Time for big tech to respect liberty or be forced to do so – The Times of India Blog

The internet has pretty much been the Wild West for over two decades, which is a good thing and has allowed the best among various internet companies to grow.

We have all benefited. To me the greatest value-add of social media is that I can directly follow the smartest people on earth: Nobel prize winners and others whose opinions I find worth considering.

But somewhere down the line the winners in this internet battle (Big Tech companies like Facebook, Microsoft, Google and Twitter) seem to have become too big for their boots. They have begun to trample upon the liberty of their customers.

We have always had problems with these companies not adequately protecting our privacy but through the years we had struck sort of a balance. That is why, for long Ive argued that governments must not regulate Big Tech. Ive trusted in their innate common sense (they cant afford to annoy customers too much else they lose business) and in peoples ability to move to alternative platforms if they are unhappy with a particular service.

But 2020 has changed my mind. The option to move to alternative platforms means that still there is only a minimal case for regulation, but governments must now step in to define the minimum expectations from speech-related platforms. Terms and conditions cannot be allowed to be used to get people to sign away their liberty, just as contracts for slavery are forbidden. Speech-related companies must develop an industry code or be forced by the law assure their customers of the same speech protections that are assured by the First Amendment to the US Constitution.

To the rest of the world, the USA is a beacon of liberty. The First Amendment restricts only the US government from infringing free speech but the spirit of liberty represented in the Statue of Liberty represents something more: a belief amongst people across the world that the USA will lead us all to freedom. Through social media people living outside the USA get to experience some of that American liberty.

But in 2020, these companies have egregiously blocked content and even disabled the accounts of highly talented, competent people. One would not expect anything better from companies based in other countries but when American companies start trampling liberty, the world is facing a problem.

Over the past year I have been personally affected by these attacks. LinkedIn has banned me permanently a couple of months ago for posting material that I had taken from publicly available data sources. They claimed my post was not professional whatever that means. But it was absolutely true and authentic. The information I had posted casts doubt about the classification of covid deaths (an issue that has been repeatedly confirmed from other sources). All I can think is that this information might have been inconvenient for LinkedIns owner Bill Gates, with his drive to vaccinate everyone regardless of the true risk of covid among various age groups.

Likewise, with Facebook, on which I have diligently built around 50 pages and groups over the past decade to promote liberty. Then, in late 2020, I was banned twice. First, I was banned for 3 days for sharing a meme critical of Victoria Police. By blocking my criticism of the atrocities being committed by Victoria Police, Facebook has behaved no differently from the Chinese Communist Party. It is colluding with the oppressive acts of Western governments.

I resumed posting after the 3-day ban expired but within days, Facebook banned me for a further 7 days for sharing an extract from a publication which discussed how people had grossly exaggerated the magnitude of the swine flu. I compared this with the official covid narrative which is also greatly exaggerated. That was sufficient for Facebook to block me, in an uncanny resemblance to totalitarian CCP.

These are not minor infringements that can be shrugged off. These attack everything that the free world stands for and that freedom fighters gave up their lives for even the Indians who fought Nazi totalitarianism during the second World War. Now that all governments (except Swedens) have adopted a totalitarian path to deal with a minor pandemic, Big Tech companies are treating people like Nazi Germany would have done.

This is intolerable. Either they must tell us that they are being forced by totalitarian governments to block our speech or they must immediately stop trampling upon our freedoms.

If speech-related companies wont self-regulate then a new law is needed. This law would require them to block direct incitement to violence (it must be direct) and content that obviously breaches criminal laws. They would be allowed to have age-appropriate settings for customer content, to protect children. But for all other speech, they would be forbidden from blocking or restricting content except on the orders of a court. And forbidden from forcing people to sign off their free speech rights through terms and conditions.

The more I see the character of some of the leaders of the Big Tech companies, the less I find to admire about them. They lie and do not keep their promises. The recent breach of promise by WhatsApp is a glaring example, with data that users were assured would never be released now being handed over to Facebook.

No one expects private business leaders to behave with any integrity. As Indias only pro-busines party, Swarna Bharat Party does not expect business leaders to be paragons of virtue. But we trust government leaders even less. The reason why our party prefers private businesses to undertake most activities in society and not the government is because we believe that competition can keep the private sector in check whereas there is no check on the excesses of monopoly governments.

Fortunately, people have the option even today of voting with their feet. I am making arrangements to permanently abandon WhatsApp and will incrementally move out of Facebook in which I had once invested considerable time and money to build groups and pages. I will take my business elsewhere, blacklist any company that advertises on totalitarian Facebook, and recommend that we all look for and support free speech platforms.

Let us make it clear to all these people that our freedoms are non-negotiable.

Views expressed above are the author's own.

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Time for big tech to respect liberty or be forced to do so - The Times of India Blog