Credit: YouTube
Another week, another row about BBC impartiality, a regular event has that become almost as much a national institution as the Beeb itself. But amid the interminable culture wars now fought over media bias it is crucial that we do not miss an even bigger story — involving the far more powerful tech giants.
BBC bias stories drive many people wild because it is a taxpayer-funded organisation, and also because we have a long-held reverence towards what people used to call ‘Auntie’. But in the long run, the issue of fairness and freedom in news-reporting and opinion-forming is going to focus far more around information giants such as Google and Facebook than it is for the national broadcaster, its best days already behind it.
Viewing figures for Newsnight — to pluck an example at random — are currently at under 300,000. In contrast an endless number of podcasts and online-only content providers get far larger viewing figures; Joe Rogan gets 6 million downloads a day. So while Emily Maitlis’s monologues are of great concern to small clusters of people in Britain, the overall impact is limited; Google and Facebook, in contrast, have the sort of power media barons of the newspaper age could only dream of.
And just as the tech platforms have allowed a great flowering of online debate, discussion and information-sharing, so the power of these companies to shut off that debate, by de-platforming or muting content they do not approve of, is an issue which becomes more troubling by the month.
The issue recently hit particularly close to home. Earlier this month, an UnHerd interview with respected oncologist Professor Karol Sikora was, bizarrely, taken down by YouTube. According to the tech giant’s website, the interview was found to have ‘violated guidelines’ because the high-profile immunity specialist was critical of the lockdown policy (which, he believes, may end up killing many people due to missed cancer screenings).
YouTube has said in the past that it would delete any videos critical of WHO coronavirus guidance, the same World Health Organisation that has been heavily criticised for its links to the People’s Republic of China, (and its lack of links to the Republic of China).
But this in itself is not a simple public safety issue, because there is still much expert disagreement about how to fight the coronavirus pandemic; WHO, for example, has advised against mask-wearing in public, while some governments and states encourage or even enforce it.
After a certain amount of press attention, YouTube allowed the interview to go back online — which is entirely normal YouTube policy.
For years, the company has been hiding or removing content it didn’t approve of, and whenever public attention was brought to the matter YouTube would simply blame error or oversight. What it looks like, more often than not, is that the site acts as censor up until the moment that it is caught, at which point it’s one of those unfortunate errors again. If the unexplained disappearance of bad thinkers on the platform is not noticed, the error mysteriously remains in place.
Similar censorship happens at an astonishingly micro level. Just this week YouTube was accused of automatically removing below-the-line comments critical of the Chinese Communist Party. According to The Verge, statements containing certain words critical of the Chinese government have been regularly deleted from YouTube since at least October last year; statements that include ‘communist bandit’, for instance, have been being automatically erased in around 15 seconds.
When this was brought to YouTube’s attention, with all the attendant publicity and embarrassment, the company once again claimed that this censorship had been happening in error and that they were working on fixing the issue. Those damn gremlins in the machine, once again.
The problem for YouTube and other platforms is that over the last decade the goodwill that users initially had for these dynamic young tech start-ups has perceptibly faded, for a number of reasons. Some of the most high-profile include the revelations about Facebook data-harvesting and Google’s extraordinary desire to be seen to stand up to all governments apart from the authoritarian ones.
But equally significant is simply the growing number of individuals with their own experience of the tech platforms instituting forms of censorship, censorship which the companies first deny and then implement.
Twitter is perhaps the most pernicious case in point. For years, users of the addictive social media site — myself included — have noticed strange patterns on the platform. Certain tweets, or tweets containing particular words or relating to certain themes, would land as though into a great silence. They would go out and be liked by tiny numbers of people or none at all; or there would be nothing and then a sudden surge, as though in acknowledgement that the zero figure was unsustainable. Or people would find that the ‘likes’ for a particular tweet did not only remain static but would suddenly go down, as though Twitter had decided that a particular tweet needed to look less popular than it was.
I have experienced a certain amount of this myself, with readers regularly having to ‘re-like’ tweets promoting certain of my books. They had liked it, and Twitter had mysteriously ‘unliked’ it for them and they had then had to come back again to say that, no, they really did like it. I don’t think it is paranoia to observe that these shenanigans have a particular political bent.
It is well known that Silicon Valley is perhaps the most liberal (in the American sense of the term) place in the world. The people who work at the tech companies are almost uniformly left-leaning progressives, if not something stronger, and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has admitted in the past that the corporation’s few conservatives don’t feel safe to voice their opinion. Similarly a former Facebook employee has accused the site of ‘curating’ feeds to screen out conservative content.
At the higher end, these companies have strong links with progressive politics on both sides of the Atlantic. The flood of former officials from the Obama administration into Silicon Valley after he left office, and Hillary Clinton failed to reach the White House in 2016, is well recorded. In recent times there has been a certain British flavour added to this, with reports that since Nick Clegg joined the top ranks of Facebook, that company has seen a marked influx of otherwise unemployed, perhaps otherwise unemployable, Liberal Democrats, swelling the ranks.
All of this and much more means that the tech companies swim in a bubble within a bubble. Their awareness of where the political or moral centre skews consistently left. When they do manage to take down terrorist material from their platforms, for instance, they placate the criticism they expect by stressing that they are opposed to ‘extremism’ in general; or ‘hateful content’, to give just one of the fabulously flatulent terms currently in vogue.
It is the reason why Twitter and all the other platforms acted so swiftly against Milo Yiannopoulos even as Dorsey’s site continued to allow Lashkar-e-Taiba (which carried out the Mumbai massacre in 2008) to keep active Twitter accounts.
It is the same with YouTube, which even before you get to the issue of banning has the subtle art of ‘demonetisation’, by which the media giant signals whom it favours and whom it does not. For years it has become clear that conservative-leaning content in particular is having its ability to monetise (that is, make money from advertising revenue raised by views) removed because the site disapproves of the politics.
Regrettably, again, I find myself to have been on the receiving end of a fair amount of this, as has almost everybody I know who has questioned not just regular political orthodoxies, but specific Silicon Valley orthodoxies, such as anything to do with trans issues.
The kicker in all of this is that as the various platforms are caught out in various forms of censorship, their final move is to confirm in their terms of service that they are allowed to do the things that, up till that point, they denied doing. So having spent years denying that they engaged in ‘shadow-banning’, in January the new terms of service agreement that all Twitter users were requested to agree to included having the right to refuse to distribute certain content and to “limit distribution or visibility of any Content on the service”. Otherwise known as shadow-banning.
Now that much of this is out in the open, perhaps it is inevitable that there is a surge in people volunteering to make themselves the arbiters of what is and is not acceptable material to publish online. In recent weeks there have once again been calls to either ban Donald Trump from Twitter or insist that his tweets are in some way fact-checked into irrelevancy by the company. Well, good luck to anybody auditioning for that job.
The debate around this political curating, as with the scandal over these companies’ China policies, returns us to the simultaneous recognition of two deeply troubling facts: that the social media companies have an awesome responsibility, greater than perhaps any comparable information-wielding power in history; and that this is a power that the platforms in question are utterly unfit to wield.
BBC rows will come and go. But the inadequacies and malignancies of the social media platforms are here to stay.
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SubscribeAn excellent summary from Douglas, as always. Those of us who follow leading political and cultural podcasters of the left, right and centre are well aware of the sinister ways in which these social media giants practice the most outrageous censorship and manipulation.
As for Newsnight’s viewing figures it’s incredible to think that so many are watching, especially at a time of night when the Preying Maitlis is liable to give you nightmares. Joking aside, there are countless podcasters broadcasting from their basement who get more views that does Newsnight, with all the resources of the BBC behind it. Really, this hideously biased and selr-regarding programme should be taken off air. i would replace it with old footage of comedy routines by Dave Allen, Joan Rivers and Robin Williams. This is what I like to watch late at night.
At least the embarrassingly low viewing figures for Newsnight show that’s it’s now repelling more viewers than its attracting, i.e. its appeal is therefore to only a very small and narrow audience.
The downside, of course, is that the rest of us, anyone with a tv license, has to pay for it.
Don’t forget Harry Enfield.
I gave up on Twitter a year ago as it had become the ultimate echo chamber. The idea of debate has long since gone. I made the mistake of trying to explain on the #bolloxtobrexit hashtag that it was actually insulting to abuse people based on their referendum vote. The response was a mass blocking and my account suspended. I couldn’t be bothered to set up a new account!
Seems simple enough:
– if Twitter wants to act as a publisher, it should be regulated as one.
– if the BBC wants to be partial, the Govt should not renew its Charter. It can reemerge in whatever form it likes, except not funded by the tax payer. I would suggest it becomes subscription service and would recommend it separates News and Entertainment, charging separate subs for each and giving a choice to the consumer which one/s to subscribe to.
People really need to understand the “platform” versus “publisher” distinction. The problem is that these companies effectively do act as “publishers” (who have editorial control over content) already, while also simultaneously claiming to be “platforms” (because the latter gives them greater liability protections form libelous user content, etc.). So they want it both ways – to have the legal protections of platforms, while having the editorial/content control of publishers.
What needs to happen is that these “social media” platforms be declared part of the “public square” and strict First Amendment protections applied to all user content, thus taking editorial control out of the hands of the companies themselves (in theory the existing “platform/publisher” distinction should already allow for those protections and limit the companies’ editorial control over free speech – but it is not working).
Same goes for the ABC in Australia. Make it a subscription service so the rest of us who don’t watch it don’t have to pay for it.
Twitter is rubbish and you don’t have to use it.
YouTube has its good stuff and a lot of dross and don’t have to use it.
The BBC is no longer worthy of being forced funded by the people of this country and because I now refuse to buy a TV licence because the BBC tried to put me in prison.
so I can no longer watch any TV channels ever again!
Think that you’re missing the point. Mr. Murray. We have to pay protection money to the BBC to watch any terrestrial TV. Twitter et al is free.
And what point do you think Douglas Murray is missing?
What point do you think he was trying to make, but missed?
What is your point, the one that you think he got wrong?
Did you even understand what Douglas is talking about?
I hope you are being facetious Edward, but if your avatar is accurate you’re probably not. The only reason social media is “free” to you, the user, is because you are the product.
I think rather he’s saying there are bigger issues at stake than being hacked off about paying for stuff you don’t watch.
Free at the point of service perhaps, but still hugely influential and therefore dangerous if left unchecked. It cannot be denied that by editorialising user-generated content, they are acting as a publisher, and therefore need to abide by the same rules as every other publisher does
That doesn’t go far enough. Every publisher has the right to decide what he publishes or not, so saying they are publishers still allows them editorial control over what speech is allowed on the platform. The issue with “social media” platforms is that they now need to be deemed not “publishers” but the “public square,” in which strict First Amendment free speech protections apply to users of the platform, thus taking editorial control out of the company’s hands.
How does the USA First Amendment apply to us living here in the UK – or any other European nation state – with respect to “social media”?
I’m not sure that Twitter is ‘hugely influential’ outside of the media bubble. As Tim Pool points out, about 20% of Americans have a Twitter account. But only 10% or so of those are active users, with a slight majority of those being liberal progressive SJW nutters. Most of the people who vote for Trump, or the Tories, or Brexit, have no interest in Twitter or Facebook or any of this garbage.
In bare numbers this may be true, but there is a dangerous trend in ‘journalism’ becoming Twitter screenshots, thereby extending the reach of the tweets and giving them extra credibility at the same time. These are, naturally, the most extreme ones. I have no Twitter account but see at least two dozen tweets a day on other platforms.
A challenge to the MSM to avoid Twitter screenshots for a month wouldn’t go amiss
Eh, but the USA is most assuredly not the world, dearie.
How many Europeans have a Twitter account, and of those, how many are active users?
Twitter is not free. It was at its inception now the price we pay is liberty and freedom of speech being a huge contributor to that liberty.
Twitter, Facebook, YouTube & Google are not free – just free of charge to use them. And as someone once said, there is nothing as expensive as free.
If the service if “free” that means the user is the product. In the case of “social media” your data is being sold to advertisers, etc.
The cost of Twitter is absorbed by us paying slightly more for anything related to it. It’s obviously not really free.
Of course not. It is “free at the point of use” – just like the UK National Health Service (which is paid for by both direct and indirect taxation).
There is an issue of monopolistic power here with protection extended by government.
The BBC is a problem but is far more fixable than the issue with big tech.
Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube all have a far greater reach than the BBC, as galling as it is for the UK population to have to pay for the latter if they want to watch live tv on any other channels.
The media platforms have the potential to sway voting intentions and therefore election. It’s precisely for that reason that various governments around the world, including our own in the form of Damien Collins (Conservative-in-name-only MP), want to force the platforms to censor opposing and unwanted opinion, which the social media are only too happy to go along with.
Trump wasn’t supposed to have won the last election, ditto Brexit. The social media executives have said to their employees (luckily on camera, and therefore to the rest of the world) that they won’t let that happen again. They are clearly and blatantly acting as political players. Ditto the BBC, but its audience is limited.
Well, you got a bit of a kicking. That’ll teach you to make comments on topics you know absolutely nothing about.
The social media thing is here until some significant legal changes take place in the US to solve that matter. A mechanism to restore the pre-CDA platform/publisher distinction and a need to demonstrate impartiality. Suddenly there will be a step change in attitude.
Add in extending certain issues of election law to the internet and you will see lots of these problems disappear. New ones will spring up in their place, but these are not as intractable as they can appear.
There is no question that, as the author says, the big tech corporations determine the spirit of the age. What I find even more alarming, though, is that the same “spirit” has infused hundreds of other sites and platforms. Just as an example, last year I was banned forever(?) by cyclingnews.com because I responded to an article by an LGBT activist by expressing the opinion that I, along with others, went to cyclingnews.com to feed my passion for cycling and not to be indoctrinated on the latest PC developments.
Cleggy and the banning from Facebook of a particular person.
Another Lib Dem member boasted on Twitter that he’d been instrumental in getting
the person banned and had attended meetings at the Facebook offices in the US.
There would be no other reason for such a nobody to attend Facebook offices
other than the Lib Dem connection. That was weird, if not worrying.
As a staunch BeeB fan. As you I am disturbed by recent bias . Brexit and the Cummings Saga are obvious. What else is getting through unnoticed?
Could this be why a Government revue has been mentioned re general running of the Service?
Am I not the only one that is concerned of the Army of reporters the BBC seems to throw at one subject 5 news/Political 3health and so on. Lots of jobs sharing.
We should on the actual running of a public services as a normal. For a long time I have noticed a waste of resources. If London can have one in the studio why do other regions have two?
The biggest threat to free speech these days comes not from governments, but from Silicon Valley “social media” platforms. Some PC/SJW in a cubicle decides what speech is allowed or not, base don vague “company policy/standards”. Given the ubiquity and importance of these platforms now to so many people for the dissemination of news, information, and opinion, they are now effectively the “public square,” and it is imperative that they be broken up and/or declared such and strict free speech protections applied to user content in order to take editorial control away from these companies. Since almost all are US-based, it should be made clear under the law that strict First Amendment protections afforded to all users.
I’ve had a bad experience with YouTube watching The Five on Fox News yesterday that has made me resolve to change my viewing habits. It was always a substandard experience from watching the full show on the Fox News website: invariably truncated, frequently padded with Trump press conferences, old programming misidentified as tonight’s episode and so on. But I’m not in a position now to pay a fee to watch the show on the Fox News website and what I could see was enjoyable. Last night the show was cut short by a Russian language newsfeature centring on Ramzan Kadyrov, the Islamist thug that Putin installed as ruler of Chechnya. This is so bizarre I don’t know what to think, but I am not taking chances of having my computer infected with a virus, and will stop trying to access the full programs for The Five at least until the end of the year. I have never had any similar trouble accessing Canadian Broadcasting Corporation programs through YouTube, many of which are strongly marked by Trump Derangement Syndrome. Perhaps this is another indication of YouTube and Twitter’s anti-Trump bias.
I’m torn on this. I don’t like seeing mainstream conservative thinking treated as some kind of disease, but at the same time surely the free market approach is for conservatives to set up rival platforms – appealing to the government to tell a private company what to do hardly feels conservative. On the other hand, if there were a “lefty twitter” and a “righty twitter” then this would only serve to strengthen the walls of the echo chambers we already seek out. A conundrum indeed!
On the money and timely. Uncle Donald is about to start playing whackamole with these Femanazis. He has his own people embedded at the CIA leadership now and FBI, a chief justice is looking at a pine box and that will solve the supreme court problem for 2 decades.
Can you believe Mark Zuckerberg has the nerve to get on national TV (Fox) professing his Facebook does not edit conservative content the day after Facebook de-platforms PragerU, the mildest conservative journalistic and educational platform that regularly allows Liberal value free and open discussion. https://www.prageru.com/ Please check them out and sign the petition to have Facebook reinstate them.
Mark Zuckerberg is a liar and a hypocrite!
Twitter isn’t free – one pays for the data usage. In the US, for example, a typical charge for unlimited data is about $40/month.
Of course one pays for one’s internet connection (or phone data). That doesn’t change the fact that Twitter use itself is free (though really the user is the product). That’s like saying old-fashioned over-air TV broadcasts aren’t free because one has to buy a TV first.
Interesting article. If a platform offered the opportunity to comment freely, surely this could supplant the politically driven agendas of the likes of Twitter. Would people not naturally gravitate to free speech, versus curated speech?
The big problem is Google et al engage in surreptitious curation while claiming the shelter of market-square neutrality to avoid a publisher’s liability for content.
Even now, how many Twitter/Facebook/Google/Youtube users are aware of the censorship? Any new platform could do the same and it would take a while to be found out.
The first step to a solution would be the immediate loss of neutrality protection for the owner of a platform that indulges in even a single instance deliberate censorship. This is an instance where “guilty until proven innocent” should apply. They could demonstrate that it was “accidental” by correcting immediately the error immediately when it is pointed out. However that defence would fail if they stonewall or make it difficult to complain (by say, failing to provide an easy to find complaint link).
The loss of market-square neutrality protection would open the platform owner to legal liability for abetting libel, copyright infringement etc.
Even though I perfectly agree with the analysis, much of the fault lies with politicians that had exploited these private, biased companies to spread their official messages and communication, giving them even more political decisional power. It is always rightful to blame the bias of media, but while if they are funded by taxpayers, they are due to be as impartial as possible, private companies are not, in theory, obliged to do it.
This is a very important issue and COVID has really highlighted Facebook and Google’s pharmaceutical preferences. Leading epidemiologists and front line doctors do not qualify as terrorists or hate mongers so to see them shadow banned so shamelessly was frankly a shock, and wake up call. Further study, comparing search engines confirmed that Google was likewise pushing narratives, burying articles they do not like.
The only solution is likely the creation of new media platforms and a willingness of viewers to start paying for content again.
If you’re getting something free of charge, you’re the commodity.
The other tactic YouTube plays is to clear the search autofill. For example, there’s a YouTuber I regularly follow called Stefan Molyneux. Molyneux is best known for his philosophical chats but recently released a documentary on Hong Kong and its manipulation by mainland China. Someone or some group within the YouTube community decided that his material did not fit the narrative and, subsequently, they dealt with it by making searching for his name or his content very difficult.
This is also happening on the “shop floor” at platforms like Facebook.
Pages ostensibly about cooking, gardening and science, for example, have in recent days donned the black profile pic and berated and blocked followers for not being onboard the BLM bandwagon.
The hostility, anger and irrational attitude to people who follow the page for recipes sans political activism is astounding.
FB’s high hiedyins must be over the moon at how well their methodology is spreading throughout the platform.
Top down thought control appears to be working.
Haha, you guys are such a joke. You criticize other platforms for removing comments, but you remove them in their thousands yourselves.
Or are they? perhaps it is time that people such as yourself start looking into alternatives and put automated disclaimers on the biased liberal media platforms and links to better platforms.
I admit it is difficult to know which platforms are good or have a chance of being successful or are not controlled by equally biased actors or will thy be bought out by such. I think going forward open source decentralised platforms seem the best choice to overcome all those problems. Can they be monetised? maybe over time but I think there is little harm in duplicating videos for example on other platforms.
Thank God Twitter has taken the action they have. At least it offers the possibility to the weak minded who believe Trumps tweets that there is indeed a method on checking the facts… Facebook now need to ban political advertising, as if Zuckerberg doesn’t have the guts to stand up and take responsibility for the monster he unleashed… at least the damage they helped create can be limited.