The MAGA Doctrine Page 13

  However, that’s asking us to put a great deal of trust in an organization whose past CEO, Eric Schmidt (he held various leadership positions with Google and its parent company Alphabet from 2001–2017), was an advisor to the Obama 2008 campaign and who started a company that did consulting work for Hillary Clinton throughout her 2016 campaign. Google sells to both companies and political campaigns its ability to influence the public, and at the same time wants us to believe it does nothing to subtly influence that public at those times when the smallest nudges could yield the biggest changes in the state of the world.

  Anecdotal evidence suggests that searches for embarrassing stories on Clinton, for instance, when performed on other search engines yield the sorts of results you’d expect but on Google cough up pages of results debunking the criticisms. It’s hard to say. Google’s algorithm is proprietary, and search results vary in a personalized way with the user as well.

  But what Robert Epstein knows as a psychologist is how much difference little nudges can make, especially when multiplied by hundreds of millions of users. Whether or not it has yet been abused, that is an awesome power to be vested in the hands of one company.

  We have a window into how Google thinks when it does take an active hand in shaping content, in the form of the rules for use of YouTube, which Google owns.

  The Canadian conservative psychologist Jordan Peterson found himself locked out of his Google and YouTube accounts without explanation after he criticized the transgender movement—not advocating violence or hate, merely reaffirming that he thinks there are two biologically rooted genders. But that, combined with the Canadian government’s warnings it would treat anti-trans sentiment as bigotry, was likely enough to get Peterson frozen out for a few days despite his immense popularity (indeed, were he not so popular, popular enough to make a stink and get other well-known pundits tweeting and posting about the ban, it’s possible he would have remained permanently locked out by Google/YouTube).

  It’s hard to say for sure because YouTube gave him no explanation, and the same is true of many other conservative, libertarian, and non-mainstream leftist voices on YouTube. They might not all find themselves banned outright, but YouTube has other ways of punishing dissenters, most notoriously “demonetizing” videos so that ads do not appear on them, meaning the people who posted the videos make no revenue from them—while their approved rivals continue to rake it in.

  The power of social media platforms such as Google, YouTube, and Facebook to determine the bounds of acceptable discourse is unnerving enough when the president and his allies in government are butting heads with the liberals who run those platforms. What would it be like—realistically, we should say what will it be like—one day when those platforms are completely allied with the administration in Washington, presumably a left-leaning one, perhaps someday even a left-leaning one that dominates all three branches at the same time?

  President Trump sparring with tech companies may not always be pretty, but it beats watching the tech companies quietly blend into the state. Already, we know that the Deep State, US intelligence agencies that may be more loyal to their own agendas than to a given president, from time to time makes requests of the major social media companies, not to mention Amazon, to hand over user data that might help the government in an investigation (and the companies, to their credit, often resist if they do not think the users’ suspected activities rise to the level of terrorism or criminality). What happens if those tech companies one day have as collegial and enthusiastic a relationship with the government as Eric Schmidt did with Obama and Clinton?

  There is reason for a bit more paranoia here than is caused by asking what the nationalization of just any industry might look like. Traditional industries are fat, slow-moving targets compared to ephemeral social media. Traditional industries build things, sell them, ship them. We can see the results, tote up the widgets hauled.

  If the tech sector in its search engine–controlling and social media–managing form blends with the state, by contrast, we will be in the hands of the most advanced, algorithmic, artificial-intelligence-assisted, stealthy means for influencing public opinion the world has ever known.

  And this, too, will harken back to the days of Woodrow Wilson in a way. Madison Avenue public relations firms arose hand in hand with the modern military as Woodrow Wilson pushed the United States into World War I and expanded the domestic role of government as well. There is a longstanding precedent for the heads of media, military, and economic regulation to work in tandem, though they do not call too much attention to their collusion and sometimes make a big show of their internal divisions and clashes.

  We could simply hope for the best, assume that despite the incredible power to shape public opinion the tech sector is amassing, it will not abuse that power or collude with some factions in government against others. On one hand, of course, the tech companies, like all of us (even presidents) are presumed innocent until proven guilty. On the other hand, the tech companies have given us so many reasons to worry already. They assure us AI personal assistants Siri and Alexa aren’t listening to us and sharing our conversations with human analysts back at their parent companies—until they belatedly admit, oh, yes, they are doing that, though the way we were asked about it by the press or Congress didn’t technically match the methods we use and thus didn’t mandate full disclosure on our part.

  You thought when you got a device that could react to your voice commands it would be able to search for shopping items you requested. You just weren’t savvy enough to realize what that meant was that the personal assistant would be listening to you have sex, or your children talking about their deepest fears, with those sounds archived for later sharing with big teams of human researchers back at the company. Apparently you don’t understand contracts—or didn’t stop to think what you were signing onto when you clicked a little box saying your data could be used to help determine what ads and services to send you.

  Foolish you, thinking there’s anything sinister about all this. Meanwhile, reports emerge that the doorbell cameras Amazon provided customers to spot deliveries and visitors are also sharing their footage with police departments. What will it be next?

  All of this at least raises questions about how we interpret static, old-fashioned contracts, including implicit ones between customer and service-provider, in an era in which the technology that matters most in your life next year may not even exist when you check that little box on the user form this year.

  If populism, then, looks to the pure free-marketeer like a blunt instrument being used to slam both big government and big business, maybe it’s not because populism is retrograde and Luddite. Maybe populism is avant-garde. Maybe, like the complaints of conservatives banned from Twitter that they’re being excluded from contemporary democratic discourse—which at first sound maudlin and perhaps even like an inappropriate attempt to tell a private media company what to do—populism is a necessary, historically adaptive response to changing technology.

  Yes, regulating social media or breaking up Google could have clear downsides. Injecting more government power and politics into Google is likely to lead to an even more powerful and politicized government-Google partnership. However, without greater transparency and assurance of fairness, the social media companies will rightly remain targets of suspicion—especially when they sometimes already collude with government.

  Well before critics started complaining that in Trump we have a conspiracy theorist for a president, former CIA and National Security Agency staffer Edward Snowden woke the world up to the domestic snooping potential such agencies have, how massive databanks are already warehousing metadata, at the very least, about all our online communications and phone calls. That was a big enough blow to public trust. What happens when the walls between such agencies and the tech sector erode? And what happens if the government cannot peer into and police social media practices?

  You can already see this on the horizon with billio
n-dollar companies like Palantir. A private company with little transparency, they work extensively with hedge funds, banks, and manufacturers. However, they also work for almost every part of the government, processing data on terrorist suspects, illegal immigrants, and potentially illegal financial transactions.

  Populism arises in part from the sneaking suspicion that whatever balance of power is worked out between big-government and big-business forces, the average citizen’s say in it all will be quite small. If James Comey and other Obama allies could spy on candidate Trump and lie about it, and the latest documents released suggest that is the case, what hope is there for the privacy of the average citizen? Yet that same spying government is often the only tool big enough to challenge deceptive behavior by companies as powerful as Google and Facebook have become.

  If serious rivals to those companies do not arise soon in the marketplace without government getting more deeply involved, I think some sloppy government-mandated solution is almost inevitable, possibly including antitrust legal action against the big tech companies. I would prefer it didn’t come to that.

  Hong Kong might provide a glimpse of what a future populist revolt against an otherwise untouchable tech regime could look like. If you can’t trust online communication (or mainstream media), at some point you take to the streets in protest.

  For years, the Chinese government has been developing an elaborate online “social credit system” for tracking citizens and determining what benefits they’ll receive for good behavior, which is of course to say obedient behavior that doesn’t challenge the government. Beijing has had a little help in shaping its online totalitarian architecture from Google, which has been working on a skewed search system that doesn’t return information banned by the Communist Chinese government. It’s the kind of results-tweaking Google says it would never do, at least domestically—and yet they’re working on similar search censorship for the United States, presumably one that will be fully mandatory, without the force of communist legal compulsion.

  And yet I have to wonder how much difference that will make if the system ends up determining people’s credit ratings, access to social media, perhaps even ability to open a bank account. It is troubling that our tech companies would be comfortable working, or at least considering working, with Beijing after all the times those companies have suffered the theft of their intellectual property by China (or at least China’s routine failure to enforce intellectual property claims, one of the reasons for Trump’s heightened “trade war” and punitive tariff threats against that country).

  Then again, it is also amazing that Silicon Valley overwhelmingly donates to Democrats despite all the regulatory and tax roadblocks the Democrats throw in the way of commerce and innovation.

  Whether in China or the United States, though, one common way to cope with a regime of constant monitoring is simply to keep your head down. Don’t do or say anything risky. Most people in the United States already take that approach on social media—joking about not wanting a rude comment on Twitter to end up being mentioned in a job interview five years later. In Hong Kong, where the risks have been greater since it was formally taken over by the Communist mainland government in 1997, for two decades there have been worries about creeping “self-censorship.” The little island city-state with the big economy in theory retained virtually all of its rights from before 1997, the inheritance of a century and a half of British rule.

  But if you’re a newspaper editor or TV journalist there considering whether to mention some minor story reflecting badly on the new rulers in Beijing, it may just be easier . . . not to.

  And yet in mid-2019 we saw people take to the streets of Hong Kong in protest, despite all the overwhelming force at Beijing’s disposal and its thorough lock on people’s “social credit” scores, complete with travel bans and hiring restrictions for the disobedient. People can still rebel. And to the horror of some leftist journalists back in the United States, it seems they can even adopt American symbols such as our flag as emblems of freedom. Recall, similarly, that American blue jeans were sometimes a symbol of rebellion in the Soviet Union, jazz enraged the Nazis, dumped tea marked the start of our own revolution against the Brits, and you never quite know what the next free-floating imagery denoting freedom will be.

  In fact, it’s interesting that the far right and far left are often in agreement on the importance of transparency about the rules of speech at the big tech companies (and in government). After all, it’s the people on the fringes who get censored first. The cozy establishment liberals like Hillary Clinton are safe. They’re the ones who define what’s considered safe discourse, so no centrally mandated “etiquette” rules are ever likely to scare them. I might get censored by some social media platform. A far-left commentator like Tim Pool might get censored. Joe Biden, I promise you, never will be.

  So one thing we should be on the lookout for, as we urge greater transparency, not greater censorship, from online media, is the kind of mission creep we see from European Union regulators. To their credit, they see the dangerous potential of social media. To their credit, they call out social media companies for lying about their internal practices (in business, that’s called fraud, after all). But government rarely stops at just punishing fraud, which would accomplish so much. Instead, for example, the European Union has begun pressuring Facebook to take down any posts it deems hateful. And then the definition of hate expands to include criticism of mass immigration and open borders. (And for the coup de grâce, American companies adopt whatever practices over here would keep the EU regulators happy over there—and our liberties erode out of a quest for globalized efficiency, as surely as if we were ruled from Brussels instead of Washington.)

  You can see the potential for a similar definitional creep in the United States. A left-leaning company that would like to silence conservatism can do it by slowly redefining what is unacceptable online conduct. You start out tracking terrorists. Then you forbid any violent threats, which is reasonable. Then you start claiming that no users should be made to feel “unsafe.” Then you start deploying the broad campus-activist definition of unsafe. Then any advocacy of policies that the left thinks might, in the long run and in a roundabout way, make citizens in general less safe, becomes forbidden speech. Heck, let’s label it “hate speech” while we’re at it.

  And somehow, bit by bit, you find yourself trapped in a mental cell in which only talking in ways compatible with leftist policy is deemed safe, nonviolent, non-hateful discourse.

  And the more pervasive and powerful social media becomes, the more corners of our life are made tech-compliant and “smart,” the more this shrinking of acceptable discourse can happen without ever quite running afoul of the First Amendment, which after all properly limits only government, not private institutions.

  This is going to yield a culture war that may be more complex and harder to resolve than the traditional right-vs.-left, religion-vs.-secularism, corporate-vs.-activist divides. The tech companies, in the most dire assessment, may become the most powerful example of capitalism turned against itself. Lenin joked that capitalists are so dumb and greedy we’d sell communists the rope with which to hang us. I hope we don’t one day conclude that technology and capitalism made possible the social media culture in which the voices of capitalism and the right get silenced, almost as effectively as in China.

  With the mediated, technological component of our lives only likely to get bigger, we might find our culture struggling with how to handle tech and communication long after current wars and border struggles have faded into history. To be sure, the days when nearly all Americans could agree on the same basic rules of etiquette to tamp down such disputes are long gone.

  For now, though it may be arbitrary and cagey about its speech rules, at least Twitter is enough of a free-for-all to include President Trump’s account, a source of daily joy and frequent hilarity.

  The subtler question is how much the social media companies foreground or
downplay the frequency with which we see such users as they do allow. It’s nice to live in an era wrestling with a question that subtle—beats being told you’ll be shot if you insult the Communist Party. If you live in a country where you can openly call the leader a fascist, you don’t live in a fascist country! But subtler can also be creepier. Little nudges can make big differences in our lives without inspiring the reflex to fight back. You may never know what online posts, what political ads, what criticisms of immigration, what gun-purchasing advice you never got to see. No one can know how much our individual online experiences have been tailored, much less how much they have been tailored to exclude conservative content.

  I realize that to many on the left, the idea that the MAGA Doctrine includes a thoughtful free speech plank would seem shocking. To them, Trump is merely the president who constantly insults the press and thus a threat to the First Amendment itself. That is a misunderstanding of what it means to have a free press. Trump shouldn’t censor—and hasn’t. His private company can sue, as it sued MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell for suggesting that company was funded by Russian oligarchs.

  But he has no intention of outlawing even the media he complains about most, and he has said that explicitly, even while ribbing the likes of Rosie O’Donnell. He’s just exercising his free speech as she exercises hers, and he plainly loves that sort of low-level ongoing debate and mockery and wouldn’t have it any other way.

  Far from being the menace to the First Amendment the thin-skinned press makes him out to be, President Trump may be the greatest defender the Bill of Rights has in modern America. Let’s count the ways.

  Chapter 13

  Protector of the Bill of Rights

  The site Huffington Post warns of “Trump’s War on the First Amendment.” PEN American Center executive director Suzanne Nossel, formerly executive director of Amnesty International USA, writes that “Trump’s Divisive Speech Puts the First Amendment at Risk.”