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Social Media Censorship Laws Face a Skeptical Court

Politics

Social Media Censorship Laws Face a Skeptical Court

Oral arguments about laws in Florida and Texas did not seem to sway the Nine.

Annual March For Life Held In Washington, D.C.
(Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in late February on the fate of conservative thought in mainstream social media. It doesn’t look good for our side.

The Court expressed skepticism at best about Florida and Texas laws (Moody v. NetChoice, NetChoice v. Paxton) enacted in response to social media platforms censoring conservative views after January 6. The state laws restrict social media companies canceling user-generated content and require individualized explanations for editorial choices. Media trade groups challenged the laws, with the Eleventh Circuit blocking Florida’s enforcement while the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit upheld the Texas law. The Texas law is not currently in effect, however, because the Supreme Court barred the state from implementing it with the challenge ongoing.

During the oral arguments, the justices suggested the laws may violate the First Amendment by infringing on companies’ editorial decisions.

The deeper questions are whether or not social media are publishers or conveyors (common carriers), and whether or not they are bound by the First Amendment not to censor content. The first issue tries to draw out the question of whether, say, Facebook (or Google, or X, but we’ll use “Facebook” as a proxy) are publishers in the same sense that The American Conservative magazine and website are.

A publisher by definition has a First Amendment right to select which authors to include or exclude and what topics to write about. It is literally what a publisher does. A conveyance is closer to the phone company; they provide the means of communication fully independent of what is being communicated. The phone company, for example, couldn’t care less whether you are talking to mom about Aunt Sally’s apple pie recipe or organizing to burn the flag to protest an over-emphasis on mom and apple pie.

More issues to resolve: the First Amendment prevents government from suppressing speech and has never been applied to private companies however large and dominant in the marketplace, and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which says Facebook and others are not publishers. (Technically, the Act shields tech companies from liability for content published by others, i.e., Facebook is not liable for posts from crazy people.)

Nonetheless, Florida and Texas passed laws prohibiting social media from editorially eliminating (conservative) thought. For example, the Florida law bars social media platforms from banning candidates for political office, as well as from limiting the exposure of those candidates’ posts. The Texas law prohibits companies from removing content based on users’ viewpoints. The laws also would have forced the platforms to explain each decision to delete, shadow ban or otherwise block a specific example of thought.

The social media giants claim such regulation violates their First Amendment rights. They claim the Florida and Texas laws are unconstitutional if they apply at all, independent of who is or is not a “publisher.” The states maintain their laws do not “implicate the First Amendment at all, because they simply require social media platforms to host speech [a conveyance], which is not itself speech but instead conduct that states may regulate to protect the public.” The business model for these platforms, the states say, hinges on having billions of other people post their speech on the platforms – something very different from, say, a newspaper that creates its own content and publishes it.

Associate Justice Elena Kagan was one of several justices to question the constitutionality of the Florida and Texas laws, asking, “Isn’t this a classic First Amendment violation [of Facebook’s rights]?” Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh also appeared unconvinced. He noted that the First Amendment protected against the suppression of speech “by the government” not private companies and that the Supreme Court had a history of cases “which emphasize editorial control [such as Facebook’s] as being fundamentally protected by the First Amendment.” Chief Justice John Roberts echoed Kavanaugh’s point.

Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett said that “it all turns on” whether the social media platforms are exercising “editorial control,” acting as a publisher, when they remove or deprioritize content. Justices also voiced concern that the Florida law was quite broad, potentially applying not only to large social media platforms but also to other sites like Gmail, Uber, and Etsy. The Texas law, on the other hand, specifically excludes standard web sites and tools such as Gmail.

The justices pressed for a discussion of the interaction between the Texas law and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch stated there is a tension between the idea a tech company can’t be held liable for its users’ speech and the idea that moderating that content is the tech company’s speech. Is it speech for purposes of the First Amendment, he asked, but not for purposes of Section 230?

“Just as Florida may not tell the New York Times what opinion pieces to publish or Fox News what interviews to air, it may not tell Facebook or YouTube what content to disseminate,” the tech companies emphasize in their argument. Is content moderation just a euphemism for censorship? Associate Justice Samuel Alito pressed tech companies to define the term “content moderation.” 

“If the government’s doing it, then content moderation might be a euphemism for censorship,” said a company representative. “If a private party is doing it, content moderation is a euphemism for editorial discretion.”

The Biden administration filed an amicus brief against Florida and Texas supporting the tech groups.

A decision by the Supreme Court is expected this summer. The Court is likely to prevent Florida and Texas from implementing laws restricting social media from removing conservative thought or controversial posts, even as they express concern about the power platforms wield over public discourse.

That does not end the debate, however. The interplay between the First Amendment and Facebook is the most significant challenge to free speech in our lifetimes. Pretending a corporation with the reach to influence elections is just another place that sells stuff is to pretend the role of debate in a free society is outdated.

The post Social Media Censorship Laws Face a Skeptical Court appeared first on The American Conservative.

What Is Marriage For?

Par : Nic Rowan
Culture

What Is Marriage For?

Bourgeois values bring stability, prosperity, and dignity—but happiness is another matter.

shutterstock_246645346

I have found that it is impossible to write honestly about marriage and family life without some personal disclaimers. So, I’ll get this out of the way first: I am 26 years old and I have been married for four years to a woman two years my senior. We met in college, where she was my editor on the school paper. Our relationship has persisted along those same lines ever since. I write; she edits. We don’t have too many other interests to speak of, but we do have a two-year-old daughter. We live in a rowhouse in Georgetown, but we go to church across the river in Northern Virginia. Our tastes skew conservative, but as a rule we don’t vote.  

Am I happy? I have no idea. My usual line is that it doesn’t matter. I didn’t marry my wife for love. I don’t know why I married her. Sometimes we joke that my intentions must have been noble because I married down, at least in socioeconomic terms. Whatever the case, we are both great believers in Fate—the inexorable unspooling of our destinies—and trust that as together we hurtle toward death, and, we hope, eternal life, all will be revealed. I shouldn’t be melodramatic; our time is so occupied by the demands of our jobs, housework, and childcare that only occasionally do we consider these things.

But I did find myself wondering about it all as I read through Brad Wilcox’s case for marriage, Get Married, the result of his years of sociological research at the University of Virginia. Wilcox argues that marriage for the great majority of people marks the clearest path to happiness, or, to use his word, “flourishing.” It’s a fascinating study, one whose detail forced me to work through it very slowly, and I think it will prove profitable reading for anyone trying to understand debates about marriage in America today.

But it’s also a frustrating book. Wilcox seems to get all the details about the benefits of marriage right, and yet when he tries to look at the big picture, he only sees more details. What I mean is that while it makes sense to argue that getting married might make you happy, choosing personal satisfaction as the selling point and ultimate good for the target audience—in this case, educated American liberals—seems to betray a rather low estimation of those people’s depth of desire. Of course, happiness is understood in many ways, and the case for eternal happiness is nothing to sniff at. But that’s not exactly what is happening here: Wilcox speaks about happiness in terms of “maximizing,” “boosting,” and “promoting,” jazzy self-help terms borrowed from the school of Arthur Brooks, rhetoric which weakens the force of his case.

Wilcox frames his book with a discussion of four often-overlapping groups—regular churchgoers, political conservatives, social climbers, and Asian Americans—all of whom he argues have the greatest success in their marriages. Their reasons are different. Churchgoers tend to be connected to communities that exercise some measure of social control; they also usually regard the integrity of marriage as religiously significant. Conservatives are also often religious (though that is by no means a given), but the main reason why their marriages succeed, Wilcox writes, is that they embrace “bourgeois” and “traditional” values, such as hard work, personal responsibility, and sexual fidelity.

Social climbers, whom Wilcox calls “Strivers,” roughly correspond to Paul Fussell’s Class X and David Brooks’s Bobos. These are upwardly mobile people who are conversant in all the latest bohemian ideas, but in their own lifestyles are comfortably upper middle class, so marriage, children, and a basically traditional family are a must. The final group, Asian-Americans, seems like a funny fit—for one thing, it’s the only racial group examined at any length in the whole book—but Wilcox uses it to make the point that high-skill immigrants tend to prize stability in their lives, which of course includes stable families and high-earning children. 

For these four groups, marriage, Wilcox argues, is a much more powerful predictor of happiness than work and money, two other goods educated adults most often associate with happiness. He cites a study published in 2004 to make his point: Having a job only boosts your likelihood of happiness by about fifty percent. A high-paying job brings it up by 88 percent. But marriage brings it up by 151 percent. “In fact,” Wilcox writes, “two economists found that a stable marriage was estimated to be worth approximately $100,000 per year of extra happiness.” I’m always suspicious of putting numbers on abstract things, so I looked into these stats. As it happens, the two economists behind the study, who looked at happiness in America and England, did their research from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, before smartphones, before widespread deindustrialization, before the mass marketing of oxycontin—in a completely different world, which makes me wonder if radically changed conditions might yield different results.

In any case, I don’t know if replicating the same research today would yield data from which any meaningful conclusions about society at large could be drawn. This is because the number of marriages has been reduced to the point where, similar to anime, kink, and board games, the institution may soon become effectively just the pastime of another subculture. In the past fifty years, the marriage rate in the United States has fallen 65 percent, from a peak of nearly 86 marriages per 1,000 unmarried people in 1970 to 31 marriages per 1,000 unmarried people in 2021. Less than half of American adults are married today. In the future, that number is only expected to drop. There is some good news: divorce rates are down, but most people suspect that is only a side effect of the bad news.

Wilcox is well aware that marriage, and more particularly lasting marriage, has become something of a luxury good, and he is anxious to demonstrate that it need not be so. The subtitle of the book is Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization. To justify that wordy exhortation, Wilcox frequently peppers his stats and case studies with invective against the upper orders. These people, he writes, have discovered the secret to happiness, and they are hoarding it all for themselves. 

“The problem isn’t that elites have forged stable marriages for themselves and their kids in the twenty-first century,” Wilcox writes. “The problem is that they are not producing films, developing curricula for public schools, writing articles for the New York Times, or advancing public policies on Capitol Hill that conform to the truth about the realities of contemporary family life. They are not doing much of anything culturally, economically, or politically to strengthen the foundations of marriage for Americans outside of their own privileged circles.”

There is some truth in this, though I have to wonder whether an op-ed in the New York Times has ever changed anyone’s opinion about anything. But what I find more interesting in the anti-elite posturing is that it brings Wilcox into a strange agreement with one of his most vehement critics, the Twitter personality Matt Bruenig. Bruenig argues, somewhat autistically, that marriage today is primarily a vehicle for the preservation of wealth: “With marriage, you have an institution that attracts and retains more economically secure and stable people, not an institution that creates them,” he said in a recent article for the American Prospect. Wilcox responds that while that may be descriptively true right now, marriage historically is also transformative for the people who enter it: “it endows their lives, day in and day out, with more meaning, prosperity, stability, and solidarity, all of which typically boost the sense of satisfaction that men and women take from their lives after they enter our civilization’s most fundamental institution.”

The two think they are in disagreement, but really they are only approaching the same end from different directions. Bruenig, who is a strict materialist, thinks marriage is about preserving material security and that only rich people can access it. Wilcox, who is Catholic and vocal about his faith, thinks that marriage can create—and then preserve—that same security and, perhaps, build up other non-material securities. But in the cold eye of data analysis, it washes out to about the same thing: both believe that people get married to feel happy. 

For Wilcox, this is where the gloves come off. Even though he borrows some of the language, he is no Arthur Brooks; he is not selling a personal wellness regimen. He knows that “happiness” can mean many things, and when represented with charts and graphs, it often means nothing at all. That won’t do. For him, the term has a very clear meaning—even if he doesn’t represent it clearly at all times—and it leads him to this conclusion: “conservative and religious Americans are winning the ‘pursuit of happiness’ game, and their signature move is getting married and staying married.” So, what do you have to do to be happy? Be religious; be conservative; get married.

Here is where I must get personal again. I understand that it is possible to construe statistics to demonstrate the veracity of just about any claim. I understand that it may very well be true that married conservative and religious Americans are actually happier than their peers. But I also have my own eyes and my own experiences, which, for what it’s worth, track pretty closely with the circumstances ofWilcox’s case studies. (Many of the people he interviewed for the book live in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., where I grew up.) And what I have seen—what I think most people see—is that everyone, regardless of race, class, or marital status, lives in a state of ambient unhappiness, punctuated occasionally by alternating states of ecstasy and horror.

Catholics of an intellectual bent call it fallen human nature. Less lofty minds simply call it human nature. But most everyone agrees that it is our lot in life to be dissatisfied. True, lasting happiness, if we should be so lucky, comes after death; any brief, unearned snatches of it we catch in this life are reminders of its existence. I am unconvinced by anyone who tells me that I can become happy, because I don’t think I or anyone else can achieve happiness through our own abilities. I’m also wary of expecting another person to provide me any degree of self-satisfaction. And I think, when pushed, most people would agree on these points. The best we can do for now is hope. And the case for marriage is that it is better not to hope alone.   

Behind all of Wilcox’s numbers and case studies, there is a very different book that only occasionally peeks through the charts. It is a personal memoir, describing his own life and marriage. His father died when he was three years old, and his mother, recognizing that he needed male role models, made sure that a whole cast of mentors looked after him. When he grew older and became married himself, Wilcox and his wife adopted five children. And then, when they thought they were all done with kids, they had twins. Their lives were turned upside down, and life became unexpectedly difficult. Wilcox describes a full year of “bickering, long silences, and sober stares” as he and his wife attempted to raise two newborns along with their other children. Somehow they did it. 

The story Wilcox chooses to relate about his marriage is not a straightforwardly happy one. Even when he looks with pride on his grown twins, the memory of those insane first few months persists. There’s nothing wrong in that. This time of suffering seems to be an important episode in his marriage: the union persisted despite it and strengthened because of it. This is the best case for getting married that Wilcox makes.

The post What Is Marriage For? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Is Trump Right on Social Security?

Politics

Is Trump Right on Social Security?

The retirement system presumes the 20th-century political economy that made America great.

Washington,Dc.,Usa,,30th,January,,1984,President,Ronald,Reagan,Talks
Credit: mark reinstein

When he quickly axed the Reagan administration’s proposed harsh cuts to early Social Security retirement benefits in 1981, House Speaker Tip O’Neill branded the New Deal achievement the “third rail” of American politics. Yet the clash didn’t stop the Massachusetts congressman from shaking hands with the Gipper on a deal embracing the 1983 Greenspan Commission recommendations to resolve an immediate crisis—yielding trust-fund surpluses for the next four decades.

Unlike the “bean counters” then and now, the two sunny Irishmen recognized that the centerpiece of the New Deal and, later, Medicare were designed to function within a bipartisan policy framework steering U.S. wealth generation—the political economy—that served the country incredibly well throughout much of the 20th century but has been all but abandoned today.

But as trillion-dollar-plus deficits since 2020 have ballooned the federal debt to $34 trillion, and interest payments on that indebtedness are poised to outstrip defense spending in a year or two, all the usual suspects are lining up again, spears in hand, to gore the lead ox of mandatory spending. 

Whether the editors of the Wall Street Journal, scholars at the American Enterprise Institute and the Manhattan Institute, or the analysts at the bipartisan Peter G. Peterson Foundation with its tagalong Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the whole green-eyeshade crowd is clamoring for cuts at Social Security and Medicare. This show of force seems to have spooked the House Budget Committee to push for a debt commission.

Why aim daggers at programs that retirees have paid into with every paycheck throughout their laboring years—which are projected to stay afloat for the next ten years via payroll taxes and existing surpluses—rather than the trillions squandered on over two decades of foreign interventions? Or the “gusher of subsidies,” as the Wall Street Journal frames it, of pandemic and green-infrastructure dollars to states and localities? Not to mention the trillions spent on the War on Poverty, still being waged on manifold fronts after 60 years, propping up a legion of social-welfare handouts, including Medicaid, that have no funding mechanism nor demand any recipient buy-in other than relative need.

More important, why do the budget alarmists offer no solutions to the root problems yanking at Social Security reserves: stagnant wages, tanking birth rates, and the elephant in the room, our deconstructed political economy?

Not long ago, the bipartisan “American Way,” which provided the context and economic foundation to carry Social Security and Medicare easily, worshiped the trinity of indispensable wealth creators delivering the highest living standard in the world: 

  • Domestic manufacturing and the energy extraction to power that sector;
  • Infrastructure gamechangers like the Interstate Highway System; and 
  • Cutting-edge defense capabilities, spearheaded by long-term economic drivers like Eisenhower’s DARPA, JFK’s Moonshot, and Reagan’s strategic-defense industrial policies.

Winning demographics iced the cake. From its early years, Social Security established the married-parent family as the “American Standard,” reinforcing the “family wage” pioneered by Henry Ford and embraced by labor and management in the Treaty of Detroit in 1950. From our entry into World War II through the Reagan era, the lion’s share of U.S. households could boast one adult, most often the father, earning wages sufficient not merely to support both parents and several children, but also generous benefits that would extend into a couple’s retirement. 

The arrangement exuded generational reciprocity: Those same families reared a relatively sizeable posterity that guaranteed future human and social capital, not to mention healthy social-insurance reserves.

That bipartisan consensus continued in somewhat modified form under Presidents Carter and Reagan. By the 1990s, however, the political class was fully casting the American Way overboard, gambling the country’s fate on finance, the outsourcing of skilled labor and production, and mass immigration.

Due to an interlocking set of “supply-side” misconceptions—from free trade and tax-rate cuts for investors to the frenzied deregulation of U.S.-based multinationals—the economy would serve new pharaohs, especially global capital markets, who did not know the American Josephs. We transferred much of our industrial prowess to Communist China and put the untested lords of a service sector—investment bankers, venture capitalists, and management consultants—in charge. 

Although the gut punches did not hit immediately, the Great Recession demonstrated that America had lost her productive edge while her once-great middle class was shrinking and rapidly losing ground.

Parsing Census Bureau data, the Pew Research Center quantifies the fallout. The share of “middle-income” households declined from 61 percent in 1971 to 50 percent in 2021, and that cohort’s contribution to national “aggregate income” plunged from 62 percent in 1970 to 42 percent in 2020. More distressing: middle-income couples enjoying the postwar family wage declined from 54 percent of households in 1971 to 37 percent in 2021. Today’s middle-income household now requires multiple earners to achieve the same status that their less-educated family-wage counterparts enjoyed under President Nixon.

President Biden points to historically low unemployment, a bullish stock market, and rising GDP numbers under his watch. Yet the country has suffered, as demographer Nicholas Eberstadt has exhaustively documented, from Depression-era rates of idleness among men since the end of the Cold War. This is hardly surprising: Net labor-force growth since 1990 mostly represents low-value-added service gigs, including part-time or seasonal work, not coveted family-wage jobs with good benefits. Making matters worse, entire swaths of low-skilled workers are being legally downgraded as “independent contractors,” short-circuiting fair-labor protections enshrined since the New Deal. Per the Social Security Administration, the median annual wage in 2022 stood at $40,847.

No wonder new automobiles only fill the dreams of 60 percent of U.S. households. The median price of existing single-family homes, now $382,600, mirrors the meteoric rise in asset values of the last 15 years and leaves many average Americans without an ownership stake in society. Meanwhile, unrestricted abortion and the necessity of dual-income households have helped depress the nation’s fertility rates to levels not suffered since the Great Depression, eating the seed corn of social and human capital to enable the United States to thrive, and afford earned benefits.

It’s the political economy, not Social Security, that needs immediate reform. If the political class would instead focus on rebuilding the working and middle class, rather than the budget woes generated by its meltdown—and restore the American Way—such an achievement would make the smiling O’Neill and Reagan grin anew.

The post Is Trump Right on Social Security? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Why Trump Is Right about Social Security and Medicare

Politics

Why Trump Is Right about Social Security and Medicare

The popular, earned-benefit programs have strengths on the merits.

Hershey,,Pa,-,December,15,,2016:,President,Donald,Trump,Grabs

After winning re-election 20 years ago, President George W. Bush wasted his political capital on a wild goose chase to partially privatize Social Security, an issue seldom discussed during the campaign. The more he pitched the concept during the early months of 2005, the less the public bought in. Nor could Dubya secure enough support from his enlarged majorities in both chambers of Congress to bring up the proposal for a vote.

This domestic-policy Edsel set the pace for a failed second term, including Republicans losing both houses of Congress in 2006. Yet prominent GOP voices since have remained stuck in the Bush dreamworld of “reforming” Social Security, exaggerating the projected, down-the-road funding shortfalls, as did Bush, into an existential crisis.

Former President Donald Trump understands the political reality that the 43rd president did not: Earned-benefit programs remain popular with Middle America, especially with voters over 45 years of age, who have favored Republican presidential picks since 2012. So his White House did not mess with Social Security or Medicare. As the likely GOP nominee this year, Trump has reaffirmed his pledge to heed the GOP base on these pocketbook issues.

He may lack the electoral magic of Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan, but Trump stands with the masters in accepting—not relitigating—the New Deal centerpiece that served the country well until the Great Society broke from the bipartisan policy consensus. The unconventional candidate might remember that FDR borrowed the Social Security idea from his GOP cousin Theodore Roosevelt. Or how congressional Republicans dared the Democrats, during the 1938 midterms, to improve the then-fledgling program. As social historian Allan Carlson captures the drama, by criticizing the stinginess of the old-age component that had yet paid any beneficiary, the GOP picked up 80 seats.

Consequently, the 1939 Social Security amendments transformed the original setup, modeled after private insurance, and geared to the individual worker, into pay-as-you-go social insurance delivering spousal and survivor benefits to the married-parent family, elevating “the American standard” as the socioeconomic ideal. So popular were these reforms, cementing Social Security’s enduring appeal, that the 1940 GOP platform endorsed the program.

Later linked to Medicare, the sole Great Society program premised on New Deal principles of reciprocity, the socially conservative system laid the foundation of the family-benefits package wage earners still covet. As John Mueller, the Jack Kemp advisor who helped craft Reagan’s 1981 tax cuts and 1986 tax reform, contends in Redeeming Economics, pay-as-you-go benefits “provide a valuable form of retirement security that the private market cannot duplicate.”

Trump also knows that attacks on the system, from Texas’s former Senator Phil Gramm’s claim that Social Security “was doomed from the start” to Bush 43 Social Security Deputy Commissioner Andrew Biggs’s insult that retirees don’t earn their benefits, worsen the party’s branding problems, in the manner of Mitt Romney’s infamous whopper demeaning half the country as “takers.” Such toxic rhetoric only gives President Biden ammo to blast Republicans and inspires progressives to lobby the White House to “go big” on enhancing benefits to beat Trump. All the while, these unforced errors kneecap Republicans from constructing a platform that delivers economic tangibles to average workers, not just investors.

The equivalent of Democrats calling for outlawing teachers unions or turning bullish on fossil fuels, the crying wolf over Social Security is also selective, if not disingenuous. No question, Social Security drives federal spending and faces shortfalls come 2034, per the most recent trustees’ report. Yet that observation captures only half the story.

Its funding mechanisms, especially the payroll tax, have established the mostly self-financing retirement-and-disability program as more budget-bracing than budget-busting. Revenues flowing into the Social Security trust funds, including interest on the reserves, have generated surpluses for at least a generation, per the chart below. Even as baby-boom retirements have cut into those reserves, the old-age and disability funds ran combined shortfalls only in 2021 and 2022.

The same cannot be said of Medicare. Surpluses from its hospitalization-insurance component are less pronounced, lasting only through 2031. And Medicare’s supplemental medical insurance—never supported by the payroll tax—is funded mostly by general revenues covering 75 percent of costs. In the last three years, this part of Medicare required roughly $400 billion annually from the U.S. Treasury, a legitimate concern.

Yet if budget hawks were so concerned about fiscal discipline, why so little protest over the decades when Social Security surpluses were hijacked to boost federal appropriations, from Wall Street bailouts to endless foreign interventions? Moreover, as Trump’s OMB Director Russ Vought argues, budget cutting should aim first at the low-hanging fruit in the woke bureaucracies, from the State Department hosting LGBTQ+ parades abroad to Homeland Security’s promoting multiculturalism via open borders and HUD’s war on the suburbs.

The easy targets also include bigger-ticket items: means-tested, anti-poverty welfare outlays, which the Great Society placed on steroids. Having tracked these expenditures over his career, Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation details a cornucopia of 87 assistance programs sprawled over four independent agencies and nine federal departments. Per Rector, the hemorrhaging exceeds not only the growth of Social Security and Medicare but also defense and education, reaching $841.4 billion in federal resources by 2018, before the pandemic and President Biden’s welfare spree. Using similar calculations, this writer counts the 2022 toll at more than $1.5 trillion, more than triple the public costs of Medicare.

Yet the same Republicans obsessed with entitlements popular with their own voters never declare the means-tested monstrosity “bankrupt” or a “Ponzi scheme”—even though it feeds the Democratic base, from the underclass to the grantees and public-union apparatchiks who run the overlapping programs. We’ve come a long way from President Reagan, whose budget knife carved back the Great Society, not the New Deal.

Knee-deep in the numbers, the critics of Trump’s endorsement of social insurance can’t see the macro perspective explaining why Social Security reserves are in retreat. Indeed, the crowd pushing entitlement reform is the same that cheered policy departures from the Reagan era that have devastated the U.S. manufacturing sector, a key source of American strength and wealth, not to mention stability for rank-and-file Americans, most of whom lack college degrees. 

These influencers seem unaware of how our downward spiral—from a family-wage, middle-class economy centered on producing and exporting sophisticated products toward a low-wage, service-based Hunger Games dystopia brought on by skilled-labor outsourcing, mass immigration, and the elevation of finance—has turned many former producers of government revenue (high-wage workers) into consumers of government revenue (welfare recipients).

Even their solutions for trust-fund replenishment, from upping the retirement age to adopting alternative formulas to trim COLAs for retirees, fall flat with the public. Likewise, the Trump critics aren’t weighing the imperatives of rebooting our defense-industrial base, reducing our ballooning trade deficits, or recovering the family wage, an achievement that built the American century. Nor do they offer solutions to the country’s upside-down demographics, including the decades-long retreat from marriage and anemic birthrates—inseparable indicators, Adam Smith observed in The Wealth of Nations, on which the nation’s fortunes, including trust-fund balances, rest.

If addressed, these underlying challenges would enable Republican policymakers to construct a policy agenda that would resonate with the “silent majority” to which earlier GOP presidents pledged allegiance. Rather than calling our social-insurance system busted, we should declare our political economy broken—and promise to rebuild the country around the restoration of a rising and robust middle class. Such visionary leadership would have prevented Bush 43 from squandering his presidency. And ensure that next time the GOP controls both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, the party would have a real shot at ushering in what Karl Rove has only dreamt about: a permanent Republican majority.

The post Why Trump Is Right about Social Security and Medicare appeared first on The American Conservative.

Montana Is Right to Ban TikTok

Politics

Montana Is Right to Ban TikTok

Our children deserve nothing less.

Tver,,Russia,-,January,31,,2021;,Tik,Tok,Logo,On

This text has been adapted from an amicus brief filed by the Institute for Family Studies in support of Montana’s SB 419, which bans TikTok from the state.

Although only a relatively recent entrant into the U.S. social media market, TikTok escalates dangerous online activity. Nearly a third of Americans of all ages spend more than an hour on the app daily. With over one billion monthly users, it ranks fourth globally among social media platforms. More than any other social media platform, TikTok appeals to the youngest market possible

In May 2023, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued a public advisory warning that social media’s mental health effects have created an “urgent public health issue” for young Americans. The most critical period of adolescent brain development is from ages 10 to 19, when the brain is “especially susceptible” to harm and influence by these applications.

The psychologist and Institute for Family Studies (IFS) contributor Jean Twenge finds significant evidence of social media’s negative effect on teen mental health, and says, “With heavy users twice as likely to be depressed as light users, it seems odd to describe the links as small. The associations are just as large as factors subject to public health interventions like smoking, obesity, and lead exposure.” 

Certain populations prove particularly at risk for technological addiction. A 2022 report by IFS and the Wheatley Institute showed that children from non-intact families—i.e., those who don’t live with married parents—suffer disproportionately. Unfortunately, “Children being raised in non-intact families [tend to] have fewer rules guiding their use of technology and more exposure to that technology,” spending almost two hours more daily on their devices than their peers who live with married parents. This makes TikTok an extremely influential force for children in such circumstances. 

TikTok fosters injurious social behaviors through its addictiveness and the false authority granted to so-called “influencers.” TikTok’s algorithm encourages children to engage in deadly “challenges,” such as the notorious “Benadryl Challenge,” which claimed the life of 13-year-old Jacob Stevens. At the algorithm’s urging, Stevens ingested large doses of Benadryl and filmed it live, to die on a ventilator days later. 

These monetized influencers also offer users mental health “hacks” to self-diagnose and self-cure. Young users investigate their own mental health problems, and in many cases manifest symptoms they did not present before their self-study, such as the “TikTok tic.” Kids are lured into the app for help when they should be alerting a parent or guardian or seeing a professional. When one considers the young demographic to which TikTok caters, the risk of inexperienced diagnoses becomes more apparent

TikTok’s algorithm is not designed for sociality. Unlike Facebook, for example, a TikTok user’s feed is not a timeline of the life events of friends and family. The New York Times journalist Ben Smith summarized: “[TikTok] displays an endless stream of videos and, unlike the social media apps it is increasingly displacing, serves more as entertainment than as a connection to friends.” 

A 2019 New York Times article on TikTok provides a synoptic view:

The most obvious clue [of TikTok’s nature] is right there when you open the app: the first thing you see isn’t a feed of your friends, but a page called ‘For You.’ It’s an algorithmic feed based on videos you’ve interacted with, or even just watched. It never runs out of material. It is not…full of people you know, or things you’ve explicitly told it you want to see. It’s full of things that you seem to have demonstrated you want to watch, no matter what you actually say you want to watch. 

While TikTok’s algorithm considers industry-standard metrics such as likes and comments in organizing a user’s feed, it puts more weight on replicating the content a user tends to return to and view for the greatest duration. This means that users cannot direct the feed away from content they may be drawn to by addiction and compulsion. Thus, children fall down the “rabbit hole” to very dark places. When a child is scrolling through her feed, she has little to no agency. TikTok’s algorithm is the dominant agent.

TikTok resists adequate monitoring by parents or guardians. Under severe pressure, in July 2022, the platform introduced tools for parents to customize the experience of their children. But the tools are notoriously difficult to operate. Even with these tools, no parent can possibly monitor content in such volume. Kids’ feeds can evolve from one day, one hour, one video to the next. 

The platform shares YouTube’s visual appeals and the power of video, but the shorter clips tend to be even more intimate. TikTokers don’t only show their face and bedroom, but often record as they move around these and other places they frequent, such as their school, neighborhood, and gym, exposing friends, family, and strangers as well. TikTok thus destroys young users’ agency, intimate social connections, and privacy in one fell swoop.

As IFS executive director Michael Toscano has summarized in Compact magazine, TikTok “controlled by the Chinese government through its parent company, the China-based ByteDance.” TikTok is so dangerous for children, however, that the Chinese government itself does not allow its own children to use it. Douyin—TikTok’s Chinese counterpart—is not allowed to provide the same content that TikTok shows to American kids. Instead, China restricts Douyin to edifying material and rigorously excludes content that could threaten the moral and spiritual welfare of Chinese youths. Even so, the Chinese government placed a 40-minutes per-day restriction on Douyin for users under the age of 18. As Tristan Harris, founder of the Center for Humane Technology, recently told 60 Minutes, “It’s almost like they [the Chinese government] recognize that technology is influencing kids’ development, and they make their domestic version a spinach version of TikTok, while they ship the opium version to the rest of the world.”

In more than thirty states, TikTok is banned from the devices of government employees. On December 30, 2022, as part of a new appropriations bill, President Biden signed a federal ban into law. Why? As the Guardian has reported, an analysis of TikTok’s source-code revealed that it can “collect user contact lists, access calendars, scan hard drives including external ones, and geolocate devices on an hourly basis.” The Guardian writes that the app needs none of these data collections to operate, which suggests to analysts that, whatever the stated objectives of the app, its real purpose is data collection. Millions of American children emit geolocation data hourly, providing, potentially, a textured map of the United States. This threat to national security has been underexamined.

Perhaps the gravest threat of all is that this seemingly autonomous algorithm is in fact designed to re-shape the identity and personality of American kids, making them pliant to behaviors that, we have seen, the CCP finds destructive among its own youth. Prudence demands that we not give TikTok the benefit of the doubt as to whether it is intentional or not. Senate Bill 419 relieves the children of Montana of being objects of surveillance and manipulation. They deserve nothing less.

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Yes, Social Media Censorship Is a First Amendment Issue

Politics

Yes, Social Media Censorship Is a First Amendment Issue

Recent court rulings show the government’s deep involvement in platform management.

Supreme,Court,Of,The,United,States,Of,America,In,Retro

If you think your social media is being edited and blocked to favor a certain point of view, it is. If you think the government is trying to get you to think a certain way, it is. There’s no more hiding this behind dummy allegations of conspiracy theories.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled that the Biden White House and the FBI violated the First Amendment by improperly driving social media companies’ decisions to remove or suppress posts on Covid-19 and election topics. The ruling is a step toward bringing social media under the umbrella of the First Amendment and ending proxy censorship, and sets up a major Supreme Court battle over the censorship of free speech as demanded by the Biden administration.

The appeals judges wrote that,

The White House, the CDC, the FBI, and a few other agencies urged the platforms to remove disfavored content and accounts from their sites. And, the platforms seemingly complied. They gave the officials access to an expedited reporting system, downgraded or removed flagged posts, and deplatformed users. The platforms also changed their internal policies to capture more flagged content and sent steady reports on their moderation activities to the officials. That went on through the Covid-19 pandemic, the 2022 congressional election, and continues to this day.

The judges wrote that the White House “coerced the platforms to make their moderation decisions by way of intimidating messages and threats of adverse consequences.” They also found the White House “significantly encouraged the platforms’ decisions by commandeering their decision-making processes, all in violation of the First Amendment.” The decision found that, although the platforms stifled the speech, it was government officials who “coerced, threatened, and pressured social-media platforms to censor” through private communications and legal threats—censorship by proxy.

The appeals court decision includes emails from White House officials showing pressure on the social media companies to address “misinformation.” Things reached a boiling point in July 2021 when President Joe Biden accused Facebook of “killing people.”

In one email, a White House official told a platform to take a post down “ASAP,” and instructed it to “keep an eye out for tweets that fall in this same genre.” In another, an official told a platform to “remove [an] account immediately”—he could not “stress the degree to which this needs to be resolved immediately.” The decision notes that “White House officials did not only flag content; they started monitoring the platforms’ moderation activities, too.”

In that vein, the officials asked for and received frequent updates from the platforms. Those updates revealed, however, that the platforms’ policies were not clear-cut and did not always lead to content being demoted. So, the White House pressed the platforms. For example, one official demanded more details on Facebook’s internal policies at least twelve times, including to ask what was being done to curtail ‘dubious’ or ‘sensational’ content, what ‘interventions’ were being taken, what ‘measurable impact’ the platforms’ moderation policies had, ‘how much content [was] being demoted,’ and what ‘misinformation’ was not being downgraded.”

The platforms did not fight back. As the judges wrote, from the beginning, the platforms cooperated with the White House. One company made an employee “available on a regular basis,” and another gave the officials access to special tools like a “Partner Support Portal” to “ensure” their requests were “prioritized automatically.”

Once White House officials began to demand more from the platforms, they stepped-up their efforts to appease officials instead of pushing back. When there was confusion, the platforms would call to “clear up” any “misunderstanding[s]” and provide data detailing their moderation activities. They met with officials, “partnered” with them, and assured them that they were actively trying to “remove the most harmful COVID-19 misleading information.” When Facebook did not take a [unnamed] prominent pundit’s “popular post” down, a White House official asked what good is the reporting system, and signed off with “last time we did this dance, it ended in an insurrection.”

In another example, one official emailed Facebook a document recommending changes to the platform’s internal policies, including to its deplatforming and downgrading systems. In another example, one platform sent out a post-meeting list of “commitments” including a policy change “focused on reducing the virility” of anti-vaccine content even when it “does not contain actionable misinformation.” 

On another occasion, one platform listed “policy updates…regarding repeat misinformation” after meeting with the Surgeon General’s office; the platform’s representatives signed off with the comment “we think there’s considerably more we can do in partnership with you and your teams to drive behavior.” The platforms obliged the censorship requests in every instance cited and were “keen to amplify any messaging you want us to project.” At times, the judges wrote, their responses “bordered on capitulation.”

In an escalation, the platforms began taking down content and deplatforming users more broadly. For example, “Facebook started removing information posted by the ‘disinfo dozen’—a group of influencers identified as problematic by the White House, despite earlier representations that those users were not in violation of their policies. In general, the platforms had pushed back against deplatforming users in the past, but that changed. Facebook also made other pages that ‘had not yet met their removal thresholds more difficult to find on our platform,’ and promised to send updates and take more action. A month later, members of the disinfo dozen were deplatformed across several sites.” Specifically mentioned was Gateway Pundit.

The judges also focused on the FBI interaction with social media platforms in the run-up to the 2020 elections, which included regular meetings with the tech companies. The judges wrote that the FBI’s activities were “not limited to purely foreign threats,” citing instances where the law enforcement agency targeted posts originating inside the United States. The judges said in their rulings the platforms changed their policies based on the FBI briefings, citing updates to their terms of service about handling of hacked materials, following warnings of state-sponsored “hack and dump” operations. The latter was used as justification initially by Twitter (now X) in blacklisting articles about the Hunter Biden laptop, suggesting its contents had been obtained via hacking and/or the contents were created as disinformation by the Russians. Neither was true but both were used, via the FBI, to step roughly on Americans’ First Amendment rights and influence the 2020 presidential election.

The current appeals court decision follows a July injunction in response to a lawsuit brought by the attorneys general in Louisiana and Missouri. They alleged government officials went too far in their efforts to demand social media companies address posts that they worried could contribute to vaccine hesitancy during the pandemic. The state attorneys general accused the Biden administration of enabling a “sprawling federal ‘Censorship Enterprise’” to encourage tech giants to remove politically unfavorable viewpoints and speakers.

In their filings, the attorneys general alleged the actions amount to “the most egregious violations of the First Amendment in the history of the United States of America.” The judge wrote the attorneys general “have produced evidence of a massive effort by Defendants, from the White House to federal agencies, to suppress speech based on its content.” The injunction starts by citing the famous quote “I may disapprove of what you say, but I would defend to the death your right to say it.”

The answer to all this from the July injunction was to create a wall between social media and state. This affected a wide range of government departments and agencies, and imposed ten specific prohibitions on government officials. The more recent appeals court decision threw out nine of those and modified the tenth to rejoin the government from seeking to “coerce or significantly encourage social-media companies to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce, including through altering their algorithms, posted social-media content containing protected free speech.” 

That will likely be tested before the Supreme Court. Associate Justice Samuel Alito temporarily paused the lower-court order limiting Biden administration officials from contacting social media firms. This follows an emergency filing from the Justice Department. Biden is again (temporarily) free to work with social media to censor.

During times when unbiased information was badly needed—on vaccines, for example—the government of the United States egregiously violated the First Amendment to pressure social media companies to amplify certain points of view and do away with others. This censorship at the request of the White House targeted both broad ideas (“anti-vax”) and individual American citizens. It shows how the administration conducted an end-run on the First Amendment, using the social media companies as proxies. It was done by the Biden administration to drive the American people toward its political positions. Its goal was nothing short of shutting down the marketplace of ideas so necessary in a democracy.

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A Gang of Eight

Politics

A Gang of Eight

Without Donald Trump on the stage, it’s hard to know what sort of debate this could be.

Republican_Party_debate_stage_(24640887681)

The Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, a series of seven across Illinois between the Democrat Senator Stephen A. Douglas and his Republican challenger Abraham Lincoln, have set what is perhaps an unfair standard for American public political discourse. Each occasion—really one debate spread over seven encounters—was some three hours long; they were eloquently concerned with fundamental political questions, questions of sovereignty, equality, and inalienable rights. Though part of a mere Senate election, which Douglas won, the debates reviewed the very nature of the American republic, and their compilation and printing became a centerpiece of Lincoln’s presidential election and all that followed. Of course, even if we had statesmen capable of such dialogue today, thanks to television formats and digital news, we the people lack the capacity to attend to them. 

A more fair standard for contemporary presidential debate might be the series between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016. With some 84 million viewers, the first one on September 26 of that year was the most watched in American history. They were, in many ways, bizarre and painful viewing, but not without substance: the status quo versus a resurgent populism, getting at what it means to have a government of the people, by the people, and—most controversial of all—for the people. They are more easily reviewed and assessed with the help of “Her Opponent,” the gender-swapped theatrical re-presentation of parts of each of the three debates. As a man called “Jonathan Gordon,” Clinton is, somehow, even more unjustifiably condescending, distastefully presumptuous; meanwhile, as a woman called “Brenda King,” Trump is even more compelling with his rhetoric of gut instinct and transaction. 

The former president will not be participating in tonight’s first RNC debate in Milwaukee, which will be moderated by Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, broadcasting at 9 p.m. on Fox News. He has reportedly pre-taped an interview with Tucker Carlson that will air as counterprogramming. Announcing his decision to skip on Sunday, Trump wrote, “The public knows who I am.” That is true, and it is difficult—and perhaps something of a problem for the general election—to imagine anyone in the country still on the fence about the man, after eight years of unceasing media coverage. From his campaign’s perspective, with his commanding lead in the primary, the conspicuous absence makes strategic sense. He can participate in the circus, or he can be the subject of the discussion. If one is inclined to take a debate like this very seriously, then there is a certain contempt for the party in not deigning to appear. But Trump didn’t win in 2016 as a Republican; he beat the GOP for the nomination, and reminded us television debates are entertainment anyway. 

So, Republicans, masochists, and sadists can watch some Republicans debate tonight. Who is participating? RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said in a statement late Monday night that the GOP “is excited to showcase our diverse candidate field” in the eight people whose campaigns secured 40,000 donors and received 1 percent support in some polls. They may be unequal, and not everyone running is included, but at least these eight are diverse, the adjective the New York Times went with, too: “The candidates will give Republicans a diverse field attempting to take on President Biden: six past or present governors, one Black candidate, two candidates born to Indian immigrants, one woman and one former vice president.” 

On the stage will be, in alphabetical order: Doug Burgum, the unknown governor of North Dakota who does admittedly look like a 19th-century president; Chris Christie, who has said he’ll show that Trump isn’t the only one who can smack people around on stage; Ron DeSantis, defending second place and a sterling gubernatorial record now greasy with campaigning; Nikki Haley, challenging President Biden for the Democratic ticket; Asa Hutchinson, who is campaigning for the Mike Pence vote; Mike Pence, who is campaigning for the Asa Hutchinson vote; Vivek Ramaswamy, running for the 2028 nomination; and Tim Scott, with his $22 million warchest and army of adoring AARP members. 

For a successful debate, these eight diverse candidates will, fundamentally, need to answer three questions, two ways. What has happened (to America under Biden/to the party after Trump)? What should we do (for America/with Trump)? And how should we feel (about America/about Trump)? The Times reports that Fox plans “to turn Mr. Trump into a presence, with quotes and clips from the former president, even though he will not be on the stage.” A few of the candidates will be certain to add, if the moderators don’t prompt them first, answers to a third version of the same questions, focused on Ukraine. On the one hand, that the proxy war with Russia is certain to receive significant attention during the debate is a prudent recognition of the risks the country runs in a conflict with a nuclear power. On the other hand, it seems likely that the location and solidity of the eastern Ukrainian border will receive more attention tonight than that of the U.S. southern border—the Wall, after $60 billion, looks pretty inexpensive. 

As offensive as Trump’s skipping the proceedings may be to some Republicans, that he is doing so, can afford to do so, and has an alternative platform on which to counter-program might be more important than anything his eight competitors say tonight. The monolithic media environment in which the television debate emerged, to the famous advantage of John F. Kennedy and disadvantage of Richard Nixon, has been dead for about a decade. The televisual age adapted to cable news and talk radio, but 2012 marked an inflection, the moment when nearly half of American adults owned smartphones. From there it has been off to the digital races, with online streaming, social media, and an app for everything displacing more and more pieces of our previous information and entertainment environment. The 2016 election was our first presidential election in the digital age, and as revelations like the Twitter files have shown, the establishment panicked in response. What does that mean for 2024? That’s a question I don’t expect anyone on stage tonight to answer. 

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Disinformation and Censorship, 1984–2023

Politics

Disinformation and Censorship, 1984–2023

Americans’ free speech is threatened as never before.

Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 Ð 21 January 1950), better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an influential English author and journalist, c. 1940
(Photo by: Pictures From History/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

Orwell, again. 1984 seems written for the Biden era. Underlying it all is the concept of disinformation, the root of propaganda and mind control. So it is in 2023. Just ask FBI Director Chris Wray. Or Facebook.

George Orwell’s novel explores the concept of disinformation and its role in controlling and manipulating society. Orwell presents a dystopian future where a totalitarian regime, led by the Party and its figurehead Big Brother, exerts complete control over its citizens’ lives, including their thinking. The Party employs a variety of techniques to disseminate disinformation and maintain its power. One of the most prominent examples is the concept of “Newspeak,” a language designed to restrict and manipulate thought by reducing the range of expressible ideas. Newspeak aims to replace words and concepts that could challenge or criticize the Party’s ideology, effectively controlling the way people think and communicate (in our own time and place, think of “unhoused,” “misspoke,” LGBTQIAXYZ+, “nationalist,” “terrorist”).

Orwell also introduces the concept of doublethink, which refers to the ability to hold two contradictory beliefs simultaneously and to accept them both as true. This psychological manipulation technique allows the Party to control the minds of its citizens and make them believe in false information or embrace contradictory ideas without questioning (think mandating masks that do not prevent disease transmission). The Party in 1984 alters historical records and disseminates false information through the Ministry of Truth. This manipulation of historical events and facts aims to control the collective memory of the society in a post-truth era, ensuring that the Party’s version of reality remains unquestioned (think war in Ukraine, Iraq, El Salvador, Vietnam, all to protect our freedom at home.)

Through these portrayals, Orwell highlights the dangers of disinformation and its potential to distort truth, manipulate public opinion, and maintain oppressive systems of power. The novel serves as a warning about the importance of critical thinking, independent thought, and the preservation of objective truth in the face of disinformation and propaganda.

Disinformation is bad. But replacing disinformation with censorship or replacement with other disinformation is worse. 1984 closed down the marketplace of ideas. So for 2023.

In 2023 America, the medium is social media, and the Ministry of Truth is the executive branch, primarily the FBI. Topics that the FBI at one point labeled disinformation and sought to censor in the name of protecting Americans from disinformation include, but are not limited to, the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, the Covid lab-leak theory, the efficiency and value to society of masks, lockdowns, and vaccines, speech about election integrity and the 2020 presidential election, the security of voting by mail, and even parody accounts mocking the president (for example, one about Finnegan Biden, Hunter Biden’s daughter).

When asked before Congress to define disinformation, FBI Director Christopher Wray could not do it, even though it is the basis for the FBI’s campaign to censor Americans. It’s a made-up term with no fixed meaning. That gives it its power, as “terrorism” was used a decade or so earlier. Remember “domestic terrorism”? That stretched to cover everything from white power advocates to January 6 marchers to BLM protesters to Moms for Liberty. It just can’t be all those things all the time, but it can be all those things at different times, as needed.

The term “hate speech” is another flexible tool of enforcement, which is why efforts to codify banning hate speech under the First Amendment must be resisted so strongly. Same for QAnon. We’ve heard about QAnon for years now but still can’t figure out if it even exists. To read the mainstream media, you would think it is the most powerful and sinister thing one can imagine, yet it seems to be imaginary, another Cthulhu. Do they have an office, an email address, a lair somewhere?

In simple words: The government is using social media companies as proxies to censor the contrary thoughts of Americans, all under the guise of correcting misinformation and in direct contrivance of the First Amendment.

How bad does it get? As part of its 2023 investigation into the federal government’s role in censoring lawful speech on social media platforms, the House Committee on the Judiciary issued subpoenas to Meta, Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, and Alphabet, Google and YouTube’s parent. Documents obtained revealed that the FBI, on behalf of a compromised Ukrainian intelligence service, requested and, in some cases, directed, the world’s largest social media platforms to censor Americans engaging in constitutionally protected speech online about the war in Ukraine.

Another tool of thought control is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which was supposed to be used to spy on foreigners but has been improperly used against thousands of Americans. Over 100,000 Americans were spied on in 2022, which is down from the nearly 3 million spied on in 2021.

Does all that sound familiar? An amorphous threat is pounded into the heads of Americans (communism, Covid, terrorism, disinformation) and in its name nearly anything is justified, including in the most recent battle for freedom, censorship. The wrapper is that it is all for our own protection—Biden himself accused social media companies of “killing people,” the more modern version of the terrorism era’s “blood on their hands”—with the government assuming the role of knowing what is right and correct for Americans to know.

The target in name is always some Russki-type foreigner; in reality, what happens is the censorship of our own citizens, who are tarred with the suspicion of being “pro-Putin.” Yet Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, admitted that the government asked Facebook to suppress true information. He said during the Covid era that the scientific establishment within the government asked “for a bunch of things to be censored that, in retrospect, ended up being more debatable or true.”

Under President Joe Biden, the government has undertaken “the most massive attack against free speech in United States history.” That was the extraordinary conclusion reached by a federal judge in Missouri v. Biden. The case exposed the incredible lengths to which the Biden White House and its federal agencies have gone to bully social media platforms into removing political views they dislike. The White House is appealing and obtained a stay, hoping to retain this powerful tool of thought control right out of 1984. A victory for censorship of Americans and their thoughts could be the greatest threat to free speech in American history.

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White House to Appeal Social Media Ruling

Politics

White House to Appeal Social Media Ruling

State of the Union: That the Biden administration hopes to resume its interference tells you everything you need to know.

President Biden Delivers State Of The Union Address
(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

An appellate court this week enjoined the Biden administration to cease interfering in the operations of social media companies. The Biden White House has already announced plans to appeal the ruling.

The named plaintiffs in the suit included users who claimed to have had their posts demoted or removed by a social media site responding to Biden administration pressure. The states of Missouri and Louisiana were also among the named plaintiffs in the class-action suit.

The court documented extensive coordination between the Biden White House and social media platforms, with the former pressuring the latter to remove or demote supposed Covid-19 misinformation. Twitter, for example, set up code on their internal servers to prioritize moderation requests from the White House, while Facebook assured Biden officials that “vaccine-skeptical” posts on their platform would be demoted and given warning labels. Posts making “debunked” claims, Facebook told the White House, would be removed entirely.

Former Biden digital strategy official Rob Flaherty even asked Facebook for “some metrics” indicating “the scale of removal for each” type of supposed misinformation, and sent angry letters to the company, accusing it of stoking “vaccine hesitancy.”

To get a sense of the type of coercion involved—remember, this is the federal government we’re talking about—here are a couple of messages sent by White House personnel to private social media companies:

“Cannot stress the degree to which this needs to be resolved immediately. Please remove this account immediately.”

And:

“I care mostly about what actions and changes you are making to ensure you’re not making our country’s vaccine hesitancy problem worse.”

That the Biden administration is appealing the ruling in hopes of resuming this type of behavior tells you everything you need to know.

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A Technical Tool to Take TikTok to Task

Politics

A Technical Tool to Take TikTok to Task

Make social media random rather than scale-free.

Children Screen Time Rockets
(Photo by Matt Cardy/Getty Images)

A specter more horrifying than communism is haunting Washington: bipartisanship. The pestilence has returned to batter the Chinese technology company ByteDance and its flagship application, TikTok. 

The popular app is a conduit for Chinese cyber-warfare efforts. No government but ours has been so slow to tend to the salus populi, but the threat TikTok poses to national security has stirred Washington to action. The elite’s attempted attack on the app represents the “kid soccer” swarm pattern we have grown accustomed to on so many issues. 

I don’t often believe that much is possible in Washington today. Most intelligent solutions are what political people call “outside the Overton window” and computer scientists might call “regime hard.” But in this case, there are options that are both effective and politically feasible. These solutions become clearer if one takes a step back and considers the problems of social media more broadly. 

Any attempted solution to the TikTok threat that mortally threatens Big Tech companies, especially American ones, will be a political non-starter. Although norms are regularly breached when it suits the elite, some breaches are difficult to sell to the public, and the government closing down an internet application would seriously breach expectations. It is safe to assume that anything that obviously imperils the fortunes of the Democratic Party or opposes “wokeness” is a non-starter. Anything that “harms” a favored constituency or lobby, or that elevates those of the “wrong sort” will not work. 

Many of the major problems associated with social media— addictiveness, the proliferation of socially and neurologically destructive content, and threats to national security—can be mitigated in one fell swoop, in a way that avoids these pitfalls. Congress should require social media apps to create their social networks to be “random” rather than “scale-free.” 

A scale-free network is one that contains nodes, or users, with a high degree of “preferential attachment,” and thus many more connections, than other nodes within the network. Scale-free networks allow growth in the network to accrue mostly to preferred users by presenting the accounts of preferred users more often than their non-preferred counterparts. If you plot a graph with the number of users in a scale-free network against the number of their connections, you will get a power-law distribution rather than a bell curve. In a random network, in which users are presented to other users stochastically, there would still be variance between each user’s number of connections, but the distribution of users by number of connections would resemble a bell curve. 

Most real-life social networks are random networks, or at least can be thought of as bell curve distributions. There are, after all, only so many acquaintances a person can have. A particularly charismatic person might have many more than average while a wallflower might have none, but compared to a scale-free network such as Twitter, it won’t vary by much. 

One should not confuse the fact that real-life social networks can have a “small world” effect with them being scale-free. The small world effect is the famous “six degrees of separation” phenomenon that emerges from the combination of clusters with random links. A scale-free network, on the other hand, requires growth and a higher degree of clustering than is necessary for the creation of a small-world network, though some small-world social networks—such as one that spreads a disease—can effectively resemble scale-free networks if growth is substantial.

Social media apps can be made into random or, at worst, small-world networks by taking measures such as limiting a user’s number of followers or creating random links between clusters of users. If Congress and federal regulators believe a company is not doing this, the agency responsible for enforcement could hire an expert witness to create visualizations of the network topography. The social media company could do the same in their defense. The consequences of this change would be the end of “influencers,” and fewer instances of content going “viral.” Most of the destructive and addictive content can be linked to those incentives. 

It might be objected that influencers would resist this change. But there are not very many of them; only the ones at the very top earn any significant amount of money, and they have no mechanism of coordination. Furthermore, some might find a way to live with this change. The effect on the consumer of social media would similarly be positive. While the most interesting and worthwhile influencers would be harder to listen to, it would still be possible. In any case, it would be the equivalent of reverting the music industry to before the winner-take-all effects induced by the record player and radio. You had professional musicians in every neighborhood, and while the top musicians could play to larger and more frequent crowds, there was a limit. Was music worse in the 18th century?

In fact, Facebook used to be like this, so we know it can work and be profitable. It was the norm before Twitter and Instagram exploded on the scene. When it was the norm, short-film companies like Vine and Beme could not be made profitable. Their odious Chinese successor would likely suffer the same fate if such a rule were applied to all social media. 

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