Big Tech Reverting to Old Ways?
Meta clamps down on a documentary criticizing Meta. Is old-school digital censorship returning?
On Wednesday, the firm Empower Oversight sent a letter to four Congressional Committee chairs, complaining that Facebook is supressing ads for a documentary about IRS whistleblower clients Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler, called Shielded by Power: The Whistleblowers vs. The Big Guy. I’m in this film, because the story Shapley and Ziegler blew the whistle on involved Hunter Biden and became part of Twitter Files stories. Google, X, and Meta all appear to be declining to run ads, while Meta told the firm the platform doesn’t “support the scope of this content.”
Zuckerberg joined Sundar Pichai and Jeff Bezos as major tech figures who stood in prominent places at Trump’s inauguration. He did so after publishing a controversial (at the time) letter in August of 2024 that criticized the Biden administration’s pressure to “censor” certain political material. The letter admitted to misconduct with regard to this particular story:
When we saw a New York Post story reporting on corruption allegations involving then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s family, we sent that story to fact-checkers for review and temporarily demoted it while waiting for a reply. It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story. We’ve changed our policies and processes to make sure this doesn’t happen again.
It is happening again. In a similar case, a Baffler review for a new book on digital censorship by Jacob Siegel, The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control, was pulled with the frankly unbelievable explanation that it “does not meet The Baffler’s fact-checking standards.” Siegel, whose 2023 investigation into the “anti-disinformation” complex was crucial in raising awareness about the issue, described the Baffler decision as follows:
To say that this is unusual by the standards of magazine publishing undersells it by a wide margin. Removing an already-published book review without so much as specifying the offense is not something done by any publication interested in maintaining a reputation as intellectually open and honest.
Obviously, Donald Trump continues to accumulate his own speech controversies. FCC chair Brendan Carr’s ham-handed threats to networks that they will “lose their licenses” if they don’t “operate in the public interest” when it comes to coverage of Iran were just the latest additions to a pile of demerits against a president who seemed to run against censorship in the 2024 campaign. The two phenomena are almost surely related. My worry has always been that as politicians of any party fall into public disfavor, they will feel greater temptation to use the awesome information-squashing gadgets available on these platforms. If both parties use the tools, the first things to vanish will be criticism of the tools. We’re headed that way.
More to come. As for last night’s speech, tune in to our Today’s News livestream with Michael Tracey tomorrow morning.
“Old school digital censorship”? It has been one long continuous trend of ever increasing clamp-downs on free speech. Trump, Musk and any other false heroes have been engaged in exactly the same speech-curtailing activities as every other member of the techno-fascist oligarchy. Covid was the apotheosis of the global censorship and propaganda efforts — demonstrating very clearly that it is not partisan or political: it is about raw power and control.
There are no good guys in this battle: just the population/serfs vs our would-be feudal overlords.
Thanks Matt. Important perspective. You say, "...the awesome information-squashing gadgets available..." I am praying that, in this age of broad independent platform availability, truth finds its way to the pubic. X has helped to this point, but I don't think we can put our trust in Musk. You are certainly doing your part; I'm off to purchase Siegel's "The Information State." I also highly recommend Iain Davis' new book, "The Technocratic Dark State." NOT available on Amazon, a good sign that it hits the mark.