[D66] “World War Web.”

[A.O.]

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/09/05/pers-s05.html

As social opposition mounts, Silicon Valley and Washington step up
internet censorship
5 September 2018

As executives from Facebook and Twitter prepare to testify Wednesday on
Capitol Hill, the social media monopolies are scrambling to demonstrate
how far they have gone to implement censorship measures demanded by the
intelligence agencies and dominant sections of the political establishment.

These actions are inevitably couched in the language of combatting
“foreign interference” and “meddling” in “American democracy” via the
promotion of “fake news.” However, the real target is the growth of
social opposition among millions of workers and young people.

Throughout the United States, hundreds of thousands of workers are
entering into struggle against low wages, the attack on social programs
and the decay of social infrastructure. As the school year begins,
teachers in the state of Washington have launched strike action, as the
unions seek desperately to contain the anger of educators. There is
overwhelming opposition among 370,000 US-based UPS workers to a new
concessions contract demanded by their employers and the Teamsters
union. The ruling class knows that any eruption of class struggle, in
any sector, could set off a social explosion.

At the same time, popular support for socialism is growing. A recent
Gallup poll showed that, for the first time, fewer than half of young
people aged 18-29 have a positive view of capitalism, while more than
half have a positive view of socialism.

To combat what they call “extreme” political views, the major technology
companies have massively accelerated their efforts to monitor, police
and control the flow of information online.

Samidh Chakrabarti, Facebook’s product manager of Civic Engagement, told
NBC News Monday that the company is building a “war room” to monitor its
users’ statements on the 2018 US elections, allowing the social media
monopoly to “take quick and decisive action.”

“We’ve been building this war room, a physical war room,” Chakrabarti
said. Continuing the military metaphor, Chakrabarti told NBC, “Every
single corner of this company has mobilized” to remove what he called
“fake accounts” and to stop the “spread of misinformation and fake news.”

What the company means by “fake news’ and “misinformation” is shown in
practice. Among the pages removed by Facebook was the official event
page for last month’s anniversary protest against a neo-Nazi march in
Charlottesville, South Carolina. The most recent batch of “fake” pages
taken down by the company all expressed left-wing political views,
including opposition to US and Israeli foreign policy and police violence.

The scope of the company’s enforcement actions is vast. The executive
boasted that, over a six-month period, Facebook “detected, blocked and
removed, over a billion fake accounts before they could do anything like
spread fake news or misinformation.”

The company has doubled its security and enforcement team, from 10,000
people a year ago to 20,000 today, meaning that the majority of the
company’s employees work to “police” its users’ statements. These
include thousands of individuals with police and intelligence
backgrounds. “We basically have some of the best intelligence analysts
from around the world,” Chakrabarti said.

Facebook is far from the only organization to use the analogy of “war”
to describe the future of the internet. The cover story of this month’s
edition of Foreign Affairs, the influential foreign policy magazine, is
entitled “World War Web.” Its lead editorial argues that the “Internet
open to all” is being transformed into something “different from, and in
many ways worse than, what we have now.” The internet, as one article
argues, “has turned into an active battlefield.”

By allowing “propagandists and extremists” to “push misleading or
outright false content,” the internet is “robbing citizens of a basic
understanding of reality,” claims Karen Kornbluh, a Senior Fellow for
Digital Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. “It is hard to
escape the conclusion that the technology that promised to give power to
the powerless has ended up also hurting the very people it was supposed
to help,” she writes.

The conclusion is clear. If the internet is “robbing citizens of a basic
understanding of reality,” and “hurting the very people it was supposed
to help,” wouldn’t they be better without it? Or, at the very least,
aggressive measures must be taken by the state to enforce its own “basic
understanding of reality”—that is, censorship.

The fundamental concern of the American ruling elite supposed campaigns
originating in St. Petersburg or Tehran, but the growing political
opposition by the working class, which is increasingly hungry for
socialist politics.

And it is precisely left-wing, anti-war, and socialist organizations
that have been the central targets of censorship by the technology giants.

In April of last year, Google announced measures to promote
“authoritative content” over “alternative viewpoints,” leading to a
massive drop in search traffic to left-wing websites. Search traffic to
the World Socialist Web Site dropped 75 percent in the months following
the changes and has continued to trend downwards.

The US media has maintained almost total silence on Google’s censorship
of left-wing political viewpoints. However, US President Trump’s claims
last month that conservative news outlets are being silenced by Google
has been met with a series of denials by Google, the print and broadcast
media, and large sections of the US political establishment.

In responding to Trump’s claims, however, Senator Mark Warner, the
leading figure in the Democrat’s drive to censor the internet, gave a
Wired reporter a revealing response regarding how Google treats “extreme
periodicals.”

“There are genuine concerns about some of the algorithms that almost
create addiction tendencies, but those are generally about if you have a
personal profile of searches, and you search a left-leaning story,
they’re going to give you another, usually more extreme story, to keep
feeding the beast.”

In other words, if people search for “social inequality” and “strike” on
Google, they just might stumble onto “socialism” and the “extreme
periodicals” on the left that advocate it.

What Warner is describing, in other words, is the exact method by which
Google has targeted the World Socialist Web Site: by down-ranking its
pages in searches on the topics it principally covers.

The growth of working class struggle also provides the way forward to
defend the freedom of expression on the internet. As workers throughout
the United States and internationally enter into struggle against their
employers and their union lackeys they must take up the fight against
internet censorship as a central political demand.

Andre Damon