The Manipulators Page 2
Social media is all-encompassing and seemingly ever-present. Professional athletes stream Snapchat videos to their followers from locker rooms before games. Instagram is littered with “influencers” selling attire. Meeting romantic partners on social media or mobile apps is now commonplace. Presidential candidates livestream themselves on Instagram doing housework and going to the dentist, and U.S. senators snipe at each other on Twitter—also the preferred social media platform of the President of the United States, who uses it for everything from conducting international diplomacy to ranting about his political enemies. It’s mortifying, laughable, and awe-inspiring all at the same time.
The size and scale of social media companies exploded primarily because they presented themselves as open platforms—blank slates for people to use however they wanted. Google, Facebook, and Twitter all characterized their products as engines for social improvement. “We think of Twitter as the global town hall,” said former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo. “We are the free speech wing of the free speech party.”5 Costolo was Twitter’s chief executive from 2010 until 2015 and the immediate predecessor of current CEO Jack Dorsey. Twitter’s general manager in the United Kingdom, Andy Yang, likewise described Twitter as the “free speech wing of the free speech party” in March 2012.6 Google became a multibillion dollar company by offering a portal for free, unrestricted information to anyone with access to the Internet; famously, its original motto was “Don’t be evil.” An internal Facebook memo circulated in June 2016 stated that at Facebook, “we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is de facto good.”7 As we’ll see, that’s no longer the case at Facebook.
Americans have given these three major tech companies (and others) enormous power to select the information we read, share, and discuss with our neighbors and friends. We’ve gotten so accustomed to the role they play in our lives that we fail to even notice that Big Tech is sifting through the available information and narrowing—and prioritizing—our choices. Although Facebook, Google, and Twitter once touted themselves as bastions of democracy and free speech, they are now openly moving towards direct censorship and media manipulation. They say so themselves.
In March 2018, Google circulated an internal memo that instructed employees on the benefits of censorship. In the memo, which was titled “The Good Censor,” Google conceded that while the Internet was “founded upon utopian principles of free speech,” free speech is no longer en vogue.8 The memo explained that “tech companies are adapting their stance towards censorship” in direct response to “the anxiety of users and governments.” The memo conceded that “tech firms have gradually shifted away from unmediated free speech and towards censorship and moderation,” but framed that shift as a positive development. One major way that tech companies are “stepping into the role of moderator” is by “significantly amping up the number of moderators they employ—in YouTube’s case increasing the number of people on the lookout for inappropriate content to more than 10,000,” the memo boasted.9 It argued that censorship was necessary partly because of users “behaving badly,” which required tech companies to oversee them. The most alarming part of the internal missive, however, was that it even spoke approvingly of foreign governments that were censoring online speech. Google framed the censorship as governments “taking steps to make online spaces safer, more regulated, and more similar to their offline laws. Protected from hate speech on the street? Now you are on the net too….”
Twitter has completely and publicly abandoned its brand as the “free speech wing of the free speech party.” Jack Dorsey now claims that the whole “free speech wing” thing was one giant “joke.” His company, once seemingly devoted to the free expression of its users, now says it is prioritizing making users feel safe from others’ speech.10
Facebook, too, is openly rebranding itself as a benevolent censor. Here’s what Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told the Senate Commerce and Judiciary committees in April 2018 (emphasis added):
Overall, I would say that we’re going through a broader philosophical shift in how we approach our responsibility as a company. For the first ten or twelve years of the company, I viewed our responsibility as primarily building tools that, if we could put those tools in people’s hands, then that would empower people to do good things. What I think we’ve learned now across a number of issues—not just data privacy, but also fake news and foreign interference in elections—is that we need to take a more proactive role and a broader view of our responsibility. It’s not enough to just build tools. We need to make sure that they’re used for good. And that means that we need to now take a more active view in policing the ecosystem and in watching and kind of looking out and making sure that all of the members in our community are using these tools in a way that’s going to be good and healthy.11
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Three forces are driving Big Tech’s online censorship. Two are external and related: market pressures and de-platforming campaigns by liberal activists and journalists. The third pressure is internal: Silicon Valley is staggeringly one-sided politically.
Profit margins and market pressures are crucial levers that left-wing ideologues use to pull tech giants and other corporations in the direction of censorship. Companies want to avoid controversy, and, in the era of outrage mobs, that means avoiding offending the left, which controls most of the cultural institutions in America. That’s part of the reason why massive companies are embracing left-wing politics in advertising, like Gillette did with its “toxic masculinity” ad. Left-wing activists amplify those pressures with smear campaigns and boycotts intended to rattle advertisers and investors, forcing tech companies to take action. No company wants their name and “racist content” in the same sentence, regardless of whether the charge is true. If you convince corporate marketing agencies that advertising on Facebook is risky, you can be certain that Facebook will take some form of action to shed controversy and reassure investors.
The external pressures of left-wing activists are compounded by the internal pressures of the companies’ employees, who want Big Tech to embrace censorship against non-progressive opinions as a moral and political necessity. The internal office cultures at Facebook, Google, and Twitter have always been overwhelmingly left-leaning, but the election of Donald Trump as president has made them far more radical. I told one Silicon Valley insider that I thought tech culture now resembled the left-wing activist culture on college campuses. He replied, “They’re the exact same people.”
Their political opinions are certainly monochromatic. Of the $8.1 million that tech industry workers donated to presidential candidates during the 2016 campaign, 95 percent of it went to Hillary Clinton. Among donations from the Silicon Valley area specifically, 99 percent went to Hillary Clinton.12
So maybe it’s not surprising that Google, Facebook, and Twitter have all become vehicles for left-wing activism. The companies encourage employees to bring their “authentic selves” to work. One Silicon Valley executive told me, “We want people to… bring their entire perspective and all their values to work, and in the positive sense, that means getting rid of a huge distinction between my professional life and my personal life.” For left-wing activists in Silicon Valley, their professional, personal, and political lives are all one. That’s why Twitter launched an “intersectionality” initiative for its employees and Google gives millions to left-wing causes—to signal their allegiance to the tribe and placate its members. As a lawsuit by former Google employee James Damore made clear, conservatives have to hide their opinions and remain silent or face retribution at the high tech giant, but support for the violent, extremist ideology of Antifa can be freely expressed.13
What the Numbers Show
In 2017, the nonprofit Lincoln Network conducted a survey of tech workers in Silicon Valley, including those employed at Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft. The political leanings of those surveyed were more politically diverse than Silicon Valley
’s overall population: 29 percent were liberal; 24 percent were libertarian; 22 percent were conservative; and 16 percent were moderate. But on one thing they agreed. 75 percent of the liberals and 70 percent of the conservatives characterized their workplace as either “liberal” or “very liberal” and fewer than 2 percent of the survey-takers said their places of work were conservative.14
Even some of the liberal respondents thought that left-wing intolerance had gone too far. One liberal tech worker said, “I witnessed repeated calls from managers and non-managers alike for people to be fired for the political views they expressed.” Another liberal employee said, “There are people who are looking for a reason to be offended, and any sort of disagreement would make them wonder if I’m a secret Trump supporter. The idea of ‘I agree with you 90 percent’ is not enough.”
One self-identified libertarian said, “I have lost multiple talented colleagues who resigned rather than continue in the face of an increasingly extreme, narrow-minded, and regressive environment here at Google. It’s terrifying here. A real horror show. Every day could be my last.”
89 percent of respondents who identified as “very conservative” said they didn’t feel comfortable expressing their opinions at work. “It’s a postmodern, secularist Silicon Valley viewpoint. Highly liberal. It’s motivated by changing the world masquerading as intellectualism,” said one conservative tech employee.
A libertarian said that “there were many groups devoted to identity politics” in his company, and every one of them was leftist. “If you’re not part of the liberal Democrat crowd, you’re an outsider. Talks are often politicized, whether overtly or not. The entire executive team leans in a certain direction, and you don’t want to be the odd one out for fear of being ostracized…. Nobody who didn’t fit the company’s mold talked about their political views. The company was very homogenous in that sense.”
One conservative employee said, “There is overwhelming internal support for leftist political candidates, policies, and ideas, and they are frequently expressed…. There are zero to very few senior people who dare to speak up or represent an alternative (more conservative) point of view in company debates or policy decisions.”
A libertarian employee said. “At times when I have had a difference of opinion, I have been retaliated against, bullied, verbally intimidated….” A conservative added, “It is unsafe to have any discussions in Silicon Valley that do not subscribe to its tyrannical groupthink. I believe they’re already trying to push me out of the industry.”
A libertarian employee alleged that at Apple there is “a concerted purge of conservative employees.”
Another libertarian said: “There are certain things you *can’t* talk about… without serious risk to your career.”
This groupthink affects everything that Big Tech does, every decision it makes, every program it releases. As a former Google engineer noted, despite the company’s protestations that its algorithms are programmed for the interests of everyone, Google’s algorithms reflect the assumptions and biases of their creators.15
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The Censorship You See—and the Censorship You Don’t
The discussion about tech platforms and political bias often (and understandably) centers on what is or isn’t allowed on Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter—but the other half of the picture is what is and isn’t prioritized on a platform.
Broadly speaking, tech companies censor users and content in two ways. The first, which we’ll call “hard censorship,” is pretty straightforward: deleting content or suspending users. The second method, which we’ll call “soft censorship,” involves tech companies making content harder to find. Hard censorship is tearing down a roadside billboard; soft censorship is making the billboard difficult to see by erecting other billboards in front of it.
Soft censorship by tech companies can be just as effective as hard censorship. Studies show that people rarely click past the first page of Google or YouTube results. Even fewer click past the second or third page. So, pushing a link off the first page (or two or three) of Google is nearly the same as removing it from Google results altogether. The same is true with your Facebook and Twitter feeds: companies don’t have to delete content to make sure you don’t see it.
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Since 2016, every major tech company—including Facebook, Google, YouTube, and Twitter—has been busy re-tooling algorithms or news feeds or monetization standards in ways that benefit liberals and sideline conservatives. Big Tech also partners with left-wing groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) to “flag” allegedly problematic content. The SPLC falsely labels individual conservatives as “extremists” and conservative organizations as “hate groups,” and then promotes more restrictive content policies against alleged “hate speech.”16 To give you some idea of the SPLC’s standards, it once accused Dr. Ben Carson of being an “extremist” for stating his belief that marriage is between a man and a woman.17 Immersed in scandals of its own,18 the SPLC has been widely discredited.19 But it still works closely with Google engineers who design the digital tools and algorithms to police hate speech on YouTube as part of Google’s “Trusted Flaggers” program.20 Google kept its collaboration with the SPLC a secret, hidden behind a confidentiality agreement, and the SPLC only admitted the partnership after I broke the story.21 All of these partnerships are occurring while the SPLC publicly keeps pressure on Facebook, Google, and Twitter, calling for them to do more to combat “hate speech” on their platforms, which invariably means giving the SPLC more power in their private dealings with the companies.
The SPLC led five other left-wing groups in forming a coalition called “Change the Terms” that aims to pressure all major technology service providers into setting speech codes that govern what their clients say both on and off their platforms. The coalition demands that each company agree to implement a specific set of policies already drafted by the activists. Among the required changes: empowering third-party organizations (like, say, the SPLC) to flag “hateful” actors. The activists’ targets aren’t limited to Facebook, Google, and Twitter (although those companies are certainly on the list) but also include credit card companies and crowdfunding sites. Once a company caves to the pressure and agrees to adopt the left-wing contract, it has essentially deputized the SPLC to decide who can stay on its platform or use its services and who must leave. (After all, under this arrangement, it is the SPLC who defines who is an “extremist.”) Once the contract is official, the activists immediately shift gears to identifying the users or customers the company is now required to ban from its platform. As we’ll see, the left-wingers’ plan for weaponizing tech platforms bears resemblance to the “Social Credit Score” system adopted by the Chinese government. Only instead of the government monitoring your private behavior and limiting your access to society as a result, it’s a collective of left-wing advocacy groups partnered with multinational corporations. Activists are working to harness the power of Big Tech and commerce to implement ideas that are similar in principle to those practiced by Communist China, and there is no law that can stop them; First Amendment rights do not protect you from private organizations’ limitations on speech. It’s a devious strategy, and it’s working.
Media Matters is a left-wing political group devoted to silencing conservative viewpoints in the media. For much of its history, it focused on attacking Fox News, but in recent years it has targeted conservative voices online as well. Media Matters presented a forty-four-page memo to liberal donors at a January 2017 summit that bragged about its plans to work with Facebook and Google to destroy non-liberal media outlets.22 The memo argued that enlisting Big Tech in the left-wing campaign to destroy conservative media is essential if liberals hope to defeat Donald Trump in 2020. Media Matters promised to accomplish exactly that. “Key right-wing targets will see their influence diminished as a result of our work,” the left-wing group promised. The leftists don’t need to banish every conservative from social media, the
y only need to dominate social media the way they dominate the mainstream media. They’re okay with discussion that takes place within boundaries they set (as on MSNBC), and as long they win the elections that matter to them (like the White House). Since November 8, 2016, they have shifted the digital landscape against conservative voices. By November 3, 2020, they will have transformed (or rigged) social media in ways that will have far-reaching implications for America.
CHAPTER THREE Facebook
Facebook’s influence over the American population is astounding: seven in ten Americans use Facebook, and three-quarters of those users say they’re on Facebook every single day, an early 2019 Pew Research Center study found.1 A September 2018 Pew study found that 43 percent of Americans obtain news primarily through Facebook, leading the research institute to conclude that Facebook “is still far and away the site Americans most commonly use for news.”2
Facebook wields enormous power over its users and has no qualms about exercising it. The tech giant collaborated with academics from Cornell and the University of California San Francisco to conduct experiments on the effects that tweaks to its News Feed algorithm had on users’ emotional states. The kicker: Facebook used its customers as guinea pigs in the experiment without their knowledge.3 In the experiment, which involved a jaw-dropping 689,000 users, Facebook manipulated individuals’ newsfeeds by increasing the share of positive material presented to some users and increasing the share of negative material presented to others. The results of the experiment revealed that Facebook could influence an individual user’s own posts in a positive or negative direction by skewing the information the user was exposed to on his or her news feed.4 In other words, Facebook tested its societal influence by tampering with the emotional states of private citizens without their consent. Facebook did so without remorse.