Silicon Valley tech companies have responded to the terror in Charlottesville with an unprecedented purge of Nazi and white nationalist web sites. It’s not just the big companies that you interact with every day, like Facebook, Google and PayPal, but lesser-known platforms like GoDaddy and Cloudflare—which support the critical infrastructure of the internet—that have joined a gloves-off campaign to sanction and suppress the online sewers of the far Right.
The premises of John Stuart Mill’s brand of liberalism—that the truth will eventually win out in a free and fair fight; that we should counter bad ideas with good ideas; that if we don’t hear the bad ideas we’ll forget why we opposed them in the first place—tell us that this is a bad idea. Sure, it’s permissible under the First Amendment as these are private companies, not government actors. But in a society where certain technology platforms have near-monopoly control of the flow of political opinion, this defense is too pat.
And according to the classically liberal school, it is better for the filth to exist so that it can be mocked and repudiated than for it to be stamped out altogether. There is arguably some positive value, for example, even in the Daily Stormer’s piece on “kike ‘journalist’ (((Jason Willick)))”, in that it led me to visit a part of the internet I’m not frequently exposed to and see just how vile and frankly pathetic much of this material is. Perhaps scrubbing such sites will counterproductively further the alt-right’s persecution narrative and strengthen hate movements even as it hides them from view.
But Mill’s most powerful argument for the free exchange of ideas is that people should be less certain of their own rightness and more open to correction. So those of us with classically liberal instincts should also consider the possibility that our position needs to be revised—that marketplaces of ideas on social media are failing and that some command-and-control by the gatekeepers is actually a better approach if we want a free society to survive and thrive.
The best argument for what the web companies are doing would begin with the premise that this type of soft suppression is not new. In the 1950s and 1960s, when the American political system was more stable and prosperous than it is now, and elites more secure of their status, the flow of political opinion was tightly controlled—not by the government, but by a small handful of New York-based TV news networks and magazines, which mostly hewed to the same set of establishmentarian opinions. First Amendment rights were protected even as the media and political class asserted its privilege in sketching out an Overton Window, forcing people to work much harder than they would need to today to access radical ideas. That system was gradually weakened by cable TV and FCC deregulation, but the internet created a radically new challenge, threatening to dismantle hierarchies and flatten the flow of information altogether. Starting in the 1990s, anyone could set up a website or a blog. The rise of social media took this process a step further, granting anyone and everyone access to a highly efficient and receptive online forum with billions of listeners.
The web pioneers facilitating this shift saw themselves as hippie-style disrupters who would challenge governments and bring about a utopian democratic world. (Recall the brief tech euphoria around the so-called “Twitter revolutions” across the Middle East). But like all revolutionaries who actually win power, technology companies realized that things weren’t quite so simple. Silicon Valley rushed the commanding heights of American media, seizing power from the centrist TV anchors of yore. Without realizing quite what they were doing, computer nerds became the de facto gatekeepers of ideas for the American political system. And they soon realized that the fight-the-power attitude that animated their founding could no longer obtain. We are now seeing these companies make their first moves to set basic boundaries on elite-sanctioned political debate—a task not unlike the one that American media elites performed confidently a half-century ago.
After all, as Jonathan Rauch argued in Kindly Inquisitors, his brilliant 1993 defense of freedom of thought, liberal debate doesn’t mean that all claims are given equal weight. We depend on various kinds of elites and experts outside of government to filter the flow of knowledge. That’s why, for example, science classes don’t teach creationism, and respectable journals don’t publish it. The more consolidated media world that existed before the internet really did make less room for radicalism, and America was just as free.
The problem with the route Silicon Valley is taking isn’t that it’s bad, in principle, for elites to disfavor extremist and incorrect ideas. This is part of the job description of any elite. Rather, it’s that Silicon Valley corporate executives aren’t up to the task. The elite gatekeepers of the pre-internet age (partly because of their gatekeeping) were presiding over a much less polarized society. They believed they had a responsibility to wield their power in the public interest. And people like Walter Cronkite commanded the trust of the vital center of the vast media-consuming public.
Contrast with Silicon Valley’s attempt to play referee in 2017. First, Silicon Valley has done nothing to win the trust of the moderate and Right-leaning segments of the American political spectrum. In 2014, Mozilla fired its CEO, Brendan Eich, for his previous contributions in support of California’s anti-same sex marriage campaign. In 2016, Facebook came under scrutiny for allegedly disfavoring Right-leaning news items in its algorithms and boosting Left-leaning ones. This year, Google summarily fired an engineer for an internal memo criticizing company’s diversity policies. After the white supremacist murder in Charlottesville, many companies blacklisted the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer, which seems all well and good—but Apple’s Tim Cook also chose to fight hate by publicly donating a million dollars to the Southern Poverty Law Center, an increasingly partisan organization that labels some legitimate political activists like Ayaan Hirsi Ali as “extremists.” These decisions are certainly defensible, but they reflect the actions of an industry that is seeking to act as an arm of liberal progressivism, not a neutral gatekeeper that Americans of all political stripes can trust to filter political content.
Moreover, unlike the media wise men of the mid-20th century, technology executives are obviously deeply uneasy with the gatekeeping role they are increasingly undertaking. As John Herrman wrote in the New York Times Magazine, technology companies have always self-consciously conceived of themselves as democratic spaces. “In the process of building private communities,” he argues, “these companies had put on the costumes of liberal democracies.” They “tend to refer to their customers in euphemistic, almost democratic terms: as ‘users’ or ‘members of a community’… They borrowed the language of rights to legitimize arbitrary rules.” Most companies have appealed to legalistic-sounding user policies in scrubbing hate groups from their sites. The CEO of Cloudflare was uncharacteristically honest when he said he “woke up one morning and decided that [Storm Front] shouldn’t be on the internet. No one should have that power.” If Silicon Valley doesn’t really believe in its own legitimacy to serve as a political gatekeeper, then why should the public?
The age of consolidated media wasn’t perfect—it was stifling and homogeneous and suppressed worthy causes. But it was able to productively suppress extremist views and sometimes serve the public interest because the people who controlled it did so confidently, with a sense of duty, and an awareness of the need to maintain the trust of a wide audience. The elites at the top of the new information hierarchy are, for now, utterly unprepared for such responsibilities. They are walled off politically from the rest of the country; they are more concerned with profit and image than with a public mission; and they have so internalized a crude small-d democratic vision of what the web should be that they are struggling to even explain why they should be able to wield this fearsome new authority.
The new media landscape will ultimately need to develop ways to filter knowledge and opinions in the public interest while respecting the First Amendment prohibition of government censorship. But so long as tech is what it is, a more anarchic web is probably better than a dictatorship-by-Mountain View.
