Republican anger boils up into fresh political threat for Big Tech
Rightwing criticism of social media groups has become a powerful tool for politicians
For just a moment, it looked like Big Tech was having a good day.
For three hours, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, and Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chief executive, carefully managed questions from US senators on how their platforms have become tools for manipulating voters.
Neither company has managed to solve the problem, which now looms over the November midterm elections, with Facebook admitting that it expects “bad actors” to try to stir up division.
But Ms Sandberg was composed, Mr Dorsey was thoughtful and, more importantly, their examiners were divided: Republicans looked just as likely to resist regulation in this fourth and final hearing, as they were in the first.
However as the pair left the room, they walked straight into another political storm. Criticism that social media companies are censoring rightwing views has been bubbling among Republicans all summer, and Alex Jones of Infowars, the rightwing polemicist, was waiting to heckle Mr Dorsey as he left the hearing.
US president Donald Trump, in an interview on Wednesday, accused social media companies of rigging political debate against him. “The truth is they were all on Hillary Clinton’s side,” he said.
The argument has been a powerful tool for Republicans to rally support to their base.
The accusations then became a full-blown political crisis, and a potential legal threat, when Jeff Sessions, the attorney-general, announced that he would discuss with some state attorneys-general whether social media platforms “may be hurting competition and intentionally stifling the free exchange of ideas”.
The announcement was a worrying development; until now, while many have accused Big Tech of anti-competitive practices, only the EU has taken significant action, recently applying a €4.3bn fine to Google over its mobile operating system Android.
Matthew Buck, a researcher with the anti-monopoly Open Markets Institute welcomed a US justice department investigation, but warned that it should not become politicised.
“Generally the concern is that Google can stifle voices both on the left and the right, regardless of where you stand. That’s not a good thing for democracy generally,” he said.
The justice department under Mr Sessions has already taken up free speech issues championed by Conservative activists.
It has intervened in the ongoing battle in US universities between progressives and conservatives about what speech should be allowed on campus. In June, the DoJ joined a lawsuit against the University of Michigan that sought to strike down its free speech code, which prohibits “harassment” and “bullying”.
In a speech last year, the attorney-general decried what he called an effort by protesters on US campuses “to silence voices that insufficiently conform with their views”.
But legal experts were surprised by the approach of linking competition law to free speech — and were not convinced it will work.
Amy Ray, an antitrust partner at Orrick, said it was unlikely that the companies would violate competition law by restraining speech on their platforms, even if they co-ordinated to suppress certain voices.
“The only antitrust theory that comes to mind right now is if there’s some allegation of co-ordination among the platforms [to suppress speech], but even then it’s difficult to understand how you would describe that as a harm to competition,” she said.
Any action by the justice department would also have to contend with the fact that private companies do not have any obligation under the constitution to protect free speech. The Supreme Court has generally ruled that the government cannot force citizens or companies to publish speech they disagree with.
“It seems like antitrust would just be a Trojan horse for censorial efforts,” said Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University. “That’s not the way it is supposed to work and it is pretty much exactly what the first amendment was designed to stop.”
Nevertheless, by the end of the day Twitter’s share price had fallen 6.06 per cent to $32.73, Facebook had dropped 2.33 per cent to $167.18 and Alphabet, the parent of Google, which drew criticism by declining its invitation to appear before senators, had dropped 1.01 per cent to $1199.10.