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1、 BACKGROUNDERNo.3678|February 7,2022CeNTer FOr TeCHNOLOGy POLICyThis paper,in its entirety,can be found at http:/report.heritage.org/bg3678The Heritage Foundation|214 Massachusetts avenue,Ne|Washington,DC 20002|(202)546-4400|heritage.orgNothing written here is to be construed as necessarily reflecti
2、ng the views of The Heritage Foundation or as an attempt to aid or hinder the passage of any bill before Congress.Combating Big Techs Totalitarianism:A Road MapKara FrederickThe growing symbiosis between big Tech and government gives these companies undue influence over americans daily lives and und
3、ermines their rights.KEY TAKEAWAYSbig Tech has increasingly exercised perva-sive control of information and access to the digital space in ways that undermine freedom and a functioning republic.It is time for aggressive reforms to ensure that big Tech is held accountable,provide scrutiny and oversig
4、ht,and constrain its ability to reshape society.Too many gatekeepers of information for the American publicelite media,academia,gov-ernment institutions,and various organs of the cultureare captured by leftist ideology.As the past year has borne out,Big Tech companies are not afraid to exercise thei
5、r power in the service of this ide-ology.1 Given their positions as global oligopolies,the ability of Big Tech companies to manipulate the flow of information renders their actions transformative.Every American should be concerned about Big Techs willingness to shut off direct access to digital info
6、r-mation,their demonstrated pattern of information manipulation,and their impact on Americas culture of free speech.Beyond this,the growing symbiosis between Big Tech and government,the constriction of digital life,the pernicious targeting and exploitation of the next February 7,2022|2BACKGROUNDER|N
7、o.3678heritage.orggeneration,and the expansion of digital surveillance will accelerate the stratification of American society.If current patterns are not disrupted,conservatives will bear the brunt of this tech-enabled classification system implemented hand-in-glove with the government.This report e
8、xamines the developing landscape and issues a call for conservatives to push back against the trend toward totalitarianism in America that is being ushered in with the help of Big Tech.Big Techs Information MonopolyInformation Manipulation.A handful of Big Tech corporations now manipulate the flow o
9、f information in such an expansive way as to fun-damentally reshape the public discourse.The past year demonstrated that suppression of conservative viewpoints by technology companies can materially impact the body politic.2 For example,tech corporations actively insert themselves between“the user a
10、nd content”in increasingly ideological ways.3 lAn October 2021 poll by research firm McLaughlin and Associates found that 52 percent of Americans believe Facebook,Twitter,and other social media sites censorship of the New York Posts Hunter Biden story constituted interference in the election.4 lA No
11、vember 2020 study by the Media Research Center(MRC)found that one in six Biden voters claimed they would have changed their vote had they been aware of information such as the Hunter Biden laptop story that was actively suppressed by tech companies.5 lMore than 17 platforms muzzled the then-sitting
12、President of the United States within two weeks in January 2021.At the same time,three tech companies acted in concert(within approximately 48 hours of each other)to eliminate a conservative-friendly competitor as it sat atop the Apple store.6 lIn July 2021,a consortium of companies and organization
13、s revealed plans to expand an industry-wide terrorism database to include“right-wing”content.7Quantifying viewpoint discrimination by Big Tech is becoming easier.Conservatives used to be hard-pressed to collect data to verify the anecdotal February 7,2022|3BACKGROUNDER|No.3678heritage.orgsuppression
14、 they experienced at the hands of these companies.8 Yet the evidence now paints a clearer picture.lUsing a dataset of prominent,politically active users suspended from Twitter since its inception,a Columbia University researcher discovered in 2019 that Twitter suspended users in the“conservative”cat
15、egory at a ratio of 21-to-1 compared to“liberals.”9 lIn 2020,an independent media company observed that Google likely suppressed conservative-leaning outlets such as the Daily Caller,Breitbart,and The Federalist during the 2020 election season.10 The companys analysis of raw,third-party data indicat
16、ed,for example,that Breitbarts Google search visibility shrank by 99 percent during the 2020 presidential election cycle compared to the same period in 2016.11 lIn October 2021,the MRC determined that Twitter and Facebook censor Republican Members of Congress at a rate of 53-to-1 compared to Democra
17、ts in Congress.12 lAlso in October 2021,leaked documents obtained by The Wall Street Journal revealed that Facebook created and used two internal tools in the aftermath of Donald Trumps 2016 electoral victory that suppressed right-wing content,media traffic,and reach on the site.Facebooks own intern
18、al research concluded that if the tools were removed,Breitbart would experience 20 percent more traffic,The Washington Times 18 percent more,Western Journal 16 percent more,and Epoch Times 11 percent more.13 One of these tools was still in use by Facebook as of October 2021.Additional evidence is po
19、uring in.YouTube censors content that con-tradicts left-wing orthodoxy.14 Facebook suppresses access to information critical of Democrat politicians.15 Sitting Republican Members of Congress are regularly sanctioned by multiple platforms.16 Christian commentators,preachers,and even mothers are penal
20、ized for posting“misinformation.”17 The works of authors and filmmakers are suppressed or removed entirely due to critical stances on the Black Lives Matter organization or biological views on the sex differences between men and women.And run-of-the-mill outlets expressing a right-leaning position,i
21、ncluding Sky News and the New York Post,Americas oldest daily newspaper,are curbed for violating Big Techs ever-changing policies.18 February 7,2022|4BACKGROUNDER|No.3678heritage.orgA few recent examples(among the many others that could be cited)serve to make the point:YouTube lIn January 2022,YouTu
22、be removed an interview between podcaster Joe Rogan and vaccine scientist Dr.Robert Malone for comparing the current public health climate in America to Germany in the 1920s and 1930s.19 lIn November 2021,YouTube suspended U.S.Senator Ron Johnsons(RWI)channel for discussing vaccine injuries.20 lIn A
23、ugust 2021,YouTube suspended U.S.Senator Rand Paul(RKY)after he referenced studies that questioned the efficacy of cloth masks.21 lIn August 2021,Presbyterian minister Carl Truemans YouTube livestream was dropped for a“content violation”as he lectured on classic Christian mores for the Immanuel Bapt
24、ist Church.22 lIn April 2021,YouTube removed a recording of a roundtable con-ducted by Governor Ron DeSantis(RFL)for contradicting“the consensus of local and global health authorities regarding the efficacy of masks.”23 lIn March 2021,YouTube suspended commentator Steven Crowder after he questioned
25、the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election in Nevada.24Facebook lIn January 2022,Facebook locked the ads account of a conservative publisher that sells childrens books featuring former President Ronald Reagan,economist Thomas Sowell,and Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett for violating rul
26、es against“low quality or disrup-tive content.”25 lIn August 2021,Facebook removed the Instagram account of a Gold Star mother who criticized Joe Biden after the death of her son,a U.S.Marine,during the Afghanistan withdrawal.Her profile on Facebook was“incorrectly deleted”from the main platform as
27、well.26 February 7,2022|5BACKGROUNDER|No.3678heritage.org lIn October 2020,Facebook suppressed details reported by the New York Post of a potential relationship between Joe Biden and a Ukrainian energy company that employed his son as a board member.27Twitter lIn January 2022,Twitter permanently sus
28、pended the account of U.S.Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene(RGA)for repeated“viola-tions”that include citing Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System data,discussing the risks of masking children,and highlighting studies on alternative COVID treatments like ivermectin.28 lIn December 2021,Twitter
29、suspended the policy director of a pro-fam-ily think tank for supporting bans on the chemical castration and surgical mutilation of minors suffering from gender dysphoria.29 lIn October 2021,U.S.Representative Jim Banks(RIN)was sus-pended from Twitter after referring to a transgender individual who
30、was born male as a man.30 lIn August 2021,former lawyer for President Trump Jenna Ellis was suspended after criticizing Bidens Afghanistan withdrawal and his plan to resettle refugees in the United States with limited or no vetting.31 lIn August 2021,Christian commentator Allie Beth Stuckey was sus-
31、pended after tweeting that transgender Olympic weightlifter Laura Hubbard is“a man”and that men“should not compete against women in weightlifting.”32Amazon lIn September 2021,Amazon prohibited ads promoting Heritage scholar Mike Gonzalezs book criticizing the Black Lives Matter organization and its
32、relationship to Marxism.33 lIn March 2021,Amazon revealed that it removed scholar Ryan T.Andersons book on gender dysphoria,which was written from a con-servative perspective,from its platform three years after publication.34 February 7,2022|6BACKGROUNDER|No.3678heritage.org lIn February 2021,Amazon
33、 deleted a documentary on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas without explanation.35The list goes on.All of this occurs while MSNBCs Rachel Maddow propagates misinformation of her own36 and the Taliban,Irans supreme leader,and Chinese Communist Party(CCP)spokesmen spread anti-Se-mitic and genocida
34、l rhetoric on the American-owned platforms without consequence.37Access to Information.38 As a practical matter,Big Tech companies can now control Americans ability to access information.Not all censorship is created equal.Censorship conducted at the cloud hosting infrastructure or Internet service
35、provider(ISP)level severely curtails direct access to digi-tal viewpoints and actors who run afoul of these providers.By controlling these lower levels of the technical stack upon which many other layers(like digital platforms and applications)depend,a small group of unelected tech executives can pu
36、ll the plug on entire companiesand with very limited recourse.No companys board of directors doing business at any layer of the stack is insulated from political and public pressure to jettison specific viewpoints in todays woke culture.The case of Twitter competitor Parler in January 2021 illustrat
37、es how this can happen.Google and Apple removed Parler from their stores at the application layer of the technology stack after the January 6 Capitol riots,but it was not until Amazon Web Services declined to host Parler at a lower level of the stack(cloud hosting infrastructure)that it suddenly cea
38、sed to exist on the Internet as originally conceived.Parler,then the most down-loaded application on Apples app store and a Big Tech competitor popular with conservatives,has yet to reach even 4 percent of the users it had gained immediately before its deplatforming.39Culture of Free Speech.At a mor
39、e abstract level,despite arguments focused on Big Tech as private companies acting within their rights to ban users,40 Americas culture of free speech is at issue.The threat of deplat-forming by tech companies based off wanton enforcement of their vague rules inevitably has a chilling effect.When co
40、nfronted with the evidence that certain viewpoints are disproportionately censored,sympathetic users are apt to restrict their speech.Such practices engender a form of self-cen-sorship that imperils a foundational norm within American culturethe disposition to speak freely.Even the American Civil Li
41、berties Unions senior legislative counsel stated in January that“it should concern everyone when companies like Facebook and Twitter wield the unchecked power to remove people from February 7,2022|7BACKGROUNDER|No.3678heritage.orgplatforms that have become indispensable for the speech of billions.”4
42、1 Russian dissident Alexei Navalny,German Chancellor Angela Merkel,and Mexicos President Andrs Manuel Lpez Obradornone of whom is par-ticularly sympathetic to American conservativeshave also spoken out about Big Techs threat to freedom of expression.42New Trends in Big TechBeyond restriction of spee
43、ch,conservatives face more expansive problems:the growing fusion between technology companies and the gov-ernment,the constriction of digital life,practices that target and exploit the next generation of American citizens,and novel forms of digital surveillance that will disproportionately impact co
44、nservatives.Symbiosis Between Big Tech and Big Government.New revelations reflect what is already a troubling trend in the digital public square:the growing symbiosis between the federal government and Big Tech.43The Biden Administration is attempting to circumvent the Constitution by pressuring pri
45、vate tech companies to take down content under a broad and politically biased definition of misinformation.44 When Big Tech com-panies do the governments bidding by removing users and content that the government tells them are objectionable,they are essentially acting as government agentsa potential
46、 violation of the First Amendment.45In July 2021,White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki described how the government is coordinating with social media platforms to flag users and content that cut against the Administrations COVID messaging:Well,first,we are in regular touch with these social media pl
47、atforms,and those engagements typically happen through members of our senior staff,but also members of our COVID-19 team.Weve increased disinformation research and tracking within the Surgeon Generals office.Were flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.Its important to tak
48、e faster action against harmful posts.And Facebook needs to move more quickly to remove harmful,violative postsposts that will be within their policies for removal often remain up for days.Thats too long.The information spreads too quickly.46Within a month of this warningand additional warnings from
49、 U.S.Surgeon General Vivek MurthyFacebook removed the Administra-tions“Disinformation Dozen:”the 12 individuals explicitly cited by the White House as“producing 65%of anti-vaccine misinformation on Face-book.”47 Separate from the COVID narrative,Department of Homeland February 7,2022|8BACKGROUNDER|N
50、o.3678heritage.orgSecurity Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas also declared that his organization is“working with the tech companies that are the platform for much of the disinformation that reaches the American public”48 with respect to elec-tions and“threats”to the homeland.This willingness of Big Tech