How the Right Has Wrestled with Silicon Valley for 20+ Years

And why relying on conspiracy theories is hurting legitimate conversations about speech

First and foremost, I owe yet another apology for sending a newsletter twice. The exhaustion of a crazy start to the year caught up with me this week, and I didn’t realize that I had created Tuesday’s piece twice. I’m sorry, and I appreciate your understanding. It’s not my intention to spam you.

As many know, this was a big week in the tech policy world. The Supreme Court issued its first ruling on the series of tech cases before it this term and heard arguments in Murthy v Missouri. 

The ruling was in Lindke v Freed, where Freed, the city manager of Port Huron, Michigan, blocked Lindke from one of his social media accounts. The unanimous ruling by the court created a new test for determining when someone is acting in their official or personal capacity. Lawfare has a great rundown that I recommend you read to go more in-depth.

In Murthy v Missouri, I was trying to think about what unique perspective I could bring to the case, as many people smarter than me have covered it. Kate Klonick has two deep dives on her Substack that I recommend. One includes resources about the case (including pieces by other really smart people), and another includes an analysis after oral arguments. For those unfamiliar, this case looks at the government’s engagement with social media companies in flagging potentially harmful content.

What kept coming back to me is that it might be helpful to look back at the two-decade relationship the Right has had with the tech industry and speech and consider what might follow these arguments. This debate is far from done, and while I think the Right is asking some legitimate questions, I also think they need to stop trying to make their points on speech by jumping on conspiracy theories and harassing people.

But how did we get here? Some may think it goes back to the controversy surrounding Facebook’s trending topics product in 2016. We’ll get there, but we need to return to 2000. As Collier Fernekes and I wrote in our brief history of tech and elections:

“[R]eporting emerged in September 2000 on an interesting phenomenon called Googlebombing. An online humor magazine had manipulated Google’s search results so that if you searched for “dumb motherf****r” [asterisks ours] you would be redirected to a George W. Bush merchandise store. Google called the prank an anomaly and said it was working to improve online security.”  

Fast forward to 2005, when Google’s then director of consumer web products, Marissa Mayer, had to issue a blog post explaining why if someone searched for “miserable failure,” the first result was the White House’s official biographical page for President Bush. Google said they received some complaints from people who assumed that this reflected a political bias on their part. Google tried to explain they didn’t condone Googlebombing but were reluctant to step in to alter the results.

This happened again in 2006 when the liberal blogger Dan Savage began an online campaign against Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum. Savage created an unflattering website about the Senator that popped up first when users searched for Santorum’s name. In 2011, when Santorum was running for president, the Senator became more vocal about how none of the search engines would fix the top results, and he accused them of bias.

In 2008, Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes left the company to help the Obama campaign garnering headlines in the New York Times such as “The Facebooker Who Friended Obama.” That certainly didn’t help the perception that Silicon Valley was liberal. It also didn’t help that when Facebook hired Ted Ullyot as general counsel; there was an uproar from some employees about his work in the George W. Bush administration.

When I joined the company in 2011, I had a lot of folks on the Right shocked that the company would actually hire a Republican. I wasn’t the first, and I was far from the last. For a few years, people of all ideologies wanted to come to campus. Presidents Bush and Obama, Representatives Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor, and Kevin McCarthy did live streams with leadership.

Over the years, there have been examples of content accidentally being taken down and people attributing it to political bias. There would be stories of the percentage of employees at these companies donating to which political campaigns - most of which were on the left. There was always an undercurrent with the Right that tech was biased against them. (It’s worth here re-plugging my recent post about how everything is politics, but politics is not everything)

Then, it all broke out into the open on May 9, 2016. I was in the Philippines that night doing press hits for their election when I looked at my phone and saw a story by Gizmodo where a contractor accused Facebook of suppressing conservative content in their trending topics unit. You can read all about what happened here (and sort of surprisingly, Meta is trying trending topics again in Threads), but needless to say - this and the reaction to Trump’s win in November broke this tension out in the open in a way that continues to this day.

I have many more examples, but I think you get the point.

Politicizing the work of the platforms wasn’t just a thing on the Right. I’ve got plenty of examples of when the Left accused me and others at Facebook of “calling the shots” at the company and purposely taking actions to help the Right. 

Moreover, some research shows that Right-leaning content has gotten more reach and engagement over the years than other types of content. This is complicated to track, though, as there’s no way to categorize every account on any platform. Moreover, it’s not a reality that content will get 100 percent equal reach and visibility. Nor will there be parity as to whether the accounts violate a company’s terms.

Needless to say, it’s all very complicated.

Since 2020, and especially since Musk took over X in late 2022, the Right has really jumped the shark when making their case against tech. Rather than focusing on very legitimate questions and tradeoffs about how companies should write their content moderation policies or what the right guardrails are for the government in engaging with online platforms, they have built a case based upon lies, falsehoods, and cherry-picked nuggets of information strung together to create conspiracy theories that are not true. Dean Jackson has a good rundown of all that here.

Thankfully, on Monday, the justices - on both the left and right - called this out, and Justice Sotomayor said, “You know, I have such a problem with your brief, counselor. You omit information that changes the context of some of your claims. You attribute things to people who it didn't happen to. At least in one of the defendants, it was her brother that something happened to, not her. I don't know what to make of all this because you're -- you have a -- I'm not sure how we get to prove direct injury in any way.” 

My interpretation of this and the government’s brief is this scene from Happy Gilmore:

This is not the way we should be having this conversation, and the Right needs to regroup as these are serious issues we have to deal with, and it deserves better than the C team.

I know I am a mixed bag for many of you. Some of you are reading this and will always see me as a Republican political operative. Others will think I’ve sold out to the left and endorse censorship. 

I’ve been struggling with the word censorship. In his interview with Don Lemon on Monday, Musk said moderation is just another word for censorship. It’s such a loaded term when I think there are legitimate reasons to moderate content and behavior that isn’t illegal. I also am loathe to take content down. Platforms have a right to make those decisions, and advertisers and users can decide where they spend their time and money. But we also need counterspeech and to help people better navigate the information environment.

This week, at the Summit for Democracy in South Korea, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken outlined how the right to freedom of expression can be upheld while fighting disinformation. I agree; they are not mutually exclusive. 

This is the conversation we need to have about balancing those tradeoffs: how we hold people accountable for their words and how online platforms, governments, civil society, academia, and the media all hold one another accountable for their decisions.

We can do this without doxxing people, forcing them out of their homes, yelling at them in Congressional hearings, suing them, and ruining their careers. This goes across the spectrum.

As Americans, we need to remember that the rest of the world is watching and, often, emulating us. According to the latest Variety of Democracies report, “Freedom of expression remains the worst-affected component of democracy and is worsening in 35 countries in 2023.”

This is another newsletter topic for another day, but I think this is in part due to the Left calling for more content to be removed and the Right trying to silence academic researchers and others from doing their work.

This rant has already gone on a little longer than I probably should have let it, but here’s my hope. It looks likely that the court will rule that the Biden administration didn’t cross any lines. I suspect these rulings will be helpful, but they will not end this debate. I suspect that the politicization of Silicon Valley will grow as the election gets closer.

However, I hope we can also view this as a reset to the conversation to find ways forward on these very challenging issues. We all deserve that.

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