The liberal case for censoring the social media conglomerates

Chinese communists and Silicon Valley plutocrats are not our friends

Photo by Nonsap Visuals on Unsplash

Increasingly now I find myself nodding along with notions that only a few years ago I would have found outrageous.

To take the latest example, faced with a “sophisticated” and “massive” Russian propaganda campaign on TikTok, Romania’s constitutional court barred Călin Georgescu from standing in the country’s presidential election.

He had topped the poll in the first round, and the Kremlin was working hard to ensure that he won the final ballot. Georgescu is extremely right wing and extremely pro-Putin. Russia’s propaganda campaign on TikTok took Georgescu from polling in single digits for most of the campaign to taking 23 per cent of the vote.

So the judges stopped the electoral process, and disqualified him from standing again.

And quite right too, I thought.

And then I pulled myself up.

What do I and many liberal people believe in? We are meant to believe in democracy and in freedom of speech – or that’s what we said. We are meant to be suspicious of governments or anyone else who tries to tell us what to read and think. Yet now, apparently, we want our governments to ban TikTok and stop elections.

Hardly consistent, are we?

A part of the explanation for our apparent hypocrisy can be found in Karl Popper’s “paradox of tolerance”. Free societies tolerate people who wish to destroy them because their liberal principles demand it.

In good times, tolerance creates few difficulties. But when tolerance allows the intolerant to grow too powerful, liberal principles lead to the overthrow of liberal democracy and with it the tolerant society.

In our time we allow Russia, China and other hostile states full access to social media, even though they want to use it to manipulate our elections at a time when Europe is in a cold war with Russia and Ukrainians are experiencing all the horrors of the real thing.

The Romanian judiciary has now resolved Popper’s paradox with brutal decisiveness. Liberal freedoms can be suspended in wartime, the judges said.

Some may accept their reasoning. But what happens if Romanian voters rise up?

More pertinently, what happened to all those traditional liberal objections to censorship?

We believe that bad ideas will be exposed in free debate – or that’s what we used to say. We believe that people aren’t idiots who can be brainwashed by Russian propagandists or Elon Musk or any other outside agency, or so we once said.

Why are we abandoning our principles with such speed?

There are four reasons for believing that the state should limit our freedoms in the age of social media. They are not wholly convincing to my mind, and they are highly dependent on what type of state you live under.

Nevertheless, as we head towards a Europe trapped between Putin on one side and Trump on the other, they are worth considering.

1/ The new media conglomerates do not believe in free speech

They may profit from free speech. But they don’t believe in it. Not for a moment. I accept that charges of “whataboutery” and tu quoque denunciations of hypocrisy are not conclusive arguments.

But it remains telling that Karl Popper would have few difficulties in seeing big tech as an enemy of the open society.

TikTok is ultimately accountable to the Chinese Communist Party. Its owners ByteDance may say it is an independent corporation. But no Chinese institution is independent of the party. ByteDance employees have spoken of interference from the Chinese government, and there are reports that the state has quietly taken a direct stake and a board seat at the Chinese subsidiary.

Chinese communists, like all communists, do not believe in freedom of speech.

But then nor do the titans of Silicon Valley. In this week’s Lowdown podcast Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate told me a cautionary story.

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When Elon Musk bought Twitter (X), he welcomed back extreme right wingers, the previous owners had barred.

Musk tweeted that Twitter’s new policy would be “freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach” and that hate tweets would be “max deboosted & demonetized”.

Ahmed and his colleagues showed that Musk’s change of direction had led to an explosion of homophobia, sexism, antisemitism, and anti-black racism. Advertisers pulled away. Faced with the loss of revenue, the supposed champion of free speech sued the CCDH claiming “tens of millions of dollars” in lost advertising revenue.

US journalists clumsily call suits like Musk’s “SLAPP actions” – strategic lawsuits against public participation. “Lawfare” is a better term or “vexatious litigation”. Rich men – and you don’t get richer than Musk – tie their critics up in vastly expensive law suits. I have seen friends and contacts have years of their lives taken from them as they cope with the terror of exorbitant costs.

Ahmed and his colleagues got lucky. The judge turned on Musk and said “this case is about punishing the defendants for their speech,” and threw it out.

Musk did not give up. He declared “war” on the organisation alleging that it was violating laws against foreign interference in US elections – charges that could lead to criminal punishments.

“Do as we say not as we do,” should be Silicon Valley’s motto.

Meanwhile, and speaking of foreign interference….

2/ Big tech is a hostile foreign force

It is not unreasonable for countries to regulate wealthy men and institutions that seek to interfere in their politics, and it is hardly as if the controls are onerous.

The EU has passed a Digital Services Act that was meant to protect Europe. In theory, regulators can fine companies up to 6 percent of their global annual turnover and even block their services in the EU.

And yet Brussels failed to act as Russia organised support for its favoured candidate in Romania.

Whether the EU will eventually issue fines is anyone’s guess. But the fact remains that when the Kremlin mobilised social media, the EU, which is denounced on the Trumpian right as some kind of successor state to the Soviet Union, did not intervene. The Romanian judiciary was on its own.

"There's no ability to intervene quickly in these situations, and the platforms clearly don't seem to care," Kim Van Sparrentak from the Greens told Politico.

Because the EU does not want to be accused of meddling in elections it leaves the field clear for Russia to meddle.

Meanwhile Musk is becoming a major force in UK politics as he intervenes to support racist rioters on the streets and the radical right in Parliament

I don’t know whether the UK government will punish him. But I do know there is a case for restricting the power of social media corporations. Indeed, it has already been made.

British election law bans parties from receiving money from foreign donors, and no one objects to that. To prevent the United Arab Emirates taking over the Spectator and Telegraph Parliament banned foreign governments from owning British newspapers. Once again, most people thought that was fair enough.

Most democracies are not like the United States. We do not allow unlimited spending on elections because we see that as a route to plutocracy.

3/ The medium pushes the extreme messages

Marshall McLuhan was right. The medium determines the message. Just as print favoured Protestantism because the people of early modern Europe could afford to buy cheap Bibles so social media favours extremism because extremism boosts profits.