Domino détente
“You are the vulgarian, you fuck.”* Impolite content abounds on platforms. And, by hook or by crook, governments everywhere are going to clean it up. Stick around. There’s stuff to see here.
A few years back, governments coerced platforms to show (or not show) content that suited their perceived public good. Of course, we only learned about that Meta played ball four years ago last week when Mark Zuckerberg mea culpa-ed his way to absolution. I’m guessing he’s finished his couple of rosaries. Hallowed be his name.
For those paying some attention, this isn’t new. After Elon Musk bought Twitter and before shortened it to X, he dumped files that showed how the government had worked with Jack Dorsey’s people to sway information. For those sans a Casio pocket calendar, that dump happened two years ago.
We know what the people in charge didn’t want us to see. Something about Hunter Biden being a coke head and other stuff about COVID vaccines having some side effects.
To be clear, I don’t care about either of those things. Laptop. No laptop. Russian disinformation. Foreign bad actor intervention. I have bigger things to worry about than pictures of a nepo baby in a bathtub with hookers. I’m guessing that’s just an average Tuesday afternoon in most upscale Beverly Hill hotels. And, when it comes to COVID, yeah, I worried about dying on a respirator in overpopulated, understaffed hospital. But day to day, it was the fear that got me. They could have shot my arm up with peppermint Tic Tac placebo juice and I would have been placated.
Half the ads I see the few times I watch live TV (which ain’t often), are for drugs with funny-sounding, guess-how-to-pronounce-it names. 48 seconds into a 60-second ad, some fast-talker will list all the bad things that can happen in “rare circumstances” if you take the pill that fixes foot fungus. Like cancer or death.
Which is kinda the point. We see the drug ads and we see the disclaimer. I wouldn’t mind seeing the stuff people don’t want me to see, just slap a disclaimer on it.
Asking platforms to bow to whim nicely probably won’t work anymore. The folks who run governments seem to know this. In the last couple of weeks, Brazil banned X and France arrested the guy who runs Telegram. A little bit before that, the U.S. DOJ threated to take Android and Chrome away Google.
It’s working. In the last 24 hours, Telegram removed language from their FAQs saying private chats are protected. It used to say, “All Telegram chats and group chats are private amongst their participants. We do not process any requests related to them.” Now, it says, “All Telegram apps have ‘Report’ buttons that let you flag illegal content for our moderators — in just a few taps.” That’s about as 180-degrees as you can get. All it took was threatening to throw a CEO in jail for years.
To be clear, I don’t like people selling guns illegally or trafficking humans. 950 million people use Telegram. I’m going to guess the 949 million probably don’t sell guns illegally or traffic humans. Prohibiting them from doing things on Telegram is going to force them to some other place that allows things. We remember Prohibition, right?
Telegram CEO, Pavel Durov (as he goes by in Russia)/Paul du Rove (as he goes by in France) bent but he wasn’t happy about it. He said he was “surprised” that French Police interviewed him for four days. He’s been a frequent guest at the French embassy in Dubai. Telegram has an EU address for law enforcement. And, personally helped the French government establish a hotline to deal with terror threats.
That might have been enough four years ago. It’s not enough now. Brazil told Musk what they wanted for X to stay him active in their country. Musk didn’t bend. He pulled X (and Space X) out of Brazil. I have a strongish feeling that Google will. Bend, that is.
This week starts the next phase of Google’s fight for its monopolistic life. Three weeks ago, Google reminded us they can put thumbs on the content mitigation scale. The week before that, Google buyer-hired Character AI in a way that didn’t look like they were getting larger. All the way in March, Google radically changed the internet’s traffic patterns.
The governments of three different countries upped their approach to modify the behavior of three massive platforms. Even the most conspiratorial bettor wouldn’t have played that parlay.
The ask to make unwanted content go away is overt now. It’s going to be interesting to see how the platforms respond and which dominos fall next.
We’re in a censorship arms race.
It’s fucking vulgar.
*A Fish Called Wanda
At the risk of irking Python purists and Fawlty aficionados, for my money, peak Cleese genius.