A few years ago, the think tank I worked for published a report into the availability of jihadi content on Google. We found that users searching for information on mainstream Islamic concepts would often find extremist content within the first two pages of search results. One of our main recommendations was that there should be a greater requirement on technology companies — and in particular search engines — to push extremist content down the results pages, and to draw mainstream content up.
Having done our usual political and media rounds to promote its findings and recommendations in the UK, the author and I went to the US to do the same. The response could not have been more different. In a meeting with security officials in the administration, we were told that, while our findings were concerning, it would not only be impossible but also morally wrong to “suppress free speech” in the way we were suggesting. That was the end of the conversation.
Concern about free speech in the US is so ingrained into the political culture that the very first amendment to the US Constitution affirmed it. But there has never been a time when its meaning was not contested, with debate about whether its protection was qualified (and therefore subject to other considerations) or absolute. The general position taken by the courts, as it must be in a country governed by law, has always been that it is qualified. The extent of its qualification, though, has varied.
The discussion with the administration official came back to me this week as I reflected on the row between US President Donald Trump and Twitter. Trump has issued an executive order that may have the effect of changing the way the US government judges content on social media platforms.
The social media companies’ position is that they are mere platforms, no more responsible for what its users publish than a public square is responsible for what its street preachers say. Their view is that so long as users follow the rules of the platform and the law of the land, then anything else they do is up to them. That is a position that has been accepted by the authorities in the US and much of the West — and it is that acceptance that Trump is threatening through his executive order.
The trouble for the social media organizations, however, is that they do not seem to apply the rules fairly or without bias. And this takes them into difficult ground. Such is their influence on political and media narratives that a failure to act (or to be seen to act) impartially becomes a threat to the balance of public life.
In this sense, Twitter, Facebook and others are victims of their own success. If they were niche concerns, no one would care if they were ideological echo chambers. The internet abounds in such things. And if they proclaimed a partisan viewpoint openly, then their success would matter less.
But I’m not convinced that Twitter or Facebook or Google are corporately left leaning. I think they suffer much more from a form of broadly left-leaning group think in their employees — a group think that can be found in major institutions across the West. And there is one shared experience that the vast majority of skilled workers in any major field of public life will have; their time at university, an institution that across the Western world has become dominated by left-wing thought and what could at best be termed a disapproval of dissenting political views.
This shared experience, leading to a largely shared view of the world and how it ought to be, is exacerbated by the media environment that has been created by social media; a media environment driven by outrage rather than enlightenment.
The trouble for the social media organizations, however, is that they do not seem to apply the rules fairly or without bias
Peter Welby
The entire Western political discourse is overdosed on reactive — and often performative — outrage, to the point that it can no longer tell a genuine crisis from an invented one. And the response of governments is to resist the pressures of outrage on social media and in the press, on the assumption that it is all whipped up.
This has been a latent tendency in much media for many years. Radio shock jocks, or nakedly partisan television channels, were a feature of American political life long before Twitter or Facebook. But social media ignites and amplifies it. And the major established media outlets have adjusted their output accordingly to increase readership and revenue.
Governments of all kinds, all over the world, survive only if they have some sense of the sentiments of their people. That doesn’t require democracy — even North Korea would not survive without it (though such totalitarian regimes do a lot to control the sentiment of their people). But that sense of public sentiment requires a functioning system of feedback. When that is lost, the system is in trouble.
The danger for the West today is that the system of feedback is broken. If everything requires outrage in the press or on social media, then no crisis is more serious than any other. And if most of the outrage comes from a particular frame of reference, then it is meaningless to those with a different perspective.
The social media companies are likely to be outraged themselves by Trump’s executive order. It would be better for them if they took action before they are forced to — and in the process, they can go some way to healing our political discourse too.
• Peter Welby is a consultant on religion and global affairs, specializing in the Arab world.
