Portions of Fire and Fury were distributed early to The Guardian, which published breathless articles on Wolff’s claims. What happened next, in the words of CNBC’s Marty Steinberg (who showed more skepticism than most), was a “journalistic feeding frenzy.”41 CNN’s Brooke Baldwin gushed about the “bombshell details” and “the myriad shockers” in the book.42 Her network devoted repeated segments to questioning the president’s fitness for office, based on reports in Wolff’s book.43 A minority of journalists noted Wolff’s errors. Matt Drudge, as always, was ahead of the crowd, calling Wolff’s work “fabricated bullshit.”44 New York Times White House correspondent Maggie Haberman more or less agreed: “The details are often wrong. And I can—I can see several places in the book that are wrong.”45 But most of the establishment media ran with the fake-but-accurate narrative. MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough told his million-plus viewers46 that, regardless of the factual accuracy, the book “rings true.”47 His MSNBC colleague, Katy Tur, noted that despite the criticisms, Wolff’s book “did feel true.” She pointed to “a lot” of the book that “reads true, that feels true.”48 “There’s disappointment about the errors that are in the text, but the book itself does hold up,” added CNN’s Brian Stelter, who hosts a show called “Reliable Sources.”49 Wolff’s book was tabloid-level sensationalism, full of half-truths and outright falsehoods; it was, in short, misinformation, yet prominent members of the establishment media helped propel Fire and Fury to the top of the New York Times best-seller list, where it remained for weeks.
It showed, if there was any doubt, that the liberal establishment media is intent on controlling the national narrative. And the establishment media wants its narrative to control social media as well.
CHAPTER NINE What Comes Next
In Europe and in authoritarian states like China and Venezuela, tech companies are already using their awesome power to stifle the flow of information, in some cases to silence political dissent and to keep pro-censorship authorities happy.
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Cologne, Germany: During New Year’s celebrations, in the first few hours of 2016 in Germany, as many as 1,200 German women and girls were sexually assaulted. The perpetrators were largely young, male migrants from Arab and North African countries.1 That’s not a political statement—it’s a fact.
The rampant sexual assault and harassment was a predictable result of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open-door immigration policy to Syrian and Iraqi refugees, Brookings Institute fellow James Kirchick argued in his 2017 book The End of Europe. “No woman who has ever walked the streets of a major Arab city—nor any man who has ever accompanied one—could have expressed shock at this turn of events. Blatant street harassment is simply the norm in much of the Arab world,” observed Kirchick, a respected foreign correspondent and no extremist on immigration matters. Kirchick pointed out that a “2013 study conducted by the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women found that 99.3 percent of women in Egypt—the most populous Arab country—have experienced sexual harassment, half of them on a daily basis. So prevalent is mass, participatory sexual assault in this part of the world that there is a word for it, taharrush, one with which Europeans have become painfully acquainted as this distinctly Arabian pathology has been imported to their streets.”2
Mass sexual assaults of German women and girls by thousands of migrants who had recently immigrated to Germany without being vetted was politically disastrous to Merkel and her party, who had staked their credibility on their controversial open-doors policy. The attacks undeniably would not have occurred if Merkel hadn’t broken with longstanding immigration policy and authorized mass entry. So, rather than openly discussing the incident, Cologne authorities tried to keep the public in the dark about the politically inconvenient mass rape and sexual assault of their wives, sisters, and daughters. But those facts slowly trickled out, drip by drip, and the number of victims ticked ever higher. It took more than six months for the public to learn the full story. A police report obtained by German newspaper Süddeutscher Zeitung in July 2016 finally revealed the full, horrifying scale of the mass attacks.
Fast forward two years to New Year’s Eve 2018 in Germany. When the clock struck midnight, it rang in both the new year and a new German censorship law that requires social media companies to delete “illegal hate speech” immediately—within 24 hours of posting—or risk a 50 million euro fine.3 The Cologne police department, earnestly trying to avoid a repeat of the mass attacks against women in the city, tweeted out safety bulletins in Arabic. That didn’t sit well with Beatrix von Storch, a right-wing member of German Parliament.4 Ms. von Storch slammed the police on social media and accused them of pandering to “barbaric, gang-raping Muslim hordes of men.” Her message was inflammatory, but it didn’t come out of nowhere—von Storch was addressing a real issue that had irreparably affected the lives of thousands of Germans. Roving rape gangs assaulted six hundred women in Cologne alone in a single night.5 And the problem was not contained to a single night, either: a study released in January 2018 found that young, male refugees in Germany are driving a violent crime spike across the country.6
But just because an issue is real, that doesn’t mean Facebook will allow you to have a real conversation about it. Tech companies quickly deleted von Storch’s posts, as well as posts that quoted von Storch’s posts. Even comedians who posted satirical tweets about von Storch’s censored posts were themselves censored.7
Von Storch wasn’t the only female member of Parliament to trip over the new speech rules. Alice Weidel, another right-wing politician, was similarly disgusted by what she viewed as a concession by the Cologne police. She wrote on Twitter: “Our authorities submit to imported, marauding, groping, beating, knife-stabbing migrant mobs.” Twitter deleted Weidel’s post as well. Apparently, in this instance, the progressive position on hate speech was to err on the side of censoring women who were outraged about mass gang rapes. And profit-driven tech companies, seeking to avoid massive fines, agreed.
For those who care about free speech, it was easy to see the censorship coming. Reporters Without Borders, a press freedom organization, expressed alarm about the German bill when it was proposed. “The short deadline for removal, coupled with the threat of heavy fines, will very likely drive social networks to remove more content than is legally justified. Even journalistic publications will face a real danger of being affected by this kind [of] over-blocking without due process,” said the organization’s executive director in Germany, Christian Mihr. Mihr implored German politicians to shelve the legislation, saying, “This hastily-drafted bill should be adjourned and only decided upon after national elections this coming fall and after thorough consultations with civil society. This applies especially true for the crucial question under which conditions content will have to be removed.”8 His warnings were ignored.
There’s no indication that German authorities plan to change anything, even as tech companies engage in overly broad censorship as a result of the new law. As it stands, it’s a massive blow to free speech in Germany, a country which some ostensibly smart pundits have claimed is now the leader of the free world.9
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The rest of Europe is following Germany’s lead in attempting to control their citizens’ online speech. As Google’s “good censor” memo approvingly noted: “governments are taking steps to make online spaces safer, more regulated, and more similar to their offline laws. Protected from hate speech on the street? Now you are on the net too….”
In the United Kingdom police officers now act as online speech cops to combat “hate speech”—a term so expansive that it includes posting rap lyrics and not complying with transgender pronoun mandates.
What’s that look like? Scottish YouTuber Markus Meechan was convicted in March 2018 of a hate crime for training his girlfriend’s pug to do Nazi salutes and to react to antisemitic phrases like “gas the Jews” in a video he posted to YouTube. Meechan, known online as Count Dankula, sai
d his goal was to turn his girlfriend’s small dog into the “least cute thing I could think of”—an antisemitic pug.10 After a lengthy court process, Meechan was fined the rough equivalent of $1,100.11 “As a matter of law, the test is not whether the video was offensive but whether it was grossly offensive. That standard is an objective one in which I must apply the standards of an open and just multi-racial society, taking account of context and the relevant circumstances, applying reasonably enlightened contemporary standards, considering whether the message is liable to cause gross offence to those to whom it relates: in this case, Jewish people. It is a high test. I concluded, applying these standards to the evidence, that your video was not just offensive but grossly so, as well as menacing, and that you knew that or at least recognised that risk,” Sheriff Derek O’Connell wrote in his sentencing order.12 “The fact that you claim in the video, and elsewhere, that the video was intended only to annoy your girlfriend and as a joke and that you did not intend to be racist is of little assistance to you. A joke can be grossly offensive,” O’Connell wrote.
Nineteen-year-old Liverpool woman Chelsea Russell was convicted of a hate crime over an Instagram post.13 Her crime: including offensive rap lyrics in an Instagram tribute to a friend who had recently passed away. An anonymous tipster sent a screenshot of one of Russell’s Instagram posts to authorities, at which point Russell “was brought in for questioning,” the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) wrote in an announcement.14 Russell denied the post was offensive but “Police Constable Dominique Walker, who works in the Hate Crime Unit, gave evidence that the terms Ms. Russell had used were ‘grossly offensive’ to her as a black woman and to the general community.” The CPS authorized police to charge Russell with “sending by a public communication a grossly offensive message…. The district judge agreed with us and found her guilty. The CPS applied for the sentence to be uplifted as it was a hate crime. The district judge agreed with this too and increased the sentence from a fine to a community order,” CPS announced. Russell was sentenced to eight weeks of community service, ordered to pay roughly $900 in penalties, and given an eight-week curfew.15
Meechan and Russell are far from alone in facing government inquisitions over social media posts. British Home Secretary Amber Rudd in October 2017 announced “a new national hub to tackle the emerging threat of online hate crime.” The official announcement promised that the hub would be operational within months and would “help drive up the number of prosecutions.”16 As it was, British authorities arrested nine people a day in 2016 for “posting allegedly offensive messages online as police step up their campaign to combat social media hate speech,” British newspaper The Times reported that same month.17 That made for a 50 percent rise in arrests in just two years, the paper noted.18 In September 2018, the South Yorkshire police urged residents to report offensive online comments made by their fellow citizens, whether or not they constituted a hate crime. “In addition to reporting hate crime, please report non-crime hate incidents, which can include things like offensive or insulting comments, online, in person or in writing,” the police department wrote on Twitter.19 Police in Hertfordshire, England, arrested Kate Scottow, a thirty-eight-year-old mother, in front of her children in December 2018 because she referred to transgender activist Stephanie Hayden as a man.20 Hayden, a male who self-identifies as a transgender woman,21 reported Scottow to authorities. Scottow was released with a warning for verbal harassment, after being detained for seven hours.22 “We take all reports of malicious communication seriously,” the police assured the public.23
In January 2019, police in Britain interrogated a man because he “liked” a humorous poem that authorities considered “transphobic.”24 The man, Harry Miller, told the BBC that a police officer told him that “even though I had committed no crime he needed to check my thinking.” Reflect on that for a minute: the police needed to check his thinking. Orwell’s Big Brother would be proud: thoughtcrime is on its way to becoming a real crime in the U.K.
In February 2019, a seventy-four-year-old Suffolk woman, Margaret Nelson, received a visit from police officers, who were concerned about some of her tweets and blog posts. The tweets that drew the attention of law enforcement included “Gender is BS. Pass it on,” the U.K. Spectator noted.25 “Gender’s fashionable nonsense. Sex is real. I’ve no reason to feel ashamed of stating the truth,” Ms. Nelson wrote in another tweet. “The bloody annoying ones are those who use words like ‘cis’ or ‘terf’ and other BS, and relegate biological women to a ‘subset’. Sorry you believe the mythology.’ ” In one of the offending blog posts, titled “Death doesn’t misgender. You die as you were born,” Nelson wrote: “If a transgender person’s body was dissected, either for medical education or a post-mortem examination, his or her sex would also be obvious to a student or pathologist. Not the sex that he or she chose to present as, but his or her natal sex; the sex that he or she was born with. Even when a body has been buried for a very long time, so that there is no soft tissue left, only bone, it is still possible to identify the sex. DNA and characteristics such as the shape of the pelvis will be clear proof of the sex of the corpse.”26 Nelson recounted the officer’s visit: “The officer said she wanted to talk to me about some of the things I’d written on Twitter and my blog. She said that some of the things that I’d written could have upset or offended transgender people. So could I please stop writing things like that and perhaps I could remove those posts and tweets?” Nelson informed the officer she would do no such thing.
In September 2018, British Member of Parliament Lucy Powell of the Labour Party introduced legislation that would regulate even private Facebook groups and hold the groups’ administrators responsible for what their members say. The law was necessary, Powell claimed without an ounce of self-awareness, because police couldn’t monitor private conversations as well as they could monitor public tweets. “Because these closed forums can be given a ‘secret’ setting, they can be hidden away from everyone but their members. This locks out the police, intelligence services and charities that could otherwise engage with the groups and correct disinformation,” she wrote in an op-ed touting her legislation in The Guardian.27 “I believe we can force those who run these echo chambers to stamp out the evil that is currently so prominent.”
Two months after Powell’s announcement, Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would begin suppressing “provocative groups” and “provocative content” across all countries.28 Tech companies have shown time and time again that they’re willing to censor on behalf of governments or leftist groups if that’s what it takes to protect profit margins.
The media and political establishments support crackdowns on online speech in Europe and in the United States, because social media represents a serious threat to them and to progressive priorities. Nigel Farage made this point to Mark Zuckerberg in a May 2018 letter blasting Facebook’s algorithm changes. Without “Facebook and other forms of social media, there is no way that Brexit or Trump or the Italian elections could ever possibly have happened. It was social media that allowed people to get behind the back of mainstream media,” Farage wrote.29 “Now perhaps you’re horrified by this creation of yours and what it’s led to. I don’t know,” he continued. “But what is absolutely true is since January of this year, you changed your modus operandi, you changed your algorithms, and it has led directly to a very substantial drop in views and engagements for those who have got right-of-center political opinions.”
In March 2018, French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe announced that France would pass its own version of Germany’s online “hate speech” law and require social media platforms to delete “hate speech” within twenty-four hours or face severe fines.30 The French government took matters even further eight months later. President Emmanuel Macron announced in November 2018 that his administration would “embed” regulators inside of Facebook to help combat “hate speech” on the platform.31 One French official called the partnership between the government and Facebook
an “unprecedented experiment.”32
The European Parliament has even threatened to pass online hate speech legislation that is similar to the German bill and would impose online “hate speech” regulations and censorship across the entire continent.33 The EU hasn’t had to follow through on that threat, because Facebook, Google, YouTube, and Twitter quickly ramped up their censorship operations, much to the EU’s delight.34
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The rise of populist movements around the world and Big Tech’s all-encompassing censorship regime are on a collision course. The European establishment’s populist nightmare is just beginning: the underlying destabilizers of their liberal governments—societal trends like stagnating wages, changing demographics, and an increasing gap between ultra-wealthy elites and everyone else—aren’t going away. These external pressures are only growing, and, at the same time, European governments are increasingly pressuring major tech companies to change their algorithms to combat populist forces. As populism spreads in Europe and as tech companies become cozier with European governments, the political establishment will pressure Big Tech to head off populist revolts like the “yellow vest” protests in France. Indeed, some of Big Tech’s current censorship activities, like suppressing “provocative” groups and “polarizing” content, are designed to do just that. But reliance on these heavy-handed tactics produces a conundrum: the more tech companies intervene on behalf of the establishment, the more they risk feeding those same populist forces they’re trying to thwart.
European leftists using Big Tech to silence political dissent are playing a dangerous game and establishing dangerous precedents, but for now they intend to exploit their influence over and within Big Tech as much as possible.
The Manipulators Page 16