Until recently, you were deemed a swivel-eyed conspiracy theorist or gullible purveyor of falsehoods if you took seriously indications that governments worked hand-in-hand with big tech to censor information which may have been lawful and factual from billions of people when it suited them.
But this week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave a muted admission to a US Congressional Committee that that is exactly what his platforms did. He said that his social media sites, which include Facebook and Instagram, were pressured by the White House to censor public discussion during the Covid-19 pandemic, even including “humour and satire”, and that he censored reporting about Hunter Biden’s laptop and his overseas business affairs during the 2020 presidential election in order to tackle “disinformation”.
The seriousness of this disclosure can hardly be overstated. Social media firms withheld access to journalism and stifled free discussion at a time when people’s health, and the health of their democracies, was at stake.
Disinformation is a real phenomenon, which we once called “lying”. But the term has taken on new meaning as a censorious buzz word, and has been relentlessly abused by partisan actors attempting to discredit truths we can see with our own eyes.
For example, claims that President Biden had performed poorly in his debate with Trump were dismissed as disinformation by some Left-leaning US press outfits.
While the House Judiciary Committee has celebrated Zuckerberg’s admission as a “big win for free speech”, he made it with only a hint of remorse. He said “we own our decisions” but “we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today”.
That is not how the right to free speech works. It is not limited to government-approved “facts”, only to be reviewed (with hindsight) once thousands of people have been wrongly censored and the political winds have changed. Societies can only discover truths through a free, open and fearless exchange. Zuckerberg has shown all the contrition of a Roman Inquisitor musing that, with new information, he might not have convicted Galileo for saying the Earth moves around the Sun.
Freedoms fought for over centuries have been eroded by the tech revolution and politicians’ misguided response to it. While Zuckerberg’s personal decisions as to what Meta’s 3.6 billion users can say, see and read may be problematic, the bigger problem is that such vital decisions are being left to unaccountable figures at all.
Governments of all stripes seizing opportunities to influence platforms every time there is a crisis or major political moment only makes the concentration of power worse, not better. We already have precious rights and responsibilities on speech codified in law when it comes to analogue expression. But the centrality of the rule of law has become an afterthought in the age of big tech.
The UK’s growing pro-censorship lobby, which claims the support of some ministers, seems to have adopted the corporate responsibility guff of “tackling harm” over protecting free speech. Pressure groups are urging tech leaders to “do more”, and quietly rebooting the controversial Counter Disinformation Unit, now called the National Security Online Information Team.
Free speech is not a politically-influenced corporate privilege: it is a fundamental right. The responsibility of Britain’s democracy cannot be left to foreign tech billionaires who say the right things at the wrong times.
