Nigerians angry about their government's recent banning of Twitter have understandably focused their ire on President Muhammadu Buhari: the crackdown was prompted by Twitter's decision to take down his tweet implicitly warning separatists they could suffer the same violent end as former Biafran rebels.
But the Nigerian ban should be a warning to US lawmakers and activists, too. Their efforts to rein in US-based social media giants such as Twitter and Facebook risk restricting democratic freedoms worldwide.
Antipathy towards the big platforms is rising across the US political spectrum. Democrats blame them for allowing misinformation to flourish; Republicans, for allegedly censoring right-wing voices.
Both agree they should be cut down to size.
The US consensus has now begun to equate the tech companies' attempts to maintain the integrity of their platforms through content management with infringements on state power by powerful corporate monopolies. Congress has taken up harsh new bills that are a first step towards using antitrust laws against tech companies.
This backlash is a gift to authoritarian governments around the world, which have been looking for a stick with which to beat Twitter and Facebook, among others. Illiberal leaders have adopted the language and legal tools being wielded by activists and politicians in the US.
Nigeria's information minister has complained: "Twitter's mission in Nigeria is very suspect, they have an agenda." Russia, which has started choking Twitter's bandwidth, last week fined Google and Facebook for "banned content". Moscow also wants to force the companies to open offices in Russia, so employees can be held hostage to an increasingly arbitrary legal system. India reportedly decided last week that Twitter is no longer an "intermediary" but a publisher - and so can be held criminally liable for anything anyone says on it. Police in Uttar Pradesh swiftly registered a criminal complaint against Twitter and seven journalists, all of them Muslim.
The reason? A viral video in which an elderly Muslim man claimed to have been attacked because of his religion. (The state police, which answers to a government run by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, has insisted that there was "no communal angle" to the assault and that both Hindus and Muslims attacked the man.) In response, India's information minister said: "What happened in UP was illustrative of Twitter's arbitrariness in fighting fake news."
What global authoritarians want is for the big US-based social media networks to fall into line with the rest of the local media - which are already, more or less, subject to state control and intimidation. Many struggling activists in backsliding democracies may not be happy at depending on the faceless bureaucracies of Big Tech to have their voices heard. Yet not one of them would want that power to devolve instead to the functionaries of their own states.
US activists should take heart in knowing that the state is not the only option for disciplining the social media platforms. Tech companies face another burgeoning check on their power, one some would argue is more trustworthy than any politician: their own workforces.
Facebook, for example, recently had to reorganise its team in India after employees worldwide accused it of being too close to the government. The company's Israel public policy team, whose head had earlier worked in Benjamin Netanyahu's office, faced similar accusations last month. The New York Times said: "Dozens of employees . formed a group to flag the Palestinian content that they said had been suppressed."
Authoritarians around the world won't stop trying to suppress critics online or off. That doesn't mean US activists and politicians have to help them.
Bloomberg
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