How Silicon Valley, in a Show of Monopolistic Force, Destroyed Parler
In
the last three months, tech giants have censored political speech and
journalism to manipulate U.S. politics, while liberals, with virtual
unanimity, have cheered.
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Critics of Silicon Valley censorship for years heard the same refrain: tech platforms like
Facebook, Google and Twitter are private corporations and can host or
ban whoever they want. If you don’t like what they are doing, the
solution is not to complain or to regulate them. Instead, go create your
own social media platform that operates the way you think it should.
The
founders of Parler heard that suggestion and tried. In August, 2018,
they created a social media platform similar to Twitter but which
promised far greater privacy protections, including a refusal to
aggregate user data in order to monetize them to advertisers or
algorithmically evaluate their interests in order to promote content or
products to them. They also promised far greater free speech rights,
rejecting the increasingly repressive content policing of Silicon Valley
giants.
Over
the last year, Parler encountered immense success. Millions of people
who objected to increasing repression of speech on the largest platforms
or who had themselves been banned signed up for the new social media
company.
As Silicon Valley censorship radically escalated over the past several months — banning pre-election reporting by The New York Post about
the Biden family, denouncing and deleting multiple posts from the U.S.
President and then terminating his access altogether, mass-removal of
right-wing accounts — so many people migrated to Parler that it was
catapulted to the number one spot on the list of most-downloaded apps on the Apple Play Store, the sole
and exclusive means which iPhone users have to download apps. “Overall,
the app was the 10th most downloaded social media app in 2020 with 8.1
million new installs,” reported TechCrunch.
It
looked as if Parler had proven critics of Silicon Valley monopolistic
power wrong. Their success showed that it was possible after all to
create a new social media platform to compete with Facebook, Instagram
and Twitter. And they did so by doing exactly what Silicon Valley
defenders long insisted should be done: if you don’t like the rules imposed by tech giants, go create your own platform with different rules.
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But
today, if you want to download, sign up for, or use Parler, you will be
unable to do so. That is because three Silicon Valley monopolies —
Amazon, Google and Apple — abruptly united to remove Parler from the
internet, exactly at the moment when it became the most-downloaded app
in the country.
If
one were looking for evidence to demonstrate that these tech behemoths
are, in fact, monopolies that engage in anti-competitive behavior in
violation of antitrust laws, and will obliterate any attempt to compete
with them in the marketplace, it would be difficult to imagine anything
more compelling than how they just used their unconstrained power to
utterly destroy a rising competitor.
The united Silicon Valley attack began on January 8, when Apple emailed Parler and gave them 24 hours to
prove they had changed their moderation practices or else face removal
from their App Store. The letter claimed: “We have received numerous
complaints regarding objectionable content in your Parler service,
accusations that the Parler app was used to plan, coordinate, and
facilitate the illegal activities in Washington D.C. on January 6, 2021
that led (among other things) to loss of life, numerous injuries, and
the destruction of property.” It ended with this warning:
To ensure there is no interruption of the availability of your app on the App Store, please submit an update and the requested moderation improvement plan within 24 hours of the date of this message. If we do not receive an update compliant with the App Store Review Guidelines and the requested moderation improvement plan in writing within 24 hours, your app will be removed from the App Store.
The 24-hour letter was an obvious pretext and purely performative. Removal was a fait accompli no matter what Parler did. To begin with, the letter was immediately leaked to Buzzfeed, which published it in full.
A Parler executive detailed the company’s unsuccessful attempts to
communicate with Apple. “They basically ghosted us,” he told me. The
next day, Apple notified Parler of its removal from App Store. “We won’t
distribute apps that present dangerous and harmful content,” said the world’s richest company, and thus: “We have now rejected your app for the App Store.”
It
is hard to overstate the harm to a platform from being removed from the
App Store. Users of iPhones are barred from downloading apps onto their
devices from the internet. If an app is not on the App Store, it cannot
be used on the iPhone. Even iPhone users who have already downloaded
Parler will lose the ability to receive updates, which will shortly
render the platform both unmanageable and unsafe.
In October, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law issued a 425-page report concluding that Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google all possess monopoly
power and are using that power anti-competitively. For Apple, they
emphasized the company’s control over iPhones through its control of
access to the App Store. As Ars Technica put it when highlighting the report’s key findings:
Apple controls about 45 percent of the US smartphone market and 20 percent of the global smartphone market, the committee found, and is projected to sell its 2 billionth iPhone in 2021. It is correct that, in the smartphone handset market, Apple is not a monopoly. Instead, iOS and Android hold an effective duopoly in mobile operating systems.
However, the report concludes, Apple does have a monopolistic hold over what you can do with an iPhone. You can only put apps on your phone through the Apple App Store, and Apple has total gatekeeper control over that App Store—that's what Epic is suing the company over. . . .
The committee found internal documents showing that company leadership, including former CEO Steve Jobs, "acknowledged that IAP requirement would stifle competition and limit the apps available to Apple's customers." The report concludes that Apple has also unfairly used its control over APIs, search rankings, and default apps to limit competitors' access to iPhone users.
Shortly thereafter, Parler learned that Google, without warning, had also “suspended” it from its Play Store, severely limiting the ability of users to
download Parler onto Android phones. Google’s actions also meant that
those using Parler on their Android phones would no longer receive
necessary functionality and security updates.
It was precisely Google’s abuse of its power to control its app device that was at issue “when the European Commission deemed Google LLC as the dominant
undertaking in the app stores for the Android mobile operating system
(i.e. Google Play Store) and hit the online search and advertisement
giant with €4.34 billion for its anti-competitive practices to
strengthen its position in various of other markets through its
dominance in the app store market.”
The
day after a united Apple and Google acted against Parler, Amazon
delivered the fatal blow. The company founded and run by the world’s
richest man, Jeff Bezos, used virtually identical language as Apple to
inform Parler that its web hosting service (AWS) was terminating
Parler’s ability to have AWS host its site: “Because Parler cannot
comply with our terms of service and poses a very real risk to public
safety, we plan to suspend Parler’s account effective Sunday, January
10th, at 11:59PM PST.” Because Amazon is such a dominant force in web
hosting, Parler has thus far not found a hosting service for its
platform, which is why it has disappeared not only from app stores and
phones but also from the internet.
On
Thursday, Parler was the most popular app in the United States. By
Monday, three of the four Silicon Valley monopolies united to destroy
it.
With virtual unanimity, leading
U.S. liberals celebrated this use of Silicon Valley monopoly power to
shut down Parler, just as they overwhelmingly cheered the prior two
extraordinary assertions of tech power to control U.S. political
discourse: censorship of The New York Post’s reporting on the
contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, and the banning of the U.S. President
from major platforms. Indeed, one would be hard-pressed to find a
single national liberal-left politician even expressing concerns about
any of this, let alone opposing it.
Not
only did leading left-wing politicians not object but some of them were
the ones who pleaded with Silicon Valley to use their power this way.
After the internet-policing site Sleeping Giants flagged several Parler
posts that called for violence, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez asked: “What are @Apple and @GooglePlay doing about this?” Once Apple responded by removing Parler from its App
Store — a move that House Democrats just three months earlier warned
was dangerous anti-trust behavior — she praised Apple and then demanded
to know: “Good to see this development from @Apple. @GooglePlay what are you going to do about apps being used to organize violence on your platform?”
The liberal New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg pronounced herself “disturbed by just how awesome [tech giants’] power is” and added that
“it’s dangerous to have a handful of callow young tech titans in charge
of who has a megaphone and who does not.” She nonetheless praised these
“young tech titans” for using their “dangerous” power to ban Trump and
destroy Parler. In other words, liberals like Goldberg are concerned
only that Silicon Valley censorship powers might one day be used against
people like them, but are perfectly happy as long as it is their
adversaries being deplatformed and silenced (Facebook and other
platforms have for years banned marginalized people like Palestinians at
Israel’s behest, but that is of no concern to U.S. liberals).
That
is because the dominant strain of American liberalism is not economic
socialism but political authoritarianism. Liberals now want to use the
force of corporate power to silence those with different ideologies.
They are eager for tech monopolies not just to ban accounts they dislike
but to remove entire platforms from the internet. They want to imprison
people they believe helped their party lose elections, such as Julian
Assange, even if it means creating precedents to criminalize journalism.
World
leaders have vocally condemned the power Silicon Valley has amassed to
police political discourse, and were particularly indignant over the
banning of the U.S. President. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, various
French ministers, and especially Mexican President Andrés Manuel López
Obrador all denounced the banning of Trump and other acts of censorship
by tech monopolies on the ground that they were anointing themselves “a
world media power.” The warnings from López Obrador were particularly
eloquent:
Even
the ACLU — which has rapidly transformed from a civil liberties
organization into a liberal activist group since Trump’s election —
found the assertion of Silicon Valley’s power to destroy Parler deeply
alarming. One of that organization’s most stalwart defenders of civil
liberties, lawyer Ben Wizner, told The New York Times that
the destruction of Parler was more “troubling” than the deletion of
posts or whole accounts: “I think we should recognize the importance of
neutrality when we’re talking about the infrastructure of the internet.”
Yet
American liberals swoon for this authoritarianism. And they are now
calling for the use of the most repressive War on Terror measures
against their domestic opponents. On Tuesday, House Homeland Security
Chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) urged that GOP Sens. Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley “be put on the no-fly list,” while The Wall Street Journal reported that “Biden has said he plans to make a priority of passing a law against domestic terrorism,
and he has been urged to create a White House post overseeing the fight
against ideologically inspired violent extremists and increasing
funding to combat them.”
So
much of this liberal support for the attempted destruction of Parler is
based in utter ignorance about that platform, and about basic
principles of free speech. I’d be very surprised if more than a tiny
fraction of liberals cheering Parler’s removal from the internet have
ever used the platform or know anything about it other than the snippets
they have been shown by those seeking to justify its destruction and to
depict it as some neo-Nazi stronghold.
Parler
was not founded, nor is it run, by pro-Trump, MAGA supporters. The
platform was created based in libertarian values of privacy,
anti-surveillance, anti-data collection, and free speech. Most of the
key executives are more associated with the politics of Ron Paul and the
CATO Institute than Steve Bannon or the Trump family. One is a Never
Trump Republican, while another is the former campaign manager of Ron
Paul and Rand Paul. Among the few MAGA-affiliated figures is Dan
Bongino, an investor. One of the key original investors was Rebekah
Mercer.
The
platform’s design is intended to foster privacy and free speech, not a
particular ideology. They minimize the amount of data they collect on
users to prevent advertiser monetization or algorithmic targeting.
Unlike Facebook and Twitter, they do not assess a user’s preferences in
order to decide what they should see. And they were principally borne
out of a reaction to increasingly restrictive rules on the major Silicon
Valley platforms regarding what could and could not be said.
Of
course large numbers of Trump supporters ended up on Parler. That’s not
because Parler is a pro-Trump outlet, but because those are among the
people who were censored by the tech monopolies or who were angered
enough by that censorship to seek refuge elsewhere.
It
is true that one can find postings on Parler that explicitly advocate
violence or are otherwise grotesque. But that is even more true of
Facebook, Google-owned YouTube, and Twitter. And contrary to what many
have been led to believe, Parler’s Terms of Service includes a ban on
explicit advocacy of violence, and they employ a team of paid, trained
moderators who delete such postings. Those deletions do not happen
perfectly or instantaneously — which is why one can find postings that
violate those rules — but the same is true of every major Silicon Valley
platform.
Indeed,
a Parler executive told me that of the thirteen people arrested as of
Monday for the breach at the Capitol, none appear to be active users of
Parler. The Capitol breach was planned far more on Facebook and YouTube.
As Recode reported,
while some protesters participated in both Parler and Gab, many of the
calls to attend the Capitol were from YouTube videos, while many of the
key planners “have continued to use mainstream platforms like Twitter,
Facebook, and YouTube.” The article quoted Fadi Quran, campaign director
at the human rights group Avaaz, as saying: “In DC, we saw QAnon
conspiracists and other militias that would never have grown to this
size without being turbo-charged by Facebook and Twitter.”
And
that’s to say nothing of the endless number of hypocrisies with Silicon
Valley giants feigning opposition to violent rhetoric or political
extremism. Amazon, for instance, is one of the CIA’s most profitable partners,
with a $600 million contract to provide services to the agency, and it
is constantly bidding for more. On Facebook and Twitter, one finds official accounts from the most repressive and violent regimes on earth, including Saudi Arabia, and pages devoted to propaganda on behalf of the Egyptian regime. Does anyone think these tech giants have a genuine concern about violence and extremism?
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So
why did Democratic politicians and journalists focus on Parler rather
than Facebook and YouTube? Why did Amazon, Google and Apple make a
flamboyant showing of removing Parler from the internet while leaving
much larger platforms with far more extremism and advocacy of violence
flowing on a daily basis?
In part it is because these Silicon Valley giants — Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple — donate enormous sums of money to the Democratic Party and their leaders, so of course Democrats will
cheer them rather than call for punishment or their removal from the
internet. Part of it is because Parler is an upstart, a much easier
target to try to destroy than Facebook or Google. And in part it is
because the Democrats are about to control the Executive Branch and both
houses of Congress, leaving Silicon Valley giants eager to please them
by silencing their adversaries. This corrupt motive was made expressly
clear by long-time Clinton operative Jennifer Palmieri:
Jennifer Palmieri @jmpalmieriJanuary 7th 2021
The
nature of monopolistic power is that anti-competitive entities engage
in anti-trust illegalities to destroy rising competitors. Parler is
associated with the wrong political ideology. It is a small and new
enough platform such that it can be made an example of. Its head can be
placed on a pike to make clear that no attempt to compete with existing
Silicon Valley monopolies is possible. And its destruction preserves the
unchallengeable power of a tiny handful of tech oligarchs over the
political discourse not just of the United States but democracies
worldwide (which is why Germany, France and Mexico are raising their
voices in protest).
No
authoritarians believe they are authoritarians. No matter how
repressive are the measures they support — censorship, monopoly power,
no-fly lists for American citizens without due process — they tell
themselves that those they are silencing and attacking are so evil, are terrorists,
that anything done against them is noble and benevolent, not despotic
and repressive. That is how American liberals currently think, as they
fortify the control of Silicon Valley monopolies over our political
lives, exemplified by the overnight destruction of a new and popular
competitor.