Market Unfreedom: Causes and Cures (and other musings)
Concentrated economic power becomes a truly existential threat, but is the right prepared to act?
Hello! If you’re receiving this email, it’s because you’ve signed up to receive my columns from TinyLetter. Unfortunately, TinyLetter, owned by MailChimp, was grievously offended by the email below. They’ve flagged it for “abuse prevention,” and are refusing to send it out.
If TinyLetter’s content team changes their mind, you may get this email twice — apologies in advance. All future emails will be coming from this Substack address.
Somehow, TinyLetter/MailChimp has managed to confirm the motivating premise of my work over the last two years: corporations are increasingly controlling the flow of information, who can speak, and what they can say.
Anyway, onto the point.
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Good morning!
I'm out with four (!) new pieces today. Three of them are closely related to the White House announcement last week that they are working closely with Facebook and other social media companies to flag "problematic" posts about COVID-19. What began as a potentially defensible coordination regarding inaccurate information about vaccines quickly spiraled into an outright admission of narrative control. The problem, of course, with moderating for misinformation is that the definition of misinformation is constantly changing to meet the needs of the people, or companies, in power.
My quick take on this was published in the New York Post on Friday, which you can read here. I've included my lengthier essay on the implications of this below, published this morning in The Federalist.
My coverage of a fun little tool put out by the American Principles Project is also running at The Federalist this morning. APP's Big Tech Funding tool is designed to help users see which think tanks and Twitter pundits take funding from the Big Tech companies.
Finally, I have a new essay out in Modern Age this morning, as part of a symposium on the humane economy. My essay is featured alongside contributions from Oren Cass, Anne Rathbone, and Richard Reinsch. You can check it out here (or below).
Thank you, as always, for reading. If you're the watching kind, I'll be on Breaking Points with Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti on Thursday, and I'm guest hosting Hill TV's Rising program on Wednesday morning. I'll also be on The First TV with Dana Loesch on Wednesday afternoon. And you can find me on the Edmund Burke Foundation's NatConSquad podcast every week.
My best,
Rachel
Biden Administration Admits To Helping Control What You’re Allowed To Know
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki made a startling revelation: major social media platforms take direction from the government in deciding what content to suppress, amplify, or remove.
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki last week made a startling revelationfrom the White House press podium: that the major social media platforms take direction from the government in deciding what content to suppress, amplify, or remove.
On Thursday, Psaki casually made note of the fact that the White House was working in coordination with Facebook, flagging specific “problematic” posts for COVID-19 “misinformation.” She was joined by Vivek Murthy, the U.S. surgeon general, whose office released a 22-page guidance urging platforms to “impose clear consequences for accounts that repeatedly violate platform policies.” Facebook later confirmed it is involved in “private exchanges” with the Biden administration on how to manage COVID-19 information on the platform.
What could have potentially been defended as a well-meaning effort to work with major speech outlets to combat certain inaccuracies about the efficacy of vaccines, however, quickly progressed beyond that. By Friday, the White House was pressuring companies to work together to ban users across multiple platforms. Efforts to ban “misinformation” about the COVID-19 vaccine, meanwhile, had evolved into banning “the latest narratives dangerous to public health.”
The problem with all of this, of course, is that the definition of misinformation is constantly changing to meet the needs of the powerful—whether that is the political needs of the party in charge, or the political or financial self-interest of the platforms.
Narrative Control Is The Real Power
Psaki’s revelation, as startling as it was, is clarifying. It remains a contested point in the debate over Big Tech whether these companies constitute “private enterprise” or if they’ve reached the level of indispensable services. But the Biden administration’s flippant acknowledgement that control of what is said on Facebook is central to their policy goals points toward the true status of these companies as essential corridors of speech.
It was for the same reason that Michelle Obama, when she decided that Donald Trump should be banned from social media, didn’t go to Congress to make her case, nor write an op-ed arguing for that position in a national newspaper—she issued a statement to Silicon Valley. Likewise, when congressional Democrats want to silence the influence of right-leaning speech, they threaten the social media companies with regulatory action to urge them to do more.
When a handful of companies take over the public square and dictate who can speak and what they can say—and, by extension, what people can hear—it fundamentally changes the nature of free speech as America has always understood it. But when the government exerts itself upon that power, dictating to compliant companies who can speak, and what can be seen, heard, and said, that, as Glenn Greenwald pointed out recently, is the taproot of fascism.
That we have reached the point where the White House is proudly admitting to an effort to control who can speak and what can be said on the world’s biggest speech platforms should not be surprising to anyone who has been paying attention over the last year. The COVID-19 outbreak has provided something of a case study of all the ways in which government can outsource the censorship of speech it would otherwise be obligated to protect.
Chokepoints of Public Discourse
In America, social media platforms have taken over the once-democratized public square. Posts on Facebook, information sorting on Google (and by extension, YouTube), apps filtered through Apple and Google, journalists sourcing stories and angles on Twitter, and documentaries and books sold and viewed through Amazon, largely shape the parameters of how Americans take in news, organize community gatherings, access the market, search for information, form opinions, and petition and hear from their government.
At the same time, the federal government has come to understand that co-opting these companies, which effectively control the national narrative, is where real power of modern governance resides. But this is hardly a new discovery.
Centuries ago, the philosopher John Stuart Mill, the chronicler of early America Alexis de Tocqueville, and dystopian novelist George Orwell all foresaw the imminent danger that arose from concentrated control of speech, thought, and opinion, whether through the government, housed in corporations, or enforced by a tyranny of a majority. Modern dictatorships have borne out their thesis. Control of capital, agencies, resources, and weapons is secondary to total control of a national narrative. The latter dictates where the former will go.
Concentrated Economic Power Requires a Response
The power of narrative control, and its attendant ends of power over speech, thought, and access to the marketplace centralized in the Big Tech platforms, will always be irresistible to government, regardless of who is in charge. This is why the concentrated power of these platforms must be so urgently addressed.
Accepting the reality of these companies as the brokers of expression in a free society requires a public policy response. No more is “transparency of terms of service” or advocating for “user rights” a sufficient solution, not when the power of these companies has evolved into a de facto arm of the state.
The power that these companies have is explicitly structural. The control that Google and Facebook, in particular, exert over speech is downstream of their market power. It is only worth the government’s time to successfully co-opt a speech platform if that platform represents a central avenue of expression. If the scale of that market power is broken—that is, if Google filters information for 30 percent of America, instead of its current market share of 90 percent—the co-option of full narrative control is impossible, either by Google or the government.
This is why the right must get serious about a type of antitrust enforcement that can successfully manage this kind of concentrated economic control over speech, information, and market access. Lax enforcement of our antitrust laws has played a direct role in the cartel presently controlling our market for information.
In the Senate, there is now general consensus ranging from progressive Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minnesota, to libertarian-leaning Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, that the status quo is insufficient, and statutory changes to enforcement must be made. Although the proposed solutions run across a spectrum, Congress must begin actively working toward that end.
But antitrust alone is not enough. How these companies operate must also be considered. While our discourse tends to treat these companies as speech platforms, which they are, they are also much more than that: Facebook and Google are massive digital advertising agencies and considered critical campaign infrastructure for political candidates.
Amazon is the biggest book retailer in the country, Apple and Google control the country’s app market, Facebook and Amazon are the primary access point for millions of small businesses, and newsrooms and other businesses throughout the country conform themselves to terms set by Google and Facebook for good results in search rankings and access to the valuable consumer data that now runs much of the digital economy.
Together, Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook have concentrated not only the market for speech and expression, but represent the primary access points to the modern market and communications economy. How this is dealt with from a public policy perspective—by instituting common carrier laws, reshaping our legal framework for digital advertising, or regulating markets for data—is of vital consideration.
Our Self Government Must Act
In April, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas issued a concurrence that seemed to anticipate rising policy challenges presented by the union of corporate and state control over speech. “We will soon have no choice but to address how our legal doctrines apply to highly concentrated, privately owned information infrastructure such as digital platforms,” he wrote.
In his statement, which suggested that social media platforms be regulated as common carriers, Thomas mused over previous times in which new technologies began to transform the manner in which a free society operated, from the railroad to the telegraph. At each juncture, he noted, it was our self-government that acted to assert the terms, rather than waiting for private companies to decide for us the means of our democratic engagement.
The country again finds itself at such an occasion. Corporate power is merging with state power at massive scale, in ways that ripple beyond speech and into the ability of individuals to access the levers of capitalism, and to openly question or dissent from government narratives without serious consequence. These are the bedrocks on which a pluralistic, diverse, and free society is built. In their absence, there is only a soft descent into tyranny.
Rachel Bovard is The Federalist's senior tech columnist and the senior director of policy at the Conservative Partnership Institute.
New Tool Unmasks Big Tech’s Social Media Sock Puppets
In 2020 alone, Facebook and Amazon spent more money on lobbyists than did Raytheon, Northrup Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing—major players in the defense-industrial complex.
Big Tech companies are infamous for their massive lobbying muscle in Washington D.C., where they spend roughly $100 million annually to try and manipulate the policies meant to govern them. In 2020 alone, Facebook and Amazon spent more money on lobbyists than did Raytheon, Northrup Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing—major players in the defense-industrial complex.
The shadow influence of Big Tech on the institutions and academics of public policy formulation is just as significant, although far less transparent. For more than a decade, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple have been dumping hundreds of thousands of dollars a year into the think tanks and research arms of universities, paying for the intellectual infrastructure to support their favored policies. Who they pay, and how much, is only disclosed if the recipient deigns to make it public.
To tackle this problem, the American Principles Project (APP) has recently announced a new tool designed to help both the public and lawmakers make sense of where Big Tech money is flowing and to whom. Using what data is publicly available, they’ve developed a browser extension for use on Google’s Chrome browser that interfaces with Twitter to disclose which users are affiliated with organizations funded by Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple. In many cases, if organizations are funded by the big four and receive money from Microsoft or the technology company Oracle, that information is flagged as well.
Their effort provides much-needed clarity in an area that is notoriously murky. While lobbyists have to register and disclose their work, the disclosure of donations to think tanks, academics, and the public policy process is largely optional.
This allows Big Tech companies to launder lobbying for public policy outcomes through the veneer of independent analysis from both left and right perspectives. As APP puts it, Big Tech donations to think tanks are “inherently transactional rather than charitable, with full-time staff and consultants dedicated to disseminating talking points and tracking deliverables.”
This can result in some truly Potemkin levels of absurdity. The Federalist’s Emily Jashinsky observed this recently when the Progressive Policy Institute, a think tank heavily funded by Amazon, Facebook, and Google, put out a supposedly independent list of “investment heroes,” that ranked Amazon at the top.
Amazon immediately snapped up the plaudit and paid for an ad in Politico, a news outlet widely read by policymakers in Washington, to highlight it. As Emily put it, “Amazon funds a think tank that ranks it as a top investor, then uses that ranking to sponsor a newsletter touting the award.”
Think tanks, of course, exist to provide intellectual direction for policymakers. There is a significant role for outside experts in DC policy formulation, both in providing expertise not housed in Congress, and bringing to bear thoughtful scholarship and analysis.
But if and how Big Tech companies are attempting to influence the outcome of this research has largely been unclear. All the companies provide some level of disclosure about the “third party” groups they fund, although it’s usually buried in obscure PDFs in cobwebbed corners of shareholder information websites, and it generally does not include the amount of funding provided (institutional disclosures indicate contributions to think thanks are usually in the roughly low to mid six figures). The contours of Big Tech’s intellectual influence, in other words, have been difficult to define.
Reporting suggests the influence is vast. Last year, The New York Times made note of the “hundreds of thousands of dollars” from Google and Amazon and a “three year, multimillion-dollar donation” from Qualcomm that went to the Global Antitrust Institute at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School. The institute regularly writes, argues, and testifies in front of Congress for a hand-off approach to antitrust enforcement.
Tech-funded third-party groups also engage in a practice called “grasstopping,” recruiting small business owners to write op-eds in local papers supporting Big Tech’s positions, largely without disclosing their involvement.
Following a practice pioneered by the pharmaceutical industry, Google also makes a robust practice of paying professors at universities to write papers defending against regulatory challenges. In 2017, the Wall Street Journal reported that Google had funded roughly 100 academic papers on public policy matters since 2009.
Some of those papers end up weighing in on consequential public policy decisions. When the Federal Trade Commission decided not to pursue an antitrust case against Google in 2013, agency economists advising that approach cited as partial justification a study by Google and two academic papers funded by grants from Google.
The opaqueness clouding Big Tech’s think tank influence has always been its defining feature. The biggest companies in the world are able to make their case in Washington with the same rights as the rest of us, but the size and scope of their efforts should be easy to see and understand.
“Sunlight,” Louis Brandeis once noted, “is said to be the best of disinfectants.” Our self-government is only beginning to grapple with how the country will engage with the biggest and most powerful companies the world has ever seen.
The debate that follows will involve many voices. And if some of those voices are amplifying the concerns of the companies at issue, that information should be widely available. APP’s Big Tech Funding project is a welcome contribution to that end.
Rachel Bovard is The Federalist's senior tech columnist and the senior director of policy at the Conservative Partnership Institute.
RACHEL BOVARD
“MARKET UNFREEDOM: CAUSES AND CURES”
The American right is facing a host of new challenges. From the rise of China to the costs of globalization, from ideologically weaponized corporate power to the financial struggles of middle-class families, almost everyone can acknowledge the problems, but there is little agreement on what to do, or even whether something should be done at all.
Much of the disagreement centers on a tension that has long bedeviled conservatism: the tug between prioritizing traditional values and the family, on the one hand, and promoting economic freedom, on the other. In 1958, Wilhelm Röpke tried to bridge the two with A Humane Economy. In Röpke’s telling, economic freedom and society’s values are not so much in conflict as they are mutually reinforcing. A free economy depends on sturdy institutions and strong families, and the social and economic liberty a market provides is required for true freedom of choice and action.
But for the past forty years or so, much of the political and institutional right has emphasized markets over traditional values, convincing itself that competition and markets are the end-all of a free society, even as those markets concentrate and wield power in ways that are antithetical to traditional values, moral liberty, and free thought.
The result has been an institutional conservative movement that expresses a singular policy focus on markets, such that any positive action by the state—to curtail monopolies, respond to the excesses of globalization, engage with economic competition from China, or use public policy to support families in ways that sustain freedom and strengthen traditional values—is lumped together as “the heavy hand of government,” which we must avoid using at any cost.
This tension between markets and values, and between hesitance and action, is crystallized in the right’s approach to corporate power, in particular to the unprecedented market concentration and multisector control enjoyed by companies like Amazon, Google, and Facebook. The massive scale at which these companies exist has empowered them to alter the flow of information, limit the visibility of political speech and public dissent, and constrain access to the digital marketplace, which is now a dominant area of commerce.
These companies are profoundly reshaping our markets as well as our values of free speech and expression. Many on the right point out that these are private industries acting independently in the free market, and they suggest that the corporate First Amendment should trump the right of the individual. To use public policy to engage with these companies would be an abdication of principle, as market forces, not the government, should resolve market questions.
But this question is one that the right should not so easily dismiss. Amazon, Google, and Facebook monopolize different markets in legal ways and dominate value systems that exist outside of any marketplace. True, monopolies may fall on their own, but only after decades of wielding maximal economic power to crush competitors and impose cultural priorities that fundamentally remake the way we think, act, and engage with one another—behaviors that form the bedrock of citizenship and self-government.
Moreover, confronting tech companies on their own terms will require conservatives to be honest about the reality that these are not pure “free market” actors. They receive carve-outs and subsidies, and they benefit enormously from a government-created liability shield known as Section 230. In other words, the government incentivizes, and our public policy protects, behaviors that have grown detrimental to healthy market competition and the social order.
This is not to say that there aren’t trade-offs in public policy, or that the consequences of government action should not be thoughtfully and robustly considered. The state retains unique power to distort incentives and crush individual liberties, often in ways that are hard to foresee and difficult to undo. But just as there is prudence in pausing for reflection, there is imprudence in failing to consider the risks of inaction within the full context of the values, liberties, and traditions that are at stake.
Policies addressing these companies, from reforming Section 230 to common carrier regulation to enforcing our nation’s antitrust laws, are less about government acting where it wasn’t before than about a choice to be made between competing priorities. Does the unfettered market win for its own sake, or has the market created an excess that now threatens the values we as a society prioritize?
This question becomes especially pointed as “woke capital” escapes the Big Tech companies and infects the infrastructure of capitalism. Major financial institutions—beneficiaries of tremendous government largesse—are already denying services to companies that do business with our federal immigration-enforcement services, “dirty” energy industries like oil and gas, and anyone involved with the sale of certain firearms.
A conservative movement that supports active public policy toward these institutions in the form of tax breaks, deregulatory efforts, and multiple financial-sector bailouts but that also calls any action that opposes the targeting of politically disfavored businesses and individuals the “heavy hand” of “big government” is not one with a coherent political vision. Moreover, such positioning accepts the modern corruption of liberalism in which rights, once conceived in the Lockean sense as enlarging the space for individual autonomy against coercive power, are now used to justify narrowing that space in accordance with an inquisitorial agenda.
Conservatives have always believed in a government with limits. A function of the limited state is to clear and protect the space in which our markets, associations, and value systems can freely interact. Many of the policy challenges facing conservatives—from tackling China’s economic aggression, to combating the scourge of critical race theory and the diminishment of parental rights, to using our laws to correct distortions in our own free market, to encouraging strong family development—should be viewed through this lens. Recent actions taken by Florida governor Ron DeSantis to beat back the corporate power of tech companies that are shrinking the public square, for example, are instructive.
The left has shown no compunction about giving itself the authority to impose its will upon every area of public and private life—the economy, the culture, and even religion—regardless of what conservatives do. The question for conservatives now is whether they will meet their adversaries on the field of politics and use self-government to maintain and preserve a traditional order against the forces of decay, or whether they will continue their relentless retreat, paralyzed by an ideological commitment to individual trees as the entire forest is set ablaze.
Rachel Bovard is senior director of policy at the Conservative Partnership Institute.