Big Tech and government shuffled another step closer to an open China-style merger in the West this week. On Friday, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki appeared to suggest in a briefing that social media platforms should collude more proactively to ensure government-approved messages are transmitted to the general public.
Activists in the UK pointed out that an equivalent dialogue between tech platforms and UK government also exists here. Civil servants have ‘trusted flagger’ status with the platforms, meaning their concerns are prioritised by tech platform censors.
Of course, ‘misinformation’ and ‘harmful posts’ are a movable feast. Psaki was referring specifically to information relating to coronavirus, but once it’s generally accepted that the government has not only a right but a duty for — as Psaki puts it — “the public health of the country” to root out “misinformation” and “harmful posts”, that rubric can be easily applied to other topics deemed important.
In the US, for example, Big Tech censored the New York Post regarding the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop during the presidential election campaign, a story subsequently acknowledged to be true but at the time deemed (one presumes) ‘misinformation’.
Much of the debate about Psaki’s apparent call for overt collusion between regime interests and Big Tech has turned on its incompatibility with the ideals of free speech and pluralism still widely supported by liberals on both Left and Right. But to my eye the bigger story is the inadequacy of liberal political ideals full stop for a de-materialised society.
This is especially the case when that de-materialised public square is governed by a similarly de-materialised state, that deploys the same digital technology to track, shape and discipline its polity. This is illustrated by another breaking story this weekend on the intersection of Big Tech and the state.
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