The intersection of Silicon Valley and democracy is the subject of the newsletter Platformer. You can subscribe here.
As the year winds down, let's talk about what we learned about the relationship between tech and democracy, and where the most urgent questions lie as we head into 2022.
Donald Trump's accounts were often removed from platforms in the years that he was president. Trump spread lies about COVID, harassed average citizens, and threatened a nuclear war from his primary posting station. He lied about the outcome of the election and inciting the January 6th attacks on the Capitol after losing re-election to Joe Biden.
He was able to keep his accounts through January 6th because he was the president. His accounts were suspended indefinitely after Congress certified Biden's victory. Tech determinists believe that social networks uniquely enabled Trump's rise and were among the primary sources of his power, but the past 11 months have offered an imperfect test of that hypothesis.
His power has only increased.
If you think that social networks were a primary source of Trump's power, then removing him from them would diminish that power. Since Trump was removed from those networks, his power has only increased. He has settled into a routine of sending out press releases that are similar to atweets, and many of them find their way into the news cycle. He held a rally in Iowa. A SPAC deal that promised to create a Trump-focused media company and social network is currently underway.
Trump has been the promoter-in-chief for a national campaign to rewrite election laws in his favor, while installing supporters in key positions that could enable him to overturn an election loss in 2024.
It was the right thing to do to remove Trump from social media, as it spared us a year of lies and violence. It is clear that deplatforming Trump did not improve the political situation in this country. The situation is getting worse all the time.
Barton Gellman describes January 6th as a rehearsal for what is to come in his cover story for The Atlantic. If you abandon today's edition and just read the whole story, it won't hurt my feelings. Two themes from the piece stand out, the way Trump critics are being systematically purge within the Republican party, leaving only the feeblest resistance behind, and how small a role tech in general or social networks specifically seem to play in any of this.
There are hints of it in the story, for example a Telegram message and a Facebook live stream. A retired firefighter who believes the 2020 election was stolen, or says he does, serves as a proxy in the story for Trump's base, and the firefighter gets most of his misinformation from the right-wing media.
21 million Americans could be described as insurrectionists.
This is not a story about how we are polarizing ourselves by ranking or how demagogues are recruiting followers. Gellman thinks that it is about a reliable predictor of genocide and fears of a Great Replacement. White Republicans are desperate to cement their power as demographic changes show a white minority in the United States by 2045
A group called the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats, or CPOST, ran national opinion surveys to gauge the attitudes of people who say they do not trust the 2020 election results. 21 million Americans could be described as committed insurrectionists.
Gellman writes of Americans today with connections to Yugoslavia in the 1990s and Northern Ireland in the 1960s.
Pape thought the insurrectionists were dangerous. More than one in four people said the country needed groups like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys. One-third of them owned guns, and 15 percent had served in the military. All had easy access to the internet.
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The results did not fit the government model of lone wolves and small groups of extremists. He told me that it was a new violent mass movement. This is political violence.
It was thought that if we caught and removed Russian agents, stopped recommending extremists, and eliminated all the misinformation we could find, a kind of balance might be restored. The country is moving inexorably toward a constitutional crisis four years after those steps were necessary.
It is clear that the determinist case for tech reform was not realistic. On the other hand, platforms have been found to be involved in spreading hate speech that leads to real-world violence, most famously in India. In the United States, where platforms devote an outsized percentage of their moderation resources, a violent movement like QAnon was allowed to flower for years before they finally cracked down in 2020.
It is clear that our emergency is much larger than what we are hearing about in the Washington Post. I had assumed that the platforms had a bigger role to play. The past five years have shown that tech companies can be prodded into addressing some of the harms that occur on their watch.
I can't say for Congress.
In The New York Times over the weekend, Cecelia Kang examined the fruits of American lawmakers' five-year-old reckoning over the size, power, and influence of our biggest companies. She finds a lot of hearings, a bunch of confused congressmen, and a blank space where their long-promised tech reforms should be. Kang writes.
The lack of regulation of technology companies isn't because elected officials don't understand the internet It helps explain why they have been so slow with oversight measures. New questions about technology are being mapped onto political divides.
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The reality is that the parties are deeply at odds over how to protect consumers and encourage businesses. There is a disagreement over the hand of government on businesses that is stalling dozens of bills.
This is true. It can feel quaint in the context of democratic erosion. One of America's two major political parties is trying to eliminate the role of voters in choosing their elected officials. We were surprised that the two sides couldn't agree on how to govern Facebook.
It is a shame because there is so much regulation to be done. There are some good ideas, such as the new bill from Chris Coons, Rob Portman, and Amy Klobuchar, which would require platforms like Facebook to share data with independent researchers. Disclosures around moderation of content and political advertising are some of the worthy bills. The tripwire that has doomed so many efforts to date could be removed with these reforms.
As this year comes to a close, I need to restore some sense of proportion to the subjects that we cover. The current and future state of platforms will always be the focus of Platformer. Many assumptions about the future rely on the idea that the platforms will be built inside a stable democracy within a few years.
The majority of Americans voted to preserve their democracy, and gave to Democrats the presidency and both houses of Congress. Our governance system is brittle and time is running out.
All of this has been said before by people who make politics their full-time job. I would love to join the rest of Silicon Valley in full-time contemplation of Web3 and anything else that might distract me from the potential of life under permanent minority rule.
The future of tech and democracy are related. Biden's victory last year gave hope that Congress would be able to make progress on both subjects. There is little progress to be found as we approach the elections next year.
Lawmakers have lectured the tech industry about its failures for the past five years. Effective platform governance will only take us so far. The most catastrophic failure of all will be that of Congress if it can't protect our democracy at this crucial moment.
