By Kevin D. Williamson
Wednesday, September 12, 2018
Attorney General Jeff Sessions is convening a meeting of
state attorneys general to consider whether Facebook, Google, Twitter, and
other social-media companies are “intentionally stifling the free exchange of
ideas.” The honorable gentleman from Alabama should stick to his brief.
Two quick questions asked and answered. One: Do these
companies treat conservatives unfairly? Yes, they do. Two: Is that any business
of the attorney general of the United States of America? No, it isn’t.
A funny thing happened on the way to the
counterrevolution. Conservative media have become a constituency of the Republican party. Conservative media have had
many different relationships to the Republican party over the years: sometimes
a megaphone, sometimes a critic, sometimes a talent scout, sometimes a friendly
forum for working out in-the-family disagreements. But its emergence as a
political constituency with interests and demands of its own is something new.
It is no longer merely a voice for conservative interests but an interest group
of its own, and for the moment its attention is focused on Silicon Valley.
Our friend Dennis Prager has played a role in this. He
unsuccessfully sued Google (the firm is officially known as Alphabet, and it owns
YouTube), claiming that the company has violated the First Amendment by
engaging in viewpoint discrimination as it restricts certain videos, including
his PragerU presentations, which cover a wide variety of topics: At this
writing, the top three videos on his site are “What Is Net Neutrality?”, “Left
Or Liberal?”, and “Make Men Masculine Again.” Some of the videos touching on
religion and sexuality have been restricted, even while comparable videos from
nonconservative sources are left unmolested.
The restrictions are ridiculous. Prager is one of the
Americans least likely to produce videos that are obscene, that incite
violence, or that in any other way pose a risk to “safety,” which is the
theoretical justification that most Internet companies use to restrict content.
Agree or disagree with him, it is hard to argue that Dennis Prager is somehow
outside the mainstream of American life. But that does not seem to matter:
Videos from Hillsdale College have been restricted as well; if there is an
institution less likely than Hillsdale to coarsen public discourse, I cannot
think what it is.
But this is not about political content, and it isn’t
even really about political bias: Facebook, Google, et al. operate in an almost
uniformly Left-Democratic culture, and they heard a great deal from both
organized and semi-organized efforts from progressives and left-wing
organizations whose sole purpose in life is trying to discredit conservative
figures and exclude conservatives from public discourse. But they are not
responding to concerns about “safety,” and they are not ordinarily responding
to concerns about possible legal issues. They are responding to peer pressure.
What the Left has discovered is that the bosses at Facebook and Google and
Twitter can be embarrassed, and that figures such as Alex Jones embarrass them
in a way that figures such as Louis Farrakhan do not. This is a crutch, a
strategy that is going to play itself out eventually: Pointing the finger Invasion of the Body-Snatchers–style and
screaming “Racist!” at Ben Shapiro
is ridiculous, and eventually it will be seen as such.
Peer pressure is not a problem that is likely to be
effectively solved through the careful ministrations of the U.S. Department of
Justice, or by the attentions of state prosecutors. And Republicans here are
coming dangerously close to the Democrats’ game: abusing prosecutorial powers
to bully their political opponents on issues such as climate change, under the
transparent and risible pretense that they are investigating securities fraud
or consumer-safety laws.
Earlier this year, I sat on a panel with Pete Wilson and
a few other conservative activists. Wilson was part of Prager’s legal team.
With me as the sole exception, the panel was unanimously in favor of regulating
social-media companies in such a way as to keep them from disadvantaging
conservative-leaning content. On what constitutional grounds? Somebody will
think of one, I am sure. It was quite something to hear Republicans sounding
like Elizabeth Warren on a trust-busting bender, but it is difficult to take
seriously the proposition that what’s at work here is concern about monopoly
power, Supreme Court precedents, or anything of the sort: This is about friends
and enemies, and Republicans have decided that Silicon Valley is the enemy.
Silicon Valley has more than returned the favor. To some
extent, this is a question of politics on the ground: Internet companies tend
to be located in places that do not love Republicans — and places that
Republicans do not love. Republicans apparently have decided that instead of
trying to win votes in California or New York City, the best thing to do is to
use those parts of the country as piñatas to be beaten for the amusement of
Republican stalwarts in Kansas and Wyoming. It is not obvious that this is the
right path for Republicans: As our friend J. D. Vance points out, three states
— California, New York, and Massachusetts — account for the vast majority
(about 75 percent) of venture-capital investment in the United States. And for
“three states” you can read “three metropolitan areas,” those being the Bay Area,
New York City, and greater Boston. A Republican party without a business
constituency is an unviable thing, and promises of tax cuts followed by more
tax cuts probably will not do the trick.
Republicans might try the carrot before the stick.
(Especially since the stick is unlikely to survive judicial challenge.) Silicon
Valley is indeed full of insufferably puritanical progressives, but get them
talking about protectionism in the Asian markets or European tax challenges,
and they sound like Milton Friedman. (Kids: Milton Friedman is a very famous
economist whose opinions Republicans used to value back when they believed in
things like capitalism and free trade.) There have been some recent efforts to
help with some of this, for instance improving the outdated portions of NAFTA
covering online commerce and international trade in digital services.
Republicans are going to need to make inroads there eventually, and they should
want to have a fruitful relationship with America’s most successful industry.
Treating social-media companies like a 1930s telephone company is not going to
get that done.
The judge in the case wisely threw out Prager’s lawsuit
on the grounds that the First Amendment is a restriction on the state, and
Google is a private business, not a state or an arm of government. There is
some Supreme Court precedent on Prager’s side, including the 1945 case of Marsh v. Alabama, which held that
Jehovah’s Witnesses proselytizers had a First Amendment right to distribute
their propaganda in a town that was entirely owned by a private corporation.
(Chickasaw, Ala., was a company town under the ownership of the Gulf
Shipbuilding Corporation, now defunct.) But that case was subsequently limited
by Lloyd Corp. v. Tanner, which held
that the owner of a shopping mall could pick and choose what to allow on its
own premises. The difference, as Justice Lewis Powell saw it, was that in the
case of the company town, there was no public space for the missionaries to
use, whereas the privately owned mall was surrounded by the very public streets
of downtown Portland, Ore. In the Prager suit, the “defendants are private
entities who created their own video-sharing social media website and make
decisions about whether and how to regulate content that has been uploaded on
that website,” the judge wrote. “Numerous other courts have declined to treat
similar private social media corporations, as well as online service providers,
as state actors.”
That is, I think, how conservatives should want things.
We believe in property rights, limited government, skepticism regarding grand
and effectively unlimited interpretations of government power, and the like.
We also believe that we get hosed by California-based
media companies.
A few questions: When you read a few weeks ago that a
Cambodian-American candidate for public office was running ads that touched on
the horrifying history of her native country, and that those ads were being
suppressed by Facebook, did you even have to ask whether the candidate was a
Republican? No, of course not. And as much as we conservatives might lament the
fact, conspiracy nut Alex Jones is, broadly speaking, a creature of the Right.
Is anybody surprised that he was the target of an obviously coordinated action
by Apple, Facebook, and YouTube, while much more dangerous conspiracy nuts such
as Louis Farrakhan are permitted to operate without interference? Of course
not. If Louis Farrakhan is good enough for Barack Obama, you can bet he’s good
enough for YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, Jew-hating weirdo though he is. There
are some important differences, of course: Minister Farrakhan has been complicit
in at least one political assassination, and Alex Jones, whatever his
transgressions against truth and taste, has not.
Silicon Valley is hardly without blame here. It is full
of Little Suppressors. And while the bosses sometimes talk a good game about
addressing their epidemic bias problems, one of the problems with bias is that
biases are usually invisible to the bias-holder. That’s going to be a long conversation
— a lot of long conversations.
But it’s a job for persuaders, not prosecutors.
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