President Trump, Arizona Attorney General . . . Push Back Against Social-Media Giants

By DEXTER DUGGAN

Social media have assumed a power of their own, as anyone has noticed who didn’t just wake up from a hundred-year nap. They can be not merely information tools but also brawny propaganda engines.
And they may trace your every move so as to amass an understanding of, among other possibilities, what advertising to pitch to you online. And what else may be in their bag of tricks?
Recently, from out of the blue, when I’m reading political articles, not entertainment or gossip sites, which I avoid anyway, I started receiving pop-ups graphically advertising young women’s underwear. I’ve never even searched online for men’s outerwear or men’s underwear, much less women’s! And the pitches kept coming no matter how much low-tech me deleted or reported them.
I get the idea of some shadowy master control room where the globalists figure out to harass Christian conservatives through the web. Maybe that’s being too suspicious, but this definitely isn’t a case of advertisers responding to inquiries from this corner that would elicit such pitches.
Longtime media-savvy Donald Trump was only one of those who realized the value of tweeting to a big audience, although Trump’s followers were more numerous than most others. But he saw that supposedly neutral social-media platforms could be as hostile to him as dominant “news” media that loathed and manipulated about every word he said.
On May 28 Trump issued an executive order saying in part: “In a country that has long cherished the freedom of expression, we cannot allow a limited number of online platforms to hand-pick the speech that Americans may access and convey on the Internet. This practice is fundamentally un-American and anti-democratic.
“When large, powerful social-media companies censor opinions with which they disagree, they exercise a dangerous power,” Trump’s order said. “They cease functioning as passive bulletin boards, and ought to be viewed and treated as content creators….
“Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube wield immense, if not unprecedented, power to shape the interpretation of public events; to censor, delete, or disappear information; and to control what people see or do not see,” he added.
“. . . Twitter now selectively decides to place a warning label on certain tweets in a manner that clearly reflects political bias. As has been reported, Twitter seems never to have placed such a label on another politician’s tweet,” Trump said.
“As recently as last week, Representative Adam Schiff was continuing to mislead his followers by peddling the long-disproved Russian Collusion Hoax, and Twitter did not flag those tweetes. Unsurprisingly, its officer in charge of so-called ‘Site Integrity’ has flaunted his political bias in his own tweets,” the president said.
Arizona conservative Republican political consultant Constantin Querard told The Wanderer on June 1, “I expect we’ll see legal challenges to the president’s authority in this area, but there is a worthwhile debate going on over whether or not these big social-media platforms are just platforms who are not responsible for the content that appears on them, or if they are actually publishers, exercising editorial control or censorship over the content.
“They certainly appear to be the latter, which increases the likelihood that they are liable/responsible for what they publish or allow to be published,” Querard said. “They want it both ways — they want to silence the voices they disagree with while claiming they have no control and should therefore have no liability.”
In the home state of much of the social-media industry, a California woman told The Wanderer on May 30, “Fox News was reporting that Trump wants to treat Google, etc., as ‘publishers’ rather than as they pushed to be, ‘platforms,’ because they didn’t want to be sued.
“The minute they started suppressing some news/groups and promoting others, ‘fact-checking’ and putting such warnings on ideas they didn’t like, they became publishers and can be regulated by libel laws, among other things. I say, go for it, Mr. President,” she said.
Victor Joecks, an opinion columnist with the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Nevada’s largest news platform, told The Wanderer on June 1, “Social-media companies have repeatedly used their platforms to promote their liberal political ideology.”
Meanwhile, the attorney general of Arizona, conservative Republican Mark Brnovich, filed suit against Google on May 27 for allegedly collecting data on users that they should have been able to put off-limits. A news release from Brnovich’s office said:
“. . . Brnovich filed a lawsuit in Maricopa County Superior Court . . . against Google LLC for deceptive and unfair practices used to obtain users’ location data, which Google then exploits for its lucrative advertising business.”
It said the state “brought forward this action under the Arizona Consumer Fraud Act to put a stop to Google’s deceptive collection of user data and obtain monetary relief up to and including forcing Google to disgorge gross receipts arising from its Arizona activities.”
Interviewing Brnovich on his Conservative Circus talk program on Phoenix-based KFYI (550 AM) on May 28, host James T. Harris noted that the state attorney general didn’t confer with other Arizona officials like Republican Gov. Doug Ducey before filing the suit. Brnovich replied that’s because he serves the people of Arizona, not other interests.
Reporting on Trump’s executive order, National Public Radio said on May 28 that Twitter in a statement “called Trump’s order ‘a politicized approach to a landmark law,’ saying attempts to erode the decades-old legal immunity may ‘threaten the future of online speech and Internet freedoms’.”
NPR said later in its story, “Legal experts greeted the order with heavy skepticism, saying, absent a new law passed by Congress, it would not be legally binding.”
Former Montana daily newspaper conservative editor Frank Miele noted in a June 1 online column with RealClearPolitics that Twitter was setting itself up as Trump’s censor by appealing to other liberal sources to judge the accuracy of what the president said.
Because Twitter didn’t like what Trump said about the potential for fraud during mail-in balloting, Miele wrote, “the company created a new policy that allowed it to flag his tweets as ‘unsubstantiated, according to CNN, Washington Post, and others.’ Never mind that hundreds of other sources could be provided to buttress the president’s concerns; CNN has spoken!”
Twitter soon went on to attack Trump’s tough warnings against current rioting around the nation as the president “glorifying violence.” Not the actual violence by the rioters, as Twitter saw it, but Trump’s warnings against committing it.
“In the course of an astounding 100 hours,” Miele wrote, “Twitter effectively shed its liability exemption by revealing exactly what it truly is — a publisher with a political agenda — and therefore subject to the same laws that obligate all publishers to take responsibility for any content they publish.”
Miele added later in his column, “I’m no lawyer, but common sense tells me that as soon as Twitter evaluates a tweet for content, it has stepped beyond its role as a neutral platform and has become a publisher. If so, then the president was entirely correct in his…executive order calling for a review of the legal protections that have been granted to Internet companies like Twitter and Facebook for decades.”
U.S. Attorney General William Barr supported Trump’s action, saying, according to a White House transcript, that basically what had started as website “bulletin boards” decades ago “have become really behemoths who control a lot of the flow of information in our society to engage in censorship of that information and to act as editors and publishers of the material.
“So,” Barr said, “when they put on their own content — like ‘fact check’ content — onto other people’s content, and when they curate their collection, and when they start censoring particular content including, in many cases, at the direction of foreign governments like Communist China, they become publishers and they shouldn’t be entitled to the same kind of shield that was set up earlier,” when they were “a fledgling industry.”

Detailed Information

As for the Arizona lawsuit, state Attorney General Brnovich said, “While Google users are led to believe they can opt-out of location tracking, the company exploits other avenues to invade personal privacy. It’s nearly impossible to stop Google from tracking your movements without your knowledge or consent. This is contrary to the Arizona Consumer Fraud Act, and even the most innovative companies must operate within the law.”
A news release accompanying Brnovich’s announcement said: “Google derives the vast majority of its profit through selling advertisements and displaying them to users of Google’s products and services. In 2019, over 80 percent of Google’s revenues — $135 billion out of $161 billion total — were generated through advertising.
“Google collects detailed information about its users, including their physical locations, to target users for advertising in a specific geographic location,” the release said. “Google’s collection of location data also allows the tech giant to validate the effectiveness of ads by reporting to advertisers how often online ad clicks are converted into real-world store visits. . . .
“Arizona’s investigation has also revealed that Google uses deceptive and unfair practices to collect as much user information as possible and makes it exceedingly difficult for users to understand what’s being done with their data, let alone opt-out,” it said.
“Given the lucrative nature of Google’s advertising business, the company goes to great lengths to collect users’ location, including through presenting users with a misleading mess of settings, some of which seemingly have nothing to do with the collection of location information,” the news release said.
ABC News reported on May 29 that Google spokesman Jose Castaneda disputed Arizona’s lawsuit in a statement, saying: “The attorney general and the contingency-fee lawyers filing this lawsuit appear to have mischaracterized our services. We have always built privacy features into our products and provided robust controls for location data. We look forward to setting the record straight.”