You might think the most powerful man in the world is the President of the United States. But you would be wrong.
- The latest tweets from @DouglasKMurray.
- The latest tweets from @douglaskmurray.
Because as this past week has shown, the Big Tech companies have power over even him. No one in human history has had the kind of reach and influence now wielded by a small group of men on the west coast of America.
Indeed, several things over this past week demonstrated a dramatic escalation in the desire of the Big Tech companies to decide what everybody on the planet should think, know and say – culminating in the ‘cancelling’ of Donald Trump, the 45th President of the United States of America – now permanently suspended by Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
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The gaffe came during an episode of The Joe Rogan Experiencewith British author and political commentator Douglas Murray. Rogan shared the apology in a video and caption on his Instagram.
Douglas Murray Boyfriend
You might think the most powerful man in the world is the President of the United States. But you would be wrong
Of course, the tech companies have been over-reaching for some time. It is several years since Google dropped its childish motto ‘Don’t be evil’.
And perhaps there is a reason – as the tech companies grew, they realised the world was a little more complex than their playground liberalism had led them to think.
As they became the most powerful publishing platforms on the planet, they started to confront questions that the free Press, governments and other institutions have had to address for centuries. Questions such as what should be published and what should not.
No one in human history has had the kind of reach and influence now wielded by a small group of men on the west coast of America. Pictured: Donald Trump’s controversial tweets made Twitter a lot of money
What constitutes respectable opinion and what does not? Because they grew at an astonishing rate, companies such as Twitter had no idea how to handle these questions. And the people they hoovered up to work for them didn’t help them much.
After the Democrats lost the 2016 election to Trump, the Big Tech companies employed swathes of men and women formerly employed by the Obama administration. And they duly brought their predictable prejudices to Silicon Valley, embedding biases that didn’t need much more reinforcing.
It was the same in the UK. When former Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg lost his seat at the 2017 Election, where did he find people willing to pay him top dollar?
Why Silicon Valley, of course, where the Liberal Democrat leader became Facebook’s ‘head of global policy and communications’.
It was the same in the UK. When former Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg (pictured) lost his seat at the 2017 Election, where did he find people willing to pay him top dollar?
Like his American counterparts, Clegg dragged large numbers of otherwise unemployable Liberal Democrats into Silicon Valley in his lucrative wake. All earning top dollar to dictate what you and I and everybody else can know.
Because that is the situation these platforms are now in. At the start they struggled with the easy questions. Should they allow incitement to murder and other things that obviously broke the law of the land? Clearly not, you would think.
But the tech companies were not at all clear, in fact.
And when they did attempt to clean up their act, they moved too late and in dubious directions.
For example, while Twitter started removing certain ‘Right-wing’ provocateurs such as Katie Hopkins from their platform, they continued to allow the terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba (who carried out the 2008 Mumbai massacre, among other atrocities) to operate an account in plain sight.
The most powerful platforms in the world seemed to be run by the slowest kids in the class.
In fact, these companies are way out of their depth. And it is not just ignorance that they display.
Twitter Douglas K Murray
Despite Google’s famous early slogan, what they and other Big Tech companies have done throughout their history really is distinctly, deeply, evil.
Twitter, for instance, has become one of the most powerful companies in the world – accumulating vast sums of money for a tiny number of people.
Douglas K Murray
The business model is simple. Every time some great controversy occurs, it enriches Twitter, which makes money from advertising, data harvesting and much more. (Yet it relies on others – you, me, people across the planet – to point out errors and correct what it publishes for free.)
The social media companies like the money their model makes them. And so they loved Donald Trump.
They pretended not to, of course. But five years ago, the then contender for the US presidency used Twitter with incredible skill. Trump knew the liberal media would treat him as an idiot or misreport him and so he chose to speak to his supporters and gain new followers by going to them directly through Twitter.
Every time Trump tweeted anything, it went around the globe in seconds, bringing the company to the attention of ever more people and growing their brand.
Then he won the presidency and some of the Democrats and other leftists started to blame themselves. Had they perhaps helped someone whose politics they didn’t like? Certainly. But they had also done something worse.
Platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube thrive on disagreement. They don’t want consensus. They want fury and rage. Those are the things that drive people to engage on their platforms.
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Bland centrism doesn’t quite cut it. For example, on YouTube it is rarely the more thoughtful videos posted that get the most attention. The platform is set up for videos to do well when they promise that a particular political figure has (for instance) ‘destroyed’ their opponent. Or ‘annihilated’ them, or any other number of computer game-like vanities.
In time, this computer-reality set up by the tech companies infected the real world. Left-wing commentators in Britain started popping up on the media purely to say something they knew would go ‘viral’ on social media.
They didn’t have to do the real work of journalism – they could become famous overnight by simply being astoundingly offensive or disrespectful to someone.
Our political world – from Donald Trump to the radical Left – is the creation of social media companies.
And as they have come to dominate, the way they have used their power has become increasingly outrageous. Before the November election in the US, a major corruption scandal emerged about the family of Joe Biden. The story was broken over successive days by the New York Post – America’s oldest and most venerable paper.
How did the tech platforms react? In the most egregious way imaginable. They censored the story.
Facebook and Twitter suspended the New York Post’s social media accounts. What is more, they prevented any and all other users from ‘sharing’ this story. So ahead of an election they decided what the American people could or could not know about one of their candidates. They did it because they wanted Joe Biden to win.
But that is just one of the wicked oversteps Big Tech has made this year. Only last week, YouTube removed the account of TalkRadio from their platform because they accused it of questioning lockdown and facemask policy.
Who the hell do these people think they are, to muzzle journalists in this way? There are many good questions to be asked about our Government’s advice – and the advice of authorities around the world – about the coronavirus.
Plenty of disinformation has been put out by people in government and other positions of authority. A free Press should question and interrogate such policy.
But being new to the game, and wildly too powerful, YouTube decided they could decide what the British people could or could not know.
They only reinstalled TalkRadio’s account – as in earlier cases – by pretending the ban had been an error. It wasn’t. YouTube has a long history of simply lying about its own behaviour. Because it will get away with it. Because Big Tech always does.
But this week the companies made their biggest move yet, with Facebook and Twitter banning Trump. Twitter also suspended his National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and former Federal Prosecutor Sidney Powell, both Trump loyalists.
Of course, the President’s behaviour, and many of his pronouncements since the election have been outrageous. But he is (for another few days at least) the President of the United States – technically the most powerful person on the planet. And he, unlike the tech billionaires, has been elected by millions.
But once again Big Tech knows best. It knows best for you, for me, and for everybody else on the planet. They discarded their creation – Trump – because they had no further need of him. He had helped make them rich, as we all have.
Because, like Trump, many of us thought we were using Big Tech. We weren’t. They were using us.
Like nearly everything named a ‘scandal’, ‘affair’ or given the suffix ‘gate’, almost nobody now remembers the Dalai Lama affair. But back in 2012, flush with recently acquired power and optimism, David Cameron and a man called Nick Clegg went to see the Dalai Lama while he was on a trip to London.
Whether Cameron and Clegg knew what they were getting into wasn’t clear. The pair had a short meeting with the Lama at St Paul’s Cathedral — or at least in one of those bland conference ante-rooms English cathedrals constructed in the last century to atone for the splendours next door. Looking like a couple of travelling salesmen trying to flog the Dalai Lama a timeshare, Cameron and Clegg had the meeting and moved on.
Not so Beijing. The British ambassador was immediately called in and given the traditional post-Lama telling off. In the wake of the meeting the Chinese Communist party announced relations with Britain had been damaged. Sure enough, Chinese investment into the UK went on hold. A trip to the UK by Chairman Wu Bangguo was called off. And the CCP talked about how ‘hurt’ the Chinese people had been by the meeting.
You can do that sort of thing if you are a dictatorship: pretend to act as the mouthpiece of more than a billion people, not one of whom can hold you to account. But Cameron got understandably spooked and — proving himself years ahead of the game — announced plans to socially distance himself from the Dalai Lama. Indeed soon he was declaring that he saw no need ever to meet him again. The British government issued an apology to the Chinese authorities for all the offence caused and normal trade relations were eventually restored.
It was the account of the first meeting between British and Chinese officials after this affair that was so memorable. I was told that before the meeting could get under way, the CCP officials attended to a bit of old business. A copy of the British apology was pushed across the table towards the British officials, who were then asked to stand up and read it out loud, which they duly did. Sitting down afterwards, the lead Chinese official apparently smiled and said: ‘We just wanted to know you meant it.’
I doubt there is a British subject whose skin doesn’t crawl at the thought of someone being so abject on our behalf. But there it is. A nadir of the conundrum that Britain — and the wider world — has long known ourselves to be in.
We always realised that there were price tags attached when dealing with the CCP. And as our politicians have repeatedly learned, the line between receiving the largesse of China and receiving orders from it is a fine one.
Other countries have been aware of this for years. On a trip to Australia in 2018 I was struck by how much further along the road the public’s understanding of the China conundrum was there compared with in Britain. They had long since passed through their politicians praising the benefits, watched them join the boards of Chinese companies, and then slowly but surely observed the political class back away as they saw what that cooperation entailed.
Today the Australians have an advantage over us. While we have a vast trade deficit with China (around £20 billion), Australia has a vast trade surplus with the country (around £30 billion). Even so, they remain vulnerable to the CCP’s normal diplomatic routine of extortion and threats.
Towards the end of last month the Australian government started calling for an international, independent inquiry into the origins of Covid-19. This followed intelligence leaks suggesting that the virus may have originated in a laboratory in Wuhan rather than one of the city’s famously delicious wet markets. The Chinese response was textbook. The country’s ambassador to Australia warned the Australian Financial Review that the Chinese public (there they go again) were ‘frustrated, dismayed and disappointed with what you are doing now. If the mood is going from bad to worse, people would think why we should go to such a country while it’s not so friendly to China. The tourists may have second thoughts.’ Students, parents and consumers were also said to be on the verge of once again choosing bat soup over Aussie beef and Shiraz.
In other words, the CCP’s response to Australia was the usual mob trick: nice continent you’ve got there. Shame if anything happened to it.
The editor of the state-run Global Times, Hu Xijin, was less diplomatic. Hu took to Weibo (China’s answer to Twitter) to describe Australia as a piece of ‘chewing gum stuck on the sole of China’s shoes’. He went on: ‘Sometimes you have to find a stone to rub it off.’ As Britain learned in 2012, the stone that China uses to get rid of us pieces of chewing gum is a familiar one. It involves the full litany of investment threats. And it includes claims — issued from its embassies worldwide — that all criticism of the CCP is motivated by ‘racism’.
Of course the CCP has no interest in bigotry. A survey of what it has been willing to do to the Uighur people over recent years might go some way to countering that claim. But it knows the West is cowed by such distractions. After all it isn’t very many weeks since Nancy Pelosi was telling Americans to visit their local Chinatown and the mayor of Florence was urging residents of his city to hug a Chinese person to fight racism and coronavirus.
Yet just as surely as Cameron was ahead of his time, so the Florentine mayor turned out to be behind his. We have been hugging China for years now, and it didn’t make us better. It made us sicker. And not just virally, but psychologically too.
It isn’t healthy to have your officials lick another country’s shoes. Or be told that you’re chewing gum on the bottom of them. We need to find a way out of this relationship — one that we all know turned abusive years ago.
