Silicon Valley once leveraged its absolute control over its social media platforms to forcibly export its own beliefs, narratives and cultural values to the world through its acceptable speech guidelines. The unchallenged ability of America to force democratic and free speech ideals upon the world’s nations was seen as the ultimate soft power application of American control of the Web. In turn, the darker neocolonialist aspects of Silicon Valley forcing the cultural values of its narrow demographics upon a diverse world in an effort to make the world act, think and believe like itself was largely accepted as merely the cost of exporting democracy. As governments have increasingly awoken to the power of the Web, they have increasingly modeled their regulatory arguments after those pioneered by Silicon Valley. As the world’s governments seek to turn America’s Web companies into tools of their own governments is there any hope for the future of the Web?
The early days of the Web were defined by a remarkably hands-off approach across the world, with most nations warmly embracing the arrival of American technology firms to their citizenry. Instead of respecting the rich diversity of the world’s citizenry, however, Silicon Valley adopted the role of soft power extension of the US Government, seeking the replace the unique beliefs, narratives and culture of communities across the world with its own.
As governments awoke to this harm and as Silicon Valley refused to adopt a more globalized approach that would promote free speech while recognizing and preserving local culture, that warm embrace became a distinct chill, turning these once partners into adversaries.
As governments began to take a more critical eye towards social platforms, they also began to realize their power and especially the power they as sovereign nations were ceding to American companies.
Most importantly, they recognized the power of social media platforms to be repurposed into the ultimate surveillance and repression platforms.
As Google General Counsel David Drummond noted in his address to the 2013 Google Ideas conference, “Governments have learned in what might be the steepest learning curve in history that they can shape this global phenomenon called the Internet and in ways that often go beyond what they can do in the physical world and they’re doing so at an alarming pace.”
Governments have become increasingly emboldened in recent years to reshape the Web in ways that restore their own sovereign control over their citizenry. At the same time, they are harnessing the newfound powers granted to them by social platforms to gain levels of control over what their populations see and say that they could never even imagine before.
Most devastatingly, governments that have long watched social platforms forcibly export American values are now clamoring for the right to do so themselves.
The EU was an early pioneer in this space, arguing that its “right to be forgotten” legislation should permit it to censor content globally.
Earlier this week it came another step closer to this dream, with the issuing of an opinion by one the EU Court of Justice’s advocate generals that the EU should have the right to dictate what constitutes acceptable online speech in all countries worldwide. Most importantly, the advocate general concluded that the EU should have the right to proactively ban speech it disagrees with from being expressed online by the citizens of other countries outside its borders.
This right to control global speech and conform it to EU sensibilities is not a radical idea by any stretch. It is merely the power social media platforms themselves have long wielded in an attempt to force the speech of EU citizens to conform to American values.
Putting this all together, the Silicon Valley that once saw itself as above and beyond the governments and laws of the physical world is increasingly finding those governments turning to those same laws to weaponize social media into the ultimate tool of global repression. Where social platforms were once used to forcibly export American free speech to the world, governments are increasingly turning to them to forcibly export censorship and repression.
In the end, the Web was destined to bring the world together. Instead of uniting us to a collective utopia, it is forcing a race to the bottom to a more restrictive and repressive world than we could ever imagine.
As the world’s governments seek to turn America’s Web companies into tools of their own governments is there any hope for the future of the Web?
