Trump era's true gift to Putin: Big Tech censorship

Alexei Navalny, the opposition leader whom the Russian secret police nearly killed with military-grade poison last year, is worried about Twitter's decision to shut down Donald Trump's account.

Navalny is no Trump fan. The reason he is worried is that the way U.S. tech has ganged up on Trump and his most radical supporters can lead to Navalny's own deplatforming in Russia, where he has no access to state-controlled media and relies on mostly U.S.-based social networks — YouTube, Facebook, Twitter — to spread his message. It's a valid concern.

Navalny laid out his logic in an English-language Twitter thread. "In my opinion, the decision to ban Trump was based on emotions and personal political preferences," he wrote. "Don't tell me he was banned for violating Twitter rules. I get death threats here every day for many years, and Twitter doesn't ban anyone (not that I ask for it)."

He added: "Of course, Twitter is a private company, but we have seen many examples in Russia and China of such private companies becoming the state's best friends and enablers when it comes to censorship." And, "This precedent will be exploited by the enemies of freedom of speech around the world. In Russia as well. Every time when they need to silence someone, they will say: 'this is just common practice, even Trump got blocked on Twitter'."

I can't say I was surprised to see American commentators jump in with condescending retorts telling Navalny that he doesn't get it, doesn't understand the importance of cracking down on insurrection or the right of private companies to police their platforms.

The thing is, Navalny nearly died defending Russians' right to protest and, as a corruption fighter, he's spent more than a decade delving into the shadowy relationships between private companies and the state. If he hasn't earned the right to be heard as an expert on such matters, I don't know who has.

The private company argument simply doesn't fly. Twitter and Facebook have tolerated Trump and his fans in all their glory — calls for journalists to be murdered, racist bile, direct threats — throughout the Trump presidency. Even if they said they didn't, the stuff was impossible to miss as a user of the social platforms. Apple, Google and Amazon allowed the censorship-free platform Parler, frequented by the far right, to grow using their services until two things happened: last week's Capitol riot — and the Georgia Senate elections that handed the Democrats full political control of the U.S.

Are the tech giants suddenly outraged because a Democratic administration, in control of the House and Senate, can quickly regulate them in all kinds of painful ways?

Seen from Russia or Turkey or China, where concerns about politically motivated regulatory moves by single-party governments are top of mind for every business owner, this picture is familiar.

One could argue that even if U.S.-based tech platforms have rushed to align themselves with the political winners in their country to avoid a costly confrontation, they won't do the same for Russian President Vladimir Putin or his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan. But it's more complicated than that.

On paper, authoritarian regimes' terrorism and insurrection laws are similar to those of the U.S. Now, the regimes have cover to demand from the U.S. networks that they ban Russian, Turkish, Belarusian "domestic terrorists" on the same grounds as the ones used against Trump and Trumpists — inciting aggressive, violent protest. And if the platforms refuse, they will be accused of double standards, declared tools of the U.S. government and themselves harassed and possibly banned.

That one-two combination wasn't possible before, because even authoritarians these days have to pay lip service to freedom of speech. What the platforms have done takes that concern out of the equation.

Where would a Facebook, Twitter and YouTube ban leave people like Navalny? They'd be confined to any startup platforms that emerge to pick up the slack, and to Telegram, the Dubai-based platform created by Russian libertarian Pavel Durov, which the Russian government tried to block but failed, as Telegram fought back by ingenious technical means.

But even for Telegram, which isn't U.S.-based, running uncensored content is dangerous these days. Like Parler, it could be thrown out of app stores, for example (although Telegram has been working on a full-featured mobile browser-based version for just such an eventuality).

The U.S. tech platforms, of course, weren't set up to enable political opposition to authoritarian regimes. They are commercial enterprises that exist to make money by selling ads. It's probably a strategic mistake for opposition figures in any country to put their eggs in this basket. But given the platforms' oligopolistic nature, there hasn't been much choice.

In today's world, if a platform is to enable free speech, it needs to be technologically extraterritorial — free from reliance on any providers sensitive to pressure from nation states. Both legally and financially, building such a platform is an enormous challenge. But then, I remember a time when authoritarian rulers failed despite banning private copy machines, let alone content platforms.