So NSW’s premier, Chris Minns, thinks social media platforms like Meta should prevent climate activists from broadcasting their protests.
Scientists tell us that temperatures in the sea and air are spiking; a new study warns about global ecosystems collapsing sooner than predicted. Yet governments everywhere display more determination in suppressing protest than combating warming. As Greta Thunberg notes, “activists all over the world are experiencing increased repressions just for fighting for our present and our future”.
Here in Australia, the ALP’s enthusiasm for the crackdown particularly sticks in the craw, given the willingness of Labor luminaries to associate themselves with important protests of the past.
A few weeks ago, for instance, Melbourne Trades Hall rightly honoured Zelda D’Aprano with a statue showing the women’s liberation icon clutching the chains with which she fastened herself to a government building during a 1969 protest for equal pay. Former PM Julia Gillard hailed Zelda’s determination – even though today Labor premiers have used “lock on” stunts to justify jail terms for environmental activists.
Minns’ attempt to enlist Meta in his campaign against climate activism deserves particular scrutiny, not least because it’s all too likely to succeed.
Despite rightwing bleating about the supposed “woke” bias of social media, studies show the opposite. As the researcher Paul Barrett explains, “conservatives … gain the most in terms of engagement and online attention, thanks to the platforms’ systems of algorithmic promotion of content”. Indeed, Facebook has previously shown a willingness to ban leftwing accounts when they might embarrass the powerful.
These days, Meta possesses a tremendous advantage, simply because it’s not Elon Musk’s Twitter. Recent reports suggest the company intends to exploit Musk’s buffoonery with a new platform called Threads, offering what it calls a “sanely run Twitter”.
Yet “sanely run” is a relative term, as Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg proved when he yesterday offered to fight Musk in a cage.
The prospect of these two giant manbabies settling their commercial differences by rolling around on a jujitsu mat goes to the real problem with social media. The various platforms allow users to express themselves and, because of that, seem more participatory than old fashioned newspapers. Yet they’re all owned by billionaires – and billionaires don’t inhabit the same universe as normal people.
That’s the context to think about Australia’s eSafety commissioner Julie Inman Grant’s comments about hate speech on Twitter, a platform she correctly dubbed an “absolute bin fire”.
Noting the massive job cuts at Twitter, Inman Grant suggested the site no longer even enforced its own rules on toxic content. While that might be true, the real problems pertain less to those who have departed and more to those who have arrived – in particular, the new owner.
This week Elon Musk declared that Twitter would treat the words cis and cisgender as “slurs”. The announcement came after he proclaimed that deadnaming or misgendering users would not be considered harassment. He also OKed an anti-trans documentary previously flagged as hate speech – and then personally shared the film with his own 144 million followers.
At Twitter, the calls are, as they say, coming from inside the house.
Back in 2018, when Musk described the future of transportation as tunnels with access via street-level stations, he was widely mocked for discovering the subway. Today, we might equally say that, with his $44bn acquisition of Twitter, he has reinvented the first Viscount Rothermere – the newspaper baron notorious for turning the Daily Mail into a mouthpiece for the 20th-century far right.
In that respect, Musk and Zuckerberg have far more in common than either might care to think. Both are wealthy almost beyond imagination; both run their media empires according to arbitrary whims.
That’s why, when it comes to combating the far right online, we should be very careful about what we demand. Calls to ban “extremism” can all too easily provide a pretext for the kind of censorship that Minns seeks.
More than anything, we should be calling for far greater transparency about how moderation decisions get made and by whom. As the planet continues to heat, politicians will go to greater and greater lengths to suppress popular outrage. The more we can force democratisation on media of all types, the better placed we’ll be to fight both climate change and fascism.
Jeff Sparrow is a Guardian Australia columnist
