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Frederik Stjernfelt & Anne Mette Lauritzen çen REMOVED

Tech Giants and Freedom of Speech

G) Springer Open

Preface

This book came about during the Spring and Summer of 2018 after we were connected by our mutual friend Vincent Hendricks. He had an eye for our shared interest in the topic: the new circumstances of free speech in an online world.

We would like to thank not only Vincent but also those who, during our research and writing process, have helped us with their information, inspiration, and critical comments: Finn Collin, Benjamin Rud Elberth, Jens-Martin Eriksen, Rolf Hvidtfeldt, Jacob Mchangama, David Budtz Pedersen, Katrine K. Pedersen, Agnete Stjernfelt, Karoline Stjernfelt, Philip Thinggaard, Mads Vestergaard, and Mikael Vetner.

We have enjoyed challenging discussions of this book project with our research colleagues at Humanomics Center, University of Aalborg, supported by the Velux Foundations, and Center for Information and Bubble Studies, University of Copenhagen, supported by the Carlsberg Foundation.

Thanks to our translator, Philip Thinggaard, for a quick and meticulous effort, as well as our editors, Peter Christensen, Michael Jannerup, and Ties Nijssen, for their solid and efficient collaboration.

For financial support, our thanks go to the Department of Communication and Psychology, Aalborg University, and to the Center for Information and Bubble Studies, University of Copenhagen.

Copenhagen, Denmark Frederik Stjernfelt June 2019 Anne Mette Lauritzen

Introduction

This book sheds a critical light on the Internet, more specifically on the new circumstances it is creating for one of the most important basic principles of modern liberal democracies: freedom of speech. The book has specific focus on the tech giants who, to a still larger extent, set the framework for and define the conditions of communication for most users online — Google, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Amazon, etc. The book came about during hectic times, not so much due to deadlines but because its subject matter unfolded frantically while the book was being written, with new tumultuous events taking place almost every week. Not long before the plan for the book was drafted, when 2017 became 2018, a new law came into effect in Germany. It made it mandatory for social networks such as Facebook and Twitter to assume the government’s job of regulating content in accordance with German law. In March 2018, the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke. It exposed how a shady British company specializing in spin and influencing elections had used the data of millions of Facebook users during the US presidential election and the Brexit referendum, among others. In late March, Google announced its plans to spend 300 million USD on a new initiative which featured a “Disinfo Lab” aimed at removing misinformation from the search engine, the purpose being to make sure serious journalism ranks high among Google’s search results. In April and May, Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, appeared in hearings with the US Congress and the European Parliament, where he managed to dodge most of the critical questions posed to him during the brief sessions.

In late April, for the first time ever, Facebook made public its detailed and previously undisclosed guidelines for xi xii Introduction the removal of content and blacklisting of users. In the middle of May, a Google internal video from 2016 named “The Selfish Ledger” was leaked, featuring Google’s take on the future —a society where information is crucial and each individual demoted to a random container, from generation to generation carrying important information on into the future. In late May, the new EU legislation known as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) entered into force. In June, the next Facebook scandal popped up: it turned out the company had given access to the enormous amounts of personal user data to more than 60 technological hardware manufacturers, among them Apple, Amazon, BlackBerry, Microsoft, and Samsung. Furthermore, this had apparently taken place despite the fact that Facebook had discovered, back in 2015, the Cambridge Analytica leaks and tightened its control with how data are handed over to app companies via Facebook. Around the same time, the development of a new law was started in France—with different means than the one in Germany, the French law attempts to make it legal to remove “fake news” from the Internet. In July, the European Commission gave Google (Alphabet) the biggest fine in EU history for activities bordering on monopoly. Later that month, Facebook announced that it had learned of a new political campaign using false Facebook pages, probably set up from Russia. In August, the biggest tech giants blocked access to a conspiracy site named Info Wars, all of them on the same day. At the end of that same month, it was discovered that since 2011, Iran has been behind a large misinformation campaign on Facebook targeting hundreds of thousands of users across the planet—the campaign managed to spread to both Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. In October, an internal Google document was leaked, called “The Good Censor” where a new policy of stricter censorship is developed. That same month, a “troll farm” in Saudi Arabia was discovered. In November, it was revealed that Facebook had, during its many crises, hired a spin company in order to discredit competitors and smearing critics. The same month, the company published new directions for censorship, adding to removal the technique of downgrading access to content not actually

Introduction xiii removed but merely close to the borderline of removal in some way. Last but not least, in the Spring of 2019, increasing political pressure after the March massacre in Christchurch, New Zealand, prompted several states to sharpen removal policies regarding tech giants.

Writing a critical book in the midst of all these events is sort of like riding a tiger. One is never sure if, once published, new events will already have made some of the book’s claims and conclusions obsolete. Still, there seems to be no calm Archimedean vantage point in foreseeable future from which to lean back, observe, and analyze the growing problems with the Internet and the tech giants.

Moreover, these issues are in no way simple. The global, transnational nature of the tech giants, combined with their secrecy and lack of openness when it comes to their internal procedures, creates entirely new conditions for freedom of speech. All of this takes place in times when people are getting used to one particular fact: when it comes to understanding the nature of free speech, the classic scenario of state legislation confronted by citizens expressing themselves in certain ways will no longer suffice. Not if we aim to understand free speech, that is. Rather, the scenario is now supplemented by religious and political threats of violence, which contribute to the drawing of the limits to freedom of speech. As the tech giants are turning into monopolies, and as large parts of younger generations use their platforms, on the platforms’ terms and conditions, to access both news and the public sphere, the somewhat clandestine policies of these companies have begun to define what can be uttered and what information is available to ordinary citizens. The tech giants, originally noble endeavors carried out by college students aiming to develop free services to enthusiastic users, have long evaded critical scrutiny.

This book gives a brief overview of how they became powerful and wealthy monopolies; the questionable nature of their business models based on users’ more or less involuntary consent to sharing personal data; how personalization of services restricts information and creates filter bubbles, confirmation bias and echo chambers; how community standards xiv Introduction restrict what can be expressed based on the principle of the lowest common denominator; all of the problems related to the procedures for the removal of content on these services; the ominous collaborations between tech giants and governments towards forming new, automated censorship bypassing court proceedings; the first digital losers, victims of the giants’ lucrative business model; disturbances of the public sphere led by the giants’ automated algorithms; and much more.

The tech giants are global, and their influence is felt even in countries that fight them—such as China and a number of Muslim nations. But the giants remain based in California and their activities, policies, the debate on them, and the political forces they deal with are primarily American. Therefore, this book must focus primarily on the American situation—for the simple reason that local decisions, events, and social structures in the United States affect the public sphere and free speech elsewhere —not only in Europe but in large parts of the world.

As mentioned, we do not claim that this is a simple matter, and in no way do we claim that there is one simple solution. Tech giants are companies of a wholly new breed: sprawling, tricky to define, and hard to control. We tend to support emerging ideas of some sort of government regulation of the tech giants; as such, measures would call for openness about their operations and ensure freedom, legal rights, and privacy for people who express themselves and share their data. But regulation would also prevent these companies from acting as if the removal of “fake news” and political extremism by a simple automated control procedure could be done without serious consequences for freedom of speech. At the same time, antitrust regulation and control of monopolies are serious medications that should be handed out in careful doses. Or else, the cure may be worse than the disease. At present, only the United States and the European Union possess sufficient political muscle to arm-wrestle the tech giants from a fundamentally democratic and freedom-oriented stance. In the final section of the book, we attempt to come up with some principles for developing regulation of tech giants in an attempt to ensure more freedom for their users.

Contents

The Digital Enlightenment Project Facing

Choleng csdiresnnendane Biiasaiblia 23 The Internet 24 i ckessisuissconiwavennernanunicieies 29 Entrusting Government Control to Private

Tech LC E E i 173 xvi Contents