Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

I Thought the Web Would Stop Hate, Not Spread It

This is what the internet has come to: thugs like Mohammed bin Salman funding tech companies to host the vitriol of thugs like Cesar Sayoc and Robert Bowers.

Credit...Kagenmi/iStock, via Getty Images

Ms. Swisher covers technology and is a contributing opinion writer.

When I was a reporter at The Washington Post back in the pre-Internet days, there was a man who would write me a letter every time I had a story that had a name in it that he perceived to be Jewish.

His anti-Semitic screeds were intricate and obsessive. He would cut my article out of the paper, highlight the names, and in a chicken-scratch scrawl write endless lines of venomous bile about how the various businesspeople he noted were secretly plotting to take over the world and kill the “real” Americans. It was riveting — the care he took was clearly apparent — and nauseating at the same time.

It frightened me, but it was only a letter, sent only to me. Fast forward to today, when everyone has the ability to see the toxic online stylings of Cesar Sayoc, the Trump supporter who has been arrested and charged for a series of mail bombs that he sent to CNN and a list of prominent Democrats. He was all over social media spewing his bile, which escalated on Twitter and Facebook starting in 2016.

It was the same with another radicalized man with issues, Robert Bowers, who has been charged in the murder of 11 people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh. His preferred outlet was an internet underbelly site called Gab, an alt-right platform with an adorable name and a dead-ugly purpose. As The New York Times’s Kevin Roose noted, Gab was the “last refuge for internet scoundrels — a place where those with views considered too toxic for the mainstream could congregate and converse freely.”

Internet companies like Stripe, GoDaddy and Joyent have now “deplatformed” Gab, as they did with Alex Jones this year. It took the Bowers attack for them to notice exactly who their customer was.

Of course, they said their usual so-sorrys for facilitating this dreck. And Twitter did yet another elaborate apology dance for not removing Mr. Sayoc from the platform after at least one complaint about his behavior.

But it takes only seconds to draw a line between the public posts of these internet goblins and their real-life attacks. What is happening on social networks and across digital communications platforms is disturbing and ever metastasizing. And preventable.

I wrote my first column for The Times on this, months ago. Let me say it again: Social media platforms — and Facebook and Twitter are as guilty of this as Gab is — are designed so that the awful travels twice as fast as the good. And they are operating with sloppy disregard of the consequences of that awful speech, leading to disasters that they then have to clean up after.

And they are doing a very bad job of that, too, because they are unwilling to pay the price to make needed fixes. Why? because draining the cesspool would mean losing users, and that would hurt the bottom line. Consider this: On Monday, New York Times reporters easily found almost 12,000 anti-Semitic messages that had been uploaded to Instagram in the wake of the synagogue attack.

That was after the killings. And please do not saunter over to YouTube or Twitter or Reddit if you want any relief, as you will only find more of the same.

The negligence does not stop at the platforms but includes who pays for these platforms, which is how I found myself at a dinner party recently where the guests were ranking Silicon Valley funders from most to least toxic: Russia, China, Kuwait, Qatar, along with various dicey high-net-worth individuals across the globe.

“They are all linked to awful behavior in some way if you are being really honest with yourself,” a well-known entrepreneur said. “Thank goodness for Singapore.” (Apparently “Crazy Rich Asians” had been good for the brands of funds tied to the Singapore government, like Temasek and GIC.)

And of course there is Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, who has flooded tech with Saudi investments. His glossy reform sheen has worn thin in the wake of the brutal murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi at what appears certainly to have been the behest of the government Prince Mohammed heads — or more precisely, beheads.

His government also jails activists and decimates Yemen with a war, but it was only a few months ago that he was squired around Google headquarters by Sergey Brin. In hindsight, the obsequious reception now looks unfortunate, to say the least.

So where are we now? Far too much of the money social media companies are using to host thugs like Mr. Sayoc and Mr. Bowers was paid for by thugs like Prince Mohammed. And, other than some tut-tutting about the horror of it all, there are no signs that the industry that considers itself the most woke on the planet is thinking of giving the money back or talking about not taking it in the future.

I cannot tell you how sad that is to write, because when I first saw the internet way back when, I hoped that it would help eliminate the attitudes that had fueled those horrible letters to me. I naïvely thought a lone man sending a reporter a missive of malevolence could not find such refuge on the wide-open internet, where his hate would be seen for what it was and denounced and exorcised.

I was obviously very wrong. Instead, the internet gave people like him the space to grow and thrive. Tech made no real rules, claiming the freedom from any strictures would be O.K. in what is the greatest experiment in human communications ever.

We have no idea how to deal with this situation, except to watch it play out over and over again, and allow it to kill us cell by cell.

Or not. “You must live life with the full knowledge that your actions will remain,” Zadie Smith wrote. “We are creatures of consequence.”

We have met the creature and it is a monster. I shudder to think what the consequences will be.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram, and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.

Kara Swisher, editor at large for the technology news website Recode and producer of the Recode Decode podcast and Code Conference, is a contributing opinion writer. @karaswisher Facebook

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT