With “leaders” like this, we can be forgiven for thinking we might never be able to stop the tech companies from undermining our elections.
And yet stories continue to get out about the censorship of American voices and about harassment. What began as a conspiracy theory has now reached the desk of the president of the United States. He promises reforms, and I’ve introduced them along with Sen. Josh Hawley. He has promised executive action, and I’m going to advise him on how to deliver it.
To fix our tech companies, we must bear witness to their flaws. The truth always triumphs against tyranny, even if it takes a while for most of us to notice there’s a battle going on. Eventually, though, we do. There is no algorithm that can break the human will to do the right thing. And so there have been brave whistleblowers who have detailed how Facebook and Twitter and Google and Pinterest suppress conservative content with impunity and without apology.
We must be courageous enough to encourage these brave voices to guide us and to expose what’s truly rotten at these #AmericaLast companies. All technology means is doing more with less. You can sometimes have more tyranny at a cheaper price. If we are entering a networked world, denying someone access to that network constitutes a kind of maliciousness we should oppose. Ever since the ancient world, we had two punishments—death and banishment. It’s easier to ban your opponents than to debate them.
Software is eating the world, prominent VC and Facebook board member Marc Andreessen once said. And it is eating our political discourse whole.
Your wealth is a function of your intelligence, your capacity for risk, and network social media bans are a kind of taking, no less personally destructive than taking property. Do we make America great again by banning people with bad politics from Uber or DoorDash or Instacart? Why again do we allow the tech or for that matter banking companies to work with fraudulent hate groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center to determine who can use their products? Does the heart of a tyrant beat in the heart of every Woketopian? Are they all secretly building the Chinese social credit score system to turn us all into their captive Uighurs?
Naivete has made us terribly vulnerable. Google partnered with the Chinese Communist military to build artificial intelligence—but not the U.S. military. More than 1,600 Google employees petitioned CEO Sundar Pichai to deny cops basic email services. The woke Left wants the cops to show up when they are under attack, but heaven forbid they have a right to access the basic digital necessities. Twitter hired a Chinese Communist Party-linked A.I. expert who wanted to hide “secret” weapons contracts.
We must make our tech sector love America before our tech overlords take us over. Here, policy can be our guide.
Big Tech should be required to provide transparency to validate the neutrality of its platform. Valid explanations should accompany all takedowns and suspensions. It was embarrassing when Jack Dorsey didn’t even know why users were suspended. Individual users should be able to appeal, be told exactly where they went out of bounds (quotes, timestamp) and exactly what policy guidelines they violated. The big platforms should also be required to publish aggregate data on takedowns/suspensions. Maybe also have an independent board of review. It should be hard to comply with the conditions justifying bans so that they’ll censor less.
We need a culture of free speech, and large or market-dominant communication platforms need to serve the public interest rather than their own whims. The big players need to be regulated as common carriers.
Big Tech needs to stop hurting the little guy. Sure, they need to remove spammers, scams, and child porn, but their algorithmic tools can’t be allowed to censor sociopolitical ideas, constitutionally protected hate speech, or everything deemed “misinformation.” Twitter has now made it so that their employees can work from anywhere. They should do what they can to make sure that that army of employees is representative of society as a whole, not just a narrow group of Silicon Valley woketopians.
Ban foreign companies like TikTok that are little more than data collection operations. We must ban certain Chinese organizations from operating in our country, just as they have with ours. Why do we allow the Chinese state to buy access to genetics companies like 23andMe or Complete Genomics anyway?
Don’t set sweeping public policy targeting FAANG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google) that winds up screwing upstarts, though. Making large and small companies play by the same rules will always favor the large companies.
Major operating system vendors need to offer a level playing field and encourage third-party innovation. They need to let third-party developers replace their built-in apps and let users replace their OS with modified versions on the hardware they own. App store curation shouldn’t exclude software that the OS finds distasteful.
Politics and tech need not be in an antagonistic conflict. Whatever necessary tech disruption occurs should ultimately make America great and not just enrich a few in tony zip codes. Ask not what America can do for your tech company but what your tech company can do for America.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Revenge Porn Chivalry
October 27, 2019
World Series Game 5. Presidential Sky Box. Washington Nationals Stadium.
“You’re dating her, aren’t you?”
I was not.
“No, Mr. President. But chivalry is not dead. And I’m a sucker for a damsel in distress. Besides, we all fall short of perfection in our personal lives. That doesn’t mean she should be getting bullied like this.”
(Melania nodded in approval.)
The president pointed to then-congressman Mark Meadows, his best beltway buddy, and then back at me.
“He’s dating her. Totally dating her. And he won’t even admit it to his favorite
