CENSORED!
The complicated relationship between social media & the press, AND Why big tech's bans benefit corporate media and hurt the rest of us -
There’s been a lot of discussion this week about the first amendment and free speech, after multiple social media platforms decided to ban President Trump’s accounts and then Amazon, Google and Apple seemingly worked in tandem to remove social media app Parler from the internet. A lot of people in corporate media outlets have defended the decisions of Facebook and Twitter, noting – correctly – that Facebook and Twitter are private companies and well within their rights to ban anyone they see fit. The Parler story is a little more complex, though, and is being litigated in court right now.
No matter what your opinions on what happened at the US Capitol last week or political leanings, the implications of all three bans from a media standpoint are massive; today, I’m going to show you why.
I’ve wondered before in this blog about whether a very small group of very homogenous “journalists” is capable of accurately determining what constitutes news in a VERY diverse nation of 330 million people (see this post for more on that). But the fact is, since the early 1900’s at least, that’s how things have always been - a very small group of very homogenous people has always determined what constituted national “news” in the United States.
Initially, that group consisted only of newspaper editors; once radio (and later, TV) were invented, the group expanded to include news directors at three main networks (ABC, CBS & NBC) as well. The government worked to regulate these companies and tried to make news on their networks fair, but by the 1960’s, TV had eclipsed both print and radio as Americans’ favored means of obtaining news, and those three big networks – plus the news wires that supplied them, which I wrote about in this post - basically took the lead in determining what constitutes national “news.”
When cable TV news came on the scene circa 1980, first CNN and then Fox were brought into the mix, too, but still - the main groups who singlehandedly decided what constitutes national news for multiple decades now have been two news wire services and a handful of corporate media outlets. A bunch of other, smaller outlets have come along since then, but none drive national news narratives the way these powerhouses traditionally have.
But something happened in the early 2000’s that completely upended news as we know it. Two major social media platforms – Facebook and Twitter – were born. It took a few years, but the effect these two social media platforms ended up having on the corporate news media was staggering. What started out as a fun way to share photos, or connect with family and friends, quickly grew into massive - and free - public forums for discussion, opinion-sharing and an open exchange of ideas (“open” meaning: largely self-regulated).
Why did this affect the news? Because people began transforming the way they were using social media platforms. Instead of just posting vacation pictures, social media users began uploading photos and videos in real time of things they saw happening around them – protests, police arrests, political gatherings – even crimes, like murders and drug use. By posting that kind of information to social media as it was happening, users of these platforms started to “break” news on their own, well before news cameras or reporters could even get to the scene. Social media users also began using their platforms to tell the other sides of stories when they didn’t feel corporate media outlets were giving them a fair shake.
In short, for the first time in U.S. history, American news consumers were not only seeing a completely organic, un-vetted, un-curated and unfiltered view of the “news,” they were beginning to curate, or choose, on their own – via “likes” and “shares,” or retweets - what constituted “news” in the first place. The two most prominent examples of this in recent memory were the Nicholas Sandmann and George Floyd stories. Newsmedia followed the leads, but regular people on social media broke – and spread – those stories in a way corporate media simply cannot. I don’t condone or condemn either one. I’m simply stating facts.
Suddenly, that very small group of established, corporate media outlets (CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, Fox, the WSJ & the NY Times) was no longer dictating what people both here in the U.S. and worldwide were seeing and hearing as news. Suddenly, the masses were both creating and following whatever news content they wanted. It’s a chaotic way to live for sure – a true 24/7 news cycle - but it’s definitely “American,” in that it was deeply rooted in our First Amendment rights to free speech. It was also corporate media’s worst nightmare.
Suddenly, we – the consumers - had less and less reason anymore to read or watch anything corporate media produced… because we were beginning to write and produce it ourselves. TV news ratings plummeted. People stopped subscribing to outlets like the NY Times and the Washington Post (Amazon’s Bezos saved the latter from closing up shop by buying it). In essence, the established media outlets were beginning to become useless, and – worse than that – they were being forced to follow behind regular people on social media to cover “news” that those people had deemed useful, instead of carefully curating topics on their own and telling the “regular people” that those were the only things that mattered.
Just when the media thought things couldn’t get worse, 2016 brought them Donald Trump. Whether you agree or disagree with his tactics, one thing is true - he chose to exploit that already runaway social media train for all it was worth. As soon as Trump saw that the media was not telling the whole story about things he’d done (similar to what happened with Nicholas Sandmann), and as soon as he saw them starting to twist his words (as they do for everyone else, like the councilwoman the Business Courier tried to skewer from last week’s blog post), he began doing something no other U.S. President has ever done. He began circumventing the corporate news outlets altogether and speaking directly to the public via his preferred social media platform – Twitter.
A no-nonsense New York businessman not known for his prose, Trump allegedly wrote all of his tweets himself. In an era of polished politicians and carefully worded press releases, those tweets spoke directly to his base and to people who distrust the media… but they also often came back to bite him. In fact, he – unwittingly or not (only he knows for sure) - handed the media more opportunities than any prior public figure I’ve ever known to justify, in their eyes, a four-year-long effort to discredit both him and his followers.
Here’s something I always found very interesting, though. In 2016, right after Trump won, who did the media blame? There was some blame for the FBI (James Comey’s unintentional but very public flip-flopping raised questions about Hillary Clinton just days before the election), and a lot of them were pretty angry with Wikileaks as well, for publishing information about Clinton that they – the members of the corporate media - tried hard to ignore.
But the one organization the media kept blaming over and over again for Clinton’s 2016 loss was Facebook. If Facebook hadn’t allowed people to speak so freely on its platform, prominent “journalists” reasoned, so much of the negative last-minute information that came out about Hillary Clinton would never have come to light, and she would have won. Politicians even got in on the game, forcing Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to testify before congress.
While the media worked overtime to shame Facebook, they also grew angrier and angrier at Trump. After losing “control” of the news for years to social media, corporate media now found itself losing “control” of the national political narrative as well, to a President who preferred his own words on Twitter over theirs. Love him or hate him, Trump single-handedly destroyed corporate media’s power to control what Americans saw and read as news.
For better or worse, he drove the narratives. He chose what to focus on each day. And the media had no choice but to follow behind. Meantime, Mark Zuckerberg defended free speech and his platform initially, but in the end, he caved to the media bullies. By late 2020, both Facebook and Twitter were banning late-breaking stories (like the Hunter Biden laptop piece I wrote about in this post), in an effort to not repeat the same “mistakes” of 2016 that they think got Trump elected in the first place. The proverbial icing on the cake came last week, when both outlets banned Trump outright, for his affiliation with the protests that turned violent in DC last week.
If you are a Trump foe, you might think this was a necessity. If you are a Trump fan, you might think this was unfair. Either way, the facts are irrefutable: in 2020, multiple massive social media monopolies began running interference for the regular media.
Why does this matter?
Because in the years leading up to 2020, the American people had been given the power for the first time ever, through social media, to act as a massive check on an increasingly biased corporate media. Remember that NY Times piece I mentioned in my December post, where the writer talked about news organizations needing to “regain control?” My guess is, he didn’t mean restoring order or anything as nice as that; my guess, based on the media, social media and tech behavior of the last week and a half, is that he meant it was time for all-out war against anyone who dared to oppose the established media outlets’ narratives about what does – and doesn’t – constitute news.
Again, though – why does this matter, especially to someone who dislikes Trump and is happy he can no longer speak freely? The answer may surprise you, but – this whole thing isn’t really about Donald Trump at all.
In the scheme of all things newsmedia, Twitter and Facebook are actually pretty irrelevant, too; news survived fine before they existed and will be fine long after they’re gone. The real concern here is how those two social platforms’ censorship encouraged the three largest tech companies in the world to do the same – and more; using the Capitol riots last week as an excuse, three massive global tech companies - Google, Amazon and Apple – worked, seemingly in tandem, to shut down a fast-growing media platform called Parler that they disliked (for the record, Parler was #1 on Apple’s App store downloads just before they shut it down).
No - I’m not ignoring or downplaying what happened at the Capitol. But I am trying to get you to look past it for a minute, because the most interesting – and disturbing - piece in all of this, is the way big tech and the media managed to use Americans’ anger and pain about this whole event against them. Under the guise of shutting up Donald Trump, they managed to convince Americans to celebrate the censorship of a free speech platform and willingly give up their own rights to free online speech, too – anywhere on the internet. After all, if those companies can get away with all-out censoring a competing social media platform, or the leader of the free world, chances are pretty high they can – and will – censor other voices, too: yours, of course, but also the voices of anyone who presents an opinion that differs from their own. THAT is some scary stuff, friends, and not the kind of thing any of us should expect to see happening here in the United States.
Several years ago, I was fortunate enough to interview Nobel Prize Laureate Elie Wiesel and hear him speak at Cincinnati’s Cintas Center. This man lived through and witnessed terrifying atrocities during the Holocaust, and wrote and spoke about them extensively. In spite of all he had seen and experienced, he held a deep-rooted faith in God. One thing he said that night haunts me to this day. I’m paraphrasing here, but the gist of it was this: Nothing good ever comes of raising up one group by stepping on another.
Trump elevated his base by stepping on the media every chance he got (clearly I, of all people, am not saying the media was innocent, but hopefully we’ve all learned that two wrongs don’t make a right). Obama elevated his supporters by incessantly stepping on Americans who “cling to guns and religion.” But members of the media have been raising up their preferred groups by stepping on others that they dislike for way longer than both men, combined. The latest moves by tech titans to censor free speech only accelerate the media’s pace of elevation-by-suppression.
If you don’t like Trump, encourage your state reps to convict him in the Senate, to censure him or to try him in civil court. If you’re not too emotional about it, seek out people with different viewpoints (in real life, not on social media) and just listen to what they have to say so you can learn about why they might think differently than you.
But the minute a significant number of Americans starts advocating for both the President and 12 million people on a social media platform to lose their rights to speak freely anywhere on the internet (a truly free speech platform if ever there was one, and a platform that no one in the world actually owns or controls) is the minute we all take one giant step away from the very principles on which this nation was founded.
I know I stand almost alone in my profession, but I’m not OK with coordinated mass censorship in the name of silencing dissenting voices. I’m not remotely interested in getting in a debate with anyone, either, over what Trump was or was not guilty of doing last week; I was not there. I do not know. Unless you were there, you don’t know either. And, as we ALL SHOULD HAVE LEARNED from the Nicholas Sandmann / CovCath / March for Life story, time will tell the full story. It may be what the media’s saying now. But that point is moot in the bigger picture. While Americans are all busy arguing about this on Facebook and Instagram (pointlessly, I might add, because social media arguments never lead to any actual change; they only divide people further), corporate and social media people alike are capitalizing on that distraction to hide what they’re really doing.
As I mentioned before, if you can see the forest for the trees with me here, you understand that – ironically - Donald Trump actually has very little to do with this particular discussion on free speech. He is merely the vehicle these tech giants are using to implement more stringent controls on what Americans can and cannot say online.
Soon, politicians will get in on the game too; just this week, in fact, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announced congress would likely be beginning a project soon, to “rein in” media “disinformation and misinformation” (source: this Newsmax article). If - after all we’ve seen happening with social media and big tech this past week – anyone is still willing to believe that isn’t a government push toward mass censorship of dissenting voices, God bless them. I cannot say I feel the same.
*No blog next week (I’ve got two story deadlines), but I’ll be back again 1/29 -