Checkpoint: Coups, Walled Gardens, And Censorship: Preventing The Authoritarian Future Of Digital Security

Baac3nes

A common criticism of progressive politics is that the Left has less understanding of international policy and national security than more conservative political groups. At first glance, this is an understandable criticism. The Left focuses predominantly on domestic issues and reforming the relationship between the American people and the government, while Conservatives and the more hawkish Democrats focus intently on the threats posed by foreign powers. This labeling of the Left as ignorant of foreign policy normalizes the belief that any policy that isn’t inherently hawkish is naïve. Over the past decade, international conflicts have become increasingly digital, and understanding our own nation’s impact on the digital landscape is as important as understanding foreign threats to digital security.

Holding China as a prime example, the international stage has been set to display an antagonistic relationship between the United States and China. While there is less direct conflict with China than the Middle East, the issue of digital security highlights a threat to the American empire that stems from China’s powerful digital industry. The past year has presented a litany of examples of Chinese web control and dominance in American headlines and policy. For example, when the Chinese owned video-sharing app TikTok was flagged as a potential data security threat, Trump himself announced that the app would be banned in the United States. The banning of the app wouldn’t come to pass, thwarted by judicial appeals and the diversification of digital service providers. As Chinese interests moved to pressure American companies to remove content that acknowledged Hong Kong’s sovereignty to match the Chinese government’s state-controlled media guidelines, the conflict between American business and the Chinese government intensified.

Due to the massive install bases coming from Chinese users, American companies altered their content to maintain the Chinese market, removing products and apps from multiple platforms. Afterward, an unlikely alliance between Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ted Cruz formed to criticize companies such as Apple and Blizzard Entertainment for adjusting their services to fall in line with Chinese censorship. While this bipartisan effort to curtail both domestic and international censorship is admirable, it also mirrors the lack of self-reflection shown in other areas of the United States’ foreign policy. 

While the Chinese government is building a distinctly authoritarian digital ecosystem, with the entirety of web content undergoing strict state scrutiny, the US also engages in massive campaigns of digital censorship and propaganda. For the Left, it is of utmost importance to analyze how this practice of American digital censorship occurs through corporate monopoly rather than direct state censorship. Critically analyzing our own role in the digital landscape can only serve to strengthen American security.

The concept of a “walled garden” is a digital ecosystem where the ecosystem is entirely closed, meaning that users of a platform or even computer operating system will only be able to experience content or use programs approved by the ecosystem’s administrator. A very explicit example of this is Apple’s iPhone IOS operating system, in which the programs used on the iPhone must first travel through the Apple Store so that Apple, the platform’s administrator, is included in the chain of profits. Similarly, a company like Twitter can create a social walled garden by monitoring who is allowed to post on the platform as well as designing the algorithms that determine which content is prioritized for which users. Theoretically, Twitter could avoid showing pro-Hong Kong content to Chinese users by algorithmically curating and limiting their content, rather than facing the scrutiny applied to direct censorship. These more capitalist practices of digital control can have dramatic results, such as the sitting US President being banned by a private company from posting on Twitter due to Twitter deeming him a threat to public safety. 

In 2016 Facebook came under fire from Indian customers when Facebook launched an initiative that would provide free phones to Indian people. However, these phones had limited access to the internet, primarily accessing the web through the Facebook platform. While this appeared to be an act of international charity, for many Indians it was highly reminiscent of the nation’s imperial history with Britain. Although the web platform provided was not in the grip of state censorship like the internet in China, it was still inherently censored as all information had to travel through Facebook’s platform and curation.

American tech companies are working to provide free and open internet to the world, a goal that is in direct conflict with the monopolistic process that has narrowed the methods people have to access the internet. Today the vast majority of people access digital content through a handful of curators, such as Facebook, Twitter, or Google. This private-sector growth funnels users through a limited number of digital ecosystems. The result is a growing “walled” user base, and the result of shrinking digital diversity is that people are inherently at higher risk for both censorship and propaganda. 

This past week the nation experienced an extreme example of the effects of a limited digital ecosystem. As protesters stormed the halls of congress in a shocking coup, it was hard to understand for many why exactly they were storming. For many viewers, it was hard to believe that the defeat of Donald Trump was a sufficient cause for such violent unrest. However, to those monitoring the spread of white supremacy online, the event was not only unsurprising but the logical conclusion of the propaganda barrage that many conservative readers were served online. Whether followers of the cult-like Q-Anon or just agitated patriots, the unifying factor of the rioters was that they understood that the election was stolen, a theory cultivated on platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. All of this is despite these platforms’ attempts to mitigate the anger by placing warnings stating the election of Joe Biden had been confirmed by election authorities.

While the Chinese government censored protesters in the Hong Kong protests, US tech companies such as Facebook algorithmically curated walled gardens of content leading to the radicalization of thousands. In the past year, we have seen two separate outcomes from philosophically opposed practices of web design and security: one which highlighted the dangers of a fully nationalized Internet and one that isolated and radicalized users through monopolistic private platforms. The effect of the United State’s digital management on the rest of the world has yet to be seen, but as theories like Q-Anon grow abroad, the adverse effects of American web ownership are sure to spread. This conflict between US influence and international control is an excellent arena for the Left to apply their criticisms of American imperialism, rather than focusing our perspective solely on the actions of foreign nations.