Silicon Valley tech giants quickly went from heroes to villains in the eyes of the media who fueled outrage for clicks but failed to make money. They’ve responded to this criticism in the worst possible way, by turning censor.
In the most recent incident, YouTube banned videos by the conservative undercover journalism outfit Project Veritas that contained information about Pinterest and that company’s blacklisting of an anti-abortion group Live Action. YouTube described the information provided to Veritas by a whistleblower as a violation of privacy, and therefore unacceptable.
This prompted journalist Glenn Greenwald, himself a liberal, to marvel at the fact that there are journalists out there “begging corporations to silence people.”
But is it really YouTube that supposedly radicalizes young people, or the very outlets that demand censorship on the Google-owned video platform? Spanish researcher David Rozado recently went through the Lexis-Nexis database and compiled charts chronicling the word usage by the New York Times, finding some interesting spikes in terminology that shapes the political agenda in recent years. Talk about ‘hockey-stick’ graphs!
Nor was the Times the only publication to do this, just the most mainstream one. Last month, journalist Wesley Yang held up the example of several online publications that were facing impending demise because their business models simply no longer worked. All of them had chased audience metrics and embraced a certain kind of content for that reason.
“Every [venture capital] funded online publication became a woke clickbait mill for a simple reason: the metrics told them this was the best performing type of content,” Yang wrote in an insightful Twitter thread.
Because “we are who pretend to be,” Yang continued, what “began as a cynical metrics and cost-driven expedient became a set of genuine ideological commitments through an online radicalization process driven by cycles of trolling and performative victimhood.”
Except when it ends up manipulating people’s feelings – which it did. Exhibit A is the ‘Russiagate’ conspiracy, or moral panic, which mainstream media outlets flogged endlessly for years, and continued to insist they had done nothing wrong even after it was debunked by special counsel Robert Mueller.
Google made $4.7 billion from the news industry in 2018, a recent New York Times article proclaimed, citing a study by the News Media Alliance, a trade group that represents the Times, among others. The case was then made to Congress, with media lobbyists telling the House Judiciary Committee earlier this week that it just wasn’t “fair” Silicon Valley was profiting thus, and advocating more regulations – predictably packaged by opportunistic lawmakers in layers of concern about “Russian meddling” in “our democracy,” of course.
The establishment never forgave social media for 2016, when Donald Trump used them to bypass the gatekeepers and get elected president. Every pretext was used to put more pressure on Silicon Valley companies – themselves run by people who eagerly gave Barack Obama the keys to the kingdom back in the day.
Eager to show they were virtuous and good, they began censoring – first the “Russians,” then “bots and trolls,” then “Iranians,” then “hate speech,” pretty soon getting to the point where activist journalists are demanding de-platforming of people they simply disagree with.
The end result of this has been the kind of social polarization and political radicalization not seen on these shores since, oh, 1861 or so. And we all know how that ended. Don’t we?