Twitter is perhaps the most pernicious case in point. For years, users of the addictive social media site — myself included — have noticed strange patterns on the platform. Certain tweets, or tweets containing particular words or relating to certain themes, would land as though into a great silence. They would go out and be liked by tiny numbers of people or none at all; or there would be nothing and then a sudden surge, as though in acknowledgement that the zero figure was unsustainable. Or people would find that the ‘likes’ for a particular tweet did not only remain static but would suddenly go down, as though Twitter had decided that a particular tweet needed to look less popular than it was.
I have experienced a certain amount of this myself, with readers regularly having to ‘re-like’ tweets promoting certain of my books. They had liked it, and Twitter had mysteriously ‘unliked’ it for them and they had then had to come back again to say that, no, they really did like it. I don’t think it is paranoia to observe that these shenanigans have a particular political bent.
It is well known that Silicon Valley is perhaps the most liberal (in the American sense of the term) place in the world. The people who work at the tech companies are almost uniformly left-leaning progressives, if not something stronger, and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has admitted in the past that the corporation’s few conservatives don’t feel safe to voice their opinion. Similarly a former Facebook employee has accused the site of ‘curating’ feeds to screen out conservative content.
At the higher end, these companies have strong links with progressive politics on both sides of the Atlantic. The flood of former officials from the Obama administration into Silicon Valley after he left office, and Hillary Clinton failed to reach the White House in 2016, is well recorded. In recent times there has been a certain British flavour added to this, with reports that since Nick Clegg joined the top ranks of Facebook, that company has seen a marked influx of otherwise unemployed, perhaps otherwise unemployable, Liberal Democrats, swelling the ranks.
All of this and much more means that the tech companies swim in a bubble within a bubble. Their awareness of where the political or moral centre skews consistently left. When they do manage to take down terrorist material from their platforms, for instance, they placate the criticism they expect by stressing that they are opposed to ‘extremism’ in general; or ‘hateful content’, to give just one of the fabulously flatulent terms currently in vogue.
It is the reason why Twitter and all the other platforms acted so swiftly against Milo Yiannopoulos even as Dorsey’s site continued to allow Lashkar-e-Taiba (which carried out the Mumbai massacre in 2008) to keep active Twitter accounts.
It is the same with YouTube, which even before you get to the issue of banning has the subtle art of ‘demonetisation’, by which the media giant signals whom it favours and whom it does not. For years it has become clear that conservative-leaning content in particular is having its ability to monetise (that is, make money from advertising revenue raised by views) removed because the site disapproves of the politics.
Regrettably, again, I find myself to have been on the receiving end of a fair amount of this, as has almost everybody I know who has questioned not just regular political orthodoxies, but specific Silicon Valley orthodoxies, such as anything to do with trans issues.
The kicker in all of this is that as the various platforms are caught out in various forms of censorship, their final move is to confirm in their terms of service that they are allowed to do the things that, up till that point, they denied doing. So having spent years denying that they engaged in ‘shadow-banning’, in January the new terms of service agreement that all Twitter users were requested to agree to included having the right to refuse to distribute certain content and to “limit distribution or visibility of any Content on the service”. Otherwise known as shadow-banning.
Now that much of this is out in the open, perhaps it is inevitable that there is a surge in people volunteering to make themselves the arbiters of what is and is not acceptable material to publish online. In recent weeks there have once again been calls to either ban Donald Trump from Twitter or insist that his tweets are in some way fact-checked into irrelevancy by the company. Well, good luck to anybody auditioning for that job.
The debate around this political curating, as with the scandal over these companies’ China policies, returns us to the simultaneous recognition of two deeply troubling facts: that the social media companies have an awesome responsibility, greater than perhaps any comparable information-wielding power in history; and that this is a power that the platforms in question are utterly unfit to wield.
BBC rows will come and go. But the inadequacies and malignancies of the social media platforms are here to stay.
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