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Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Instragram, and Pinterest. While each provides a different sort of service for communicating and sharing content with other individuals on the internet, they all have one thing in common: centralization. Holding the vast majority of the social media market share, people colloquially refer to these companies as Big Tech due to their massive strangle hold on online communications. This poses a rather big issue: abuse of power.
As all of these social media platforms are centralized, users are basically at the mercy of whoever is in charge. Users can be censored for harboring "wrong think", i.e. expressing views that the companies' staff dislike. Sometimes, the companies may experience internal power struggles due to conflicting interests and philosophies, victimizing some employees in the process. This was the case with Reddit and the former CEO Ellen Pao. Pao sparked a revolt from the Reddit community for suddenly firing a very popular employee. Her authoritarian demeanor earned her the nickname, Chairman Pao, in reference to the Chinese Communist Party dictator, Mao Zedong.
A satirical drawing of Ellen Pao in reference to the Cultural Revolution era paintings from China.
It is very difficult to challenge these social media platforms on the legal stage as they are protected under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. This portion of the law protects the companies from getting sued for hosting third-party content. Many people, particularly conservatives, have grown very concerned about Big Tech's censorship and ideological biases. They argue that these companies are basically publishers that have the protections of utilities. Folks on the other side argue that because these companies are private, they can do whatever they like.
However, what happens if the social media platforms curate third-party content at the government's behest? Unlike the debate surrounding the greyish nature of Section 230, the aforementioned situation is rather clear cut and is a definite legal no-no. This is the case with Twitter as revealed from two recent lawsuits by Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai and Rogan O'Handley.
Dr. Shiva's Lawsuit
In May 2021, Dr. Shiva sued Twitter and the State of Massachusetts for their coordination to censor public opinion on the 2020 election. In his supplemental memorandum, he revealed how the government and Twitter Legal collaborated to form the Twitter Trusted Partnership and Twitter Partner Support (PSP) Portal. This portal is how the government can issue an order to Twitter to remove certain content at its behest.
In addition, Dr. Shiva described how Amy Cohen, the Executive Director of the National Association of State Election Directors, and Twitter Legal architected the Elections Influence Operations Playbook for State and Local Officials. It is a three part manual on how the state should handle what are called "Influence Operators". (Part 1 and Part 2 are public, whereas Part 3 is exclusive to election officials.)
In Part 1, the manual considers phrases such as "There has been a failure in the mechanics of how elections are run", "The people who run elections are corrupt", or "Results that are not in by election night call into question the administration or legitimacy of the election". At the end, it introduces a 4-step "ongoing process that includes preparing the criteria that define Influence Operators, identifying them, dealing with them and then monitoring after the officials have acted, and continue this process indefinitely".
Part 2 of the playbook provides the actual play-by-play on how state officials should handle "Influence Operators". It provides a criteria on the "threat level" of the IO:
1) Is the IO an established voice?
2) Is the IO a credible person – meaning, are voters likely to believe the information? How prominent is the person and how many engagements do his tweets receive, i.e. retweets, likes?
3) Is the IO’s message gaining traction? Did the official receive lots of communications about the tweet?
Stage 3 of the manual requires state officials to approach Twitter, whose legal team co-authored the playbook, directly and getting the National Association of State Election Directors to approach Twitter with "more voices".
Rogan O'Handley's Lawsuit
Last month, Rogan O'Handley in conjunction with The Center for American Liberty and the Dhillon Law Group, Inc. sued a number of defendents, including former California Secretary of State and now U.S. Senator Alex Padilla, current CA SoS Shirley Weber, Twitter, Team Biden campaign consultants SKDK. Twitter permanently suspended O'Handley for tweeting concerns on how the election was conducted, i.e. criticizing Padilla job.
A bunch of emails dug up from a FOIA (Freedom Of Information Act) request revealed "then California Secretary of State Alex Padilla directly coordinating with Democratic political consulting firm SKDK and Twitter to permanently suspend users who were critical of Padilla's job in conducting elections".
While California is not Massachusetts, Padilla's actions pretty much followed Part 2 of the Elections Influence Operations Playbook for State and Local Officials to a t. O'Handley's Twitter account was an established voice with 440,000 followers. As he is also an attorney, he can certainly be considered a "credible person" by the manual's standards. In O'Handley's complaint, "prior to [the Secretary of State's Office of Elections Cybersecurity (OEC)] requesting Twitter censor the Post, Twitter had never before suspended Mr. O’Handley’s account or given him any strikes. He suddenly became a target of Twitter’s speech police, at the behest of Defendants". The attorney described the sequence of events that led to his account's suspension:
77. Shortly after Padilla’s agent or staff member “flagged” Mr. O’Handley’s post to Twitter, Twitter subsequently appended commentary asserting that Mr. O’Handley’s claim about election fraud was disputed. A true and correct copy of OEC’s comments, as obtained through public record request, is attached to this complaint as Exhibit 9.
78. Twitter then added a “strike” to Mr. O’Handley’s account.
79. Twitter utilizes a strike system, whereby users incurring “strikes” face progressive penalties, culminating in removal from Twitter altogether after five strikes.
80. The OEC tracked Twitter’s actions on internal spreadsheets and noted that Twitter had acted upon the request to censor Mr. O’Handley’s speech.
Closing Thoughts
Sure, private companies are free "to do whatever they want" and choose who they want to associate with. On the other hand, when private companies do things in collaboration with the government, then that is a completely different ball game.
As demonstrated from both Dr. Shiva and Mr. O'Handley's lawsuits, Twitter has collaborated with state officials from Massachusetts and California as well as federal officials to suppress certain speech regarding the 2020 election. As the social media company acted in the behest of the government officials, Twitter is effectively a state actor. There are some who argue that freedom of speech only applies to the government, but Twitter even fails that criteria so there's no more excuses. Heck, even Facebook may be a state actor, too.
Overall, I think there needs to be major reform in Section 230 so that Big Tech can be held more accountable. However, you can also play a role by not using these mainstream platforms and use decentralized ones instead. There are several options already available including Minds, Odysee, Ruqqus, Pocketnet, PeakD, and others. A lot of them run on open-source code and on the blockchain, which ensures transparency as users can check and verify that there's nothing nefarious under the hood.
The more decentralized the web is, the better.
