After seeking information from the likes of Steve Bannon, Mark Meadows, Sean Hannity and the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, Congress’s select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol was inevitably going to get around to the tech companies.
The committee’s chairman, Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, announced subpoenas for four social media companies — Meta, Alphabet, Twitter and Reddit — as a part of its widening investigation, underscoring “inadequate responses to prior requests for information.” Ha, no surprise there.
The committee said the records from the companies were necessary to help determine “the spread of misinformation, efforts to overturn the 2020 election, domestic violent extremism and foreign influence in the 2020 election.”
While social media platforms weren’t the prime players in this depressing democracy drama, there is no question they were a central tool for organizers, particularly Facebook. And the tech companies were asleep at the wheel when it came to any oversight that would help ensure against the proliferation of content that promotes violence.
As the actor Sacha Baron Cohen told me in an interview for “Sway,” we all have freedom of speech, but freedom of reach is another thing altogether when it is used for malevolent purposes.
It’s more than worthwhile to debate how much liability these companies should have, particularly since they have virtually none today, thanks to the protections afforded by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Not to mention the ongoing discussions in Congress about reforming Section 230. So it’s critical the committee make transparent how these social media products were used and, mostly, abused in the shameful attack.
At the heart of that is figuring what dangerous or even criminal information was traveling over those information superhighways and why so much of it was not flagged or stopped. Big Tech has long touted its superior self-regulation, so it’s high time we resolve why it did such a lousy job leading up to the Capitol siege. (Sadly, the answer is likely that there’s simply no economic incentive to crack down.)
The subpoenas center on the biggies, but we should not forget the roles of other social media companies, either. Like Parler, the right-leaning social media site that was funded by the conservative Mercer family. It was deplatformed by Apple (which later let it back on), Google and Amazon Web Services after an interview I did with John Matze, Parler’s chief executive officer at the time, as the attack was taking place. He expressed zero culpability about what was then underway at the Capitol.
I noted that many Parler users were likely using the platform to organize, share footage of the attack and, worst of all, call for violence against elected officials. But Matze was steadfast: “I don’t feel responsible for any of this, and neither should the platform, considering we’re a neutral town square that just adheres to the law.”
Parler certainly paid the price for his egregious statement, even as Meta executives claimed — falsely — that most of the problem was on platforms other than Facebook. It was not, which is a point the new Parler C.E.O., George Farmer, made to me in a recent interview.
“The George Washington University program on extremism detailed over 270 charging documents. And 54 percent of those documents, if I recall correctly, were related to Facebook, 13 percent to Twitter, 13 percent to Instagram, and only 5 percent were referencing Parler,” he said. “Scapegoating Parler as somehow a unique sort of medium through which people communicated in the run-up to January the 6th is both false and misleading.”
Well, maybe scapegoating is, but pointing fingers at the bigger guy for bad management does not absolve any of the other tech companies. Nor does it mean that the committee should not carry through with an examination into how moderation is conducted — or avoided — throughout the powerful social media ecosystem and, more important, how these platforms are so susceptible to manipulation by bad actors.
Ultimately, the abuse of digital tools for violent ends is not a free-speech issue, although that is always raised as an effective smoke screen. This sector is chock-full of sketchy players with ill intent who try to blend in with the online loudmouths and malcontents.
There is, of course, a caveat. Disdainful as it may be, innocent people should be allowed to say stupid, evil, vile things online, even if they get amplified far too much. So it’s important the committee be razor-focused on what it wants to glean from these tech giants. Big Tech will use the rallying cry of user privacy — as though it has ever cared about that — to try to wiggle out of what is clear mismanagement and a gross dereliction of duty on its part.
So I say bring on the subpoenas! And by the way, if you cheer when such legal demands are aimed at someone you don’t like — like Bannon or Hannity — you need to support the quest for truth, no matter where it leads. In other words: Mark Zuckerberg, you’ve been served.
4 Questions
I caught up with Adam McKay, the Hollywood writer, producer and director, whose most recent work includes the buzzy Netflix allegory “Don’t Look Up” and, on HBO Max, “Succession.” He answered my questions about streaming content, tech moguls and cryptocurrency. I’ve edited his answers.
Everyone wants to know which tech mogul you were channeling in the character Peter Isherwell in “Don’t Look Up.” But rather than try to pry that out of you, I’d rather know what key characteristics you were aiming for in your depiction of him.
Isherwell is a combination of all the tech billionaires — Zuckerberg, Brin, Bezos, Thiel, Ellison. Mix them up in a blender, add some basil and you’ve got Isherwell.
The climate change metaphor aside, what I took away from “Don’t Look Up” is the danger inherent in the deference to tech moguls who are now practically governments unto themselves — and who are frequently wrong but never in doubt. Do you worry about this class of power that is accountable to no one?
For sure, I’m worried about tech billionaires, but I’m more worried about a whole society and culture that has been bowled over by giant capital. Political leaders, media, tech billionaires, celebrity, social media all serve, to varying degrees, their own bottom lines first and foremost, rather than any kind of public good. The tech billionaires stand out because it’s rare to see so much societal dysfunction residing in one individual. When you have a dude worth $80 billion, you end up fusing our obsession with celebrities with spiraling income inequality into a single person.
As a filmmaker, how do you look at being on a streaming platform versus more traditional venues that dominated in the past? Or does it not matter anymore — you will gravitate to whichever medium is best for the project?
I think each specific story needs its own specific perfect home or release model. We really wanted “Don’t Look Up” to be a worldwide release, given what’s it’s about. And Netflix is able to do that in a way no other distribution platform ever has. But I can’t imagine “Succession” anywhere else except HBO. Our one worry was that “Don’t Look Up” is mostly a comedy and it’s rare to see a comedy play with broad international appeal. But when it comes to anxiety about the current state of the world, it seems that that is now somewhat of a universal experience. So it ended up working out much better than we had anticipated.
You’ve done movies on finance, like “The Big Short.” What do you imagine a cryptocurrency-centered movie would look like?
It would be about a cryptocurrency that, rather than existing on the blockchain, exists exclusively in the form of Siamese cat turds. Governments would go on to create giant litter boxes in airplane hangars where thousands of cats create turds 24/7 that are then shipped to the national bank vault. Counterfeit turds are created by black-and-white tuxedo cats but can be detected by —
I’m going to stop this answer right now and apologize to you. I’m a bit tired. Ha-ha.
