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      Republicans cry big tech bias – on the very platforms they have dominated

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      When Donald Trump’s ban from Facebook was upheld this week, the howls of bias could be heard from Republicans far and wide. Those shrieks, ironically, came mostly on social media.Republicans have spent recent years criticizing Facebook and Twitter, demonizing them as biased against the right. But they, not Democrats, have been the most enthusiastic embracers of social media, and the most successful in harnessing its potential.Between 1 January and 15 December last year, right-leaning Facebook pages accounted for 45% of all interactions on Facebook, according to a study by Media Matters for America, a progressive non-profit which monitors US media.Rightwing pages earned nearly 9bn likes or comments, MMFA found, compared to 5bn interactions on left-leaning pages. Conservative pages account for six of the top 10 Facebook pages that post about US political news.The years-long dominance on Facebook has translated to notable successes – most memorably in 2016, when Donald Trump’s win was propelled by his social media reach. “Facebook and Twitter were the reason we won this thing,” Brad Parscale, the digital director of the 2016 Trump campaign, said in the aftermath of the election.“Twitter for Mr Trump. And Facebook for fundraising.”Those successes appeared to have been forgotten in the last week, when prominent Republicans, including Texas senator Ted Cruz and House minority leader Kevin McCarthy, condemned Facebook in particular. The platform angered the right with its decision to uphold Trump’s post-insurrection suspension, even though a long-term decision has been punted down the road.“If the big tech oligarchs can muzzle the former president, what’s to stop them from silencing you?” Cruz said.“If they can ban President Trump, all conservative voices could be next. A House Republican majority will rein in big tech power over our speech,” was McCarthy’s take.Cruz and other Republicans have been accusing Facebook of bias for years – even as the platform was propelling Trump to victory, while being criticized on the left for being slow to remove rightwing lies or conspiracy theories.“Because Republicans have such a disproportionate amount of influence on these platforms and engagement, the real effect is that by constantly crying bias, it works the refs in such that they don’t enforce the rules against them in a consistent way,” Angelo Carusone, the president of MMFA, said.“Or they’re less likely to take action against cheaters and bad actors, because they don’t want to deal with the blowback of what happens when I take off one of these accounts.”Carusone pointed to how Facebook dealt with groups promoting QAnon, a conspiracy movement that alleges a group of global elites are involved in paedophilia, human trafficking and the harvesting of a supposedly life-extending chemical from the blood of abused children. It took until October last year for the network to finally ban groups, pages or Instagram pages which “represent” QAnon, despite the theory having been promulgated for years.Joe Romm, author of How To Go Viral and Reach Millions and editor-in-chief of Front Page Live, a news site “dedicated to elevating fact-based stories” said that for Republicans, claiming that they are oppressed by media is a consistent narrative.“It’s part of the overall strategy of playing the victim,” Romm said. “Donald Trump showed that it’s part of the overall strategy of: accuse your opponents of doing what you’re doing before they can accuse you.“And so it just makes it so much harder, because if you accuse them first, then when progressives then accurately say: ‘Oh, we’re being disadvantaged on social media,’ no one is going to believe it, because they bought into this big lie that the conservatives are being punished on social media.”As Republicans have cried foul, several rightwing politicians have even written books about such perceived bias – the most recent by Missouri senator Josh Hawley, a millionaire Yale law school graduate turned earthy, blue collar, man of the people.Hawley wrote The Tyranny of Big Tech after claiming he had been censored and canceled by social media. The hypocrisy of the book’s claim that big tech is suppressing conservative thought was exposed by Hawley himself this week, however, when he used Twitter, one of the companies he rails against, to giddily proclaim that his book had been “a bestseller all week” on Amazon – another company he opposes.The claims of conservative bias are only like to continue as the 2022 midterms approach, but experts sayany bias is actually against the other side.“I would say that, in fact, big tech right now is biased against liberals – the thumb is on the scale for those who put out the rightwing lies,” Romm said.“The thing that the social media apps want to do is keep you on their site. That’s what they care about. They don’t care about the truth, they care about keeping you on their site.“So the way things are set up, if you can stir up anger, and get people to comment, and engage and send out shares and say: ‘This is outrageous’, then you’ve got a big advantage in the algorithm. So what the social media sites have done is create a system that favors the most outrageous statements.”Ironically, some of those most outrageous statements are set to come against the leaders of the Republican party railing against the social media giants.“I think the right will leverage this moment to make big tech the new Hillary,” Carusone said. “And that’s going to be a galvanizing force for them leading into 2022 and then again in 2024.” More

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      Facebook is pretending it cares how its platform affects the world | Siva Vaidhyanathan

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      The world is a lot better off without Donald Trump as president of the United States. And Facebook is a lot more peaceful without Trump’s unhinged calls for vengeance against his political opponents and fabricated tales of voter fraud echoing across the platform. What’s more, the world is a lot better off now that Trump can’t use Facebook to execute his plans.The Facebook Oversight Board, a company-selected team of free speech experts, ruled on Wednesday that while, based on Trump’s statements, the company was justified in banning Trump for some period of time, doing so indefinitely meant the company was treating Trump differently than it does other users and other world leaders. The board kicked the decision back to Facebook, meaning that this saga is far from over.“In applying a vague, standardless penalty and then referring this case to the board to resolve, Facebook seeks to avoid its responsibilities,” the 20-member board ruled. “The board declines Facebook’s request and insists that Facebook apply and justify a defined penalty.” The board then demanded that Facebook come up with a clearer and more fair penalty within six months.The board deliberated for four months after Facebook itself appealed its own January ban of Trump. Trump had praised and encouraged the invasion of the US Capitol building on 6 January when five people died in the violence, in what was a clear assault not only on the process of legitimately selecting Trump’s successor but on American democracy itself.In doing so, the board not only came to the most obvious short-term decision, it exposed the limits of its utility. Instead of considering more important questions about the role Facebook plays in politics and political violence around the world, or about how Facebook amplifies some messages and stifles others, or – crucially, in the case of Trump – how a political figure or party exploits Facebook’s features to degrade democracy or exact violence, the board took on the narrowest of questions: the regulation of particular expressions.The decision to ban Trump and his pages in January was a significant reversal of company policy. For years Facebook had treated Trump gingerly, scared of blowback from Republican legislators and the Trump administration itself. Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s CEO, had also for years extolled the platform’s alleged neutrality when it came to controversial speech, going so far, at one point, as to defend the policy of letting Holocaust deniers promote their expressions on Facebook. Clearly Facebook executives considered not only the gravity of the assaults of 6 January, but the fact that Trump would only be president for three more weeks and that Republicans had lost control of the US Senate. It was a safe and almost obvious decision to quiet Trump.The oversight board content director, Eli Sugarman, stated on Twitter that the indefinite penalty, issued without standards by which Trump could correct his behavior and restore his status, was quite different from how Facebook handled misinformation about Covid-19 in March from the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro. Facebook froze Maduro’s page for 30 days and then left it up as “read-only,” limiting posting.“This penalty is novel and smacks of political expediency,” Sugarman wrote about the indefinite banning of Trump, compared to the limited penalty on Maduro.The problem is, Trump is almost novel – or at least he is among a select class of want-to-be tyrants capable of stoking massive violence and undermining democracy with years of corrosive messages. Maduro is no Trump. Comparing the reach and influence of Maduro to Trump makes no sense. And perhaps Facebook made a mistake by making Maduro’s penalty too short and light.Trump’s strategy of fully leveraging Facebook for propaganda, fundraising, organization, and stoking violence against opponents was mastered in 2015 by the leader of the Bharatiya Janata party in India, the current prime minister, Narendra Modi. It was repeated in early 2016 by Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines and Jair Bolsonaro used it in Brazil. Modi, Duterte and Bolsonaro are still active on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. The board has no power to insist that Facebook now treat those leaders like they did Trump. The board may only rule on accounts and content that Facebook decided to ban.Most significantly, the board did not consider the macro effect of Trump on Facebook, on the US, or on democracy. The board is not designed to. The board framed this question as one of expression, as if expression is the only consideration for a company like Facebook. The board was meant to ignore the ways Facebook actually works in the world and the ways some of its most influential users actually use Facebook.The reality is that Trump used Facebook most effectively as an organizing and fundraising tool. Trump’s entire political organization depended on Facebook from the start. Through Facebook, Trump built a fundraising base, recruited volunteers, filled his rallies with supporters and targeted advertisements to small slices of potential voters. Facebook is how Trump prevailed in 2016. Only the fact that Trump failed spectacularly as president to keep the US healthy and prosperous kept him from being re-elected in 2020.Even though he is no longer president and may not ever run for office again, Trump has the means and motivation to expand his political machine. Perhaps it would be to maintain his influence in the Republican party. Perhaps it would support some of his children or their spouses in their political campaigns to come.We should not expect consistency from Facebook going forward … Ultimately, Facebook is too big and too complicatedThe oversight board is committed to rule-based deliberation. It seeks consistency and predictability from Facebook. But Facebook is facing a series of unique challenges, very few of which are like the others. Rule-based deliberation forces the board to imagine that world leaders are somehow the same or even in the same situations. It also assumes that language works the same way in different contexts. Overall, it makes the board focus on the micro – the expression itself – not on the macro effects over time of a leader’s full activity on Facebook.Even comparing Modi, who has been pressuring Facebook to scrub criticisms of his government from the platform, to Trump, who has not and cannot, has its limitations. Facebook has so far failed to take Modi seriously as a threat to the lives and health of both people and democracy. But then again, India is Facebook’s largest market and Modi is close to both Zuckerberg and the chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg.We should not expect consistency from Facebook going forward. We should not even demand it. Ultimately, Facebook is too big and too complicated. And so is the real world. Any attempt to change Facebook for the better to bolster the fate of democracy must come with a full acknowledgment that whether one account is up or down or one post is deleted or not does not matter that much. The oversight board is a weak attempt by Facebook to look as if it takes seriously its effects on the world. We should not give it that much credit. More

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      The inside story of how we reached the Facebook-Trump verdict | Alan Rusbridger

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      As so often is the case, Donald Trump gets to the heart of the problem. On 6 January, he was the president of the United States: probably the most powerful man in the world. He should be free to speak his mind, and voters should be free to listen. But he was also a habitual liar who, by the end of his term, had edged into repudiating the very democracy that had elevated him.And then came his inflammatory words on that day, uttered even as rioters were breaking their way into the heart of US democracy. His words had a veneer of restraint – “We have to have peace, so go home.” But his statements were laced with lies, along with praise for the mob who terrorised lawmakers as they sought to confirm Biden as Trump’s successor – “We love you, you’re very special … great patriots … remember this day for ever.”At 5.41pm and 6.15pm that day, Facebook removed two posts from Trump. The following day the company banned Trump from its platform indefinitely. Around the same day, Twitter also moved to ban the president – permanently.So there was the problem that Donald Trump embodied – in a country whose commitment to free speech is baked into its core. The president might be a bitterly polarising figure, but surely he has a right to be heard – and for voters to be free to make up their own minds?Facebook’s decision to the contrary would spark passionate debate within the United States. But it had a wider resonance. For how much longer would giant social media platforms act as an amplification system for any number of despots around the world. Would they, too, be banned?The classic defence of free expression is that good speech defeats bad speech. Political speech – in some views – should be the most protected speech. It is vital we know who our leaders are. We have a right – surely? – to know if they are crooks, liars or demagogues.On 7 January Facebook decided: no longer. And now the Facebook oversight board, of which I am a member, has published its own verdict on the decision: Facebook was both right and wrong. Right to remove his 6 January words and right, the following day, to ban the president from the platform. But wrong to ban him “indefinitely”.The key word is “indefinitely” – if only because Facebook’s own policies do not appear to permit it. The oversight board (OSB) judgment doesn’t mince its words: “In applying a vague, standardless penalty and then referring this case to the board to resolve, Facebook seeks to avoid its responsibilities. The board declines Facebook’s request and insists that Facebook apply and justify a defined penalty.” Ball squarely back in Facebook’s court.What Facebook has to do now – in our judgment, which the company is bound to implement – is to re-examine the arbitrary penalty it imposed on 7 January. It should take account of the gravity of the violation and the prospect of future harm.The case is the most prominent the OSB has decided since it was established as an independent entity and will inevitably focus more attention on its work. Why is such a body thought necessary?But this 38-page text is, I hope, a serious contribution to thinking about free speech in an age of chaosLet’s assume we might agree that it’s a bad thing for one person, Mark Zuckerberg, to be in charge of the rules of speech for 2 billion or more people. He is clearly a wonderfully talented engineer – but nothing in his background suggests he is equipped to think deeply about the complexities involved in free expression.Maybe most people who have studied the behaviour of governments towards publishers and newspapers over 300 years might also agree that politicians are not the best people to be trusted with individual decisions about who gets to say what.Into the void between those two polarities has stepped the OSB. At the moment we’re 19 individuals with backgrounds in journalism, law, academia and human rights: by the end of 2021 we hope to be nearer 40.Are we completely independent from Facebook? It certainly feels that way. It’s true that Facebook was involved in selecting the first 20 members, but once the board reaches its full complement, we decide who our future colleagues will be. Since a few early meetings to understand Facebook processes around moderation and similar matters we have had nothing to do with the company.We have our own board of distinguished trustees – again, free of any influence from Facebook. From what I’ve seen of my colleagues so far they’re an odd bunch to have picked if you were in search of a quiet life.The Trump decision was reached through the processes we’ve devised ourselves. A panel of five – with a good spread of regional backgrounds – did the initial heavy lifting, including sifting through more than 9,000 responses from the public.The wider board fed in its own views. We looked at Facebook’s own values – what they call voice, safety and dignity – as well as its content policies and community standards. But we also apply an international human rights lens in trying to balance freedom of expression with possible harms.In the Trump case we looked at the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs), which establish a voluntary framework for the human rights responsibilities of private businesses. We also considered the right to freedom of expression set out in articles 19 and 20 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) – as well as the qualifying articles to do with the rights to life, security of person, non-discrimination, participation in public affairs and so on.We also considered the 2013 Rabat Plan of Action, which attempts to identify and control hate speech online. We took into account a submission sent on behalf of Trump himself and sent Facebook 46 questions. They answered 37 fully, and two partially.And then we debated, and argued – virtually/verbally and in writing. A number of drafts were circulated, with most board members pitching in with tweaks, challenges, corrections and disagreements. Gradually, a consensus developed – resulting in a closely argued 38-page decision which openly reflects the majority and minority opinions.In addition to our ruling about the original and “indefinite” bans, we’ve sent Facebook a number of policy advisory statements. One of these concentrates on the question of how social media platforms should deal with “influential users” (a more useful conceit than “political leaders”).Speed is clearly of the essence where potentially harmful speech is involved. While it’s important to protect the rights of people to hear political speech, “if the head of state or high government official has repeatedly posted messages that pose a risk of harm under international human rights norms, Facebook should suspend the account for a determinate period sufficient to protect against imminent harm”.As in previous judgments, we are critical of a lack of clarity in some of Facebook’s own rules, together with insufficient transparency about how they’re enforced. We would like to see Facebook carry out a comprehensive review of its potential contribution to the narrative around electoral fraud and in the exacerbated tensions that culminated in the violence on 6 January.And then this: “This should be an open reflection on the design and policy choices that Facebook has made that may enable its platform to be abused.” Which many people will read as not-so-coded reference to what is shorthanded as The Algorithm.Social media is still in its infancy. Among the many thorny issues we periodically discuss as a board is, what is this thing we’re regulating? The existing language – “platform”, “publisher”, “public square” – doesn’t adequately describe these new entities.Most of the suggested forms of more interventionist regulation stub their toes on the sheer novelty of this infant space for the unprecedented mass exchange of views.The OSB is also taking its first steps. The Trump judgment cannot possibly satisfy everyone. But this 38-page text is, I hope, a serious contribution to thinking about how to handle free speech in an age of information chaos. More

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      Facebook fudge potentially lets Trump live to lie another day

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      It was not so much “Release the Kraken!” as “please tell the Kraken to pace around the room a few more times while we think about it”.Facebook’s oversight board ruled that Donald Trump should remain banned from the platform for incendiary posts on the day of the deadly insurrection at the US Capitol. But it also told the company that its “vague, standardless penalty” should be reviewed within six months.The former president has made a career of portraying defeats as victories, bankruptcies as financial successes, the 2020 election as an epic win that was stolen. Facebook’s fudge will again allow him to have it both ways.In the short term, the continued ban will feed the rightwing narrative of “cancel culture” and the perception that both mainstream media and social media censor conservative voices. Trump is the master of the politics of grievance and victimhood, constantly telling his supporters that “they” are taking away “your voice”.Now he has more ammunition. It is surely no coincidence that on Wednesday, he launched a glorified blog in which his statements have convenient tabs for users to post to Facebook and Twitter. His tirades against Facebook might soon be appearing all over a Facebook page near you.The announcement will also empower his conservative allies to cast big tech companies as the enemy of free speech. Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, told Fox News: “It’s a sad day for Facebook because I can tell you a number of members of Congress are now looking at: do they break up Facebook? Do they make sure that they don’t have a monopoly?”The Republican senator Josh Hawley, an arch critic of Silicon Valley, tweeted that the decision is “a real life example of the tyranny of #BigTech”, adding: “That’s what monopolies do. Break them up.”But in the longer term, the quasi-independent board’s quasi-ruling leaves open the door for Trump to return to Facebook in plenty of time for the 2024 presidential election, whether as candidate or kingmaker.At first glance, this seems less significant than a return to Twitter, from which he is also barred. Twitter was always his favourite, the Ivanka to Facebook’s Eric, perhaps because its 280-character limit was better suited to his famously short attention span. His tweets, rather than his Facebook posts, generated headlines on cable TV and in newspapers.But Facebook was arguably a more important engine of his election campaigns. It was a tool to raise money, mobilise his supporters and spread disinformation about his opponents. According to the Axios website, Trump spent about $160m on Facebook ads in 2020, compared with Joe Biden’s $117m.The company’s ultimate decision on whether to allow him a comeback therefore carries high stakes. It is worth remembering what the ban was about in the first place. On 6 January, as rioters stormed the Capitol threatening to hang Vice-President Mike Pence, Trump wrote on Facebook: “We love you. You’re very special” and “great patriots” and “remember this day forever”.Just this week, Trump was still harping on the election, falsely asserting: “The Fraudulent Presidential Election of 2020 will be, from this day forth, known as THE BIG LIE!” This took the form of an emailed press release that journalists could mostly ignore. But what if he had posted it on Facebook, where it could spread like wildfire?Even without Trump’s presence, such conspiracy theories continue to thrive on the platform, helping to fuel Republican efforts across the country to pass laws that make voting harder. Trump’s ban from social media risks an out-of-sight, out-of-mind complacency, an assumption that now Biden is in the White House, America can let its guard down.Columnist Thomas Friedman told CNN this week: “There’s a sense out there that everything’s OK. Everything is not OK. Our democracy today is as threatened as at any time.”Trump’s national relevance has ebbed away with shocking speed since he left office on 20 January. The Facebook ruling, while prolonging that trend, will also help maintain the comforting illusion that America has achieved herd immunity against his Big Lie. Unfortunately, you cannot kill an idea, even an untrue one; you have to learn to live with it. More

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      Facebook ruling on Trump renews criticism of oversight board

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      Facebook’s oversight board on Wednesday ruled that Donald Trump’s Facebook account should not be reinstated. But it stopped short of making a final decision, saying Facebook itself must decide what to do with the former president’s account. The move has deepened questions over the oversight board’s effectiveness.Trump has been exiled from the platform since January over posts in which he appeared to encourage the rioters who stormed the US Capitol. Trump petitioned Facebook to reinstate his account, and the social media giant punted a decision on his fate to the oversight board, which has now punted the decision right back to Facebook.The ruling announced on Wednesday was watched closely by tech critics and advocates, marking one of the first times such a large tech platform has publicly made a crucial, public decision regarding who gets to use its platform to speak.Activists who had discouraged Facebook from allowing the return of the president say the announcement underscores failures of the oversight board, a regulatory group that was formed in 2020 to make decisions independent of Facebook’s corporate leadership. “Instead of addressing the core problems in its platform, [Facebook] exploited this fragile moment in our society in order to sell us the fiction of this oversight group,” said Angelo Carusone, president and CEO of Media Matters for America. “Don’t buy it. Now, they’re kicking the can down the road again.“Unless Facebook permanently bans Trump immediately, we will be having this same dramatic sideshow in six months from now,” he added.Activists have said Facebook has a responsibility to ban Trump, whose activity on the platform – from lies about the election to calls for violence against peaceful protesters – they say is dangerous to democracy. In addition to the Capitol riot posts that led to the ban, Trump made hundreds of false statements about Covid-19 and other issues, analyses show.In an analysis of Donald Trump’s posts between 1 January 2020, and 6 January 2021 when he was banned from the platform, the non-profit advocacy group Media Matters for America found that Trump pushed misinformation about Covid-19 and election fraud or violent rhetoric attacking his critics in more than 1,400 separate posts – more than a quarter of his total posts during that period.The scale of Trump’s coronavirus misinformation makes the decision to remove him particularly important at this moment in the pandemic, said Jessica J González, the co-chief executive officer of the non-profit anti-hate speech organization Free Press.“Given Trump’s history of spreading pandemic disinformation, it’s particularly crucial to deny him a megaphone at a time when we’re still struggling to contain the virus and increase vaccinations.”The oversight board includes high-profile members, such as the former Danish prime minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt, the Columbia law professor Jamal Greene and the former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger.The Real Oversight Board, a group of activists formed as a critique of Facebook’s oversight board, said members of Facebook’s board should step down from the group “for their own dignity”.“What is the point of the oversight board?” the activist group said. “This is a Facebook-funded, Facebook-appointed body that has no legitimacy to make real decisions. Facebook’s attempt to divert attention from its fundamental failure to take responsibility for what’s on its own platform has itself failed.”The oversight board before Wednesday’s decision had made a handful of smaller, less high-profile choices. Facebook has repeatedly said it allows posts from influential users like politicians to remain online even if they violate policy because of their newsworthiness. But the oversight board said Facebook should “publicly explain the rules that it uses when it imposes account-level sanctions against influential users”.“Heads of state and other high officials of government can have a greater power to cause harm than other people,” the board said in its explanation of the decision. “If a head of state or high government official has repeatedly posted messages that pose a risk of harm under international human rights norms, Facebook should suspend the account for a period sufficient to protect against imminent harm. Suspension periods should be long enough to deter misconduct and may, in appropriate cases, include account or page deletion.”Activists have pointed out other platforms, including Twitter and Snapchat, banned the former president outright without taking such pains to explain themselves. González said that the oversight board’s decision announced on Wednesday does not address many of the issues activists have brought up regarding hate speech and misinformation on Facebook.“Mark Zuckerberg designed the oversight board to deflect attention from the structural rot at the heart of Facebook’s hate-and-lie-for-profit business model,” she said. “Facebook’s content moderation efforts are dysfunctional by design. The tech giant earns revenues by engaging people in hate.”González added that what is truly needed to rein in Facebook’s issues with hate speech is action from legislators – a measure that seems inevitable as executives have faced a record number of hearings in Congress over the past year.“Until national and global institutions rein in Facebook, the company will continue to profit from spreading inflammatory political rhetoric and disinformation that target communities confronting oppression across the country and around the world,” González said. More

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      Antitrust: Hawley and Klobuchar on the big tech battles to come

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      Antitrust is hot. In February, the Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar introduced the Competition and Antitrust Law Enforcement Reform Act of 2021. Weeks later, the Missouri senator Josh Hawley proposed the Trust-Busting for the Twenty-First Century Act. Both bills are pending before the Senate judiciary committee.Hawley and Klobuchar have both published books. Hawley offers The Tyranny of Big Tech, and Klobuchar Antitrust. There is plenty of overlap but the substantive and stylistic differences are glaring.Hawley takes pride in owning the libs. Klobuchar criticizes the Trump administration’s lack of antitrust enforcement. His book is barbed. Hers methodical.On 6 January, Hawley gave a clench-fisted salute to pro-Trump militants and voted against certifying the 2020 presidential election. On the page, he doubles down.Two weeks after the Capitol attack, Klobuchar told the presidential inauguration: “This is the day our democracy picks itself up, brushes off the dust and does what America always does.” She remains angry with Hawley and “Flyin’” Ted Cruz for the insurrection and its aftermath.Playing to type, Hawley has also provided the sole vote against a bill to crack down on anti-Asian hate crime and opposed renaming military bases named for Confederate generals. Roy Blunt, Missouri’s senior senator and the No 4 member of GOP Senate leadership, parted ways with Hawley on both. In the civil war, Missouri was a border state. A century and a half later, it looks like Hawley has picked the losing side.In his book, he upbraids corporate America, “woke capitalism”, Amazon, Google and Facebook. He demands that Google “be forced to give up YouTube and its control of the digital advertising market”.He would also have Facebook “lose” Instagram and WhatsApp, and accuses Amazon of destroying Parler, the conservative alternative to Twitter funded by Rebekah Mercer, a Hawley donor along with her father, Robert Mercer and other Trump acolytes.Hawley’s embrace of antipathy toward big business – even that in which he invests – is not exactly new.In 2008 he published a biography of Theodore Roosevelt, subtitled Preacher of Righteousness and approving of the 26th president’s relentless support for the little guy.Almost a decade later, as Missouri attorney general, Hawley launched an antitrust investigation of Google. Shortly after that, as a Senate candidate, he told Bloomberg News: “We need to have a conversation in Missouri, and as a country, about the concentration of economic power.”But Hawley is buffeted by contradictions. He has for example feted Robert Bork as a conservative martyr, even as Bork’s legal writings have served as intellectual jet fuel for those developments in the marketplace Hawley professes to abhor.The Tyranny of Big Tech makes no mention of the professor who wrote an influential anti-antitrust book, The Antitrust Paradox, in 1978, nine years before he was blocked from the supreme court.Klobuchar, by contrast, gives Bork plenty of face time.“For Bork,” she writes, “the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few is not a relevant consideration for antitrust law.”Bork had issues with civil rights too. In 1963, when Jim Crow was still in full force, he branded what would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964 “legislation by which the morals of the majority are self-righteously imposed upon a minority”.In The Tyranny of Big Tech, Hawley also blasts corporate abuse of personal data and data mining – all while he looks to Peter Thiel of Palantir for donor dollars.Left unstated is that Palantir was embroiled in the Cambridge Analytica data scandal. Cambridge Analytica was owned by the Mercer family and Thiel was an early funder and board member of Facebook. The circle is complete.Hawley’s book can be viewed as plutocrat-populism in print. Tucker Carlson’s praise is blurbed on the jacket. Inside, Hawley defends Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News from purported predations by Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook. Both Murdoch and Zuckerberg are billionaires many times over.Hawley is on stronger ground when he revisits the nexus between the Obama administration, Hillary Clinton’s campaign and Google. Eric Schmidt, then head of the company, was Obama’s chief corporate ally. On election night 2016, Schmidt, wore a Clinton staff badge, having spent months advising her campaign.In her book, Klobuchar furnishes an overview of the evolution of US anti-monopoly law and a call for rebalancing the relationship between capital and labor. She condemns corporate consolidation and wealth concentration, and views lax antitrust enforcement as antithetical to democracy.In a footnote, she commends Hawley for addressing the “turf wars” between the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission, and their negative impact on antitrust enforcement. Unlike Hawley, however, Klobuchar vehemently disapproves of the supreme court’s Citizens United decision and characterizes it as opening “the floodgates to dark money in our politics”.In 2016, Dave Bossie, president of Citizens United, wrote an op-ed titled: “Josh Hawley for [Missouri] Attorney General”. In his maiden Senate race, Hawley’s campaign received $10,000 from the Citizens United Political Victory Fund.Unfortunately, Klobuchar goes the extra mile and calls for a constitutional amendment to overturn that decision. Her would-be cure is worse than the disease – an attack on free speech itself.The proposed amendment would expressly confer upon “Congress and the states” broad power to curtail campaign fundraising and spending. It also provides that “nothing in this article shall be construed to grant Congress or the states the power to abridge the freedom of the press”.Not so curiously, it is silent about “abridging the freedom of speech”, an existing constitutional protection. Media barons rejoice – all others start sweating.In 2020, Klobuchar came up way short in her quest for the Democratic presidential nomination. Now, she chairs the Senate’s antitrust subcommittee, where Hawley is a member.Both senators were law review editors: she at the University of Chicago, he at Yale. If Hawley has written a sort of campaign manifesto for the Republican presidential primary in 2024, Klobuchar’s book reads at times like an application for supreme court justice. It contains hundreds of pages of footnotes and pays repeated tribute to the late justice Louis Brandeis.Klobuchar also heaps praise on Stephen Breyer, a member of the court appointed by Bill Clinton and a former Harvard Law professor who in 1982 authored Regulation and Its Reform, a counter to Bork and the “Chicago School”.Klobuchar extends an array of “thank yous”. There is one for Jake Sullivan, her former counsel, now Joe Biden’s national security adviser; another for Matt Stoller, a former staffer to Bernie Sanders on the Senate budget committee and a sometime Guardian contributor; and another for Paul Krugman of the New York Times. All three come with definite viewpoints and are strategically placed.Increased antitrust enforcement by the DoJ, the FTC and the states appears to be more likely than wholesale legislative change. A government antitrust case against Google proceeds. Furthermore, Biden has already appointed two critics of big tech to key slots at the White House and the FTC. Who will lead DoJ’s antitrust division is an open question. Finding a suitable non-conflicted pick appears difficult.Klobuchar and Hawley will be heard from. Their books matter. More