The Great Deplatforming: An alternate explanation for the Parler, et al, shutdowns
A common current narrative is that tech monopolists are suddenly acting of their own initiative and in concert to deplatform the burgeoning fascist insurgent movement within the US. I approve the deplatforming strongly, though I suspect an alternative significant motivating and coordfinating factor.
An example of the "tech monopoly abuse" narrative is Glenn Greenwald's more than slightly unhinged "How Silicon Valley, in a Show of Monopolistic Force, Destroyed Parler"
Greenwald's argument hinges on emotion, insinuation, invective, a completely unfounded premise, an absolute absence of evidence, and no consideration of alternative explanations: an overwhelmingly plausible ongoing law enforcement and national security operation, likely under sealed or classified indictments or warrants, in the face of ongoing deadly sedition lead by the President of the United States himself, including against the person of his own vice president and credible threats against the President-Elect and Inauguration.
Such an legal action is, of course, extraordinarily difficult to prove, and I cannot prove it. A critical clue for me, however, is the defection not just of Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Stripe, and other tech firms, but of Parler's legal counsel, who would have to be an exceptionally stealth-mode startup to fit Greenwald's, or other's, "it's the tech monopolists" narrative. I've tempered my degree of assurance and language ("plausible" rather than "probable"). Time will tell. But a keen and critical mind such as Grenwald's should at least be weighing the possibility. He instead seems bent only on piking old sworn enemies, with less evidence or coherence than I offer.
This is the crux of Greenwald's argument. It's all he's got:
On Thursday, Parler was the most popular app in the United States. By Monday, three of the four Silicon Valley monopolies united to destroy it.
I'm no friend of the tech monopolists myself. The power demonstrated here does concern me, greatly. I've long railed against Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple, among other tech monopolists. Largely because as monopolies they are power loci acting through their occupation of a common resource, outside common control, and not serving the common weal. Hell: Facebook, Google (YouTube), Reddit, and Twitter played a massive role in creating the current fascist insurrection in the US, along with even more enthusiastic aid and comfort from traditional media, across the spectrum. Damage that will take decades to repair, if ever.
But, if my hypothesis is correct, the alternative explanation would be the opposite of this: the state asserting power over and through monopolies in the common interest, in support of democratic principles, for the common weal. And that I can support.
I don't know that this is the case. I find it curious that I seem to be the only voice suggesting it. Time should tell.
And after this is over, yes, Silicon Valley, in its metonymic sense standing for the US and global tech industry, has to face its monopoly problem, its free speech problem (in both sincere and insincere senses), its surveillance problem (capitalist, state, criminal, rogue actor), its censorship problem, its propaganda problem (mass and computational), its targeted manipulation adtech problem, its trust problem, its identity problem, its truth and disinformation problems, its tax avoidance problem, its political influence problem.
Virtually all of which are inherent aspects of monopoly: "Propaganda, censorship, and surveillance are all attributes of monopoly" https://joindiaspora.com/posts/7bfcf170eefc013863fa002590d8e506
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24771470
But, speaking as a space alien cat myself, Greenwald is so far off base here he's exited the Galaxy.
Update: 2h30m after posting, NPR have mentioned sealed indictments and speculated on whether the President might be charged, in special coverage.
Late edits: 2022-1-23 Typos: s/inconcert/in concert/; s/would bet he/would be the/;
I've been thinking about all these discussions about social media platforms and censorship (which I frankly find boring - they mostly rehash the same extreme and misguided arguments for and against censorship). Then it hit me: since the public square has essentially become outsourced to private companies, governments can engage in censorship laundering - instead of overtly declaring someone or something as undesirable, they can just pressure private companies to ban topics and deplatform people. Suddenly, it's "not censorship", because "private companies don't owe you a platform".
I'm not saying this was the case here (I'm favoring the "social media companies decide to kiss the new US government's ass, just like they always do" hypothesis), but I think it's pretty plausible that this is happening in the US in general. It's similar to how government can exert control on journalists - just a hint of pulling priority access to interesting stories is enough to keep news publishing in check.
That is an extremely valid and cogent point.
It's possible also the old Hitchcock formula: the hint of terror is more frightening than the terror itself. Government could hint, companies fall in line.
I think of it more as abdicating of responsibility to the private sector.
I don't think you are. Certainly the HackerNews crowd seems pretty evenly split between "this was totally justified," and "these companies are unfairly wielding their power!"
But the other part of it is that political discussions in this country are so broken right now that there's little value in expressing an opinion. Between the people who are downright opposed to what you put forth in a discussion (about half of them it turns out), and the people who share your view but want to be pedantic dickweeds and nitpick irrelevant points about how your argument isn't quite right, why bother speaking up? (Oops! Did I just do that very thing? I can't tell anymore.)
In any event, I pretty much agree with what you've said here. I find this particularly funny, though:
Yeah, because everyone wanted to see what kind of crazy was going on there, and also to take screenshots to collect images of people incriminating themselves. That doesn't in any way indicate that a large majority of the US agrees with the terrorists or thinks the app has any value. It's entirely disingenuous to suggest that the reason it was the most popular app was because people wanted to be on it and use it for its intended purpose.
The HN split is between views both presuming the SV monopolist's actions are endogenous and volitional, rather than, as I suggest, at least in part exogenous and compelled, or at least strongly encouraged. I seem alone in suggesting this possibility, that I've seen.
Again, I support the deplatforming.
(Edit: clarified views, s/that/both presuming/)
Ah, I see what you mean. Fair point! It was not something that occurred to me before you mentioned it, but it certainly sounds plausible to me.
To answer Greenwald:
Because there's not really bad groups to purge from Parler. Parler is the bad group, by and large. On Facebook or Twitter, most people are not calling for violence, even political extremists, and the vast majority of the violent rhetoric is coming from one political alignment. With Facebook, the majority of discussion is not aiming for violent or racist rhetoric. You can actually purge it and still have a functioning website with a large userbase.
I think something similar would've happened if there wasn't an oligopoly on cloud services and mobile platforms. Parler maybe could have crawled to a couple of cloud providers to stay online, but eventually nobody would've wanted to take them. It was just faster with fewer companies available.
Part of what I think happened is no company wanted to be the first to take any action. I think it may go as far back as Trump being banned from Twitter, the first major move in this recent series of events, to sort of "okay" the effective deletion of Parler. Once Twitter crossed that line, everybody else followed, if for no other reason than they knew it could be done. I'm obviously not discussing each company's specific motivations, but to be honest I'm not sure if it's political, economic, or some combination of things preventing them from taking action earlier, or taking action now.
Also, did they "make a flamboyant showing"? If I recall, they sent pretty straightforward letters and/or emails to Parler explaining what policies were violated and even offering to leave the app up if Parler put forth a coherent roadmap of how they were going to moderate violence on their platform. It sounded to me very similar to what other small-time developers have said happened when their apps have been found to violate these company's policies.
It's probably one of those things that depends on perspective. I felt they were fair, with a simple ultimatum: "Fix your shit, or we'll remove you." But I also don't run a "free speech" platform while ignoring the fact it's causing massive problems.
I didn't see anything out of the ordinary here until Amazon yanked their service, but even that's more or less unrelated (same reasons, different, independent action). As you said, devs get these ultimatums all the time, but even then, can generally get back into the store if they've been kicked out but also put in an honest effort to fix the violation that just came up a little late.
To be clear, you're quoting and responding to Greenwald, not me. And yes, Parler is the bad group.
The penguins-massed-on-an-ice-floe notion is one I've had in similar cases.
I edited my comment a hair to reflect that.
Thanks.
I don't have any particular evidence either, and as you say it's hard to prove anything either way.
But if we're going to compare priors, I don't think any private coordination is necessary for deplatforming to spread virally among like-minded people who are susceptible to the idea, and for it to go beyond Silicon Valley companies to other parties like lawyers and AirBnb hosts. Sure, some private coordination might have happened, but you don't need anything beyond watching the national news. Furthermore, companies can see what others are doing and pile on.
Consider how quickly the George Floyd protests spread. Was that privately coordinated? Maybe, sometimes, but so what? We are all plugged into the same news sources and public coordination is all you need.
This is sort of like seeing airlines or gas stations match prices and thinking they must be conspiring. All they need to do is watch each other.
And what consideration does this hypothisis take of law enforcement or natsec operations?
Nice jigsaw puzzle, but there are still pieces on the table.
Sure, it could be something like that. Maybe I'll bet one chip on that hypothesis, as a hedge.
I have been a fan of Glenn Greenwald since the Snowden leaks and he has done an amazing job mining and reporting on that trove of information. Snowden did not choose Greenwald out of a hat, his past pedigree as a lawyer and his reporting history showed that he was willing to speak truth to power. But Glenn Greenwald is dogmatic and an absolutist. In Glenn's world view, the US Hegemon is a force for evil and he will do what ever is politically advantageous to damage said mythic beast and I can understand it seeing what he has had to deal with.[1]
So when I read Glenn's work, I attack it with that lens. And, well, Glenn has been kinda been missing substance lately when attacking the US Hegemon. Everyone knows his shtick at this point and he is not bring any new info, the most interesting thing about his Hunter Biden piece was his torching of the relationship with the organization he built from the ground up[2].
That does not mean I dismiss anything that he has to say out of hand, I just have to put on my my Glenn Greenwald glasses to see what he is trying to say. I still think he offers a lot of valuable information and perspective. But he is not a neutral news reporter. Also, of special note, Glenn's covering of Brazilian politics is of an impressive caliber.
Both politicians and others have made it very clear that the misinformation and radicalization problems on the big platforms are issues that need to be solved. If the tech companies won't do it, lawmakers will.
Given that environment it's no surprise that companies acted quickly in response to an attack that has caused a dramatic emotional response and has lawmakers scrambling to respond to in any way they can. They're essentially moving themselves out of the crosshairs.
That's your external motivator. Law enforcement wouldn't compel a company to take Parler offline. They'd force them to share all the data instead. Then once they had a strong enough case they'd go after them directly.
This is just bad epistemology. Just because a scenario is technically plausible, doesn't mean it is worthy of consideration without evidence. I know this isn't being claimed directly, but even considering such a proposition without evidence is, ironically, the kind of justification most often wielded by the folks raiding the Capitol to justify ever increasing claims made on a relatively small amount of evidence (not to draw a comparison or "both sides" this issue, just drawing a connection for how critically weak this form of claim is epistemically.)
Absent evidence for an alternative explanation, the most likely scenario is that these companies all decided at roughly the same time to deplatform Trump. Why? Likely the liability has outweighed the value gained at this point. Twitter has cashed in Trump for all he's got, and now that he's at the end of his presidency the value Twitter gets from having him on their platform is nearing its end (on top of the additional liability with the Capitol Riots.) AWS, Apple, and Google probably saw the long-term liability Parler was going to be and probably correctly identified this as the most opportune moment to rid themselves of that risk, especially since they wouldn't be doing it alone.
This is a false dichotomy. There are numerous plausible alternative explanations, but one from a materialist, sociological perspective may go something like this: fascist movements often come in times of crisis where the Petit Bourgeois (petty landlords, small business owners, the types who can afford boats and to fly to the capitol in the middle of a work week) is in an increasingly precarious position, and when faced with the prospect of proletarianization, will lash out against the capitalist class as well as the working class.
What we are seeing is a largely petit bourgeois rebellion being crushed by the capitalist class. Should there be a strong enough working class movement that is a threat to the capitalist class in said time of crisis, we might've seen solidarity built between the petit bourgeois and the bourgeoisie, or the martialing of intersecting social hierarchies against the working class (racism, anti-Semitism, etc.), but that isn't the case. There isn't any reason for the capitalist class not to crush this movement.
Of course that's not to say they haven't been handled with kids gloves. Had leftist revolutionaries or BLM stormed the capitol, there would have certainly been mass casualties and much blood shed.
To be clear, I'm suggesting a possible explanation, a hypothesis. Both supporting and falsifying evidence can emerge, or do exist, and should reflect on likelihood. In an emergent situation we cannot simply work off proof, but must use inference and prior experience.
The scenario is plausible, and:
For what it's worth, a bit of counterevidence is YouTube's only temporarily suspending Trump's channel. Though that itself might be strategic, and several earlier bans were temporary, then extended. In Greenwald's case, key claims (no Parler participants at coup) have been robustly disproved. In response, Greenwald has doubled down on them.
Finally: both hypotheses under consideration --- Greenwald's and mine --- are largely unfounded. Specifically, Greenwald's argument fails your tests harder than mine as there is in fact no supporting evidence provided at all.
The question is one of how best to account for visible actions based on thin and suspect information, explaining not just observed behaviour but causal or institutional mechanism or understanding. A working model should be useful and consistent, and ultimately stand to historical evidence. That will take a while.
It's an interesting theory, but I'm not convinced. It doesn't really pass occam's razor:
Again, Greenwald's failure to even consider this before tilting at windmills is a serious lapse of intelligence.
I still fully admit proof is absent, but your objections lack substance.
I dunno, they're less of an objection and more of a general "doesn't it make more sense that this happened organically?".
And are you maybe focusing a little too much on what greenwald has to say? I don't find that man has much of anything worth reading. He got "lucky" with Snowden but since then he's been IMO beyond useless. Your theory doesn't have to be a response to his, it can stand on its own.
Re: Greenwald: his Snowden reporting, and some of what he's written since, impressed me. In the past year or so, not so much. This piece is a big disappointment.
I had in fact originally thought of this independent of Greenwald's story. His piece gave a frame and foil for fleshing it out against something more substantive than your typical Internet Random's take.
(Nothing against Internet Randoms ...)
This honestly is starting to sound a lot like the QAnon theories: the State has a Plan to make everything OK. Evidence for the plan can be found by examining a series of initially unrelated-seeming events, while any lack of evidence for this Plan is just how good they are at keeping it secret until the time is right.
I mean, it might be true this time, but that's not because there's better evidence for it.
Mostly addressed here, though the assertion really isn't of some Big Plan and far more:
Your criticism applies equally to Greenwald's QAnon-level conspiracy theory.
Evidence appears thin, yes, tough my read is that there's slightly more for my view, several elements emerging since formulating it. In Greenwald's case, key claims (no Parler participants at coup) have been robustly disproved.
Listing out specific elements of support or counterindication would be more helpful than broad brush smears. Which is specifically how I structured my ccounterproposal to Greenwald.
Edit: 2022-1-23: markdown on slightly.
Further empty claims of Glenn Greenwald proving entirely false:
https://twitter.com/hannahgais/status/1349082704424427520
Greenwald tweeted:
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1348619731734028293
Noting his highly-conditioned and narrowly-scoped criteria (arrests are ongoing, and few to date), data obtained directly from Parler puts multiple members directly at the scene of the coup:
https://gizmodo.com/parler-users-breached-deep-inside-u-s-capitol-building-1846042905/
Greenwald is simply fabulating at this point.
The irony is, it is these monopolies that allowed these hate groups to recruit and flourish as they have in the first place. In the times before the internet was this aggregated, sites like Stormfront existed in dark corners of the internet where they pickled themselves into being impenetrable, insular communities. They could never have had the reach they get now without modern social media platforms that are designed to incentivize high-engagement participation and provide reach to each and every lonely, alienated person with no special effort.
This Times article covers the radicalization path many of these people took. It's clearly an affirmation/addiction loop driving them to do this and the psychological behaviors seem almost identical to what you would find around warning signs that your husband might have a compulsive gambling problem. The reason it manages to go beyond harming individuals to harming society is because these platforms are so big that this garbage manages to reach into people form every nook and cranny of society and dig these tenterhooks into them.
In other words, if these platform monopolies hadn't been monopolies the need to ban these communities never would have existed. It takes both gamified participation AND universal reach to make them as bad as they are. Since they became monopolies, they shirked their duties to society in not cutting stuff like this off sooner and banning this activity before it jumped the treshold into real world violence.
Sure, though that reckognition's been slow in coming. It's widely, but still not universally admitted now. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg is still in denial. In 2009, Twitter Revolutions were cheered so long as they occurred in Moldova, Tunesia, Iran, Egypt, Ukraine. Outside the U.S.
Chickens will roost.
Organisations are not unitary entities, and factions or differences exit, between executives, between managers, between managers and staff, among employees, investors, business partners, clients, and vendors. Consensus or controlling opinion shifts.
Disinformation, or role in revolution, is not contingent on private corporate monopolies. In The Matrix, John S. Waterman devotes much of his introduction of this 1990 guide to the burgeoning universe of global data networks to the just-occurred Tiananmen Square Massacre, much news, disinformation, and censorship of which occurred online. There was Serder Argic's denial of the Armenian Genocide spam on Usenet in the 1990s. A uniformly reachable amplifying channel is all that is required, and walled-garden networks arose in large part due to the filtering failures ... mostly spam, but also legally problematic content such as warez, CP, prostitution, illicit trade, and other factors.