Platform McCarthyism
On Monday, the top story was the second assassination attempt on former President and current Presidential candidate Donald Trump from the day before. Conveniently, another story got overshadowed: TikTok’s 15 minutes in court to defend itself from getting banned in the US. TikTok is not the only platform in the crosshairs. Telegram CEO Pavel Durov was arrested in France and there were subsequent restrictions placed to appease the witch-hunters. Meanwhile, in Brazil, X is banned.
Some “journalists” have tried to justify the banning of X by saying it would reduce the amount of anti-Muslim riots in the UK. Funny that they mention violence against Muslims; though Platform McCarthyism has been underway since 2016, it has only been as flagrant and blatant as it has been since the pro-Gaza movement began in October. That has been and will be the only reason why TikTok is banned; why Durov was arrested; why X is banned. The military-industrial complex is having too tough a time losing the narrative to allow decent, honest debate to take place. True public squares must be closed.
Mark Zuckerberg did a decent job trying his hand at playing truthteller by admitting that in 2020 the White House pressured him to label anything undermining their COVID messaging as “misinformation,” including satire and parody. I want to believe he is admitting this because he’s an ally of free speech, but the skeptic in me thinks that: a) he’s one of the many players behind Durov’s arrest, since Telegram is a major competitor for Zuckerberg-owned What’sApp; b) he may be jealous that the K-Hive is more prevalent on TikTok than Reels and wants them to cut that cord.
Needless to say, Zuckerberg does not plan on undermining military propaganda ever. From The Twittering Machine:
For example, Facebook once ironically censored the ACLU’s (American Civil Liberties Union) page over a post about censorship, deleting an iconic, Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph from the Vietnam War for violating its standards….
They also act under pressure from governments to curtail opposition content. Facebook, for example, has cooperated with the Turkish and Israeli governments to remove Kurdish or Palestinian pages.
Lest you think you are in the clear, dear reader/fellow traveler, Hillary Clinton believes individuals who spread “misinformation” should be charged.
Here’s a screenshot from Twitter:
Smaller publishers, long the bastion of free speech, are feeling the effects of the new McCarthyism.
They say this fight on “misinformation” is meant to prevent a fascist from winning The Most Important Election: Part III. But this TikTok shows that current Vice President and Presidential candidate Kamala Harris may be the very authoritarian leader she is warning against.
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Harris’s avoidance of the press is wrong, but it is strategic. Arguably, it is a more advantageous strategy than Trump’s. In 2015, Trump went on Twitter to communicate directly to the base. But he did — and does — also hold press conferences and get interviewed. Harris loves platforms because she can communicate with the voters directly and any comments that undermine her credibility are downvoted by the bots supporters. Why risk a hardball question from a journalist or, even worse, a fumbled softball, which has been the pattern of the few Harris press events so far?
The right is not off the hook here either. They have no problem labeling Israel criticism as illegal hate speech and, let’s not forget, the TikTok bill was a bipartisan effort.
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Between the crackdown on campus protests, the TikTok bill and Durov’s arrest, 2024 is the worst year this century for censorship in the supposedly liberal Western world. One possible reason: the empire propagandists are trying to match virality with popularity. Was a time, in the Internet’s younger days, and with a thriving live entertainment culture, when virality was a springboard to popularity. But with the inflation of the attention economy, virality has become a parallel universe of fame that is weird to talk about in IRL. The normality that Democrats proudly signal is in opposition to the web-fried discourse of Trump and Vance. But the liberal propagandists are not foolish enough to just hand the Internet to the anti-Harris Republicans and maintain control of legacy media. Ideally, Harris can be both viral and popular, like she was in that sweet spot of late July-early August, or even as she was on debate night. Otherwise there remain a large divide between traditional media and social media.
The obvious precedent for Platform McCarthyism is actual McCarthyism in the ‘50s. OK lie: it began with the first Red Scare in the ‘40s. McCarthyism, larger than the first Red Scare, not only bred a paranoid political culture, but it successfully stifled ‘50s culture in general. From the footnote of a previous post:
The ‘50s mainly had conservatives because of McCarthyism, thus the bland sitcoms, etc. But much of the film and literature of this time was still left of center, especially in the late ‘50s, when McCarthyism died down and The Beats rose in prominence.
Kind of a Catch-22: TV was the only medium where conservatives fully ruled in the ‘50s, but TV was ‘50s culture and everything else was relatively marginal. Similarly, the Blue MAGA forces, already having their vice-like grip on broadcasting and print, are focusing on the platforms that conveniently help filter the otherwise unruly Web.
Too bad the media itself is complicit in maintaining and even creating the lie, as opposed to challenging it. Recently
wrote a generous piece explaining why journalists maintain such blatant lies as COVID not coming from a lab or Biden being capable: the writers are afraid of being called out at the dinner parties they go to. Makes you pine for the salad days of The Village Voice, when journalists argued with each other in the same pages of the same issue at times! But dinner party fears would never affect tough, pavement-pounding reporters. They can only belong to highly educated, smarmy indie twerps Make no mistake: the conservatives want in on the thought police action. This past Sunday’s events led to more calls of calmer rhetoric from the Harris campaign. Like the assassin was inspired by Harris’s word salad, not their passion for Ukraine.But even though the conservatives are to blame for ‘50s McCarthyism and are in danger of bringing it back through petty revenge, it wasn’t the only precedent for our current moment. The Patriot Act, passed on October 26, 2001, created a surveillance state, laying the groundwork for people to watch what they say or else. Nine years later, Julian Assange was arrested in London for leaking damaging footage of US soldiers firing on Iraqi civilians. Edward Snowden was granted asylum in Russia in 2013 after leaking classified US information about surveillance programs. But Platform McCarthyism began in earnest in 2016. The amount of online support for Trump frayed the previously sunny, cozy relationship between tech and media. They blamed the misinformation on the platforms for Trump’s victory, arrogantly assuming that if the unwashed masses only had access to their great journalism, everything would have been OK. The political establishment ran with this of course.
Platform McCarthyism’s golden year was 2020. Misinformation was now not just an election issue: it was a public health issue. There were few alternatives, but some of those alternatives became million-dollar alternatives:
During the pandemic, The JRE also drew audience members who were frustrated with the limits of acceptable discussion, at a time when Facebook and YouTube were banning or restricting what they labeled misinformation.
As previously discussed regarding ‘50s McCarthyism and culture, Platform McCarthyism could credibly be blamed for the notorious cultural stagnation of our times.
From a previous post:
It got particularly bad after 2016, according to Kyle Chayka’s excellent new book. Filterworld. This is when it wasn’t only Facebook that had an algorithmic news feed. Instagram and Twitter also abandoned the chronological feed at this time. From 2016 on, even though technology and politics have changed drastically, this also explains why culture, even now, has seemed relatively monotonous. Grey scale cafes, etc. Everything that exists offline must be legible on the Instagram grid or the TikTok feed.
Just like with television, social media’s advertiser-driven revenue helps the propaganda machine. Subscription-driven media platforms like Patreon, far more lax with their guidelines, were always going to lose their fight with Apple. One can only hope the writing renaissance happening on Substack does not succumb to pressures from the witch-hunters. Not that platforms are all that great anyway. A bunch of rebels losing their favorite free speech platforms might have a rock bottom moment and realize…maybe it’s time to leave the casino altogether. And I use the term “casino” here with absolute precision by the way. As Rob Horning says (inspired by Natasha Schull’s writings on machine gambling), scrolling on social media is less an act of scrolling to avoid boredom. The boredom is the point. You are meant to scroll mindlessly and compulsively. Just like a slot machine, where a gambler who starts off wanting the jackpot ends up in a daze, pressing the buttons just to watch the lights and hear the noises. Getting rid of a popular slot machine might push a bunch of one-armed bandit victims to wobble out of the casino, perhaps calling the Gambler’s Anonymous hotline.
Ideally, the casino won’t lose TikTok and they can keep them in the seats, but with payouts they approve of. Like the big Kamala jackpot. Now that the legacy media got a taste of narrative control that they have not had since 2008, it’s like a ravenous wolf that hasn’t tasted blood in sixteen years. In 2008, Millennials were only on Twitter for a few years. They were only on Facebook for a few years. They spent most of their lives watching TV and movies, reading magazines, etc. and they hoped to have careers in those industries. So when the major news industry cheered for Obama, social media acted as a signal boost. More likely than not, all major platforms will be used as a signal boost again. But this time expect an exodus of bitter gamblers from the casino.
Where? I would imagine blogs, websites, newsletters and of course podcasts. It will be more of a dark forest situation, depending on how many people starve the beast. Already, there is an exodus from dating apps and traditional social media platforms to “hobby apps” like Goodreads and Letterboxd (I would add Substack). This has great potential to resuscitate culture, having readers and viewers focus on their favorite obsession without falling prey to the pointless political rage network effects of the current social networks.
Some netizens are already jumping ship from doomscrolling, engaging in some delightfully peculiar activities as “rawdogging,” where you ride either a plane or a subway without looking at your phone. A political version of this, called Coffee Revolution, is built on the awareness that of course a revolution that is centered around a short-video app is doomed to fail.
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This is, of course, not good news for the powers that be. Our lives are dominated by what Byung-Chul Han calls “positive power,” which uses seduction as opposed to the violence and outright punishment of negative power. The PTB clearly need platforms to keep their positive power trance in play. The seduction has gone so far for some users that it has resulted in bed rot, with scrollers engaging strictly in online worlds where their curated self-image (or their authentic self) is welcome.
The fight against Platform McCarthyism is not just a fight for the future of journalism or free speech. It is an existential fight. For too long, youths have defined themselves by the metric of gaining approval on platforms that were ultimately about state approval the entire time. For too long, we have rolled over to have our bellies scratched by the Mommy State. Platform McCarthyism is more sinister than the McCarthyism of the ‘50s because this time it’s personal. The parameters of positive power on these platforms has helped greatly limit how we define ourselves. It’s like an entire nation is stricken with Jonah Complex, locked into the death drive casino, everyone limiting their personal expression to be legible online, everyone outsourcing their soul to data points. And for what? The house always wins.
Of course, the house can never win enough. There is always more of the mind to control. Scientists are working on an AI that can help debunk “misinformation.” It can be easy to gloss over this part, but we must not. The logic of this project reveals the fundamental assumption that Platform McCarthyism and traditional McCarthyism relies on: that people simply need to replace good data with bad data, like they themselves are programmable computers. This did not work as the ‘50s dragged on to the ‘60s and it is having diminishing returns in our current moment.
Which means the Platform McCarthyists have one last card to play: The Certainty Card. With the legitimacy crisis that AI is causing, they want to use the platforms as beacons of certainty, free of misinformation. And if they just end up being the arbiters of all psychological, social and political reality, gravy baby! AI does make misinformation worse, but the idea that misinformation did not exist before our current moment, that it does not go back all the way to the print media days, is asinine. Was The Protocols of the Elders of Zion an AI podcast?
This revelation does not get rid of the very human desire for certainty of course. The entire Internet’s history has been built on pacifying or pretending to pacify our wildest insecurities. Yelp reviews that tell you whether a restaurant is good so you don’t risk finding things out for yourself; Tinder profiles that help reduce the uncertainty of the dating pool so you know what they are like before you meet them; if you’re uncertain if you are the asshole, just ask Reddit; all other questions, just throw them at the Google God.
And so it has been, all of us outsourcing our soul to data points, letting the algorithm of other rank strangers’ decisions pull our puppet strings. Now, they want to throttle the controls on what the truth is. Do not believe your lying eyes; there’s a perfectly rational explanation for why Lebanon has turned into a Black Mirror nightmare. While we’re at it, don’t believe Nate Silver’s facts. Keep him exiled on Substack. Don’t worry baby; the Big Bad Orange Man will not win.
Never mind that the stochastic terror that the Big Bad Orange Man was constantly blamed for is not being labeled as such when it comes to anti-Trump rhetoric. I don’t believe the rhetoric led to either of his assassination attempts, but by the same token I am skeptical that his words are responsible for the terror he has been accused of provoking. As minorities have said for years, racism was around long before 2015. What’s more, it turns out that after all that platform tampering, Kamala Harris’s few appearances — on CNN and with Oprah — have fallen flat. Platitudes can only instill certainty for so long. After some time, something actually needs to be said.
Please don’t misunderstand me: a Trump win will only fan the flames of Platform McCarthyism, just like it did in 2016. I still haven’t ruled out the possibility that a win by Trump might help the liberal establishment in the long run, giving them a convenient villain to rail against, thus obscuring questions of American empire in general, like Biden and Harris seem to provoke.
Though I maintain that Trump won’t make things better, I will say that his victory (which I am one week away from possibly betting on again) will be a referendum not only on how the media handled Gaza, but how it lied about COVID and Biden. Perhaps the casino’s luck is running out.
Good casino analogy. Every time someone tries to make the argument that social media is "not addictive like cigarettes are" I feel like they are forgetting about gambling. I have to wonder if there is some non-conscious denial going on there too.
Also thank you for using the term "legacy" media instead of "mainstream". Meta and Google are individually worth more than all the "legacy" media companies combined. In my opinion it is no longer accurate to describe the content they publish on YouTube or Facebook as "alternative" media.
Excellent piece on freedom of speech being systematically curtailed in the West. Reminds me of this piece as well: https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/there-is-no-liberal-west
Love this quote:
> Our lives are dominated by what Byung-Chul Han calls “positive power,” which uses seduction as opposed to the violence and outright punishment of negative power.
Feels like a very elegant description of Liberalism's mechanisms of 'non-coervice control.'