Big Tech walks a tightrope as Republican Senators look for revenge over Hunter Biden allegations

“#BigTech CEOs are drunk on power & must be held accountable for interfering in this election.”

So said Ted Cruz, who unselfconsciously used #BigTech to tweet this out last week, as it emerged that Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) and Jack Dorsey (Twitter) had been instructed to appear before the Senate Commerce Committee to answer the accusation that they recently censored coverage of the New York Daily Post story about Hunter Biden and his “Laptop From Hell”. The Committee examination of this episode began yesterday with representatives from the Big Tech companies being grilled over the minutiae of the decisions that were made.

The politics of this are at once so simple and yet so complex. To unpack the tweet deserves one of those treatments you normally find on YouTube. How would you explain this to a child, a teenager, a college student, a university graduate, and a postdoc?

To the child, we’d simply point out that this is like a game of ping pong. Donald Trump has been accused of conducting shady business in Ukraine so his side is trying to hit the ball back across the net, imparting enough spin to make it seem that it’s really his rival, Joe Biden, who heads a crime family.

To the teenager, we’d get into the Realpolitik. As the majority in the Judiciary Committee, the Republicans are adroitly leveraging what power they still have while this Congress lasts. They aim to drive a narrative that Trump’s own intelligence community has already described as a Russian disinformation campaign, but they push it, nevertheless, knowing that by keeping the name “Hunter Biden” in the headlines, they will influence some voters.

The college student needs to understand this in terms of the wider culture war. Republicans are highlighting the stance that social media companies apparently take towards people with a conservative agenda. In silencing Trump and Trump surrogates during an election, social media is deciding which matters should be placed before the American public. Do the Republicans have a point? Answer in 500 words, citing your sources…

To the graduate, we’d point out that the Republican argument does appear to be contradictory. It is the Trump administration that has been pushing to repeal the Communications Decency Act and, specifically, Section 230, which ensures that media platforms are not held accountable for third-party material. Trump has repeatedly pushed the narrative that social media is biased against conservatives, despite the evidence otherwise.

After all, it is Donald Trump who rose to power because of the way his campaign weaponised Facebook and the way he himself boosted the profile of Twitter. Social media companies could merely argue that they are being more accountable, complying with Trump’s vision of new media, though in ways that Trump would not himself endorse.

At the same time, the actions of Big Tech can’t be divorced from the politics around their core business. These companies are acutely aware of their power and, rather than feeling “drunk”, they appear quite sober, choosing to act before their power is curtailed. The House’s Antitrust Subcommittee just this month released their 450-page “Investigation of Competition in Digital Markets”, which concluded that these companies have “leveraged their market power in negotiations with businesses and individuals to dictate the terms of the relationship” and that abusing “their superior bargaining power in these ways can cause long-term and far-reaching harm”.

The tone of the report could have hardly surprised anybody. Big Tech faces pressure everywhere, with both the UK and EU conducting anti-trust investigations regarding their business practices. All the while, the companies are also fighting among themselves. Epic Games – makers of the hugely popular game Fortnite – has launched a lawsuit against Apple, challenging the way the latter forces third parties to process payments through Apple’s infrastructure.

The lawsuit opens up a debate about anti-trust business practices disguised as proprietary operating systems and a ruling could fundamentally change the way Big Tech does business, as well as opening up your devices to other content providers. If that seems too niche, consider that Microsoft and Sony, the lead players in a global industry expected to be worth nearly $160 billion in 2020, who are launching new games consoles in November with ecosystems as closed as Apple’s iOS.

The Big Tech companies walk a tightrope, then, given their business interests on the one hand and their ongoing engagement with government on the other. There’s also nothing to say that a Biden administration would look upon them any more kindly given the success of Elizabeth Warren’s populist rhetoric on this matter. To the Republicans, in the meantime, Big Tech companies might argue that it’s hardly their fault if the stories they are forced to censor due to lack of evidence are stories promoted by the right.

And it is at this point where we get to the post-doctoral treatment of the story, where politics slips into philosophy. It raises questions that go to the heart of First Amendment rights and how we navigate around free speech given the ubiquity of social media. Unless a media platform is nationalised, should there be a compulsion to publish certain content? Should they be any different to traditional publishers who have the right to decide what is or is not published in their books, papers, and magazines?

Lastly, should the Republicans push this line of argument, doesn’t it leave them effectively chasing their tail? Do they genuinely welcome government interference in a free market? Just as the market produced Facebook and Twitter, doesn’t the same market provide alternative platforms such as Gab and Parler that are more popular with the Right? Isn’t it then up to users to decide which they prefer and then allow the market to decide if those platforms (and, by extension, those opinions) are sustainable?

The more context we give, the more the arguments resolve back to the simplest. The issues being raised might be worth a long and complicated debate about free speech but what Ted Cruz and the eleven other Republicans on the Judiciary Committee are doing amounts to something that even a child can understand. It’s just the old game of political ping-pong being played quite crudely. We will have to wait until November to see if it’s in any way effective.