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in US Politics'Your business model is the problem': tech CEOs grilled over role in Capitol attack
The CEOs of America’s biggest technology companies faced a grilling from Congress about the 6 January insurrection at the Capitol, as protesters outside the hearing denounced the platforms for playing a role in fueling the violence.Sundar Pichai of Google, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Jack Dorsey of Twitter on Thursday were called to testify before two committees of the House of Representatives on social media’s role in promoting extremism and misinformation.Protesters who had gathered outside the Capitol building ahead of the hearing portrayed the tech executives as the violent insurrectionists whose images went viral in the days after the 6 January riots. One cutout erected on the grounds showed Zuckerberg as the “QAnon Shaman”, a part-time actor with a horned furry hat who participated in the riot.“The platforms’ inability to deal with the violence, hate and disinformation they promote on their platforms shows that these companies are failing to regulate themselves,” said Emma Ruby-Sachs, the executive director of SumofUs, the human rights organization behind the protests. “After the past five years of manipulation, data harvesting and surveillance, the time has come to rein in big tech.”Lawmakers opened the hearing with video testimonies, criticizing the platforms for their role in the 6 January violence, as well as in the spread of medical misinformation about the Covid-19 vaccine.“You failed to meaningfully change after your platform has played a role in fomenting insurrection and abetting the spread of the virus and trampling American civil liberties,” said the Democratic representative Frank Pallone, the chair of the energy and commerce committee. “Your business model itself has become the problem and the time for self-regulation is over. It’s time we legislate to hold you accountable,” he added.“You’re not passive bystanders – you are not non-profits or religious organizations that are trying to do a good job for humanity – you’re making money,” Pallone later said. “The point we’re trying to make today is that when you spread misinformation, when extremists are actively promoted and amplified, you do it because you make more money.”“The witnesses here today have demonstrated time and time again, that self-regulation has not worked,” echoed Jan Schakowsky, a Democratic representative from Illinois. “They must be held accountable for allowing disinformation and misinformation to spread.”Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers quickly turned to the topic of “cancel culture” and perceived, but unproven, bias against conservatives on social media.In his opening statement, Facebook’s Zuckerberg, argued that the tech companies should not be making the decisions around what is allowed online, and stressed Facebook’s efforts to combat misinformation and its spread of vaccine information.Google’s Pichai, too, sought to highlight his company’s role in connecting users with vaccine information and other Covid-19 resources.Thursday’s session is the latest in a record number of hearings for the big technology players in the past year, as executives have repeatedly been called to the Hill to testify on antitrust issues, misinformation and hate speech.The hearing, which was titled “Disinformation nation: social media’s role in promoting extremism and misinformation”, was held by the House of Representatives’ energy and commerce committee.Lawmakers repeatedly pressed the CEOs on how their platforms were tackling hate speech and misinformation more widely.The Democratic representative Doris Matsui, of California, raised the issue of anti-Asian hate speech and directly asked Dorsey and Zuckerberg what they are doing to address it. She also asked why they took so long to remove racist hashtags that promoted blame for the coronavirus pandemic on Asian Americans, citing the recent attack on Asian women in Atlanta as a consequence of these policies.“The issues we are discussing here are not abstract,” she said. “They have real world consequences and implications that are too often measured in human lives.”She also cited a study that showed a substantial rise in hate speech the week after Donald Trump first used the term “China flu” in a tweet.Dorsey countered by saying he will not ban the racist hashtags outright because “a lot of these hashtags contain counter speech”, or posts refuting the racism the hashtags initiated. Zuckerberg similarly said that hate speech policies at Facebook are “nuanced” and that they have an obligation to protect free speech.Congressman Tony Cárdenas of California has asked Zuckerberg how the company addresses the major problem of misinformation that targets Latino users, noting that studies have shown Facebook catches less false content in Spanish than in English.Zuckerberg responded that Facebook has an international factchecking program with workers in more than 80 countries speaking “a bunch of languages” including Spanish. He also said Facebook translates accurate information about Covid-19 vaccines and other issues from English into a number of languages.Cárdenas noted the example of his Spanish-speaking mother-in-law saying she did not want to get a vaccine because she heard on social media it would place a microchip in her arm.“For God’s sake, that to me is unbelievable, that she got that information on social media platforms,” he said. “Clearly Spanish language misinformation is an issue.” More
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in US PoliticsAmazon's denial of workers urinating in bottles puts the pee in PR fiasco
To paraphrase one of the most iconic tweets of the past 10 years, Amazon’s recent denial about employees not being forced to urinate in bottles at work has people asking a lot of questions already answered by the denial.
In a tweet sent last night, the official Amazon News account for the behemoth corporation, whose CEO, Jeff Bezos, saw his personal net worth increase by $70bn during the pandemic, wrote: “You don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you? If that were true, nobody would work for us. The truth is that we have over a million incredible employees around the world who are proud of what they do, and have great wages and health care from day one.”
In under 12 hours the tweet has been quote-tweeted 9,000 times. (For those unversed in the dark Twitter metric arts that’s … not good.)Molly Jong-Fast🏡
(@MollyJongFast)
This tweet has absolutely completely convinced that the peeing in bottles thing happened and probably worse. https://t.co/mnjYAOkwbeMarch 25, 2021
The thousands of gleeful and mocking rejoinders to Amazon’s post came with good reason. The company is currently in the midst of a public relations battle with a group of workers in Alabama attempting to unionize. In an attempt to forestall such a historic move, Amazon has been on a campaign to illustrate just how well, in fact, they treat their workers. It doesn’t seem to be working! Numerous high-profile labor organizers, celebrities and politicians like Bernie Sanders have joined the side of the striking workers. The Vermont senator is set to travel to Alabama on Friday to meet with them.
The botched PR response in question in this case came as a reply to a tweet from another lawmaker, the Wisconsin congressman Mark Pocan, who himself was responding to jabs thrown by another Amazon executive, Dave Clark. Clark had attempted to draw a snarky analogy between his company and the success record of Sanders in his home state, saying: “I often say we are the Bernie Sanders of employers, but that’s not quite right because we actually deliver a progressive workplace.”
So far, so utterly not convincing – as was picked up on swiftly. “I was the person who found the pee in the bottle. Trust me, it happened,” tweeted author James Bloodworth, who worked undercover at Amazon for his book Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain.James Bloodworth
(@J_Bloodworth)
I was the person who found the pee in the bottle. Trust me, it happened. https://t.co/U76UlDRWSOMarch 25, 2021
Some likened the tweet to a form of corporate gaslighting akin to an abusive relationship – while others mocked pity for the person who sent it out. “Sending thoughts and prayers to the Amazon News account manager being forced to swallow Jeff Bezos’ entire boot with every tweet,” one person chipped in.
While the $15 an hour paid by Amazon in the US is better than some other companies, workers have long spoken out about brutal conditions, a dangerous, high-paced job, and, in fact, having to urinate into bottles for fear of being seen as wasting too much time on the clock.Wagatwe Wanjuki 🇰🇪 🇧🇸
(@wagatwe)
“if I were REALLY abusive, she wouldn’t stay.” https://t.co/ZxBbb7rjytMarch 25, 2021
“We broke this news,” tweeted the Business Insider editor-in-chief, Nicholas Carlson – pointing out that Amazon’s excuse, that it was contractors (rather than employees) forced to pee in bottles made the story even worse than it looked.
But why believe them – or the many outlets that reported on this story? – others joked, after all, who wouldn’t trust information about Amazon’s work practices to be impartial when written by … Amazon News?
Some have pointed out the irony of the tweet falling so close to the anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.Dan Olson
(@FoldableHuman)
You don’t really believe that people burn to death in textile factories, do you? If that were true then no one would work for The Triangle Waist Company! The truth is we have over a million incredible workers who are proud of what they do. https://t.co/p6gzShSnDJMarch 25, 2021
Perhaps all is not lost here for Amazon, though. There may end up being an upside when the fracas has subsided.
Jeet Heer
(@HeerJeet)
Amazon corporate bosses are reading this tweet and torn between 1) we gotta fire this social media person and 2) We need to make sure we’ve cornered the market on cheap pee bottles, that’s a lucrative market. https://t.co/vIJK0OOfVyMarch 25, 2021
Bezos’s Washington DC mansion has been reported to have 25 bathrooms for his own use. More
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in ElectionsZuckerberg faces Capitol attack grilling as Biden signals tougher line on big tech
Mark Zuckerberg, the head of Facebook, could be in for a rough ride on Thursday when he testifies to Congress for the first time about the 6 January insurrection at the Capitol in Washington DC and amid growing questions over his platform’s role in fuelling the violence.The testimony will come after signs that the new administration of Joe Biden is preparing to take a tougher line on the tech industry’s power, especially when it comes to the social media platforms and their role in spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories.Zuckerberg will be joined by Sundar Pichai and Jack Dorsey, the chief executives of Google and Twitter respectively, at a hearing pointedly entitled “Disinformation nation: social media’s role in promoting extremism and misinformation” by the House of Representatives’ energy and commerce committee.The scrutiny comes after a report found that Facebook allowed groups linked to the QAnon, boogaloo and militia movements to glorify violence during the 2020 election and weeks leading up to the deadly mob violence at the US Capitol.Avaaz, a non-profit advocacy group, says it identified 267 pages and groups on Facebook that spread “violence-glorifying content” in the heat of the 2020 election to a combined following of 32 million users. More than two-thirds of the groups and pages had names aligned with several domestic extremist movements.The top 100 most popular false or misleading stories on Facebook related to the elections received an estimated 162m views, the report found. Avaaz called on the White House and Congress to open an investigation into Facebook’s failures and urgently pass legislation to protect American democracy.Fadi Quran, its campaign director, said: “This report shows that American voters were pummeled with false and misleading information on Facebook every step of the 2020 election cycle. We have over a year’s worth of evidence that the platform helped drive billions of views to pages and content that confused voters, created division and chaos, and, in some instances, incited violence.“But the most worrying finding in our analysis is that Facebook had the tools and capacity to better protect voters from being targets of this content, but the platform only used them at the very last moment, after significant harm was done.”Facebook claimed that Avaaz had used flawed methodology. Andy Stone, a spokesperson, said: “We’ve done more than any other internet company to combat harmful content, having already banned nearly 900 militarized social movements and removed tens of thousands of QAnon pages, groups and accounts from our apps.”He acknowledged: “Our enforcement isn’t perfect, which is why we’re always improving it while also working with outside experts to make sure that our policies remain in the right place.”But the report is likely to prompt tough questions for Zuckerberg in what is part of a wider showdown between Washington and Silicon Valley. Another flashpoint on Thursday could be Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which shields social media companies from liability for content their users post.Repealing the law is one of the few things on which Biden and his predecessor as president, Donald Trump, agree, though for different reasons. Democrats are concerned that Section 230 allows disinformation and conspiracy theories such as QAnon to flourish, while Trump and other Republicans have argued that it protects companies from consequences for censoring conservative voices.More generally, critics say that tech companies are too big and that the coronavirus pandemic has only increased their dominance. The cosy relationship between Barack Obama’s administration and Silicon Valley is a thing of the past, while libertarian Republicans who oppose government interference are a fading force.Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google have all come under scrutiny from Congress and regulators in recent years. The justice department, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and state attorneys general are suing the behemoths over various alleged antitrust violations.In a letter this week to Biden and Merrick Garland, the new attorney general, a coalition of 29 progressive groups wrote: “It’s clear that the ability of Big Tech giants like Google to acquire monopoly power has been abetted by the leadership deficit at top enforcement agencies such as the FTC … We need a break from past, failed leadership, and we need it now.”There are signs that Biden is heeding such calls and spoiling for a confrontation. On Monday he nominated Lina Khan, an antitrust scholar who wants stricter regulation of internet companies, to the FTC. Earlier this month Tim Wu, a Columbia University law professor among the most outspoken critics of big tech, was appointed to the national economic council.There is support in Congress from the likes of David Cicilline, chairman of the House judiciary committee’s antitrust panel, which last year released a 449-page report detailing abuses of market power by Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook.The Democratic congressman is reportedly poised to issue at least 10 legislative initiatives targeting big tech, a blitz that will make it harder for the companies and their lobbyists to focus their opposition on a single piece of legislation.Cicilline, also working on a separate bill targeting Section 230, told the Axios website: “My strategy is you’ll see a number of bills introduced, both because it’s harder for [the tech companies] to manage and oppose, you know, 10 bills as opposed to one.“It also is an opportunity for members of the committee who have expressed a real interest or enthusiasm about a particular issue, to sort of take that on and champion it.” More
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in US PoliticsTrump will use 'his own platform’ to return to social media after Twitter ban
Donald Trump will soon use “his own platform” to return to social media, an adviser said on Sunday, months after the former president was banned from Twitter for inciting the US Capitol riot.Trump has chafed in relative silence at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida since losing his Twitter account and the protections and powers of office. Recently he has released short statements which many have likened to his tweets of old.Speculation has been rife that Trump might seek to create his own TV network in an attempt to prise viewers from Fox News, which was first to call the crucial state of Arizona for Joe Biden on election night, to Trump’s considerable anger.But on Sunday adviser Jason Miller said social media was the immediate target.“The president’s been off of social media for a while,” he told Fox News Media Buzz host Howard Kurtz, “[but] his press releases, his statements have actually been getting almost more play than he ever did on Twitter before.”Miller said he had been told by a reporter the statements were “much more elegant” and “more presidential” than Trump’s tweets, but added: “I do think that we’re going to see President Trump returning to social media in probably about two or three months here with his own platform.“And this is something that I think will be the hottest ticket in social media, it’s going to completely redefine the game, and everybody is going to be waiting and watching to see what exactly President Trump does. But it will be his own platform.”Asked if Trump was going to create the platform himself or with a company, Miller said: “I can’t go much further than what I was able to just share, but I can say that it will be big once he starts.“There have been a lot of high-power meetings he’s been having at Mar-a-Lago with some teams of folks who have been coming in, and … it’s not just one company that’s approached the president, there have been numerous companies.“But I think the president does know what direction he wants to head here and this new platform is going to be big and everyone wants him, he’s gonna bring millions and millions, tens of millions of people to this new platform.”Trump, his supporters and prominent conservatives alleged bias from social media companies even before the events of 6 January, when five people including a police officer died as a mob stormed the Capitol, seeking at Trump’s urging to overturn his election defeat.In the aftermath of the attack, Trump was also suspended from Facebook and Instagram. Rightwing platforms including Gab and Parler have come under intense scrutiny amid investigations of the Capitol putsch.Trump was impeached for inciting the attack but acquitted when only seven Republican senators voted to convict.He therefore remains free to run for office and has dominated polls regarding prospective Republican nominees in 2024, raising impressive sums in political donations even while his business fortunes suffer amid numerous legal threats.Miller emphasised the hold Trump retains on his party.“He’s already had over 20 senators over 50 members of Congress either call or make the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to ask for [his] endorsement,” he said.With the sort of performative hyperbole Trump aides often display for their watching boss, Miller claimed endorsements from the former president were “the most important in world history. There’s never ever been this type of endorsement that’s carried this much weight.”Saying the media should “pay attention to Georgia on Monday”, Miller said an endorsement there would “really shake things up in the political landscape”.Trump faces an investigation in Georgia over a call to a Republican official in which he sought to overturn defeat by Joe Biden. In January, Democrats won both Georgia seats in the US Senate. More
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in US PoliticsWin the Amazon union fight and we can usher in a new Progressive Era | Robert Reich
The most dramatic change in American capitalism over the last half-century has been the emergence of corporate behemoths like Amazon and the shrinkage of labor unions. The resulting imbalance has spawned near-record inequalities of income and wealth, corruption of democracy by big money and the abandonment of the working class.All this is coming to a head in several ways.Over the next eight days, Amazon faces a union vote at its warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama. If successful, it would be Amazon’s first US-based union in its nearly 27-year history.Conditions in Amazon warehouses would please Kim Jong-un – strict production quotas, 10-hour workdays with only two half-hour breaks, unsafe procedures, arbitrary firings “and they track our every move”, Jennifer Bates, a worker at Bessemer, told the Senate budget committee on Wednesday.To thwart the union drive, Amazon has required Bessemer workers to attend anti-union meetings, warned workers they’d have to pay union dues (wrong – Alabama is a “right-to-work” state that bars mandatory dues), and intimidated and harassed organizers.Why is Amazon abusing its workers?The power shift can be reversed – but only with stronger labor laws, tougher trade deals and a commitment to antitrustThe company isn’t exactly hard-up. It’s the most profitable firm in America. Its executive chairman and largest shareholder, Jeff Bezos, is the richest man in the world, holding more wealth than the bottom 39% of Americans put together.Amazon is abusing workers because it can.Fifty years ago, General Motors was the largest employer in America. The typical GM worker earned $35 an hour in today’s dollars and had a major say over working conditions. Today’s largest employers are Amazon and Walmart, each paying about $15 an hour and treating workers like cattle.The typical GM worker wasn’t “worth” more than twice today’s Amazon or Walmart worker and didn’t have more valuable insights about how work should be organized. The difference is GM workers a half-century ago had a strong union, summoning the collective bargaining power of more than a third of the entire American workforce.By contrast, today’s Amazon and Walmart workers are on their own. And because only 6.4% of America’s private-sector workers are unionized, there’s little collective pressure on Amazon or Walmart to treat their workers any better.Fifty years ago, “big labor” had enough political clout to ensure labor laws were enforced and that the government pushed giant firms like GM to sustain the middle class.Today, organized labor’s political clout is minuscule by comparison. The biggest political players are giant corporations like Amazon. And what have they done with their muscle? Encouraged “right-to-work” laws, diluted federal labor protections and kept the National Labor Relations Board understaffed and overburdened.They’ve also impelled government to lower their taxes (Amazon paid zero federal taxes in 2018); extorted states to provide them tax breaks as condition for locating facilities there (Amazon is a champion at this game); bullied cities where they’re headquartered (Amazon forced Seattle to back down on a plan to tax big corporations to pay for homeless shelters); and wangled trade treaties allowing them to outsource so many jobs that blue-collar workers in America have little choice but to take low-paying, high-stress warehouse and delivery gigs.Oh, and they’ve neutered antitrust laws, which in an earlier era would have had companies like Amazon in their crosshairs.This decades-long power shift – the emergence of corporate leviathans and the demise of labor unions – has resulted in a massive upward redistribution of income and wealth. The richest 0.1% of Americans now has almost as much wealth as the bottom 90% together.Corporate profits account for a growing share of the total economy and wages a declining share, with multi-billionaire executives and investors like Bezos taking home the lion’s share.The power shift can be reversed – but only with stronger labor laws, tougher trade deals and a renewed commitment to antitrust.The Biden administration and congressional Democrats appear willing. The House has just passed the toughest labor reforms in more than a generation. Biden’s new trade representative, Katherine Tai, promises trade deals will protect American workers rather than exporters. And Biden is putting trustbusters in critical positions at the Federal Trade Commission and in the White House.I’d like to think America is at a tipping point similar to where it was some 120 years ago, when the ravages and excesses of the Gilded Age precipitated what became known as the Progressive Era. Then, reformers reversed the course of American capitalism for the next 70 years, making it work for the many rather than the few.Today’s progressive activists – in Washington, at Amazon’s Bessemer warehouse and elsewhere around the nation – may be on the verge of doing the same. More
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in US PoliticsEx-Trump aide tweets 'executive orders' after Google lists him as president
Richard Grenell, a former acting director of national intelligence turned potential Republican candidate for governor of California, gleefully seized on an error by Google on Saturday, promising “a plethora of executive orders” after the search giant listed him as “President of the United States since 2021”.The former Trump aide also took a low shot at the actual president, Joe Biden, tweeting: “I will run up the stairs without tripping.”Biden stumbled dramatically on Friday, as he climbed the stairs to Air Force One. On Saturday, before noticing his accidental promotion by Google, Grenell complained about media coverage of Biden’s fall including criticism of Donald Trump Jr’s decision to tweet a gif showing his father knocking Biden over with a golf ball.“Washington DC types are killing humour and laughter,” Grenell claimed.Few Democrats or Washington officials found much to laugh about in Grenell’s time as acting director of national intelligence.In February last year, one unnamed former official told Vanity Fair his appointment “clearly, unambiguously” represented “the politicisation of intelligence” and said the former ambassador to Germany was Trump’s “guardian against fact”.In the event, Grenell filled the role for three months before being replaced by John Ratcliffe, a former congressman many observers thought similarly unqualified and inappropriately partisan.On Saturday, Grenell’s first tweeted “executive orders” as the Google-anointed president, if not the actual one, included the demand that a liquid natural gas terminal “be built ASAP on the west coast of the United States (preferably in California)” and that “multiple desalinisation plants [and] new nuclear power plants be built in California”.“Oh,” he added, “and Eric Swalwell hereby loses his security clearance.”Swalwell, a California Democrat who briefly ran for the presidential nomination in 2020, was a House manager in Trump’s second impeachment trial. Republicans have sought unsuccessfully to remove him from the House intelligence committee, over reports of links to a suspected Chinese spy.By lunchtime on the east coast on Saturday, Google had fixed its mistake.Grenell seems more likely to run for state than national office. Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governor of California, is the subject of a recall attempt. In February, Grenell was reported to have discussed a run with Trump.Speaking to the Conservative Political Action Conference in Florida, Grenell said: “And of course, if a public official is still failing to deliver on their promises, and if you can’t limit their term or recall them in time, there’s always one other option. You can run against them yourself.” More
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in US PoliticsLiberals want to blame rightwing 'misinformation' for our problems. Get real | Thomas Frank
One day in March 2015, I sat in a theater in New York City and took careful notes as a series of personages led by Hillary Clinton and Melinda Gates described the dazzling sunburst of liberation that was coming our way thanks to entrepreneurs, foundations and Silicon Valley. The presentation I remember most vividly was that of a famous TV actor who rhapsodized about the wonders of Twitter, Facebook and the rest: “No matter which platform you prefer,” she told us, “social media has given us all an extraordinary new world, where anyone, no matter their gender, can share their story across communities, continents and computer screens. A whole new world without ceilings.”Six years later and liberals can’t wait for that extraordinary new world to end. Today we know that social media is what gives you things like Donald Trump’s lying tweets, the QAnon conspiracy theory and the Capitol riot of 6 January. Social media, we now know, is a volcano of misinformation, a non-stop wallow in hatred and lies, generated for fun and profit, and these days liberal politicians are openly pleading with social media’s corporate masters to pleez clamp a ceiling on it, to stop people from sharing their false and dangerous stories.A “reality crisis” is the startling name a New York Times story recently applied to this dismal situation. An “information disorder” is the more medical-sounding label that other authorities choose to give it. Either way, the diagnosis goes, we Americans are drowning in the semiotic swirl. We have come loose from the shared material world, lost ourselves in an endless maze of foreign disinformation and rightwing conspiracy theory.In response, Joe Biden has called upon us as a nation to “defend the truth and defeat the lies”. A renowned CNN journalist advocates a “harm reduction model” to minimize “information pollution” and deliver the “rational views” that the public wants. A New York Times writer has suggested the president appoint a federal “reality czar” who would “help” the Silicon Valley platform monopolies mute the siren song of QAnon and thus usher us into a new age of sincerity.These days Democratic politicians lean on anyone with power over platforms to shut down the propaganda of the right. Former Democratic officials pen op-eds calling on us to get over free speech. Journalists fantasize about how easily and painlessly Silicon Valley might monitor and root out objectionable speech. In a recent HBO documentary on the subject, journalist after journalist can be seen rationalizing that, because social media platforms are private companies, the first amendment doesn’t apply to them … and, I suppose, neither should the American tradition of free-ranging, anything-goes political speech.In the absence of such censorship, we are told, the danger is stark. In a story about Steve Bannon’s ongoing Trumpist podcasts, for example, ProPublica informs us that “extremism experts say the rhetoric still feeds into an alternative reality that breeds anger and cynicism, which may ultimately lead to violence”.In liberal circles these days there is a palpable horror of the uncurated world, of thought spaces flourishing outside the consensus, of unauthorized voices blabbing freely in some arena where there is no moderator to whom someone might be turned in. The remedy for bad speech, we now believe, is not more speech, as per Justice Brandeis’s famous formula, but an “extremism expert” shushing the world.What an enormous task that shushing will be! American political culture is and always has been a matter of myth and idealism and selective memory. Selling, not studying, is our peculiar national talent. Hollywood, not historians, is who writes our sacred national epics. There were liars-for-hire in this country long before Roger Stone came along. Our politics has been a bath in bullshit since forever. People pitching the dumbest of ideas prosper fantastically in this country if their ideas happen to be what the ruling class would prefer to believe.“Debunking” was how the literary left used to respond to America’s Niagara of nonsense. Criticism, analysis, mockery and protest: these were our weapons. We were rational-minded skeptics, and we had a grand old time deflating creationists, faith healers, puffed-up militarists and corporate liars of every description.Censorship and blacklisting were, with important exceptions, the weapons of the puritanical right: those were their means of lashing out against rap music or suggestive plays or leftwingers who were gainfully employed.What explains the clampdown mania among liberals? The most obvious answer is because they need an excuse. Consider the history: the right has enjoyed tremendous success over the last few decades, and it is true that conservatives’ capacity for hallucinatory fake-populist appeals has helped them to succeed. But that success has also happened because the Democrats, determined to make themselves the party of the affluent and the highly educated, have allowed the right to get away with it.There have been countless times over the years where Democrats might have reappraised this dumb strategy and changed course. But again and again they chose not to, blaming their failure on everything but their glorious postindustrial vision. In 2016, for example, liberals chose to blame Russia for their loss rather than look in the mirror. On other occasions they assured one another that they had no problems with white blue-collar workers – until it became undeniable that they did, whereupon liberals chose to blame such people for rejecting them.To give up on free speech is to despair of reason itselfAnd now we cluck over a lamentable “information disorder”. The Republicans didn’t suffer the landslide defeat they deserved last November; the right is still as potent as ever; therefore Trumpist untruth is responsible for the malfunctioning public mind. Under no circumstances was it the result of the Democrats’ own lackluster performance, their refusal to reach out to the alienated millions with some kind of FDR-style vision of social solidarity.Or perhaps this new taste for censorship is an indication of Democratic healthiness. This is a party that has courted professional-managerial elites for decades, and now they have succeeded in winning them over, along with most of the wealthy areas where such people live. Liberals scold and supervise like an offended ruling class because to a certain extent that’s who they are. More and more, they represent the well-credentialed people who monitor us in the workplace, and more and more do they act like it.What all this censorship talk really is, though, is a declaration of defeat – defeat before the Biden administration has really begun. To give up on free speech is to despair of reason itself. (Misinformation, we read in the New York Times, is impervious to critical thinking.) The people simply cannot be persuaded; something more forceful is in order; they must be guided by we, the enlightened; and the first step in such a program is to shut off America’s many burbling fountains of bad takes.Let me confess: every time I read one of these stories calling on us to get over free speech or calling on Mark Zuckerberg to press that big red “mute” button on our political opponents, I feel a wave of incredulity sweep over me. Liberals believe in liberty, I tell myself. This can’t really be happening here in the USA.But, folks, it is happening. And the folly of it all is beyond belief. To say that this will give the right an issue to campaign on is almost too obvious. To point out that it will play straight into the right’s class-based grievance-fantasies requires only a little more sophistication. To say that it is a betrayal of everything we were taught liberalism stood for – a betrayal that we will spend years living down – may be too complex a thought for our punditburo to consider, but it is nevertheless true. More