What A Day - When Countries Ban Social Media

Episode Date: September 7, 2024

Brazil’s power struggle with Elon Musk over censorship on X (formerly Twitter) escalated this week, with the country’s Supreme Court upholding a ban on the platform. 40 million Brazilians lost access to the site, which had come under fire for allowing election deniers to incite an insurrection—sound familiar? Erin and Max take a look at other countries that have enacted similar social media bans, including Sri Lanka, Turkey and India. Does it stop the violence? Do tech companies actually care about free speech there? And what does it mean for the world if more governments follow Brazil’s lead and temporarily ban social platforms to pressure companies into compliance? Can governments really be trusted to regulate our online interactions? Find out on this week’s “How We Got Here.”

Hey Max, remember that thing that you and Favreau did last year when you went off social media? The offline challenge. I'm still buzzing from my brief experiment in touching grass. As a dog owner, I've got some bad news about what might be on the grass that you touched. Okay, well you've got 40 million new offline challenge participants this past week in a place with a plethora of grasses and plants to touch. A Brazilian Supreme Court judge has ordered the immediate suspension of the social media platform X in Brazil, meaning people there can no longer access or use it. The Supreme Court says it won't bring back the platform until Musk complies with his orders and pays millions of

dollars in fines. That was Canada's CBC News on the decision to ban Twitter in Brazil. Yeah, it's a big deal. Brazil is the world's second most important social media market after the U.S. That's because social media usage is really high in Brazil, and it's a valuable advertising market. We should say the ban is not intended to be permanent. It's over a regulatory dispute with a company that Brazil's Supreme Court says it wants to clear up so that it can reinstate access. If somebody is a big fan of perhaps Brazilian butt models, this is good news for them.

Okay, right. But this is a potentially really significant precedent that Brazil is setting for the world. There are a lot of governments out there frustrated with the big social media companies right now. Frustrated with the platforms overacting as accelerants for misinformation and hate speech, frustrated with them for playing unwitting hosts to election influence campaigns, frustrated over privacy violations. Yeah, it makes you wonder, what if more governments try hitting the off button once in a while to force social media companies to change their ways?

Yep, everybody's hiring their own department of logging off, or at least considering it. I'm Erin Ryan. I'm Max Fisher, the chief minister of Locking Off. And this is How We Got Here, a series where we explore a big question behind the week's headlines and tell a story that answers that question. Our question this week, what does it mean for the world if more governments follow Brazil's lead and temporarily ban social platforms as a way to pressure the companies? So this isn't totally a hypothetical. More countries have been doing this sort of thing in the last two years, and Brazil is just the latest.

So listeners, Max is being humble. He literally wrote a book about social media leading to widespread discord called The Chaos Machine. He's probably forgotten more about social media's role in political unrest than he'll ever know. So Max, tell us about it. Where it's happening, how it's gone, where it all points for the future of the internet and social media. Erin, you're very kind, and my publisher will be sending you a check in the usual amount. Anyway, what we're talking about today is not stuff like Russia permanently banning Instagram or China blocking access to foreign websites.

I think we feel safe saying that that's bad. We do, but cases like Brazil's are trickier. So our story this week is about a few other countries that have tried some version of this and what happened when they did. Plus, we should talk about Europe. Right. A senior European Union lawmaker recently said that it might also impose a Brazil-style Twitter ban if the company doesn't change its practices. So this really is potentially becoming a more popular practice. Yeah, and we'll talk about why that is, too. So let's get into it. What's our first story?

It's a country that is near and dear to my heart, even if it's not one that's in American news a lot, Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka has once again blocked Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, among other social media platforms, after anti-Muslim riots broke out in several towns yesterday. Police arrested a group of men yesterday and today for allegedly attacking Muslim-owned businesses. That's from a 2018 report by the Pan-Asian news outlet Channel News Asia. So I was reporting in Sri Lanka when this happened. Social media is very popular there. But there had been this flurry of online heat speech and misinformation targeting the country's Muslim minority, encouraging people to basically go out and form pogroms against them. And one day,

a bunch of people did. So I went to try to figure out the degree to which the social media platforms had driven the violence versus just been passive conduits for something that people were maybe going to do anyway. And what'd you find? So the thing to understand is that Sri Lanka is not a very big country. It's about the population of Florida, and it's pretty poor. So companies like Facebook and Twitter did not have offices or staff there. They weren't even really paying attention to what their own systems were doing there. And at some point, the platform's automated algorithms learned that they could boost traffic in Sri Lanka by promoting hate speech and incitement to racial violence. Sounds familiar. Kind of like how you can get more attention screaming obscenities in public

than you can by speaking softly and politely, which is, by the way, why I'm no longer welcome at Knott's Berry Farm. Online, attention is attention, whether for good or bad reasons. That's right. And obviously this kind of story is everywhere. It turns out that officials in the Sri Lankan government

even saw this happening and were sending these panic messages to Facebook and others asking the companies to step in. But, of course, Silicon Valley companies ignored them. Oh, I see what you're getting at. Because the social companies had no offices or staff in Sri Lanka, the local government had no power over them. Right. So religious riots broke out and the government feeling it had no other options blocked access to social media platforms that they saw as driving the violence. And what do you know, as soon as they shut down access to the platforms, the violence stopped right away. So this wasn't some authoritarian power grab, it sounds like.

I talked to one government minister who said, look, we're a young democracy. We came to power thanks in part to social media. But when these tech companies are putting our country in danger, won't even return our phone calls, shutting off access is the only tool we have. And did the social media companies do anything? Facebook's regional chief, who had been ignoring the Sri Lankan officials for weeks, finally called them back the moment the country shut off access because, of course, he wanted to know why traffic was down. That is unbelievable. Oh, yeah. Like, Facebook-pilled brain. Did they turn access back on?

A couple of days later, yeah, but they temporarily blocked access again a year later after some terrorist attacks that the government was worried could lead to reprisal violence against religious minorities. What did people in Sri Lanka think? Was this seen as a necessary step or as an abuse of power? I mean, it was controversial. I talked to some people who considered it necessary because it was the only way to turn off the dangerous hate speech getting promoted by the platforms. That was something I heard from members of religious minorities and from groups that monitor extremist violence. But I also heard some people, especially

more middle class folks, say, look, it's really a hardship to lose access to social media, even for just a few days at a time. And this is a scary precedent that could be abused. Here's a clip of a Canadian Sri Lankan analyst named Darsha Jagatheeswaran talking to Al Jazeera English in 2019, just after that second ban. You have to sort of weigh the risks that come with social media and how it can be used to sort of incite violence and further violence, which Sri Lanka has seen in the past. However, in Sri Lanka, you know, most folks actually communicate through apps like WhatsApp and Viber. And when you block those apps, it makes it very hard to access information about what's going on. This brings us back to Brazil. Max, you mentioned that the Sri Lankan government felt stuck with

only bad options on social media because the companies have no offices in their country. Right. It leaves them with nothing to regulate. They can't impose a fine or levy a tax on companies that operate totally outside of their borders. So their only two options were to either let the social media companies completely run rampant or to block access. This is exactly the problem that Brazil has tried to solve with a law requiring that foreign social media companies keep a legal representative in the country. That way there's someone for the government to contact if there's a problem. And if one of the companies breaks some law or regulation, there's somebody that the government can hand a fine to.

Which is exactly how this whole fight between Brazil and Twitter got started, right? Right. Back in April, one of the country's Supreme Court justices ordered Twitter to temporarily suspend a couple dozen accounts while those people were being investigated for spreading election-related disinformation. Yeah. And we should say, contrary to Elon Musk's claim that this represented some slippery slope to authoritarianism, the Brazilian government did the exact same thing a year ago. Twitter suspended the accused accounts and it was fine. It wasn't a big deal. We did not end up in a totalitarian mind control state.

Well, it turns out the only slippery slope was Elon Musk's smooth, smooth brain. But Elon Musk chose to make a big deal of it this time, maybe because the accused accounts are supporters of Brazil's far-right former president, Jair Bolsonaro, who's a good pal of Elon's good pal, Donald Trump. What a group chat that must be. Nightmare blunt rotation. Musk refused to comply with the order and withdrew Twitter's staff from Brazil, which of course meant Twitter had been operating in violation of Brazilian law ever since. And it means that he robbed Brazil of its ability to regulate or find Twitter. He put Brazil in the same position that Sri Lanka had been in, forced to choose between letting a social media company do whatever it wanted to or blocking access.

And when you put it that way, it feels like Brazil sort of had to block Twitter. They let Elon get away with defying them, then why wouldn't every social media company just do the same thing that he did and pull all the representatives out of the country, knowing that they can dodge regulation in Brazil forever? Especially if you think, as Brazil's Supreme Court does, that your country's democracy is at stake. Yeah, the context here is that last year, after Bolsonaro lost re-election, Brazil had their own version of January 6th, except they called it January 8th, when Bolsonaro supporters tried to storm a bunch of federal buildings, including the Supreme Court, which maybe informs why they're so touchy about all this. Here's a clip of WGBH

News reporting on the Supreme Court justice who first ordered that Twitter be blocked last week. Moraes has long been the man leading the charge against fake news and hate speech in Brazil. The Brazilian people know that freedom of speech is not freedom of aggression, he said in a televised interview earlier this year. They know that the freedom of speech is not the freedom to spread hate, racism, misogyny and homophobia. So at this point, I'm feeling pretty sympathetic to Brazil's decision. Not because I think it's good to block 40 million Brazilian Twitter users from their accounts, but because there does seem like an important principle at stake.

Feels like you're setting us up for a big counterpoint here, Max. I am, and that counterpoint is India. Home to the right-wing and increasingly authoritarian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Yes, and a country with a complicated relationship with the social media companies. Way back in 2012, India became, as far as I can tell, the first country to ever temporarily block access to social platforms on the grounds that they were spinning up real world violence. Indian security forces are patrolling streets in northeastern Assam state after days of rioting. Fighting between Bodo tribesmen and Muslim settlers have left at least 40 people dead. Residents say the troops have come too late.

That was Al Jazeera English from 2012. Basically what happened is made up reports of ethnic violence spread on social media, your classic fake news, which led to very real revenge ethnic violence, which ultimately pushed 300,000 people from their homes. The Indian government, which is understandably freaked out, ordered Facebook and YouTube to pull down the inciting posts. And when those companies did not comply, block the services to try to compel them. Okay, that seems understandable. It does. But this was 2012. And people did not yet really take seriously the idea that social media could be dangerous. Even the Obama administration pressured India to lift

the blocks, which it did. So wild to remember a time when it was seen as a point of bipartisan consensus that social media companies should be allowed to do whatever they want. Yeah, we have come a long way since then, I would say. And India has since 2012 gone through a bunch of rounds of this. Rumors and hate speech go viral on social media, leads to real world violence, and the government temporarily suspends access to social networks, but usually just in the immediate area where the violence is happening. So the Sri Lankan model, in other words. Right. Though most companies do have offices in India because of how important that country is. So the platforms will often comply when the government

there asks them to take down a post that they say breaks Indian law. Which is the Brazil model. Yes. So at some point along the way, the Indian government started asking social platforms to take down posts that weren't just incitement to violence, but criticized the government. Or in a bunch of cases in 2021, to take down posts that just talked about a protest movement led by Indian farmers. Here's former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey talking about it in a YouTube show called Breaking Points. India, for example, India is a country that had many requests of us around the farmers protest, around particular journalists that were critical of the government. And it manifested in ways such as we will shut Twitter down in India, which is a very large market for us.

We will raid the homes of your employees, which they did. We will shut down your offices if you don't follow suit. And this is India, a democratic country. Okay. Not normally on Team Jack Dorsey. I know. But I'm liking this less. Yeah, it doesn't sound great.

One digital rights group says that India imposed internet or social media shutdowns 84 times just in 2022, which puts it up there with Iran and Russia. And India's not alone in abusing this sort of power. Dorsey had more on this. Turkey is very similar. Like, we had so many requests from Turkey. We fought Turkey in their courts and often won, but they threatened to shut us down constantly. Nigeria, yet another one.

I don't think we could even put people on the ground because of what the government might do to our employees if we had them there. So Nigeria is an interesting case. In 2021, Twitter removed a post by Nigeria's president that was threatening secessionist groups. Shades of Trump getting his tweets hidden back in 2020 for threatening violence against protesters. threatening secessionist groups. Shades of Trump getting his tweets hidden back in 2020 for threatening violence against protesters. Right. Yeah. A time when social media companies were

kind of trying to do the right thing. Twitter did not have an office in Nigeria when that happened. And you have to wonder, could they have still removed that post if they did? I don't know the answer, but Nigeria blocked access to the platform over it, and they only reinstated it in 2022 when Twitter finally opened an office in the country. So maybe it's not always good for governments to have that kind of leverage over social media companies. Yeah, I think a lot about a conversation I had a few years ago when I was at Facebook's headquarters reporting a story on the company's failures to limit hate speech and misinformation. At one point, someone at the company pulled me aside and basically said, you know, look, I agree with you.

Facebook is making a lot of bad decisions about when and how to moderate dangerous content. But here's the thing. The alternative to us doing it is letting governments do it. And I'm not sure that's better. I'm sorry. Not persuaded. No. And that sort of reminds me of like the way the mafia is like, look, the cops aren't going to look out for you.

Just pay us money and we're going to look out for you instead. Like we're in your community. We know these people. We're going to protect you. We're one of you. It's a real nice country you got. Shame if something happened to it. I agree.

It's a bullshit cop out. And, you know, they built the lies and hate machine so they don't get to pick who fixes it. But I did take his point that, yes, there are some governments I would trust with regulating social platforms, but there are a lot of governments I would not trust with this. What bucket is Brazil in? I mean, for me, they have strong institutions that are generally independent. You know, their courts go after political corruption, regardless of parties, stuff like that. Wow. Imagine living in a country where the Supreme Court is not a threat to the country. Is actually looking out for democratic institutions. Right, right.

But Brazil has a reasonable left-wing government right now. If another far-right extremist like Bolsonaro comes to power, are we sure we can still trust them with this? So on that bad news side, let's go back to Turkey and something that happened there last year. We begin with breaking news, an earthquake on a terrifying scale. Officials say it's a magnitude 7.8 quake centered near the border between Turkey and Syria. And there have been multiple strong aftershocks. More than 1,300 people are dead, and that number is expected to rise. It was such a horrible disaster. Ultimately, more than 50,000 people were declared dead, which became a political scandal there

because of how many buildings that were supposed to be earthquake-proof collapsed. Right, and generally when that happens, it is taken as evidence of political corruption. Inspectors taking bribes, planning officials taking bribes. Which was seen as a reflection on Turkey's increasingly authoritarian

and corrupt president Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The government seems to have understood that this was a tentative moment for them, so they blocked Twitter, though just for 12 hours. Still, what a terrifying 12 hours to be out of touch with loved ones. Right, and to not know what's happening in the next town, to not know what's happening, you know, where your parents live. And it gets worse. Turkish security services detained 78 people over social media posts during the earthquake and ultimately arrested

20 of them. Oh, focusing on the important issues. Yeah, that's right. People talking bad about the government. And at least two of those people were independent journalists who had posted videos about the quake that cast the government a bad light. Another two were political commentators who criticized the government over it. So your point is, maybe it's a good thing that Twitter and other social media companies don't have offices in places like Turkey, which would give those governments even more leverage over what people can say online. Right. Especially at moments like Turkey's earthquake, where providing people access to reliable information is really important. And just on a micro level, you want to

be able to know, like in addition to big public safety concerns, you want to be able to communicate with family members and make sure everybody's okay. It seems like a mark in the column for social media autonomy from authoritarian governments, though these are still for-profit companies we're talking about. They'll limit people's access to important information if there's enough money in it for them. Yeah. Facebook in Vietnam is an example of this. In 2019, Vietnamese officials told Facebook to block the accounts of certain government critics or they would shut down access to the platform in the country.

Facebook complied at Mark Zuckerberg's personal direction. Loud sigh. So Facebook was actually helping an authoritarian government censor political dissent. Yeah, Zuckerberg argued that this was a necessary evil to bring Vietnamese people the other benefits of access to meta services. Hey, wait a minute. Marketplace, sometimes you just need a used potty chair for $25. And they need to bring those services to. How do you put a price on that? Exactly.

That's right. Maybe you need to form a group with the parents of other boys that are going off to college with your son where you can say really embarrassing things about like, oh, my little son's dorm isn't. No, I get it. The Vietnamese needed that. If shutting down political dissidents is the price we have to pay to have access to medical misinformation and vaccine conspiracies, then you got to sympathize with Mark. I'm personally in it for the AI generated recipes that are physically impossible to complete. And then all the comments from boomers underneath that are like, wow, looks delicious. And you're like, are you AI? Well, I'm sure it's just a coincidence that access to Vietnam is also worth an estimated $1 billion a year to Facebook.

The point is that Silicon Valley would like us to believe that their free speech absolutists standing up to governments worldwide on behalf of our rights. But it's just not true. Just not true. They do not give a fuck about our rights. They give a fuck about their money. They simply believe that nothing should stand in the way of people using their services however they want because having more users, more posts, and more engagement benefits them. Well put. Let's talk about another government that's threatening to block Twitter and actually might do it, the European Union.

Today, we opened formal proceedings against X based on several suspected infringements of the Digital Services Act. The opening of proceedings means that the Commission will now investigate ICSIS systems and policies related to certain suspected infringements. It does not prejudge the outcome of the investigation, nor does it signal that the Commission considers that ICSIS is compliant with all other obligations under the DSA. The Commission will continue monitoring ICSIS compliance

with all obligations under the DSA, and if it has suspicions of other infringements, it will then take necessary steps. That was European Commission spokesman Johann Bark using his lovely accent this past December. I looked into this one. The DSA he's referring to is the Digital Services Act, not the Democratic Socialist of America. No red roses here. No red roses. A new EU law that requires very large social platforms to, among other things, demonstrate that they're curbing political disinformation and other harmful content.

Yeah, I hate to break it to the EU, but whatever bar they've set for minimal compliance, I really doubt that Twitter is meeting it these days. Yeah, that's the conclusion that the EU reached in a report it put out in July, and then again in a formal letter that EU officials sent to Elon Musk a few weeks ago. And Erin, how did Elon handle that? July, and then again in a formal letter that EU officials sent to Elon Musk a few weeks ago. And Erin, how did Elon handle that? In a very mature and intelligent fashion. He quote tweeted the EU letter with a meme from the dorm room comedy Tropic Thunder that says, take a big step back and literally fuck your own face.

Wow, that's very persuasive. He's really getting into the weeds, the legal arguments here. A French member of the EU parliament said a few days later that if Twitter didn't comply with EU regulations, then they would block access to the platform throughout Europe. Wow, nice job, Elon. Business genius. Even if Europe doesn't go that route, these new regulations allow them to collect 6% of the company's global revenue, which is about $6 at this point. Yeah, but at $6, they don't have. That's true. That's a pretty big mark in favor of compelling social media companies to keep offices in countries where they operate, the Brazil model.

Right. You can see why Brazil's Supreme Court is so insistent on Elon restoring Twitter's staff in the country. So they have an option between doing nothing versus a nationwide ban. Okay, Erin. So what do you think? Brazil setting the precedent it set this week of blocking a social platform to force it to resolve a regulatory dispute. Good precedent

for the world, bad precedent for the world? I mean, it seems kind of like a bandaid on a bullet wound in a way, because it's doing what it needs to do to support its own interests and preserve its own democracy and minimize violence within its borders. But at the same time, I almost think there should be some sort of tech government since each individual social media platform almost functions like its own country. I take the point that the guy at Facebook made to me, which is that Facebook regulating itself is imperfect. Government's regulating Facebook is imperfect because any government is going to have different incentives.

Maybe we don't always like who's in charge of that government. But, you know, the idea of regulating the marketplace and industries and social harms and political welfare, I would rather be up to the government than the companies that stand to benefit from it. And I feel like generally in major industries, we land on the idea that, like, you know, Right. But we don't say like, well, you know, sometimes China is corrupt in the way that they regulate the chemical industry. So therefore, chemical industries in democratic countries should be totally unregulated and should be allowed to do whatever they want. Right. That's a great parallel to draw. And I also was thinking about the news story this week, the very hilarious news story about a few right-wing YouTubers being revealed to be basically the dupes in a Russian influence operation. That's the best case reading is they're dupes. Yeah, they were either dupes or traitors,

but given that Benny Johnson is in the mix, I'm going to guess idiots. It's a safe bet. And Dave Rubin, Benny Johnson, nah, they're dumb. But the thing is that unfettered social media leaves the door open in countries for foreign influence operations that can be incredibly damaging. So the threat isn't always coming from inside the house. Sometimes it's people from outside trying to mess with things. I mean, what else has Russia got going on? It's a great point. Yeah. And there's not like a specific law or regulation here where it's like, you know, don't allow your platform to be a vessel for foreign influence, although they do have versions of that in the U. But to your point, it is a case for maybe we want governments ultimately regulating these platforms rather than regulating themselves so they can look out for things that are in the public interest, even if it's not in the corporate interests of the company.

Like, you know, is Russia paying a bunch of YouTubers money to do foreign propaganda? To make really stupid YouTube videos. Something I think is also really useful about this Brazil ban, and like, look, I don't think it's a good thing on its own. I've been like texting with friends from Brazil who were like, look, I don't like Silicon Valley either, but I find Twitter really useful. And why am I being punished for this regulatory dispute between the government and the company? And I do take their point. But I think there is something useful with showing the world that, you know, actually, the planet will keep spinning if we don't have access to these social media platforms. Like,

that's always the threat that the social media companies have held over governments. There's been this trend in the last couple of years that a few countries have tried to impose regulations on social media companies. And like Meta has responded in a couple of countries, like Canada and Australia, by blocking access to news and saying, well, if you're going to regulate us, we're going to shut down access and show that like we're in charge

and that we're the ones who say what regulations you can and can't impose on our platforms because otherwise you'll have to live without us and that would be intolerable. And it turns out actually it is tolerable. Like actually you can be okay without use for Twitter. And I think that it, that helps to shift the power balance a little bit in a better direction. Right. And it's not like these companies are the, exactly. They're not the only ones that can do this for people. In India, TikTok is banned and they have their own TikTok.

People are okay. Yeah, people are fine. In China, they don't. I mean, in China, whether or not people are fine is a little bit more up for discussion. But they do have kind of dupes of Twitter. They have like all the different social media,

social networks they have dupes of. And I think that people who are high up in tech tend to think that they are the only ones capable of pulling off the revolutionary ideas that they have pulled off. The only ones who should be in charge. But they're not. Right. They're not. I mean, I'm sorry. Like, Facebook is – Zuckerberg was just the first person to think of Facebook.

Somebody else would have thought of it if he didn't. He just got there first. That's the plot of The Social Network, 2010, David Fincher. Yeah, we watched it in movies. All right, well, let's go out with an in retrospect, I think, very funny clip of Elon Musk sucking up to Thierry Breton, the EU regulator, who this very week, Musk told to fuck his own face. Boy, how times change. I was happy to be able to explain to you the DSA, our new regulation in Europe. And I think Boy, how times change. I agree with everything you said, really. I think we're very much of the same mind.

And, you know, I think just anything that, you know, my companies can do that would be beneficial to everyone. Is there a word for, like, a high-tech chicken hawk? Like someone who has got, you know, like, you know, everybody play the cowboy till shit pop off. That's right. Yes. And they're brought in as this tiny little guy, too. But, you know, that's what it looks like when governments actually regulate social media companies. That's what they sound like. Yes, sir. Please, sir. I agree, sir. Absolutely, sir. Let's

have that here in America. Lena Kahn, let's do it. Yes. How We Got Here is written and hosted by me, Max Fisher, and Aaron Ryan. Our producer is Emma Illick-Frank. Evan Sutton mixes and masters the show. Jordan Cantor sound engineers the show. Audio support from Kyle Seglin, Charlotte Landis, and Vassilis Fotopoulos.

Production support from Leo Duran, Raven Yamamoto, and Adrian Hill. 다음 시간에 만나요.