“Twitter announces it will censor some tweets; activists worried”
That was the New York Daily News headline I tweeted on January 27, 2012, just over a decade ago. Reading the linked article is a trip. It is an artifact of a different time, a different mindset, a different world. Back then, the old hacker adage “information wants to be free” was the modus operandi of the internet; major tech companies were billing themselves as the unfettered public square and leading online protests against internet censorship bills; and not only was Julian Assange a free man, but he was the subject of multiple documentary films.
Nonetheless, following the lead of Google, Twitter was publicly making its first foray into cooperating with legal speech rules overseas, such as the oft-cited example of removing pro-Nazi content in Germany. No doubt knowing this would be an unpopular move in the free internet climate that existed at the time, the company was careful to note that they would only be removing certain types of content for users in those countries whose speech rules made them illegal. In addition, “when Twitter removes a comment,” the article noted, “…it will clearly mark when a Tweet has been censored and send it to the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse.” Even still, this was disquieting enough to spark a #dontcensor protest on the site and a concerned letter from the media advocacy group “Reporters without Borders,” according to the article.
Evidently, these meager efforts of protest were not enough (oh 2012 society, how naïve we were). If I had been able to show my past self the censorious moves that are made today on a regular basis by the major platforms, I would have been devastated. In a mere 10 years, Americans have gone from being concerned that content might be taken down in foreign countries to comply with their own laws, to regularly witnessing the global censorship of the perfectly legal speech of not just conspiracy theorists, activists, and comedians, but also credentialed experts, doctors, and scientists, including newsworthy content such as congressional testimony and (as of last week) a documentary film produced by Oliver Stone. I don’t think I would have even believed that officials within the US government are now regularly touting the fact that they work with tech companies to censor online speech, simply because of how clearly and directly that defies the purpose of the First Amendment. Moreover, I would have been floored to learn that journalists were not shouting about such flagrant violations of their basic core values on a daily basis. If there ever was a need for proof that slippery slopes are a real phenomenon, this is it.
So, how did we get here? Though it’s been only a decade, it’s been a bit of an incremental creep, a slow burn towards the Department of Homeland Security’s February 2022 categorization of concepts like “mal-information” (vaguely defined as facts “used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate”) as terrorist threats. And, in fact (though hopefully not a misleading one), those of us who were worried enough about Twitter’s move in 2012 to tweet about it then, know that this has been more than a decade in the making.
In 2010, legal scholar John Palfrey wrote an article in which he outlined the four main phases of Internet regulation up until that point:
“the open internet,” lasting from its inception through 2000, in which governments pretty much left the internet alone;
“access denied,” lasting from the year 2000 to 2005, in which state actors around the world first began to directly block or manage their citizens’ access to the internet in varying ways;
“access controlled” from 2005-2010, when more “subtle and nuanced” controls such as location-sensitive filtering, surveillance, and real identity requirements began to be employed, largely in cooperation with tech corporations; and
“access contested,” beginning in 2010, when citizens began noticing and speaking out against these government and corporate controls in an effort to stop them from interfering with our freedom on the internet.
Palfrey’s fourth phase seems to have also lasted about 5 years, through 2015, at which point a new perspective on online freedom came to the forefront, one that did not see it in such positive terms. In my forthcoming book, “Interactive Media and Society,” I added the following as a fifth phase:
“controls debated,” lasting from 2015 to 2020, in which a whiplash-like reversal of public sentiment shifted from “access contested” to an increased awareness of the great harm that can come from activities on the internet, which resulted in increased pressure on internet companies and regulators to do more to stop it.
This shift was largely influenced by stories of online harassment, bullying, and stalking, as well as those detailing the disinformation and manipulation campaigns of foreign adversaries and corporations alike. While these are all valid reasons to think that perhaps there should be some limits on what can be posted online, it’s hard not to notice that this is exactly the trajectory that would have taken place if those in power used their centers of control and dominance in society to support their own agenda - first the government seeking more control, then corporations getting on board, and finally the people coming to not only accept but demand their own suppression. In a situation like this, what is the Bill of Rights but a piece of paper sitting in the National Archives?
Perhaps there is a better approach, a sweet spot between the internet equivalent of the Wild West and what is effectively tech industry-driven governance over the global public sphere based largely on the cultural moments and geopolitical positions serving the interests of the West. Since we know that the internet can be both helpful and harmful, the key principles driving what we do next should be those that best characterize the benefits that it brought: openness, transparency, decentralization, freedom of choice, and individual control. If we can keep the focus on these core tenets, we will be better equipped to address the complexities of those areas where they may clash.
In my book, I also posit that we may now be amidst a sixth phase, starting around 2020, which can be called “controls re-distributed.” This phase would see “the introduction of new regulations and products aimed at breaking up corporate dominance in the technology sector and requiring practices more supportive of fairness, transparency, and consumer choice.” So for instance, we might begin to seriously consider whether or not communication platforms, especially those with a major market share, should be required to be more transparent about when they take down content and the ways that they alter, amplify, or demote it, and why. We might think about whether or not these sites should be allowed to have such a monopoly on conversations in the public sphere at all. We might seek to find ways to give users more control over the content they see and access. We might focus more on privacy and encryption to protect whistleblowers and less on algorithmic over-blocking to censor content globally. I don’t know if these are all the right solutions, but I’m hopeful that we can at least begin to have these conversations.
In early 2022, exactly what the current phase will end up looking like remains to be seen, but I think we can all agree that moving forward, we should be taking into account more than corporate instincts for self-preservation and a state’s tendency towards social control. In the immortal words of Ferris Bueller, perhaps we should “stop and look around once in a while” and remind ourselves of what authentic human progress from the ground up looks like, so we don’t miss our opportunity to participate in it.