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How Governments Force Silicon Valley to Censor You Onlineby MILO YIANNOPOULOSBreitbart Mar. 09, 2016 |
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 On hate speech, social media companies are enthusiastically liking, retweeting, and faving national governments. In December, the German government announced that they had secured the co-operation of Facebook, Google and Twitter in removing "hate speech" from their platforms. A wave of censorship followed. Why have web firms been persuaded to give up their original free-speech ideals? Governments haven't passed any laws requiring Silicon Valley to march to their drum. So why are Facebook, Twitter and Google doing so anyway? The mad progressivism of their Bay Area CEOs probably has something to do with it. But there's another reason: Governments have become increasingly adept at intimidating companies without using the law. In 2011, liberal scholar and Net Neutrality activist Tim Wu published an essay entitled "Agency Threats," discussing how best to regulate companies. In his essay, Wu argued that passing legislation was not, in fact, the most efficient way to pressure web firms (he would soon be proven right during the SOPA and PIPA protests, in which web firms mobilised their vast userbase to cripple a major congressional attempt at web copyright reform.) Instead, Wu advocated "Rule by Threat" to force companies to capitulate to the government. Wu's study suggested that regulatory agencies didn't just have to use adjudication or official rule making processes to get what they wanted, but could force companies to bend to their will by simply threatening them. Most importantly, he suggested that these "threats" worked best for companies rolling out "newly invented technologies or business models" (e.g. Facebook, Twitter and Google). Today, governments' attention has turned from copyright to speech. With a rising tide of anti-immigration, anti-establishment populism on both sides of the Atlantic, national governments are waking up to the consequence of letting their citizens speak freely on the web for all these years. While there is no sign that they're planning to pass new laws to force social media companies to obey them, there's plenty of evidence that Wu's "Rule by Threat" doctrine is already in play. Read More |
