Today, we saw a lesson in social media. This morning if you searched “California Republicans” on Google, you saw a summary screenshot of “ideologies” for the California Republican Party with the first listed as “Nazism.”
While officially Google refers you to their “Feedback” button to report a concern, the reality is this was only changed due to pressure from right-of-center social media groups and Republican leaders such as House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy:
RNLA Vice President for Communications and RNC Committeewoman Harmeet Dhillon flagged this on her Facebook page and RNLA helped let the “movement” know about this problem early this morning. It spread fast and Google removed the offensive section and instead tried to cast the blame on Wikipedia.
The fact of the matter is that although--subject to pressure--Google “fixed” the problem as of 5:00 p.m. Eastern, “California Democrats” have an ideology listing while “California Republicans” do not.
What makes this all more troubling is the proximity to the California primary. Coupled with Facebook’s refusal to verify Republican candidates such as California Secretary of State candidate Mark Meuser, the bias of the Silicon Valley social media giants remains concerning. As we saw today, the solution is, at least in part, to fight back.
RNLA member Mark Meuser is running for Secretary of State in California, but Facebook has twice refused to verify his campaign's account. Under Facebook's new advertising policy, this prevents Mr. Meuser's campaign account from advertising on Facebook:
Facebook has banned me from advertising with them because I do not have a verified page. Let’s forget the fact that I twice tried to verify my page but Facebook denied my verification for reasons that were completely made up. (Remember that I am a lawyer and I read the reason they were denying me and the reasons they gave was completely fictitious because I had already given them the info they requested.)
Sounds to me like Facebook would like an unfair competition lawsuit being brought against them for changing their rules to affect a campaign that only has one week to the election. I understand that I am not the only campaign this is affecting. What is funny is that this happened on the day I was reading a book written by a leftist who is complaining about the Russian Facebook advertising. I guess Facebook reacted so swiftly that they forgot they were silencing valid campaign spending.
Mr. Meuser identifies the crux of the problem with social media's overreaction to claims of Russian interference in the 2016 election through online advertisements. In their efforts to restrict foreign agents, foreign bots, and other bad actors, social media companies are restricting the speech of Americans as well. Consider the expansiveness of Facebook's new advertisement requirements:
Facebook is now enforcing its new policies for political and issue-related ads. Announced last month, the new rules require all advertisers running political or issue ads on the platform to verify their identity and location. US election and issue ads will have to be clearly labeled and will include “Paid for” information to identify the person or organization behind the ad.
Instead of using a definition of political recognized by the FEC, the IRS, or the legal community, Facebook is broadly defining political to include genuine issue ads. Organizations from the Sierra Club to The Heritage Foundation will have to follow Facebook's rules for "political" ads. As a private company, the First Amendment does not prevent Facebook from placing restrictions on certain kinds of speech. But if Facebook is inconsistently and unequally verifying political campaigns and thereby preventing them from advertising, as it did with Mark Meuser's campaign, it is wading into murky legal waters and opening itself to further public backlash.
Today, a judge in the Southern District of New York held that President Trump may not block users from his personal Twitter account, @realDonaldTrump:
This case requires us to consider whether a public official
may, consistent with the First Amendment, “block” a person from
his Twitter account in response to the political views that person
has expressed, and whether the analysis differs because that public
official is the President of the United States. The answer to
both questions is no. . . .
We then proceed to the substance of plaintiffs’ First
Amendment claims. We hold that portions of the @realDonaldTrump
account -- the “interactive space” where Twitter users may directly
engage with the content of the President’s tweets -- are properly
analyzed under the “public forum” doctrines set forth by the
Supreme Court, that such space is a designated public forum, and
that the blocking of the plaintiffs based on their political speech
constitutes viewpoint discrimination that violates the First
Amendment. In so holding, we reject the defendants’ contentions
that the First Amendment does not apply in this case and that the
President’s personal First Amendment interests supersede those of
plaintiffs.
In the hours since its release, this decision has already ignited a storm of debate, some uninformed (see generally, the media) and some informed (see Eugene Volokh's initial analysis here). Prof. Volokh notes that the Eastern District of Kentucky recently reached the opposite conclusion.
While many issues are unsettled when applying the First Amendment to social media and other technologies, Ed Whelan highlights some concerns with the decision:
Ilya Shapiro points out that the identity of the parties may have improperly affected the holding:
It is also worth noting that this case is concerning Donald Trump's personal Twitter account, @realDonaldTrump, which has been his for years and will remain his after leaving office, and not the official presidential Twitter account, @POTUS, which is operated by the current holder of the White House. While the #resist movement may be cheering this decision as a victory against President Trump, few are pausing to consider its vast implications, as Mr. Whelan points out, if applied to public officials' Twitter accounts, from members of Congress down to the clerks at City Hall.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before a joint hearing of the U.S. Senate Committees on the Judiciary and on Commerce, Science, and Transportation today, and he will testify before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce tomorrow. With his usual acuity, Senator Ted Cruz highlighted some of the key problems with liberal social media companies' treatment of conservatives during his questioning (1:46:32 to 1:52:14):
. . . Sen. Cruz: Well, Mr. Zuckerberg, I will say there are a great many Americans who I think are deeply concerned that Facebook and other tech companies are engaged in a pervasive pattern of bias and political censorship. There have been numerous instances with Facebook. In May of 2016 Gizmodo reported that Facebook had purposely and routinely suppressed conservative stories from trending news, including stories about CPAC, including stories about Mitt Romney, including stories about the Lois Lerner IRS scandal, including stories about Glenn Beck. In addition to that, Facebook has initially shut down the Chick-fil-A appreciation day page, has blocked a post of a Fox News reporter, has blocked over two dozen Catholic pages, and most recently, blocked Trump supporter Diamond and Silk's page with 1.2 million Facebook followers after determining their content and brand were "unsafe to the community." To a great many Americans, that appears to be a pervasive pattern of political bias. Do you agree with that assessment?
Zuckerberg: Senator, let me say a few things about this. First, I understand where that concern is coming from, because Facebook and the tech industry are located in Silicon Valley, which is an extremely left-leaning place. This is actually a concern that I have and that I have tried to root out in the company, is making sure that we don't have any bias in the work that we do, and I think it is a fair concern that people would at least wonder about this.
Sen. Cruz: Let me ask this question. Are you aware of any ad or page that has been taken down from Planned Parenthood?
Zuckerberg: Senator, I'm not, but let me just...
Sen. Cruz: How about MoveOn.org?
Zuckerberg: I'm not specifically aware of those...
Sen. Cruz: How about any Democratic candidate for office?
Zuckerberg: I'm not specifically aware; I'm not sure.
Sen. Cruz: In your testimony, you say that you have 15-20,000 people working on security and content review. Do you know the political orientation of those 15-20,000 people engaged in content review.
Zuckerberg: No, Senator, we do not generally ask people about their political orientation when they're joining the company.
. . .
Sen. Cruz: Do you know of those 15-20,000 people engaged in content review, how many, if any, have supported financially a Republican candidate for office?
Zuckerberg: Senator, I do not know that.
Sen. Cruz: Your testimony says, "It is not enough that we just connect people. We have to make those connections positive." It says, "We have to make sure people aren't using their voice to hurt people or spread misinformation. We have a responsibility not just to build tools but to make sure those tools are used for good." Mr. Zuckerberg, do you feel it's your responsibility to assess users whether they are good and positive connections or ones those 15-20,000 people deem unacceptable or deplorable?
. . .
Zuckerberg: Senator, I think there are a number of things that we would all agree are clearly bad. Foreign interference in our elections, terrorism, self-harm. Those are things...
Sen. Cruz: What about censorship?
Zuckerberg: Ah, well, I think that you would probably agree that we should remove terrorist propaganda from the service. So that, I agree, I think is clearly bad activity that we want to get down and we're generally proud of how well we do with that. What I can say, and I do want to get this in before the end here, is that I am very committed to making sure Facebook is a platform for all ideas. That is a very important founding principle of what we do. We're proud of the discourse and the different ideas that people can share on the service, and that is something that, as long as I'm running the company, I'm going to be committed to making sure is the case.
As a practical matter, no matter what Facebook's big picture commitments are, Silicon Valley liberals are making the operational decisions about which posts, pages, and advertisements violate Facebook's terms of use. To his credit, Zuckerberg recognizes this problem, but it does not seem like enough "conservative sensitivity training" has been done. Facebook blocked the following ad from Republican state senate candidate Aric Nesbitt in Michigan for being "shocking, disrespectful or sensational content, including ads that depict violence or threats of violence":
“I’m proud to announce my candidacy for State Senate. Lansing needs conservative, West Michigan values, and as our next State Senator, I will work to strengthen our economy, limit government, lower our auto insurance rates, balance the budget, stop sanctuary cities, pay down government debt and be a Pro-Life, Pro-Second Amendment leader for the people. Find out more at www.VoteNesbitt.com.”
If that's the content that Facebook deems inappropriate, virtually all speech from conservatives and Republicans will violate the site's policies. And as we learned in the oral arguments for Minnesota Voters Alliance v. Mansky, even a liberal lawyer arguing before the Supreme Court automatically thinks that conservative messages are "political" while liberal messages are neutral. Liberals are proficient at groupthink. Even if the liberal Facebook content moderators have good intentions and genuinely believe they are evaluating content neutrally, they are going to deem speech to be "shocking" or "disrespectful" simply for containing traditional, mainstream conservative principles.
Yesterday was Republican Commissioner Lee Goodman's last day on the Federal Election Commission. RNLA Vice President for Election Education David Warrington described some of his accomplishments, fighting to protect First Amendment rights and the rule of law, on the FEC in The Hill:
The left often charges that the FEC is a “dysfunctional” agency. Goodman, however, refuted the “dysfunction” charge using the FEC’s own data, showing that the agency acted in a bipartisan fashion on 93 percent of all votes taken. Goodman exposed what the left really meant by “dysfunction” at the FEC — failing to agree with the Democrats. To the dismay of Democrats, Goodman and his fellow Republican commissioners refused to ignore existing law and change the rules governing Americans’ political speech. . . .
Goodman was committed to keeping speech on the internet free of new regulation. Despite what you might read in the news, paid advertisements on the internet are subject to the full range of FEC regulations, just like newspaper or television ads. Since 2006, Internet activities posted for free — blog posts, Facebook posts, tweets, YouTube videos, etc. — have been exempt from FEC regulations. Yet the FEC Democrats would like nothing more than to regulate these everyday activities and have been creatively trying to find ways around the longstanding “Internet Exemption.” Standing in their way have been Lee Goodman and the other Republican commissioners. . . .
As the Democrats have used alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election as an excuse to regulate social media, Lee Goodman has persistently pointed out their errors: foreign paid ads are already illegal and it is impractical to assume the FEC could police disclaimers on ads placed on foreign servers, so the real burden of any social media regulation would fall on American citizens exercising their First Amendment rights. . . .
Democrats are eager to use campaign finance laws as a tool to intimidate and suppress the speech of their political opponents. Lee Goodman, defender of the First Amendment stood in their way and thereby protected the rights of all Americans — from their right not to be hauled before his agency for a tweet, to the right to a press free from government interference, to the right to fair notice of what activity is regulated or prohibited. Thank you, Commissioner Goodman.
We agree - thank you, Mr. Goodman, for your commitment to the rule of law and the Constitution and protecting the rights of all Americans during your service on the FEC.
