case.
When Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, 9/11 was still fresh in peoples’ minds and national security was at the forefront of the American agenda. The Obama administration cut a deal with Big Tech: You help us improve our national security, and we will look the other way when it comes to regulation. This public-private partnership (wherein 55 individuals moved from positions at Google into the federal government during the Obama years, and 197 individuals moved from positions inside the government to jobs at Google) allowed these companies to quickly develop into the monopolies they are today. (I highly recommend Shoshana Zuboff’s book “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” if you want to learn more on the topic).
Obama made a deal with the devil, but it at least meant that Big Tech had to act with both public and private interests in mind. Consequently, Trump, instead of enforcing regulations on these tech companies that had grown more powerful than anyone could have predicted, essentially picked a fight with them.
The result is that Big Tech now works completely independent of the government: Every decision they make is with their own interests in mind, with no one holding them accountable, and with no transparency to the public.
We currently find ourselves at an important crossroads, as Big Tech has collectively censored the President of the United States on somewhat of a whim. There are other dangerous leaders still using Facebook and Twitter to incite violence, but they have gone unpunished. There are no clear-cut rules; only a few powerful men making decisions behind closed doors; decisions that benefit their companies but not the citizens who rely on them.
As Heer writes: “Emergency measures, created under the stress of pressing events, rarely lead to ideal policies.”
Censoring Trump has set a dangerous precedent. In a society that relies on social media to organize now more than ever — one in need of mass protest and unionization now more than ever — it’s unclear if we are going to be able to safely use these platforms to do the work that needs to be done. Even more concerning is that there are no realistic alternatives.
What is scary is that these companies have positioned themselves to crush any kind of dissent that hurts their business models or goes against the status quo. Whether it comes from the right or the left, Big Tech has the power to censor anyone without clarifying who made the decision, why it was made, or whether it was even made at all. They operate in complete obscurity, and no one in the world currently has the power to hold them accountable.
We ignore these issues at our peril. Because today it is Trump who was deplatformed, but tomorrow it could be you.
Notes
Question (please respond in the comments)
Are you worried about the power Big Tech holds over public debate? Why or why not?
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