The news that Donald Trump’s presidential campaign pressured X, formerly Twitter, to censor journalist Ken Klippenstein has reignited the controversy over tech censorship in terms that replicate, almost word for word, what transpired four years ago with the Hunter Biden laptop scandal. You’ve got a news outlet publishing unauthorized disclosures that could hurt a presidential campaign on the eve of the election; you’ve got unredacted personal details ending up going public as a result; you have Twitter/X pointing to the latter fact to justify throttling the story and kicking the publisher off the platform; and you’ve got the tech company run by people with clear political sympathies toward the campaign that viewed the reporting as an electoral threat. This time, not only did this reportedly come due to pressure coming directly from a campaign, but Elon Musk, X’s owner, is also a megadonor to that same campaign.
“There is serious political danger to giving tech billionaires free reign to censor speech.”
Most everyone seems to agree there is serious political danger to giving tech billionaires free reign to censor speech on social media platforms. But because the debate over tech censorship is irreversibly infected by the partisan wrangling that seems to shape just about every issue in American life these days, they only seem to realize it when it’s their side that’s ended up in the censor’s bullseye.
The result is that those who largely yawned at, or even cheered on, Twitter’s suppression of The New York Post’s reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop are now up in arms. Despite the hypocrisy, this is encouraging to see: The left should be alarmed at the threat to press freedom and speech that tech censorship poses, and should be erupting in outrage that a billionaire would smother a piece of news reporting at the behest of a political campaign.
But there’s an added wrinkle. The right, which only four years ago screamed bloody murder over Twitter throttling the laptop story, has now gone silent or even actively justified Klippenstein’s suppression, often recycling wholesale the talking points previously used by its opponents. “Publishing information from a foreign adversary that was obtained through criminal means for the sake of interfering in the election should result in him getting banned,” tweeted conservative influencer Ian Miles Cheong. “Left-wing writers have been celebrating and sharing the publishing of the content stolen by Iranian terrorists,” declared journalist Andy Ngo, as he called for the company’s ban on Klippenstein to be expanded. Breitbart, for its part, called Meta’s decision to join in the ban a “rare moment of fairness and common sense.”
The most shameless hypocrisy came from Musk himself. X’s owner once said of the laptop story that “suspending the Twitter account of a major news organization for publishing a truthful story was obviously incredibly inappropriate.” But two years later, he did that exact thing, declaring Klippenstein’s post “one of the most egregious, evil doxxing actions we’ve ever seen.”
This is the problem with tech censorship disputes in a nutshell: Everyone’s principles are decided by the partisan demands of a given moment, making it impossible to build a broad, cross-partisan coalition for actually solving the dilemma it poses—even though both left and right would clearly benefit from making sure moderation policies are limited, fair, and consistent.
In principle, the fact that both left and right-leaning outlets have now been suppressed due to the political bias of tech censors and pressure from political actors should, at the very least, start a broader conversation about how to stop this from happening in future. At minimum, that would include something like an online bill of rights, which would ensure freedom of the press and other basic civil liberties are guaranteed on social media platforms, put in place a transparent and independent review process so that decisions aren’t made on the whims of individual censors, and guarantee transparency and the right of appeal. As was the case with The New York Post four years ago, Klippenstein’s relatively high profile and the media firestorm resulting from the ban led eventually to reinstatement. Smaller accounts likely wouldn’t have fared as well.
Ideally, we would also consider and map out what a public ownership model might look like for these tech platforms. Public ownership would not be a perfect solution, and there are real, thorny issues involved in the idea, not least of all the potential for political meddling in how they operate. But this is already what is happening, only shielded from public scrutiny and democratic accountability on the basis that these companies’ nominal private ownership means they don’t have to answer to the rest of us. A public ownership model could at least allow some level of democratic input into tech platform policies, and not just on matters of censorship, but on the algorithms and other profit-driven elements that currently do damage to children and prompt users to engage in unhealthy and addictive behavior.
But to even start having that conversation, we have to first break out of the tribal frame of thinking that partisan politics has trained us in; that how we think about and respond to any given issue is not a matter of the basic principles or the cold, hard practicalities involved, but whether it’s “right-coded” or “left-coded.” And that might be the heaviest lift of all.