Congressional Testimony: The Leading Activists for Online Censorship Are
Corporate Journalists
A hearing of the House Subcommittee focused on anti-trust and monopoly
abuses examines the role of the corporate media in these growing
pathologies.
Glenn Greenwald
Mar 14
Hearing of the House Judiciarys Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and
Administrative Law, Mar. 12, 2021
There are not many Congressional committees regularly engaged in substantive
and serious work most are performative but the House Judiciarys
Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law is an
exception. Chaired by Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI) and Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO),
it is, with a few exceptions, composed of lawmakers whose knowledge of tech
monopolies and anti-trust law is impressive.
In October, the Committee, after a sixteen-month investigation, produced one
of those most comprehensive and informative reports by any government body
anywhere in the world about the multi-pronged threats to democracy raised by
four Silicon Valley monopolies: Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple. The
450-page report also proposed sweeping solutions, including ways to break up
these companies and/or constrain them from controlling our political
discourse and political life. That report merits much greater attention and
consideration than it has thus far received.
The Subcommittee held a hearing on Friday and I was invited to testify along
with Microsoft President Brad Smith; President of the News
Guild-Communications Workers of America Jonathan Schleuss, the Outkicks
Clay Travis, CEO of the Graham Media Group Emily Barr, and CEO of the News
Media Alliance David Chavern. The ostensible purpose the hearing was a
narrow one: to consider a bill that would vest media outlets with an
exemption from anti-trust laws to collectively bargain with tech companies
such as Facebook and Google so that they can obtain a greater share of the
ad revenue. The representatives of the news industry and Microsoft who
testified were naturally in favor because this bill (they have been heavily
lobbying for it) because it would benefit them commercially in numerous way
(the Microsoft President maintained the conceit that the Bill-Gates-founded
company was engaging in self-sacrifice for the good of Democracy by
supporting the bill but the reality is the Bing search engine owners are in
favor of anything that weakens Google).
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While I share the ostensible motive behind the bill to stem the serious
crisis of bankruptcies and closings of local news outlets I do not believe
that this bill will end up doing that, particularly because it empowers the
largest media outlets such as The New York Times and MSNBC to dominate the
process and because it does not even acknowledge, let alone address, the
broader problems plaguing the news industry, including collapsing trust by
the public (a bill that limited this anti-trust exemption to small local
news outlets so as to allow them to bargain collectively with tech companies
in their own interest would seem to me to serve the claimed purpose much
better than one which empowers media giants to form a negotiating cartel).
But the broader context for the bill is the one most interesting and the one
which I focused in my opening statement and testimony: namely, the
relationship between social media and tech giants on the one hand, and the
news media industry on the other. Contrary to the popular narrative
propagated by news outlets in which they are cast as the victims of the
supremely powerful Silicon Valley giants that narrative is sometimes (not
always, but sometimes) the opposite of reality: much if not most Silicon
Valley censorship of political speech emanates from pressure campaigns led
by corporate media outlets and their journalists, demanding that more and
more of their competitors and ideological adversaries be silenced. Big
media, in other words, is coopting the power of Big Tech for their own
purposes.
My written opening testimony, which is on the Committees site, is also
printed below. The video of the full hearing can be seen here. Here is the
video of my opening five-minute statement:
My full written statement, which focused on the key role played by corporate
news outlets in agitating for online censorship against their competitors
and ideological adversaries and the threat that poses to democracy, is
printed below:
________________________________________
Opening Statement of Glenn Greenwald
March 12, 2021
Before the House Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative
Law
Mr. Chairman and members of the Committee:
Thank you for the opportunity to testify.
I am a constitutional lawyer, a journalist, and the author of six books on
civil liberties, media and politics. After graduating New York University
School of Law in 1994, I worked as a constitutional and media law litigator
for more than a decade, first at the firm of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz,
and then at a firm I co-founded in 1997. During my work as a lawyer, I
represented numerous clients in First Amendment free speech and press
freedom cases, including individuals with highly controversial views who
were targeted for punishment by state and non-state actors alike, as well as
media outlets subjected to repressive state limitations on their rights of
expression and reporting.
Since 2005, I have worked primarily as a journalist and author, reporting
extensively on civil liberties debates, assaults on free speech and a free
press, the value of a free and open internet, the implications of growing
Silicon Valley monopolistic power, and the complex relationship between
corporate media outlets and social media companies. That reporting has
received the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service and the George Polk
Award for National Security Reporting. In 2013, I co-founded the online news
outlet The Intercept, and in 2016 co-founded its Brazilian branch, The
Intercept Brazil.
Over the last several years, my journalistic interest in and concern about
the dangers of Silicon Valleys monopoly power has greatly intensified --
particularly as wielded by Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple. The dangers
posed by their growing power manifest in multiple ways. But I am principally
alarmed by the repressive effect on free discourse, a free press, and a free
internet, all culminating in increasingly intrusive effects on the flow of
information and ideas and an increasingly intolerable strain on a healthy
democracy.
Three specific incidents over the last four months represent a serious
escalation in the willingness of tech monopolies to intrude into and exert
control over our domestic politics through censorship and other forms of
information manipulation:
In the weeks leading up to the 2020 presidential election, The New
York Post, the nations oldest newspaper, broke a major story based on
documents and emails obtained from the laptop of Hunter Biden, son of the
front-running presidential candidate Joe Biden. Those documents shed
substantial light not only on the efforts of Hunter and other family members
of President Biden to trade on his name and their influence on him for
lucrative business deals around the world, but also raised serious questions
about the extent to which President Biden himself was aware of and involved
in those efforts.
But Americans were barred from discussing that reporting on Twitter, and
were actively impeded from reading about it by Facebook.
That is because Twitter imposed a full ban on its users ability to link to
the story: not just on their public Twitter pages but even in private
Twitter chats. Twitter even locked the account of The New York Post,
preventing the newspaper from using that platform for almost two weeks
unless they agreed to voluntarily delete any references to their reporting
about the Hunter Biden materials (the paper, rightfully, refused).
Facebooks censorship of this reporting was more subtle and therefore more
insidious: a life-long Democratic Party operative who is now a Facebook
official, Andy Stone, announced (on Twitter) that Facebook would be
reducing [the articles] distribution on our platform pending a review by
Facebook's third-party fact checking partners. In other words, Facebook
tinkered with its algorithms to prevent the dissemination of this reporting
about a long-time politician who was leading the political party for which
this Facebook official spent years working (See The Intercept, Facebook and
Twitter Cross a Far More Dangerous Line Than What They Censor, Oct. 15,
2020).
This fact-check promised by Facebook never came. That is likely because it
was not the New York Posts reporting which turned out to be false but
rather the claims made by these two social media giants to justify its
suppression. The censorship justification was that the documents on which
the reporting was based constituted either hacked materials and/or
Russian disinformation.
Neither of those claims is true. Even the FBI has acknowledged that there is
no evidence whatsoever of any involvement by the Russian government in the
procurement of that laptop, and not even the Biden family, to this very day,
has claimed that a single word contained in the published documents is
fabricated or otherwise inauthentic. Ample evidence -- including the
testimony of others involved in the original creation and circulation of
those documents -- demonstrates that they were fully genuine.
This means that two of the largest and most powerful Silicon Valley giants
suppressed crucial information about a leading presidential candidate -- the
one which employees at their companies overwhelmingly supported -- shortly
before voting commenced. While Twitters CEO Jack Dorsey apologized for this
banning and acknowledged that it may have been wrong, Facebook has never
done so.
While we will never know whether this censorship altered the outcome of the
election, it is clear that this was one of the most direct acts of
information repression about an American presidential election in decades.
That was possible only because of the vast power wielded by these platforms
over our political discourse and our political lives.
In the wake of the January 6 riot at the Capitol, Facebook, Google,
Twitter and numerous other Silicon Valley giants united to remove the
democratically elected sitting President of the United States from their
platforms.
While many defenders of this corporate censorship tried to minimize it by
claiming the President could still be heard by giving speeches and holding
press conferences, several leading news outlets followed suit by announcing
that they would not carry his speeches live and would only allow to be heard
the excerpts they deemed to be safe and responsible.
In response, numerous world leaders -- including several who had clashed in
the past with President Trump -- expressed grave concerns about the dangers
posed to democracy by the ability of tech monopolies to effectively remove
even democratically elected leaders from the internet.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel argued through her spokesperson that it is
problematic that the presidents accounts have been permanently suspended,
adding that the right to freedom of opinion is of fundamental importance.
Attempts to regulate speech, the Chancellor said, can be interfered with,
but by law and within the framework defined by the legislature -- not
according to a corporate decision.
The European Unions Commissioner for Internal Markets Thierry Breton
warned: The fact that a CEO can pull the plug on POTUSs loudspeaker
without any checks and balances is perplexing. Commissioner Breton noted
that this collective Silicon Valley ban is not only confirmation of the
power of these platforms, but it also displays deep weaknesses in the way
our society is organized in the digital space. (CNBC, Germanys Merkel
hits out at Twitter over problematic Trump ban, Jan. 21, 2021).
The Health Secretary for the United Kingdom, Matt Hanckock, sounded similar
alarms. Speaking to the BBC, he said tech giants are taking editorial
decisions that raise a very big question about how social media is
regulated, adding: Thats clear because theyre choosing who should and
shouldnt have a voice on their platform (CNBC, Trumps social media bans
are raising new questions on tech regulation, Jan. 11, 2021).
Objections to Silicon Valleys removal of President Trump from their
platforms were even more severe from officials with the government of French
President Emmanuel Macron. The French Minister for European Union Affairs
Clement Beaune pronounced himself shocked by the news of President Trumps
banning, arguing: This should be decided by citizens, not by a CEO. And
Frances Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said: There needs to be public
regulation of big online platforms, calling big tech one of the threats
to democracy (Bloomberg News, Germany and France Oppose Trumps Twitter
Exile, Jan. 11, 2021).
Perhaps the most fervent and eloquent warnings about the dangers posed by
this episode came from Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. In a
press conference held the day after the announcement, he said:
Its a bad omen that private companies decide to silence, to censor. That is
an attack on freedom. Lets not be creating a world government with the
power to control social networks, a world media power. And also a censorship
court, like the Holy Inquisition, but in order to shape public opinion. This
is really serious.
The Associated Press further quoted President López Obrador as asking: How
can a company act as if it was all powerful, omnipotent, as a sort of
Spanish Inquisition on what is expressed?. And AP confirmed that Mexicos
president vowed to lead an international effort to combat what he considers
censorship by social media companies that have blocked or suspended the
accounts of U.S. President Donald Trump, and is reaching out to other
governments to form a common front on the issue (Associated Press, Mexican
President Mounts Campaign Against Social Media Bans, Jan. 14, 2021).
Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald
Please listen to the Mexican President's warnings about Silicon Valley
censorship when asked about the Trump ban. Following the center-right
Chancellor Merkel, the leftist AMLO said they were becoming a world media
power" anointing themselves "judges of the Holy Inquisition":
January 11th 2021
4,700 Retweets10,916 Likes
These world leaders are expressing the same grave concern: that Silicon
Valley giants wield power that is, in many instances, greater than that of
any sovereign nation-state. But unlike the governments which govern those
countries, tech monopolies apply these powers arbitrarily, without checks
and without transparency. When doing so, they threaten not only American
democracy but democracies around the world.
Critics of Silicon Valley power over political discourse for years
have heard the same refrain: if you dont like how they are moderating
content and policing discourse, you can go start your own social media
platform that is more permissive. Leaving aside the centuries-old
recognition that it is impossible, by definition, to effectively compete
with monopolies, we now have an incident vividly proving how inadequate that
alternative is.
Several individuals who primarily identify as libertarians heard this
argument from Silicon Valleys defenders and took it seriously. They set out
to create a social media competitor to Twitter and Facebook -- one which
would provide far broader free expression rights for users and, more
importantly, would offer greater privacy protections than other Silicon
Valley giants by refusing to track those users and commoditize them for
advertisers. They called it Parler, and in early January, 2021, it was the
single most-downloaded app in the Apple Play Store. This success story
seemed to be a vindication for the claim that it was possible to create
competitors to existing social media monopolies.
But now, a mere two months after it ascended to the top of the charts,
Parler barely exists. That is because several members of Congress with the
largest and most influential social media platforms demanded that Apple and
Google remove Parler from their stores and ban any further downloading of
the app, and further demanded that Amazon, the dominant provider of web
hosting services, cease hosting the site. Within forty-eight hours, those
three Silicon Valley monopolies complied with those demands, rendering
Parler inoperable and effectively removing it from the internet (See How
Silicon Valley, in a Show of Monopolistic Force, Destroyed Parler, Glenn
Greenwald, Jan. 12, 2021).
The justification of this collective banning was that Parler had hosted
numerous advocates of and participants in the January 6 Capitol riot. But
even if that were a justification for removing an entire platform from the
internet, subsequent reporting demonstrated that far more planning and
advocacy of that riot was done on other platforms, including Facebook,
Google-owned YouTube, Instagram and Twitter (See The Washington Post,
Facebooks Sandberg deflected blame for Capitol riot, but new evidence
shows how platform played role, Jan. 13, 2021; Forbes, Sheryl Sandberg
Downplayed Facebooks Role In The Capitol Hill SiegeJustice Department
Files Tell A Very Different Story, Feb. 7, 2021).
Whatever else one might want to say about the destruction of Parler, it was
a stark illustration of how these Silicon Valley giants could obliterate
even a highly successful competitor overnight, with little effort, by
uniting to do so. And it laid bare how inadequate is the claim that Silicon
Valleys monopolies can be challenged through competition.
How Congress sets out to address Silicon Valleys immense and undemocratic
power is a complicated question, posing complex challenges. The proposal to
vest media companies with an antitrust exemption in order to allow them to
negotiate as a consortium or cartel seeks to rectify a real and serious
problem -- the vacuuming up of advertising revenue by Google and Facebook at
the expense of the journalistic outlets which create the news content being
monetized -- but empowering large media companies could easily end up
creating more problems than it solves.
That is particularly so given that it is often media companies that are the
cause of Silicon Valley censorship of and interference in political speech
of the kind outlined above. When these social media companies were first
created and in the years after, they wanted to avoid being in the business
of content moderation and political censorship. This was an obligation
foisted upon them, often by the most powerful media outlets using their
large platforms to shame these companies and their executives for failing to
censor robustly enough.
Sometimes this pressure was politically motivated -- demanding the banning
of people whose ideologies sharply differs from those who own and control
these media outlets -- but more often it was motivated by competitive
objectives: a desire to prevent others from creating independent platforms
and thus diluting the monopolistic stranglehold that corporate media outlets
exert over our political discourse. Further empowering this already-powerful
media industry -- which has demonstrated it will use its force to silence
competitors under the guise of quality control -- runs the real risk of
transferring the abusive monopoly power from Silicon Valley to corporate
media companies or, even worse, encouraging some sort of de facto merger in
which these two industries pool their power to the mutual benefit of each.
This Subcommittee produced one of the most impressive and comprehensive
reports last October detailing the dangers of the classic monopoly power
wielded by Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple. That report set forth
numerous legislative and regulatory solutions to comply with the law and a
consensus of economic and political science experts about the need to break
up monopolies wherever they arise.
Until that is done, none of these problems can be addressed in ways other
than the most superficial, piecemeal and marginal. Virtually every concern
that Americans across the political spectrum express about the dangers of
Silicon Valley power emanates from the fact that they have been permitted to
flout antitrust laws and acquire monopoly power. None of those problems --
including their ability to police and control our political discourse and
the flow of information -- can be addressed until that core problem is
resolved.
________________________________________
What is most striking is that while Silicon Valley censorship of online
speech and interference in political discourse is recognized as a grave
menace to a healthy democracy around the democratic world, it is often
dismissed in the U.S. especially by journalists as some sort of trivial
culture war question when they are not actively cheering and even
demanding more of it. Even more bizarre is that opposition to oligarchical
censorship and monopoly power is often depicted by the liberal-left as a
right-wing cause, largely because they perceive (inaccurately) that such
oligarchical discourse policing will operate in their favor.
Whatever labels one wants to apply to it, it should not require much work to
recognize that vesting this magnitude of power in the hands of unaccountable
billionaires, who operate outside the democratic process yet are highly
influenced by public media-led pressure campaigns, is unsustainable.Thanks
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