The Dictator’s Internet Advantage

If Cloud Czars don't consider the question of truth, an answer will be imposed on them

“Credibility is the coin of the realm.” That’s what Northwestern’s Medill School taught me, when I was getting my Master’s in Journalism back in 1978.

This was reinforced during our school trip from Chicago to the media capital of New York. I literally sat at the feet of Bill Shawn, then still editor of The New Yorker. We were paraded through the offices of Time. We sat for a spell at the Top of the Week, a bar on top of Newsweek’s headquarters building. The lesson was that someday all this would be ours if we were just loyal to our employers.

I’m the last member of my graduating class still be working a beat because I didn’t believe a word of it. Credibility is a personal value, I argued. It’s not something that can be granted, like a knighthood.

But American media companies remain wedded to the idea of credibility as a corporate value. It’s why so few are international in scope. That’s because credibility, in media, is mediated. It’s a continuing negotiation among media companies, their audience, and government. It’s a balancing act.

CNN or The New York Times must choose whether to accept the verdicts of local government. They can work with local stringers. They can loudly withdraw. Ultimately their status is built on their relationships with a domestic audience, and with American values.

Social media companies don’t see themselves as media. They don’t produce their own content. Under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, passed soon after the Web was spun, they’re held harmless for what users say. They argue that you can’t have an open Internet if bad actors can destroy a publisher’s business by lying.

This doesn’t apply globally. Like the First Amendment, Section 230 is a local ordinance. If a dictator tells Facebook to bend to the censor or face expulsion, Facebook will censor. It learned that lesson with China a decade ago. The same is true for Google and the other Cloud Czars. You do what the local government allows if you want to stay in the country.  

This gives dictators a global advantage in social media. It’s not just a defensive advantage but, as we’ve seen over the last five years, it’s an offensive one. Putin and Xi can keep out truth, but they can also spread lies where democracy rules. They can take advantage of both the slow speed of democratic legal proceedings, and the natural unwillingness of Internet companies to deal with issues of credibility.

Credibility doesn’t scale. It can’t be created by an algorithm. It can only be mediated by people, who are fallible. Or, if a dictator believes themselves the only arbiter of truth, it can be imposed.

There’s still media in New York playing by the pre-Internet rules. They remain horrified by this truth. That doesn’t make it less true. Truth, like science, can’t be binary. Everything must be open to interpretation, to argument. That’s why America dominates the tech market. It’s why we dominate every creative market.

But dictators can define truth as binary. They can impose it on their people, even (to a great extent) in the online world. They can then use their truth as a weapon against the rest of us, and the Cloud Czars will treat it as just another viewpoint.

Those who would make America a dictatorship and destroy what has made us the world’s economic leader, also carry the dictator’s advantage. That’s the great issue of our time. It’s something the Cloud Czars must reckon with. They can’t let this be a discussion only for New York media.

If Cloud Czars continue to be absent from this discussion of truth and credibility, then the Internet will be run out of New York, not Silicon Valley, with Rupert Murdoch and Jeff Zucker defining what is true, and Congress deciding which stories can be told.