Since Donald Trump was elected president in November 2016, American media have been in a perpetual state of both crisis and elation. The unfortunate truth is that often what is bad for a temperate political climate is good for journalism. Subscriptions, viewing figures and readerships to many news outlets have for the first time in several years been given new life by the Trump effect. However, the often rather navel-gazing debates about the role of journalism and the press have taken on a much darker turn since a far-right white supremacist rally brought hundreds of tiki-torch-waving neo-Nazis on to the streets of Charlottesville two weeks ago.
When a white nationalist was allowed anonymity for an unchallenging interview on a Maine TV station last week, the coverage provoked a storm of protest from viewers, many posting objections on WCSH-TV’s Facebook page, some calling for the man to have his identity revealed. When the investigative journalism non-profit organisation ProPublica last week dug into a story on how Russian propaganda sites were amplifying the messages of fringe neo-Nazi groups in the US, the site found it was spammed and smeared by an army of Russian Twitter bots. Dozens of far-right websites and social media pages have been knocked off the internet in the past two weeks by technology companies who have been either provoked or shamed into unilaterally withdrawing services from hate speech sites.
The shock of the spectacle of swastikas and Nazi rhetoric disrupting a peaceful Virginian campus town, and the appalling death of the protester Heather Heyer, have not only triggered the deepest crisis so far in an alarmingly chaotic presidency, but put the American standard of free speech under intense pressure. In particular, the role of technology and the social web has created a new set of circumstances and possibilities for both the proliferation and suppression of threatening and unpleasant views.
In the days immediately following the clashes in Charlottesville, the Trump presidency proved to be the moral and ethical void that many suspected. Trump’s inability to condemn Nazi groups without suggesting there was fault on both sides merely added to the deep fear and insecurity felt among groups targeted by the ideologies of fascism. As is often the case in the United States, where government gives no guidance, business steps in. In this case, the new gatekeepers of expression in the technology industry have been at the centre of the argument.
Speech in the United States is a proudly held and constitutionally protected freedom, falling as it does under the first amendment which ensures expression remains free of government interference. In parts of Europe, where hate groups and many far-right organisations are specifically outlawed, it seems astonishing that groups of people carrying swastikas have a right to march in public chanting “Jews will not replace us” while carrying semi-automatic weapons. The organisational and polarising power of the internet has, however, raised new issues for even the most committed free speech advocates. The Unite the Right march which made international headlines was the third gathering of its kind in four months in Charlottesville, where the removal of the statue of the Confederate general Robert E Lee has been the catalyst for protest. Its third and largest march had been organised through Facebook – which had a Unite the Right event page on its network – and other social platforms. After Charlottesville, Facebook and Reddit closed down far-right sites, the gaming chat app Discord purged neo-Nazi groups, and companies that offered server services to far-right publications such as the Daily Stormer, including GoDaddy and Google, pulled the plug on them. Even Cloudflare, a service which protects internet traffic from hacking attacks, dropped the Daily Stormer from its client list. Cloudflare’s chief executive, Matthew Prince, wrote a blogpost in which he questioned his own power to remove an organisation from the internet.
Prince points out in his detailed post that there are many layers of services that make up the commercial internet. He asserts that we are rapidly approaching the time when anyone who wishes to have a presence on the public internet will have to use a service from a handful of very large, powerful companies, such as Google or Amazon. Prince points out that at the moment there is “no clear framework for content regulation”, and in the absence of such it can be the case that a small number of players can make decisions about who occupies the public sphere.
What Prince suggests is a departure from making decisions based on first amendment principles and instead using the idea of due process as a more internationally applicable standard. “I, personally, believe in strong freedom of speech protections, but I also acknowledge that it is a very American idea that is not shared globally. On the other hand, the concept of due process is close to universal. At its most basic, due process means that you should be able to know the rules a system will follow if you participate in that system,” writes Prince.
Within the space of a year we have gone from large technology companies insisting that they have no role and no interest in making editorial decisions to a point where they are the only organisations able to make decisions about certain types of content. We have been in this territory before, when WikiLeaks published American diplomatic cables in 2010. Payment services such as PayPal, Mastercard and Visa suspended or withdrew their services from the organisation, but then restored them after strong protests from a range of largely liberal-leaning organisations.
The way in which networked free speech works though is in reality far from free. Jon Snow, in his MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh international television festival, highlighted what he saw as the problematic role the duopoly of Google and Facebook played in centralising media control. His remedy for it was for the Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, and others in the tech industry to take moral responsibility for the health of journalism and the spread of false information. The contradiction of simultaneously wishing technology companies less powerful, but also wanting them to exercise their power more directly, is a frequent theme when we try to make sense of this uniquely unregulated media environment.
As in all essentially unregulated environments, vigilante justice is given the opportunity to thrive. In the wake of Charlottesville, anti-fascist groups and individuals went about identifying the neo-Nazis who took part in the march and posted their details online in the hope of pressuring employers to sack them. Self-organising groups on Twitter such as Sleeping Giants (@slpng_giants on Twitter) have been patrolling advertisers who allow their digital ads to be displayed on far-right sites, resulting in many companies changing their advertising policies. Prince found that after his Cloudflare blogpost his Twitter feed was besieged by both Nazi trolls and those who opposed the constraints he was putting on free speech. ProPublica found itself under yet more attack from far-right groups last week after it investigated technology companies such as PayPal and NewsMax which provided services to hate groups even though it is against their own written terms of service. Rightwing groups published the details of journalists involved in reporting the stories and full email chains of correspondence.
The shaping of free speech is in the hands of a very centralised internationalist and entirely commercial cohort. Many people in the US and beyond are relieved that there is a buffer between their own vulnerable communities and the thuggish views of Nazis and racists; no one is particularly sorry that Nazis and their sympathisers are being driven on to the dark web. But the matter of who regulates the channels through which we communicate, the potential limits of free speech and the protections we need against authoritarianism and mob rule is far from resolved.
