Alex Jones, the First Amendment, and the Digital Public Square

By Steve Coll, The New Yorker

13 August 18

How should we challenge hate-mongering in the age of social media?

lex Jones has drawn millions of people to his Infowars brand by promoting conspiracy theories and noxious bigotry; he monetizes his following by selling survivalist gear and dietary supplements such as the testosterone booster Alpha Power. (“Infowarriors and Patriots of the world know that it takes real vitality to push back in the fight against the globalist agenda.”) Like President Trump, Infowars has updated for the digital era the timeworn populist tactic of manufacturing controversy to attain influence. Last week, after Apple, Facebook, and Google removed some of Infowars’ content from their platforms, Jones attracted even more attention; he described himself as the victim of “a war on free speech.” He urged his fans to back him by buying more of his stuff. (Downloads of the Infowars app soared.)

The action by the Silicon Valley companies was, in one respect, bold: congenitally reluctant to alienate any customer, they decided to absorb the predictable outcry from the far right. In another respect, however, their decisions were routine. Social-media platforms continually censor content that they judge to be offensive or illegal. Facebook employs or contracts with thousands of “moderators” in countries such as India, Ireland, and the Philippines. With the aid of algorithms, they review more than a million pieces of flagged content daily. The moderators—censors, really—take down postings and may ban users if they detect a violation of their corporation’s rules. Such censorship is not unconstitutional. The First Amendment protects us against governmental intrusions; it does not (yet) protect speech on privately owned platforms. Still, the Internet and social media increasingly function as a “modern public square,” as Justice Anthony Kennedy put it in a 2017 Supreme Court opinion. This has created new dilemmas concerning free expression.

The forums of Google and Facebook seem quasi-public in part because of their extraordinary reach. Facebook’s two hundred million monthly users in the U.S. constitute about three-fifths of the American population. Its algorithms and its censors’ judgments, though they inevitably affect commerce and political competition, are based upon rules that aren’t all published. When moderators at Facebook, Google, and Twitter review the appropriateness of posted content, they generally follow First Amendment-inspired principles, according to Kate Klonick, a legal scholar who analyzed the practices of the three companies in the Harvard Law Review last year. Some of the platforms’ standards are unsurprising, such as their bans on pornography and terrorist incitement. Other rules require moderators to block “hate speech,” an ambiguous term that, despite Facebook’s efforts at delineation, can be politicized. Still other censorship reflects sensitivities that arise from operating in dozens of countries, including some run by dictators. In 2012, Gawker obtained a Facebook contractor’s bizarrely eclectic list of topics requiring careful scrutiny. These included the poaching of endangered animals, Holocaust denial (a crime in Germany, among other countries), maps of Kurdistan, and the defamation of Atatürk.

Despite this surveillance, extremist activists and propagandists managed to create huge numbers of fake accounts and distribute millions of pieces of made-up or incendiary content on Facebook during the 2016 election. (They also mounted propaganda campaigns on YouTube and Twitter.) Some abusers sought merely to make money; others tried to inflame and mislead voters. Russia’s state-directed interference was intended to help elect Donald Trump, according to American intelligence agencies. It took Facebook a year to discover and disclose the scale of the problem. That epic fail has altered the environment in which the company and its competitors now make decisions about content like that of Infowars.

Facebook and YouTube have long positioned themselves as neutral platforms, akin to eBay, open to all who are willing to abide by community standards. They’ve resisted the argument that they are in fact publishers—that their human moderators and algorithms function like magazine editors who select stories and photos. But Facebook’s stance has seemed to shift recently. In April, its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, told Congress, “When people ask us whether we’re a media company or a publisher, what they’re getting at is: do we feel responsible for the content on our platform? I think the answer is clearly yes.” This is a be-careful-what-you-wish-for intersection; none of us will be happy if Silicon Valley engineers or offshore moderators start editing our ideas.

Donald Trump and his far-right fellow-travellers have vigorously exploited the neutrality of social-media platforms. The Administration and its allies may occasionally bash Silicon Valley or pressure platform companies to remain open to alt-right channels such as Breitbart or Infowars. But Trump is unlikely to try to delegitimize the social-media giants in the way that he has sought to discredit professional journalism. The President forged his election victory on social platforms; it is by now difficult to imagine a Twitter-less Trump (and a Trump-less Twitter is an increasingly distant memory). Nor is Trump likely to endorse the tough legal steps taken recently in European countries such as Germany, where Facebook, Google, and other platforms risk fines of as much as fifty million euros if they don’t quickly remove prohibited content when notified about it.

The First Amendment would likely preclude German-style regulation here, in any event; for better or worse, America is a nation forged from raucous speech. Yet it’s one thing to defend openness and another to tolerate malign interference in election campaigns. The challenge is to combat external propaganda and bot-farmed lies without allowing Facebook, Google, and the like to become even more powerful arbiters of news or public debate. The companies themselves must strike this balance. One way would be to do much more to affirmatively promote fact-based journalism. As for Alex Jones and his fevered legions, assuming they were subjected last week to the same rules that all other users of Apple, Google, and Facebook must comply with, they can now adapt or go elsewhere. Still, we should be wary of celebrating any instance of censorship, especially by opaque corporations. There are other ways to challenge hatemongers—at the voting booth, for example. Practices that marginalize the unconventional right will also marginalize the unconventional left. In these unsettled times, the country could use more new voices, not fewer. From its origins, the American experiment has shown that it is sometimes necessary to defend the rights of awful speakers, for the sake of principles that may help a free and diverse society renew itself.

ICE Is the Sharp Edge of the Trump Administration*'s Policy of Making America White

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

12 August 18

The results are predictably inhumane.

he best bit of journalism I've read in a while is in The Atlantic, in which Franklin Foer does a Captain Nemo into the recent history and rise of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement service. Foer begins with a now-sadly-customary story about the rousting of some Mauritanian immigrants in Columbus, Ohio. The Mauritanians in question were black citizens who had been brutalized by the Muslim majority government there.

A lithe, haggard man named Thierno told me that his brother had been detained by ICE, awaiting deportation, for several months now. The Mauritanians considered it a terrible portent that the agency had chosen to focus its attention on Thierno’s brother—a businessman and philanthropically minded benefactor of the mosque. If he was vulnerable, then nobody was safe. Eyes watering, Thierno showed me a video on his iPhone of the fate he feared for his brother: a tight shot of a black Mauritanian left behind in the old country. His face was swollen from a beating, and he was begging for mercy. “I’m going to sleep with your wife!” a voice shouts at him, before a hand appears on-screen and slaps him over and over.

For a while, they were comfortably settled in here. Then the United States had an election.

Suddenly, in the warehouses where many of the Mauritanians worked, white colleagues took them aside and warned them that their lives were likely to get worse. The early days of the administration gave substance to these cautions. The first thing to change was the frequency of their summonses to ICE. During the Obama administration, many of the Mauritanians had been required to “check in” about once a year. Abruptly, ICE instructed them to appear more often, some of them every month. ICE officers began visiting their homes on occasion. Like the cable company, they would provide a six-hour window during which to expect a visit—a requirement that meant days off from work and disrupted life routines. The Mauritanians say that when they met with ICE, they were told the U.S. had finally persuaded their government to readmit them—a small part of a global push by the State Department to remove any diplomatic obstacles to deportation.

Make no mistake. The primary goal of this administration* is to make America as white as Stephen Miller thinks it should be. Nothing will stand in the way of this goal—certainly, human decency won't. Foer then goes on to describe how the new president* empowered ICE as the sharp edge of his policy, and the giddy glee with which ICE accepted the job. He describes an agency that is both a highly militarized police force with a highly militarized attitude toward the performance of suddenly militarized duty.

He illustrates this by sitting in on one guy's regularly scheduled meeting with ICE personnel—meetings that were pretty much pro forma before this president* let the creature out of the lab, but which now appear to be exercises akin to Winston Smith's having an encounter with the gang down in HR.

Two minutes later, an officer with a shaved head, a black Under Armour hoodie, and a gun on his belt leaned his body through the door to stare intently at Ismael. “Why have you been working?” he asked. “We know you’ve been working.” It appeared to be an annoyed response to the lawyer’s resistance, hurled without evidence, perhaps in the hopes of provoking a self-incriminating response. It seemed of a piece with the fraught atmosphere in the waiting room. Earlier, there had been an announcement that a car was parked illegally outside and needed to be moved. Ismael’s lawyer had leaned over to tell me that this would be widely presumed to be another trick: Many immigrants under ICE scrutiny are not allowed to drive.

When immigration lawyers in Columbus deal with ICE, they are tentative, fretful that anything that might reek of complaint could provoke ICE into seeking retribution against their clients. So Ismael’s lawyer struck a stance of studied conciliation. As she gently explained herself, Ismael disappeared behind the door for his appointment and another manager emerged. He said that the man handling Ismael’s “intensive supervision” worked for a private contractor hired by ICE, and that the company’s contract with the federal government prohibited lawyers from attending its sessions with immigrants. “Just out of curiosity,” the lawyer asked, “can I see a copy of the rules?” The supervisor returned with a sheet of paper. He pointed to the crucial passage in a section enumerating “participant rights.” It described “the right to confidentiality with the exception of information requested by ICE.” The lawyer flashed me a furtive smirk as she refrained from commenting on the bravura display of doublespeak: Ismael had been denied his right to an attorney in order to protect his confidentiality.

This is not just bad. It is hilariously bad. Ever since the "war" on drugs kicked off, we have been awash in perilous ad hoc law-enforcement procedures designed, it would appear, to chase the demon du jour without tripping over that pesky Constitution. The attacks of September 11, 2001, in reaction to which ICE was formed as part of the new Department of Homeland Security, only threw this phenomenon into hyperdrive, with the Bush Administration grabbing whatever ideas were lying around the shelves at Langley or in the J. Edgar Hoover Building and throwing them willy-nilly into the statute books.

ICE, then, was born in a moment of politicized national panic, and now it is allowed to be a rogue agency within a moment of politicized national panic that is almost wholly ginned up by a president* who knows nothing about anything.

In addition, ICE is not exactly skimming the cream of the applicants for federal law enforcement. Unsurprisingly, it seems to be a downright lousy place to work.

ICE consistently ranks among the worst workplaces in the federal government. In 2016, the organization ranked 299th on a list of 305 federal agencies in a survey of employee satisfaction. Even as Trump smothered the organization with praise and endowed it with broader responsibilities, ICE still placed 288th last year.

The rest of the piece is a judicious account of how ICE has grown beyond its ambiguous original mandate, and how it now is the law-enforcement brute force behind an immigration policy that appears to be located entirely in the president*'s spleen. There are some sympathetic nods toward ICE personnel, to be sure, but there also is an account of what nearly was an open revolt against President Barack Obama when the latter changed his own policies and reined ICE in.

But the meat of the story—and the most thoroughgoing indictment of what ICE has become—is how the agency's marriage to private, for-profit contractors has brought out every instinct ICE had for basic inhumanity. In turn, this has pumped new life into the corporations involved in private prisons generally.

Jeremy Jong, an attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center, described to me a conversation he had with an ICE official at a Louisiana detention facility. The official bragged that “he always did his best to fulfill his contractual obligation to keep the center’s beds full of inventory.” The description of immigrants as “inventory” is a logical extension of how ICE has outsourced detention to private firms, for which each confinement represents additional profit. Detention is a boom industry, backed by such megafunds as Vanguard and BlackRock, and it has experienced a decade of steroidal growth. In the months following Trump’s election, the stock prices of the biggest detention companies, the Geo Group and CoreCivic, rose by more than 100 percent. (Those prices have leveled out since then.) Last year, the bipartisan army of lobbyists employed by the Geo Group and its primary competitors included power firms Akin Gump and the Gephardt Group, founded by former House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt. That fall, the Geo Group celebrated its good fortune by holding its annual leadership conference at the Trump National Doral resort, in Miami.

At other points in our national history, we considered human beings in chains as "inventory." This, if I recall correctly, did not end well.

Private detention companies’ contracts with ICE stipulate that they uphold a set of rigorous standards, but they of course seek to tamp down costs, which means that they may skimp on basic care for detainees. Take the CoreCivic facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey, which a group of lawyers and health professionals assembled by Human Rights First toured last year. What they discovered on their visits were reports of maggots in the showers and raw food served in the cafeteria, not to mention drinking water described as “pure bleach.” Several detainees said they avoid asking for dental care because the dentist at the facility only performs extractions, even when a filling would do. Mental-health treatment commonly includes “bibliotherapy”—the assignment of self-help books—despite the obvious fact that prolonged detention can bring stress and depression.

This is what you get when you decide that the yahoos and goobers who chant at your rallies are the people for whom you should make public policies. This is worse when you are someone who knows nothing about anything. The administration*'s immigration policies are the one area in which it has been consistent. More's the pity.