Frederik Stjernfelt & Anne Mette Lauritzen YOUR POST HAS BEEN REMOVED Tech Giants and Freedom of Speech Your Post has been Removed Frederik Stjernfelt Anne Mette Lauritzen Your Post has been Removed Tech Giants and Freedom of Speech Frederik Stjernfelt Anne Mette Lauritzen Humanomics Center, Center for Information and Communication/AAU Bubble Studies Aalborg University University of Copenhagen Copenhagen København S, København SV, København, Denmark København, Denmark ISBN 978-3-030-25967-9 ISBN 978-3-030-25968-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25968-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020. This book is an open access publication. 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The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Praise for “Your Post has been Removed” “From my perspective both as a politician and as private book collector, this is the most important non- fiction book of the twenty- first century. It should be disseminated to all European citizens. The learnings of this book and the use we make of them today are crucial for every man, woman and child on earth. Now and in the future.” Jens Rohde, member of the European Parliament for the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe “This timely book compellingly presents an impressive array of information and analysis about the urgent threats the tech giants pose to the robust freedom of speech and access to information that are essential for individual liberty and democratic self- government. It constructively explores potential strategies for restoring individual control over information flows to and about us. Policymakers worldwide should take heed!” Nadine Strossen, Professor, New York Law School. Author, HATE: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship The only free cheese is in the mouse trap Russian proverb1 1 The expression is mostly used in Russian but might originate from an apocryphal statement by Margaret Thatcher on communism. Preface This book came about during the Spring and Summer of 2018 after we were connected by our mutual friend Vincent Hendricks. He had an eye for our shared interest in the topic: the new circumstances of free speech in an online world. We would like to thank not only Vincent but also those who, during our research and writing process, have helped us with their information, inspiration, and critical comments: Finn Collin, Benjamin Rud Elberth, Jens-Martin Eriksen, Rolf Hvidtfeldt, Jacob Mchangama, David Budtz Pedersen, Katrine K. Pedersen, Agnete Stjernfelt, Karoline Stjernfelt, Philip Thinggaard, Mads Vestergaard, and Mikael Vetner. We have enjoyed challenging discussions of this book proj- ect with our research colleagues at Humanomics Center, University of Aalborg, supported by the Velux Foundations, and Center for Information and Bubble Studies, University of Copenhagen, supported by the Carlsberg Foundation. Thanks to our translator, Philip Thinggaard, for a quick and meticulous effort, as well as our editors, Peter Christensen, Michael Jannerup, and Ties Nijssen, for their solid and effi- cient collaboration. For financial support, our thanks go to the Department of Communication and Psychology, Aalborg University, and to the Center for Information and Bubble Studies, University of Copenhagen. Copenhagen, Denmark Frederik Stjernfelt June 2019 Anne Mette Lauritzen ix Introduction This book sheds a critical light on the Internet, more specifi- cally on the new circumstances it is creating for one of the most important basic principles of modern liberal democra- cies: freedom of speech. The book has specific focus on the tech giants who, to a still larger extent, set the framework for and define the conditions of communication for most users online—Google, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Amazon, etc. The book came about during hectic times, not so much due to deadlines but because its subject matter unfolded franti- cally while the book was being written, with new tumultuous events taking place almost every week. Not long before the plan for the book was drafted, when 2017 became 2018, a new law came into effect in Germany. It made it mandatory for social networks such as Facebook and Twitter to assume the government’s job of regulating content in accordance with German law. In March 2018, the Cambridge Analytica scan- dal broke. It exposed how a shady British company special- izing in spin and influencing elections had used the data of millions of Facebook users during the US presidential elec- tion and the Brexit referendum, among others. In late March, Google announced its plans to spend 300 million USD on a new initiative which featured a “Disinfo Lab” aimed at removing misinformation from the search engine, the pur- pose being to make sure serious journalism ranks high among Google’s search results. In April and May, Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, appeared in hearings with the US Congress and the European Parliament, where he managed to dodge most of the critical questions posed to him during the brief sessions. In late April, for the first time ever, Facebook made public its detailed and previously undisclosed guidelines for xi xii Introduction the removal of content and blacklisting of users. In the middle of May, a Google internal video from 2016 named “The Selfish Ledger” was leaked, featuring Google’s take on the future—a society where information is crucial and each indi- vidual demoted to a random container, from generation to generation carrying important information on into the future. In late May, the new EU legislation known as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) entered into force. In June, the next Facebook scandal popped up: it turned out the com- pany had given access to the enormous amounts of personal user data to more than 60 technological hardware manufac- turers, among them Apple, Amazon, BlackBerry, Microsoft, and Samsung. Furthermore, this had apparently taken place despite the fact that Facebook had discovered, back in 2015, the Cambridge Analytica leaks and tightened its control with how data are handed over to app companies via Facebook. Around the same time, the development of a new law was started in France—with different means than the one in Germany, the French law attempts to make it legal to remove “fake news” from the Internet. In July, the European Commission gave Google (Alphabet) the biggest fine in EU history for activities bordering on monopoly. Later that month, Facebook announced that it had learned of a new political campaign using false Facebook pages, probably set up from Russia. In August, the biggest tech giants blocked access to a conspiracy site named InfoWars, all of them on the same day. At the end of that same month, it was discovered that since 2011, Iran has been behind a large misinformation campaign on Facebook targeting hundreds of thousands of users across the planet—the campaign managed to spread to both Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. In October, an internal Google document was leaked, called “The Good Censor” where a new policy of stricter censorship is developed. That same month, a “troll farm” in Saudi Arabia was discovered. In November, it was revealed that Facebook had, during its many crises, hired a spin company in order to discredit com- petitors and smearing critics. The same month, the company published new directions for censorship, adding to removal the technique of downgrading access to content not actually Introduction xiii removed but merely close to the borderline of removal in some way. Last but not least, in the Spring of 2019, increasing political pressure after the March massacre in Christchurch, New Zealand, prompted several states to sharpen removal policies regarding tech giants. Writing a critical book in the midst of all these events is sort of like riding a tiger. One is never sure if, once published, new events will already have made some of the book’s claims and conclusions obsolete. Still, there seems to be no calm Archimedean vantage point in foreseeable future from which to lean back, observe, and analyze the growing problems with the Internet and the tech giants. Moreover, these issues are in no way simple. The global, transnational nature of the tech giants, combined with their secrecy and lack of openness when it comes to their internal procedures, creates entirely new conditions for freedom of speech.