The following is an exclusive excerpt from Alex Bruesewitz’s new book Winning the Social Media War: How Conservatives Can Fight Back, Reclaim the Narrative, and Turn the Tides Against the Left. The passage below examines the problem of Big Tech censorship and the various solutions posited by conservatives, including Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow and Breitbart Tech Reporter Allum Bokhari.
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As you have seen throughout this book, and perhaps in your personal experience, here is a real concern that social media companies are too powerful, and conservative viewpoints are being silenced or altogether removed by social media companies. I have shown you that companies preach the freedom of expression and open marketplace of ideas, while simultaneously banning accounts, being the arbiters of truth in information, and punishing individuals who don’t appropriately toe the line on particular issues—all of their behaviors undoubtedly have a chilling effect on speech. I then expressed how the targeting of individuals is widespread, and the scope and capabilities of these companies to target individuals with conservative viewpoints is growing. Which leads to the obvious, so what do we do about it?
I confess I am split on the issue, both professing a limited government approach but also recognizing the obvious reality that tech companies coordinate and consolidate at an alarming rate. I wanted to present for you a few options from my own views and others’ that could be implemented to protect conservatives. I’ll leave it up to Washington and the candidates I help win to make it to Washington to decide how best to push back. But we have to push back.
Bari Weiss, a former New York Times writer, expressed skepticism about the reality of the free market and actual competition in social media: “Please spare me the impoverished argument about the free market and private companies not being bound by the constitution [sic]. Barring businesses from using online payment systems; removing companies from the App Store; banning people from social media—these are the equivalent of telling people they can’t open a bank account or start a business or drive down a street.”
Buck Sexton knows this fight is inevitable. “It’s not a concern [about being canceled or disrupted by social media]. It’s a certainty. I’m very much prepared for it. And I’m finally starting to see conservative media waking up to this reality and understanding that if we exist based on the goodwill and the good faith of our political opponents, whether it’s on social media or on the actual hosting of websites, as we’ve all seen what happened recently with Parler and Amazon Web Services, if you exist at essentially the forbearance or rely on the forbearance of our leftist political opponents, we’re not going to exist for very long at all.” The reality is a dire one because, for conservatives, we had always anticipated that the threat to our basic liberties would come directly from government. As attorney Ron Coleman notes, “The concept of free speech as a linchpin to that political health of our republic was always premised on the idea that if government doesn’t suppress speech, then no one else will. And guess what? We’re living in a world where someone else will. We said the Founders certainly didn’t cognitively quite understand the possibility, but a nation of private actors and a network of that would make it so difficult to overcome that kind of restriction of free expression.” It’s hard not to see a future without conservative action, or conservative viewpoints will either be extinguished out of fear or banned by these companies more generally.
Platform access is a real concern. The reality of access is scary: “Conservatives need to be building. It’s not a joke to say we need to build our own internet. Maybe we can’t build an independent internet, but we do need platforms. We need organic growth. We need companies that are willing to be sponsors. We need to start having more control and advertising dollars and run advertising campaigns that are explicitly pro free speech and are comfortable with conservative messaging and ideology.” Though as many note, creating alternatives is no easy feat. “We’ve had two to three years of conservatives trying to compete with Twitter, Facebook, other social media on the ground, essentially on censorship access,” Will Chamberlain told me. “We found that that hasn’t been particularly effective. Even Parler, the most successful of the group, has had spurts of popularity. Why is that? Well, it’s because Twitter has a competitive mode that’s pretty much insurmountable given the fact that every journalist, political pundit, and celebrity uses the platform for public square social media and that network effect, that first mover advantage.” Realistically, creating an alternative is fraught with complications. The tightened market share allows social media companies to exert undue influence on competitors. “There’ll be pressure on the financial companies, the banks, the credit card companies, the Apple payment processors like PayPal and Square to not allow these alternative platforms to process payments from their users…anything that becomes a serious threat to the mainstream social networks,” predicts Allum Bokhari. The lack of platform and inability to realistically create an alternative is alarming.
So why not boycott? As Ron Coleman puts it, “Companies by and large are not sensitive to the boycott. Maybe if there is a will for a very well-executed boycott. But I think changing the nature of the cultural conversation is probably going to be more valuable.” I am deeply skeptical of the effectiveness of boycotts long-term as well.
If we can’t battle with alternatives and extricating ourselves entirely isn’t a practical reality, how should conservatives respond?
Some conservative organizations like TPUSA take a different approach and advise working within the system. COO Tyler Bowyer says that TPUSA takes the position not to openly attack social media companies:
One thing that you’ll notice is we never go out and blatantly attack any of the social media sites. We rarely do that. A lot of organizations that do, when they do it, look, I’m a big believer in Reagan’s eleventh commandment, not just from the topic of Republicans and conservatives, but I think there’s a deeper issue there, which is: you should exhaust every possible avenue with people that you have conflict with in order to really understand where they’re coming from and try to resolve your issues before you go out and publicly attack. And, quite frankly, it’s been kind of embarrassing at times because we’ve seen people attack the social media giants for something that they were possibly wrong about themselves, or they were just ill-equipped or ill-prepared to really take on the fight against a Goliath like Google or Facebook or others.
Other people we spoke with advocated different approaches.
Will Chamberlain, the editor in chief and publisher of Human Events, expresses a more public square approach to social media companies:
I would treat them the same way as public universities. A public university, even if it’s not a for profit enterprise, tries to keep a bottom line together and tries to make sure that it is offering a good product. We say to the public university, because you’re part of the government, you’re constrained by the First Amendment, and your ability to prevent people from speaking out on campus [is, therefore, constrained as well]. And that’s kind of the attitude I would have: yes, you are able to curate your product under the constraints that we impose on you by law. Under current law, you’re not allowed to discriminate on the basis of race, for example…. These companies have to conform their corporate behavior and make a profit within the bounds of the law, so we’re just creating one more type of restriction that we think serves a very, very important and beneficial purpose.
This did come up in another interview; Attorney Ron Coleman sees hurdles to any sort of regulation of Big Tech on the basis of viewpoint discrimination: “It seems increasingly clear that there are a couple of very big obstacles involving the legal system. One is legal, and I think a much more substantial, one cultural. And I think the cultural one is the tougher one because judges are social creatures like everybody else. And what we have seen, for example, in the election litigation they have once a judge in one case does something about, characterizes that case in a certain way, seems to be a very strong inclination among many judges to do the same thing unless they have some kind of signal that it’s OK to do something different.”
On Capitol Hill, there are calls by some to reform Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. “Section 230 gives these Big Tech companies broad protection that other private businesses don’t have…that puts them in the judgment seat, and they judge whose voice is allowed on their platform and whose voice is not allowed…. They judge what is deemed acceptable in society, acceptable speech and what is deemed unacceptable speech,” says Congresswoman-elect Greene. Congressman Paul Gosar echoes Congresswoman Greene by saying that perhaps “we’re not going to get Democrats to help us with Section 230, then maybe what we have to start looking at is antitrust, because it’s going to be very hard for them not to look at antitrust and the monopolies that share their values.” The actual efficacy of these policies is undetermined, but a future of protection from liberal abuse is a beautiful one.
Further away from Capitol Hill in the great state of Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis is a leader on fighting back against Big Tech. BBC describes the legislation as a “first-in-the-nation bill that can penalise tech companies for deplatforming politicians.” DeSantis says that “Big tech is beginning to look like ‘big brother’ with each passing day.” The bill prevents social media companies from banning accounts for more than fourteen days and fines companies for each day afterward. Florida is leading on the issue and the rest of the nation should follow.
As Alex Marlow of Breitbart says, “We have to figure out a way to break up these tech companies so that they can’t discriminate based on ideology. They’re clearly discriminating against conservatives. And the longer they’re able to thrive like that, it’s kind of like a shark. If they’re not swimming, they’re dying. So they’re not going forward. They’re not making progress. They’re dying. And so, what’s actually happening is these values that led to conservatives getting thrown off of these social media platforms and getting silenced on these platforms and getting demoted on these platforms is now taking over other corporations…. It’s going to get to the point where we’re going to be drinking from the proverbial separate drinking fountains just based off ideology. That’s where we’re headed at this point. And Big Tech is leading the way on that and then preventing the free flow of information and the equal opportunity for certain information to get out there makes them the de facto ministers of truth, the people who decide what’s true and what’s not.” Scott Parkinson of Club for Growth echoes this sentiment: “When you look at Big Tech and sort of the holds that Facebook or Google or Twitter have in their own respective markets, those aren’t free markets, and they’re not operating with competition.… Google is tied in to all these other companies. And then the way that they promote information through their search engine is also stifling information to other markets.”
What I do believe is that Allum Bokhari is exactly right in how we prevent the deeply encroached danger of free speech: “Conservatives have to retake the Republican Party primary. Voters have to rebuff any candidate that doesn’t support the idea of maximum possible penalties on any company that doesn’t respect constitutionally protected speech.” We lack a lot in the conservative movement. We lack the vision for a future where our ideas aren’t purged from the public square.
Alex Bruesewitz is a conservative political consultant and the CEO and co-founder of X Strategies LLC. His new book Winning the Social Media War: How Conservatives Can Fight Back, Reclaim the Narrative, and Turn the Tides Against the Left is available now from Simon & Schuster.
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