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      in US Politics

      Netflix still several steps ahead in strategy for wooing subscribers

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      Only Frank Underwood could amass as much power in such a short space of time. Nearly eight years after Netflix used House of Cards as the launch of its global empire, the streaming service announced last week that it now had more than 200 million subscribers. The pandemic has hastened the company’s transformation from a debt-laden digital upstart into an essential part of the TV landscape in homes across the world.In 2013, when Netflix’s first original series made its debut, the company had 30 million (mostly US) subscribers. This was six years after it moved from being a DVD-by-post business to a streaming pioneer. Since then it has added 170 million subscribers in more than 190 countries and its pandemic-fuelled results last week sent Netflix’s market value to an all-time high of $259bn.Last year proved to be the best in the company’s history, even as a new wave of deep-pocketed rivals attempt to deprive it of its streaming crown. Accustomed to operating in battle mode, Netflix added a record 37 million new subscribers as lockdown prompted viewers to alleviate housebound cabin fever with fare including The Crown, Bridgerton and The Queen’s Gambit.Last week it reported that in 2020 the amount it earned from subscribers exceeded what it spent – to the tune of $1.9bnBut Netflix’s pioneering low-price, binge-watching approach to driving growth has come at a cost. Year after year the need to spend billions on ever-increasing numbers of films and TV shows in order to keep and attract subscribers has weighed on its balance sheet, if not its share price. With a Netflix subscription a fraction of the cost of a traditional pay-TV service, average revenue per user is low. This is great for growth but means the company has to keep on topping up its content budget to fulfil its binge-watching promise to fans. A few billion here and there has spiralled to $16bn in long-term debt and a further $19bn in “obligations” – essentially payments for content spread out over a number of years.Analysts have been split over Netflix’s grow-now-pay-for-it-later strategy, but the company finally appears to have proved the naysayers wrong. There was a symbolic announcement in its results last week: it reported that in 2020, free cashflow was positive – which means that the amount it earns from subscribers exceeds what it spends on content, marketing and other costs – to the tune of $1.9bn.Part of the reason for this was that Netflix’s content spend fell – from $14bn to $12bn – as a result of production stoppages caused by lockdowns, but it was a turning point nevertheless. It has taken 23 years since its humble beginnings as a DVD rental company in California for the Netflix machine to reach the point of sustainability.The firm’s decision in 2013 to invest heavily in original productions has proved critical – and prescient. It sensed, correctly, that its success would prompt the suppliers that it was licensing shows from to eventually keep them for their own services. In the past 18 months, HBO Max, Sky-owner Comcast’s Peacock and AppleTV+ have joined longer-term rival Amazon Prime Video in vying for subscribers.Reed Hastings, Netflix’s co-chief executive, acknowledges this second wave in the streaming wars, particularly noting the “super-impressive” performance of Disney+, which has become the third global force in streaming behind Amazon. In just 14 months since its launch, the service, powered by franchises including Star Wars TV spin-off The Mandalorian, Marvel films and Frozen 2, has amassed 87 million subscribers four years sooner than forecast. Last month, Walt Disney+ announced a doubling of its content budget and tripled its forecast of subscriber numbers by 2024.However, new rivals have yet to dent the dominance of Netflix, which reported adding 8.5 million subscribers in the fourth quarter, and revealed that 500 TV titles were in the works and a record 71 films would premiere this year. Some doubters had raised concerns that Netflix’s debt-fuelled growth was a financial house of cards. But its foundations look solid now.Nissan’s ‘edge’ over rivals is no vote for BrexitLeaving the EU without a deal would have been an act of economic self-sabotage nearly unrivalled by a developed economy. Carmakers’ relief that a deal was reached on Christmas Eve was palpable. Nissan’s glee became clear last week, with chief operating officer Ashwani Gupta repeatedly declaring that the Brexit deal had given the Japanese carmaker a “competitive advantage”.Nissan had looked through the complex new rules of origin governing trade between the UK and the EU. Parts and finished cars that cross the Channel will not attract tariffs if a certain proportion of their components are from either the UK or the EU. Nissan’s cars already comply with the rules.Crucially, this applies to high-value batteries, which a partner company builds in Sunderland, in a factory next door to Nissan’s. Other companies are not so well-placed and must rely instead on imports from east Asia. For them the Brexit deal has started a scramble to secure batteries from Europe – if they want to sell into the UK – or hope that untested UK companies can build gigafactories to supply them.However, the Japanese carmaker’s statement should not be mistaken for a “vote of confidence”, as Boris Johnson managed to do. Gupta acknowledged that the UK’s departure from the EU had brought new costs, though these were “peanuts” for a company of Nissan’s scale. They may not be so negligible for exporting entrepreneurs, a breed that will probably become rarer as non-tariff barriers increase for would-be traders with the EU.Furthermore, “competitive advantage” is a double-edged compliment. Nissan will gain on UK and EU rivals which do not source batteries locally. Even if it is less of a burden than those carried by competitors, a handicap – in this case increased trade friction with the UK’s biggest market – is still a handicap.A new president is not a panaceaIt would be a mistake to allow the relief that has accompanied Joe Biden’s victory in the US presidential election to become something close to euphoria and, consequently, freight the new US president with expectations that are unachievable.The next decade is looking troubled and fractious even now that Donald Trump’s hand is no longer on the tiller of the world’s largest and most powerful economy. From a global perspective, there is the assessment of climate economist Lord Stern that the next 10 years will be crucial if we are to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050.China, for 30 years a convenient supplier of low-cost goods to the global economy, is becoming more authoritarian and looking to use its spheres of influence in Asia and Africa to quell complaints by international bodies about the way it treats Uighur Muslims and Hong Kong protesters. To make matters worse, populations in the west and in China are ageing and struggling to provide a decent standard of living for younger members of society.In the UK, Brexit reintroduces a welter of red tape into the trading arrangements this country has with its biggest commercial partner, the EU, and will depress average household incomes over a long period. So despite the relief in many corners of the globe that greeted Biden’s inauguration, there is reason to worry.But there are grounds for hope too. The pressure to address the climate emergency is growing rapidly and politicians all over the world are at last taking notice. The 26th UN climate change conference in Glasgow, scheduled for November, could mark a seismic shift in action. And Biden showed how inclusive he plans to be with his roster of inauguration acts, from the stalwart Republican country singer Garth Brooks to 22-year-old African American poet Amanda Gorman.It was telling that Biden said he wanted to build bridges. It will be difficult, but on the issue of climate change, if on nothing else, that must include China. More

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      in US Politics

      'Democracy has prevailed': front pages across world hail Joe Biden's inauguration

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      Joe Biden’s declaration in his inauguration speech that democracy was the real winner of the presidential election has been used by many newspapers to mark his accession to the Oval Office.Along with several other titles, the Guardian employs a poster front page featuring a picture of the president making his speech on the steps of the Capitol alongside the headline: “Democracy has prevailed”.The New York Times chooses the same message with the headline “‘Democracy has prevailed’: Biden vows to mend nation” above a full-width picture of Biden and his wife Jill embracing.The normally typographically conservative Financial Times also goes with a huge picture of Biden and the same headline again: “democracy has prevailed”.The Scotsman’s front page is one picture of Biden and it splashes a longer excerpt of the same part of the new president’s speech. “Democracy is precious. Democracy is fragile. In this hour, my friends, democracy has prevailed”.The Washington Post’s headline is “Biden: ‘Unity is the path’” above a photograph of the the 46th president taking the oath of office.The Telegraph headline is another choice quote from Biden – “End this uncivil war”, while the Times goes with “Time for unity”.The Mirror zeroes in on Biden’s opening lines with a “A day of history .. a day of hope”, and uses pictures of the president and his history-making female vice-president, Kamala Harris.The Mail hails a “new dawn for America” with pictures of Trump departing Washington and Biden and his wife, Jill, celebrating his inauguration. “Don’s gone … let’s go Joe!”, says the main headline.The i can’t resist a bit of rhyme either with its headline “Ready, steady, Joe!”The Express uses Biden’s “uncivil war” quote in one of its subheads but goes with a British angle and what the new president’s relationship with Boris Johnson might be like for its main headline: “Big moment for US and Britain”.Metro has opted to use Donald Trump’s words against him with the headline: “Now make American great again”.In Europe, El Mundo in Spain carries a picture of Biden and the headline “Joe Biden: ‘Hay mucho que sanar en EEUU’”, which roughly translates as “We have much to heal”.Bild, Europe’s biggest selling newspaper, has the headline “Comeback für Amerika”, while its more sober rival Suddeutsche Zeitung goes with “Zeitenwende in Amerika”, or “New era in America”.The South China Morning Post carries the Bidens, Harris and husband Doug Emhoff waving, underneath the headline: “World wakes up to new American leader”. More

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      in Elections

      Fox Settled a Lawsuit Over Its Lies. But It Insisted on One Unusual Condition.

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      The Fox News newsroom in New York.Credit…Ryan Jenq for The New York TimesMEDIA EQUATIONFox Settled a Lawsuit Over Its Lies. But It Insisted on One Unusual Condition.Why did the network insist an agreement with the family of a murdered young man remain undisclosed until after the election?The Fox News newsroom in New York.Credit…Ryan Jenq for The New York TimesSupported byContinue reading the main storyJan. 17, 2021Updated 9:19 p.m. ETOn Oct. 12, 2020, Fox News agreed to pay millions of dollars to the family of a murdered Democratic National Committee staff member, implicitly acknowledging what saner minds knew long ago: that the network had repeatedly hyped a false claim that the young staff member, Seth Rich, was involved in leaking D.N.C. emails during the 2016 presidential campaign. (Russian intelligence officers, in fact, had hacked and leaked the emails.)Fox’s decision to settle with the Rich family came just before its marquee hosts, Lou Dobbs and Sean Hannity, were set to be questioned under oath in the case, a potentially embarrassing moment. And Fox paid so much that the network didn’t have to apologize for the May 2017 story on FoxNews.com.But there was one curious provision that Fox insisted on: The settlement had to be kept secret for a month — until after the Nov. 3 election. The exhausted plaintiffs agreed.Why did Fox care about keeping the Rich settlement secret for the final month of the Trump re-election campaign? Why was it important to the company, which calls itself a news organization, that one of the biggest lies of the Trump era remain unresolved for that period? Was Fox afraid that admitting it was wrong would incite the president’s wrath? Did network executives fear backlash from their increasingly radicalized audience, which has been gravitating to other conservative outlets?Fox News and its lawyer, Joe Terry, declined to answer that question when I asked last week. And two people close to the case, who shared details of the settlement with me, were puzzled by that provision, too.The unusual arrangement underscores how deeply entwined Fox has become in the Trump camp’s disinformation efforts and the dangerous paranoia they set off, culminating in the fatal attack on the Capitol 11 days ago. The network parroted lies from Trump and his more sinister allies for years, ultimately amplifying the president’s enormous deceptions about the election’s outcome, further radicalizing many of Mr. Trump’s supporters.The man arrested after rampaging through the Capitol with zip-tie handcuffs had proudly posted to Facebook a photograph with his shotgun and Fox Business on a giant screen in the background. The woman fatally shot as she pushed her way inside the House chamber had engaged Fox contributors dozens of times on Twitter, NPR reported.High profile Fox voices, with occasional exceptions, not only fed the baseless belief that the election had been stolen, but they helped frame Jan. 6 as a decisive day of reckoning, when their audience’s dreams of overturning the election could be realized. And the network’s role in fueling pro-Trump extremism is nothing new: Fox has long been the favorite channel of pro-Trump militants. The man who mailed pipe bombs to CNN in 2018 watched Fox News “religiously,” according to his lawyers’ sentencing memorandum, and believed Mr. Hannity’s claim that Democrats were “encouraging mob violence” against people like him.Eric G. Munchel, left, was arrested last Sunday by the F.B.I in connection with the storming of the Capitol.Credit…Win Mcnamee/Getty ImagesAnd yet, as we in the media reckon with our role in the present catastrophe, Fox often gets left out of the story. You can see why. Dog bites man is never news. Fox’s vitriol and distortions are simply viewed as part of the landscape now. The cable channel has been a Republican propaganda outlet for decades, and under President Trump’s thumb for years. So while the mainstream media loves to beat itself up — it’s a way, sometimes, of inflating our own importance — we have mostly sought less obvious angles in this winter’s self-examination. The Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan concluded last week that the mainstream press is “flawed and stuck for too long in outdated conventions,” but “has managed to do its job.” MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan said the media had “failed” by normalizing Trump.I took my turn last week, writing about how a man I worked with at BuzzFeed played a role in the insurrection. One thoughtful reader, a former engineer at Corning, wrote to me to say she’d been reckoning with a similar sense of complicity. The engineer was on the team that developed the thin, bright glass that made possible the ubiquitous flat screen televisions that rewired politics and our minds. She’s now asking herself whether “this glass made it happen.”When I shared the engineer’s email with some others at the Times, one, Virginia Hughes, a Science editor and longtime colleague, responded: “Everyone wants to blame themselves except the people who actually deserve blame.”And so let me take a break from beating up well-intentioned journalists and even the social media platforms that greedily threw open Pandora’s box for profit.There’s only one multibillion-dollar media corporation that deliberately and aggressively propagated these untruths. That’s the Fox Corporation, and its chairman, Rupert Murdoch; his feckless son Lachlan, who is nominally C.E.O.; and the chief legal officer Viet Dinh, a kind of regent who mostly runs the company day-to-day.Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch at the Allen & Company media and technology conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, in 2018.Credit…David Paul Morris/BloombergThese are the people ultimately responsible for helping to ensure that one particular and pernicious lie about a 27-year-old man’s death circulated for years. The elder Mr. Murdoch has long led Fox, to the extent anyone actually leads it, through a kind of malign negligence, and letting that lie persist seems just his final, lavish gift to Mr. Trump.The company paid handsomely for it, according to Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News, who first reported on the settlement and has covered the case extensively.The Murdoch organization didn’t originate the lie, but it embraced it, and it served an obvious political purpose: deflecting suspicions of Russian involvement in helping the Trump campaign. That’s why the story was so appealing to Fox hosts like Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs, who kept hyping it for days after it collapsed under the faintest scrutiny. There has never been a shred of credible evidence that Seth Rich had contact with WikiLeaks, and a series of bipartisan investigations found that the D.N.C. had been breached by Russian hackers.The story of Fox’s impact on the fracturing of American society and the notion of truth is too big to capture in a single column. But the story of its impact on one family is singular and devastating. Seth Rich’s brother, Aaron, reflected on it Friday from his home in Denver, where he’s a software engineer. Seth was his little brother, seven years younger and two inches shorter, but more at ease with people, more popular, better at soccer in high school.Mary Rich, the mother of Seth Rich, at a news conference on Aug. 1, 2016, several weeks after he was murdered in Washington, D.C.Credit…Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post, via Getty ImagesSeth Rich was murdered in the early morning of Sunday, July 10, 2016, on a sidewalk in the Bloomingdale neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Aaron was still wrestling with the shock, reeling from the worst week of his life, when a friend told him that something was happening on Reddit. A news story had mentioned that Seth was a staff member at the Democratic National Committee. While some of the top comments were simply condolences, the lower part of the page was full of unfounded speculation that the young D.N.C. employee — not the Russians — had been WikiLeaks’ source of the hacked emails. Julian Assange of WikiLeaks encouraged the speculation, but it remained low-level chatter about confusing theories for about 10 months. That’s when Fox claimed that an anonymous federal investigator had linked Seth Rich to the leak.The story took off. It was like “throwing gasoline on a small fire,” Mr. Rich’s brother recalled in a telephone interview from his home in Denver. “Fox blew it out of everyone’s little echo chamber and put it into the mainstream.”The story collapsed immediately, and in spectacular fashion. The former Washington, D.C., police detective whom Fox used as its on-the-record source, Rod Wheeler, repudiated his own quotes claiming ties between Mr. Rich and WikiLeaks and a cover-up, and said in a deposition this fall that the Fox News article had been “prewritten before I even got involved.”“It fell apart within the general public within 24 hours,’’ Aaron Rich recalled, yet “Hannity pushed it for another week.” Finally, Aaron Rich said, he sent Mr. Hannity and his producer an email, and the barrage stopped, but he said he never received an apology from the Fox host.“He never got back to me to say, sorry for ruining your family’s life and pushing something there’s no basis to,” he said. “Apparently, ‘sorry’ is a hard five-letter word for him.”A Fox News spokeswoman, Irena Briganti, declined to comment on Mr. Rich’s request for an apology.Fox also pulled the story down a week after it was published, with an opaque statement that “the article was not initially subjected to the high degree of editorial scrutiny we require for all our reporting.”The damage had been done. The story is still in wide circulation on the right, to the point where Mr. Rich was reluctant to share a photograph of himself and his brother for this story with The New York Times. Every time he has done that, he said, the photo — of the brothers at Aaron’s wedding, for instance — has been reused and tainted by conspiracy theorists.Seth and Aaron Rich at Aaron’s wedding on Oct. 25, 2015.Credit…Aaron RichAaron Rich, who with his brother grew up in Nebraska, said he hadn’t thought much about who beyond Fox’s talent was responsible for the lies about his brother. When I asked him about Rupert Murdoch, he wasn’t sure who he was — “I’m really bad at trivia things.” That’s the genius of the Murdochs’ management of the place: They collect the cash while evading responsibility and letting their hosts work primarily for Mr. Trump.Mr. Rich isn’t party to the settlement with his parents, and he declined to discuss its details. His parents said in a court filing that the barrage of conspiracy theories had damaged their mental health and cost his mother, Mary, her ability to work and to socialize.But he said he simply doesn’t understand why Fox couldn’t simply apologize for its damaging lie — not in May of 2017, not when it reached the settlement in October, and not when it finally made the settlement public after the election and wished his family “some measure of peace.”It reminds me of a well-known political figure now leaving the stage, one who has been strikingly allergic to apologizing, expressing any empathy or engaging in any soul searching about his role in mobilizing the ugliest of American impulses.“I was glad they stopped doing it,” Seth Rich’s brother said, a bit hopelessly. “But they never admitted they lit the fire.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      in Elections

      How Trump supporters are radicalised by the far right

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      Far right “playbooks” teaching white nationalists how to recruit and radicalise Trump supporters have surfaced on the encrypted messaging app Telegram ahead of Joe Biden’s inauguration.
      The documents, seen by the Observer, detail how to convert mainstream conservatives who have just joined Telegram into violent white supremacists. They were found last week by Tech Against Terrorism, an initiative launched by the UN counter terrorism executive directorate.
      Large numbers of Trump supporters migrated on to Telegram in recent days after Parler, the social media platform favoured by the far right, was forced offline for hosting threats of violence and racist slurs after the attack on the US Capitol on 6 January.
      The documents have prompted concern that far right extremists congregating on Telegram instead of Parler has made it far harder for law enforcement to track where the next attack could come from.
      Already, hundreds of suspects threatening violence during this week’s inauguration of Biden have been identified by the FBI.
      One of the playbooks, found on a channel with 6,000 subscribers, was specially drawn up to radicalise Trump supporters who had just joined Telegram and teach them “how to have the proper OPSEC [operations security] to keep your identity concealed”.
      The four-page document encourages recruiters to avoid being overtly racist or antisemitic initially when approaching Trump supporters, stating: “Trying to show them racial IQ stats and facts on Jewish power will generally leave them unreceptive… that material will be instrumental later on in their ideological journey.
      “The point of discussion you should focus on is the blatant anti-white agenda that is being aggressively pushed from every institution in the country, as well as white demographic decline and its consequences.”
      The document concludes with its author stating: “Big Tech made a serious mistake by banishing conservatives to the one place [Telegram] where we have unfettered access to them, and that’s a mistake they’ll come to regret!”
      The document is named the “comprehensive redpill guide”, a reference to the online term red-pilling, used to describe a conversion to extreme far-right views.
      The document adds: “Not every normie can be redpilled, but if they’re receptive and open-minded to hearing what you have to say, you should gradually be sending them edgier pro-white/anti-Zionist content as they move along in their journey.”
      Another white nationalist recruitment guide uncovered by Tech Against Terrorism, which is working with global tech firms to tackle terrorist use of the internet, shares seven steps of “conservative conversion”. More

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      in US Politics

      The silencing of Trump has highlighted the authoritarian power of tech giants | John Naughton

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      It was eerily quiet on social media last week. That’s because Trump and his cultists had been “deplatformed”. By banning him, Twitter effectively took away the megaphone he’s been masterfully deploying since he ran for president. The shock of the 6 January assault on the Capitol was seismic enough to convince even Mark Zuckerberg that the plug finally had to be pulled. And so it was, even to the point of Amazon Web Services terminating the hosting of Parler, a Twitter alternative for alt-right extremists.The deafening silence that followed these measures was, however, offset by an explosion of commentary about their implications for freedom, democracy and the future of civilisation as we know it. Wading knee-deep through such a torrent of opinion about the first amendment, free speech, censorship, tech power and “accountability” (whatever that might mean), it was sometimes hard to keep one’s bearings. But what came to mind continually was H L Mencken’s astute insight that “for every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong”. The air was filled with people touting such answers.In the midst of the discursive chaos, though, some general themes could be discerned. The first highlighted cultural differences, especially between the US with its sacred first amendment on the one hand and European and other societies, which have more ambivalent histories of moderating speech. The obvious problem with this line of discussion is that the first amendment is about government regulation of speech and has nothing whatsoever to do with tech companies, which are free to do as they like on their platforms.A second theme viewed the root cause of the problem as the lax regulatory climate in the US over the last three decades, which led to the emergence of a few giant tech companies that effectively became the hosts for much of the public sphere. If there were many Facebooks, YouTubes and Twitters, so the counter-argument runs, then censorship would be less effective and problematic because anyone denied a platform could always go elsewhere.Then there were arguments about power and accountability. In a democracy, those who make decisions about which speech is acceptable and which isn’t ought to be democratically accountable. “The fact that a CEO can pull the plug on Potus’s loudspeaker without any checks and balances,” fumed EU commissioner Thierry Breton, “is not only confirmation of the power of these platforms, but it also displays deep weaknesses in the way our society is organised in the digital space.” Or, to put it another way, who elected the bosses of Facebook, Google, YouTube and Twitter?What was missing from the discourse was any consideration of whether the problem exposed by the sudden deplatforming of Trump and his associates and camp followers is actually soluble – at least in the way it has been framed until now. The paradox that the internet is a global system but law is territorial (and culture-specific) has traditionally been a way of stopping conversations about how to get the technology under democratic control. And it was running through the discussion all week like a length of barbed wire that snagged anyone trying to make progress through the morass.All of which suggests that it’d be worth trying to reframe the problem in more productive ways. One interesting suggestion for how to do that came last week in a thoughtful Twitter thread by Blayne Haggart, a Canadian political scientist. Forget about speech for a moment, he suggests, and think about an analogous problem in another sphere – banking. “Different societies have different tolerances for financial risk,” he writes, “with different regulatory regimes to match. Just like countries are free to set their own banking rules, they should be free to set strong conditions, including ownership rules, on how platforms operate in their territory. Decisions by a company in one country should not be binding on citizens in another country.”In those terms, HSBC may be a “global” bank, but when it’s operating in the UK it has to obey British regulations. Similarly, when operating in the US, it follows that jurisdiction’s rules. Translating that to the tech sphere, it suggests that the time has come to stop accepting the tech giant’s claims to be hyper-global corporations, whereas in fact they are US companies operating in many jurisdictions across the globe, paying as little local tax as possible and resisting local regulation with all the lobbying resources they can muster. Facebook, YouTube, Google and Twitter can bleat as sanctimoniously as they like about freedom of speech and the first amendment in the US, but when they operate here, as Facebook UK, say, then they’re merely British subsidiaries of an American corporation incorporated in California. And these subsidiaries obey British laws on defamation, hate speech and other statutes that have nothing to do with the first amendment. Oh, and they pay taxes on their local revenues.What I’ve been reading Capitol ideasWhat Happened? is a blog post by the Duke sociologist Kieran Healy, which is the most insightful attempt I’ve come across to explain the 6 January attack on Washington’s Capitol building.Tweet and sourHow @realDonaldTrump Changed Politics — and America. Derek Robertson in Politico on how Trump “governed” 140 characters at a time.Stay safeThe Plague Year is a terrific New Yorker essay by Lawrence Wright that includes some very good reasons not to be blase about Covid. More

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      in US Politics

      The Guardian view of Trump's populism: weaponised and silenced by social media | Editorial

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      Donald Trump’s incitement of a mob attack on the US Capitol was a watershed moment for free speech and the internet. Bans against both the US president and his prominent supporters have spread across social media as well as email and e-commerce services. Parler, a social network popular with neo-Nazis, was ditched from mobile phone app stores and then forced offline entirely. These events suggest that the most momentous year of modern democracy was not 1989 – when the Berlin wall fell – but 1991, when web servers first became publicly available.There are two related issues at stake here: the chilling power afforded to huge US corporations to limit free speech; and the vast sums they make from algorithmically privileging and amplifying deliberate disinformation. The doctrines, regulations and laws that govern the web were constructed to foster growth in an immature sector. But the industry has grown into a monster – one which threatens democracy by commercialising the swift spread of controversy and lies for political advantage.What is required is a complete rethink of the ideological biases that have created conditions for tech giants to have such authority – and which has laid their users open to manipulation for profit. Social media companies currently do not have legal liability for the consequences of the activities that their platforms enable. Big tech can no longer go unpunished. Companies have had to make judgments about what their customers can expect to see when they visit their sites. It is only right that they are held accountable for the “terms and conditions” that embed consumer safeguards. It would be a good start if measures within the UK online harms bill, that go some way to protecting users from being exposed to violent extremism and hate, were to be enacted.In a society people also desire, and need, the ability to express themselves to become fully functioning individuals. Freedom of expression is important in a democracy, where voters need to weigh up competing arguments and appreciate for themselves different ideas. John Milton optimistically wrote in Areopagitica: “Let Truth and Falsehood grapple; whoever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?” But 17th-century England did not know 21st-century Silicon Valley. Today, speech takes place online much more so than in public streets. Politics is so polarised that Mr Trump and his Republican allies claimed without any factual basis that electoral fraud was rampant.Facebook and Twitter can limit, control and censor speech as much as or more than the government. Until now, such firms exempted politicians from their own hate speech policies, arguing that what they said was worthy of public debate. This rests in part on the US supreme court. Legal academic Miguel Schor argued that the bench stood Orwell on his head in 2012 by concluding “false statements of fact enjoyed the same protection as core political speech”. He said judges feared creating an Orwellian ministry of truth, but said they miscalculated because the US “does have an official ministry of truth in the form of the president’s bully pulpit which Trump used to normalise lying”.Silicon Valley bosses did not silence Mr Trump in a fit of conscience, but because they think they can stave off anti-trust actions by a Democrat-controlled Congress. Elizabeth Warren threatened to break up big tech and blasted Facebook for “spreading Trump’s lies and disinformation.” Her plan to turn social media into “platform utilities” offers a way to advantage social values such as truth telling over the bottom line.Impunity for corporations, technology and politicians has grown so much that it is incompatible with a functioning democracy. Populists the world over have distorted speech to maintain power by dividing the electorate into separate camps, each convinced that the other is the victim of their opponent’s ideology. To achieve this, demagogues did not need an authoritarian state. As Mr Trump has demonstrated, an unregulated marketplace of ideas, where companies thrive by debasing politics, was enough. More

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      in Elections

      I've been on Parler. It's a cesspit of thinly veiled racism and hate | Malaika Jabali

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      “Civil war is coming.”I saw this message on the social media platform Parler in November, about two weeks after the election was called for Joe Biden. The ominous post followed an even more harrowing message from a different user. “[O]ur people have guns too … it’s time for us to use it!!! Just like in old days.” The poster embedded a photograph of a noose.Parler, which has since been banned by Apple’s app store and from Amazon, has billed itself as a “free speech” platform for the “world’s town square”. Last fall, without much digging, I learned that this town square is one where an increasingly violent far right digitally dances with mainstream, influential conservatives.The fact that Parler has a vague air of legitimacy – unlike other platforms known for their explicitly far-right user bases – normalizes racist violence against Black people and anyone associated with them. Like the white police officers and “respectable” public servants who joined the Ku Klux Klan after the US civil war, or the white families who partied under the lynched bodies of Black men, white America has continued its intergenerational love affair with public anti-blackness. The methods have simply mutated. Memes calling for our deaths are the lynching postcards of the 21st century. Shared among the masses, they make casual affairs of Black terror. It’s not enough for the sharers of these memes to simply believe in white violence on a personal level; the collective experience is the point.I joined Parler in November, before various tech companies announced plans to take it offline. It didn’t take long to find a bevy of hashtags and posts romanticizing civil war. By late November, there were over 10,000 posts that included the hashtag #civilwar and its variants. The person who posted “Civil war is coming” was replying to a post by Wayne Root, a conservative media personality with more than 100,000 followers on Twitter. Root leveled the same unproven accusations of voter fraud as Donald Trump, using the same calls for battle that white power groups heeded in their storming of the US Capitol the first week of 2021.While some on the far right will probably retreat into the shadows cast by polling booths and hidden by exit polling data that obscures Trump’s popularity, many have not. Any perception of progress for Black people, even if this progress does not substantively exist, perpetuates violence against us and our perceived allies like leftists, Marxists and Democrats – all named by Parler posters as opposing parties in this hypothetical civil war).To say that Parler’s users, or any Americans who revel in white power tropes and violent memes, are “extremist” is a bit of a misnomer. What we call extremism is, if anything, a common American tradition. Millions of Americans, if they don’t proactively endorse the violence, silently concede to it. They vote for it. They dress it in words like “tradition” and “free speech”.I was raised witnessing it. There is a monument honoring Confederate soldiers in my home town of Stone Mountain, Georgia. The monument isn’t an ordinary statue erected in some mundane public square. It’s a nearly half-acre relief carved into the massive quartz and granite stone for which our town is named. It would take a runner five miles to circle around the rock formation’s base. We took field trips to Stone Mountain in high school, as if it were an amusement park and not the largest Confederate memorial in the world.Stone Mountain has now become a flashpoint for conflict. I hiked the mountain on a recent holiday trip with my mom, days before white men wielding guns protested against the widespread movement to remove Confederate statues. We tried to hike another day, but were blocked from entering. It was closed for the day after Black counter-protesters came back with guns of their own.When you talk to white southerners about honoring the Confederacy, you’ll hear a lot about heritage. I’ve heard it all my life. I heard it when our state flag featured the Confederate symbol throughout my childhood and in the debates to remove it. I read about it when I decided to make it one of my debate topics for a summer college class in my last year of high school. But what you’ll seldom hear is when this heritage has been selectively commemorated. Stone Mountain’s Confederate monument opened on the 100th anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination.This is an American tradition of terror – a culture of dehumanizing Blackness that bleeds out into the worldThis, too, is the culture of Parler.“Time to get rid of the yoke calling itself democrats,” someone wrote in response to Wayne Root’s revolution post.“Every town needs to decide on a gather place where an armed citizenry takes over everything … every traitor must be executed,” wrote another.It’s not enough to dismiss the radical right as merely having a difference of opinion, or explain it away as a population of marginalized, working-class white men who can be brought back from the brink by reason and calls for a universal basic income.Universal prescriptions are necessary, but insufficient. This is an American tradition of terror – a culture of dehumanizing Blackness that bleeds out into the world. It is the shots I heard while reporting in Kenosha, blocks from where Kyle Rittenhouse killed two white Black Lives Matter protesters, as it happened. It was the ease of white vigilantes carrying weapons in another public square, Civic Center Park in downtown Kenosha, hours earlier. It is the audacity of those white vigilantes shouting down Philando Castile’s girlfriend, from whom I was mere feet away in the park, as they argued for their right to kill to protect property. Of course, Philando was killed while exercising their revered second amendment right to bear arms, but that right is clearly reserved for some Americans more than others.Parler may be homeless now, but there is an entire world that welcomes the hatred and violence it cultivates. As threatening as it may be, the platform will probably be replaced with something else. It’s the public terror that’s the point. More

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      in US Politics

      Opinion divided over Trump's ban from social media

      by

      As rioters were gathering around the US Capitol last Wednesday, a familiar question began to echo around the offices of the large social networks: what should they do about Donald Trump and his provocative posts?The answer has been emphatic: ban him.First he was suspended from Twitter, then from Facebook. Snapchat, Spotify, Twitch, Shopify, and Stripe have all followed suit, while Reddit, TikTok, YouTube and even Pinterest announced new restrictions on posting in support of the president or his actions. Parler, a social media platform that sells itself on a lack of moderation, was removed from app stores and refused service by Amazon.The action has sparked a huge debate about free speech and whether big technology companies – or, to be more precise, their billionaire chief executives – are fit to act as judge and jury in high-profile cases.So what are the arguments on both sides – and who is making them?FORFor many, such social media bans were the right thing to do – if too late. After all, the incitement has already occurred and the Capitol has already been stormed.“While I’m pleased to see social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube take long-belated steps to address the president’s sustained misuse of their platforms to sow discord and violence, these isolated actions are both too late and not nearly enough,” said Mark Warner, a Democratic senator from Virginia. “Disinformation and extremism researchers have for years pointed to broader network-based exploitation of these platforms.”Greg Bensinger, a member of the editorial board of the New York Times, said what happened on 6 January “ought to be social media’s day of reckoning”.He added: “There is a greater calling than profits, and Mr Zuckerberg and Twitter’s CEO, Jack Dorsey, must play a fundamental role in restoring truth and decency to our democracy and democracies around the world.“That can involve more direct, human moderation of high-profile accounts; more prominent warning labels; software that can delay posts so that they can be reviewed before going out to the masses, especially during moments of high tension; and a far greater willingness to suspend or even completely block dangerous accounts like Mr Trump’s.”Even observers who had previously argued against taking action had changed their mind by the weekend. “Turn off Trump’s account,” wrote tech analyst Ben Thompson.“My preferred outcome to yesterday’s events is impeachment. Encouraging violence to undo an election result that one disagrees with is sedition, surely a high crime or misdemeanor, and I hold out hope that Congress will act over the next few days, as unlikely as that seems … Sometimes, though, the right level doesn’t work, yet the right thing needs to be done.” Free speech activist Jillian C York agreed that action had to be taken, but, she said on Monday: “I’m cautious about praising any of these companies, to be honest. I think that in particular Facebook deserves very little praise. They waited until the last moment to do anything, despite months of calls.“When it comes to Twitter, I think we can be a little bit more forgiving. They tried for many, many months to take cautious decisions. Yes, this is a sitting president; taking them down is a problem. And it is problematic, even if there is a line at which it becomes the right choice.” Some have wondered whether the platforms’ convenient decision to grow a backbone has less to do with the violence of the day and more with political manoeuvring.“It took blood & glass in the halls of Congress – and a change in the political winds – for the most powerful tech companies to recognise, at the last possible moment, the threat of Trump,” tweeted Senator Richard Blumenthal, from Connecticut.AGAINSTPredictably, opposition to Trump’s ban came from his own family. “Free speech is dead and controlled by leftist overlords,” tweeted his son Donald Jr. “The ayatollah and numerous other dictatorial regimes can have Twitter accounts with no issue despite threatening genocide to entire countries and killing homosexuals etc… but The President of the United States should be permanently suspended. Mao would be proud.”But the ban, and the precedent that it could set, has worried some analysts and media experts.“Banning a sitting president from social media platforms is, whichever way you look at it, an assault on free speech,” the Sunday Times wrote in an editorial. “The fact that the ban was called for by, among others, Michelle Obama, who said on Thursday that the Silicon Valley platforms should stop enabling him because of his ‘monstrous behaviour’, will add to the suspicion that the ban was politically motivated.”On Monday, the German chancellor, Angela Merkel – hardly known for her affection for the US president – made it clear that she thought it was “problematic” that Trump had been blocked. Her spokesperson, Steffen Seibert, called freedom of speech “a fundamental right of elementary significance”.She said any restriction should be “according to the law and within the framework defined by legislators – not according to a decision by the management of social media platforms”.The ban has also worried those who are already concerned about the strength of Silicon Valley.“The institutions of American democracy have consistently failed to hold President Trump’s unrestrained authoritarianism, hate and racism accountable,” says Silkie Carlo, director of Big Brother Watch, “but this corporate power grab does nothing to benefit American democracy in practice or in principle.”“American democracy is in peril if it relies on a corporate denial of service to protect the nation from its own president, rather than rely on accountable institutions of justice and democracy,” Carlo added.For York, such concerns are valid, but risk an over-emphasis on US politics and concerns. “The majority of the public doesn’t care about these issues on a day-to-day basis,” she says, citing world leaders such as Jair Bolsonaro and Narendra Modi as others who have engaged in hate speech and incitement on Twitter.“It’s only when it hits Trump, and that’s the problem. Because we should be thinking about this as a society day to day.” More