deplatforming

The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth
by Jonathan Rauch
Published 21 Jun 2021

By exploiting the urge to defend our commitments, they usurp attention which they could never earn on the merits. You need not be a professional propagandist to see that protesting or deplatforming someone is like putting up a neon sign attracting attention to her. After all, if an idea is dangerous, then it must be important; if a speaker is worth deplatforming, then she must have something interesting to say. Competitive condemnation is a game we can choose not to play. Next time you feel the urge to protest some piece of nonsense, to rebut it (and thus repeat it), to deplatform it, or to organize outrage against it, consider going out for a pizza instead. Don’t feed the trolls.

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The outside world keeps butting in, and internal dissent keeps cropping up, and reality keeps asserting itself. In self-defense, authoritarian regimes sooner or later turn aggressive, toward their own dissidents and eventually toward outsiders, too. They brand dissidents as traitors, seek to exclude them from power or social participation, boycott and deplatform them, dehumanize and cancel them. Eventually, they use violence, sometimes to the point of seeking to wipe out a political faction or ethnic group altogether. “When complete agreement could not otherwise be reached,” wrote the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce in his great 1877 essay, The Fixation of Belief, “a general massacre of all who have not thought in a certain way has proved a very effective means of settling opinion in a country.”

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It can exploit misinformation (false information), disinformation (deliberate falsehoods), and what has recently been called mal-information (information which is true but used misleadingly). Although the means vary widely, the end is this: to organize or manipulate the social and media environment to demoralize, deplatform, isolate, or intimidate an adversary. State actors have traditionally understood propaganda and disinformation as psychological or informational warfare against an adversarial regime. Modern trolls view it the same way. By exacerbating conflict and mistrust in the target society, they can cause headaches for their adversary and potentially destabilize it.

Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth
by Elizabeth Williamson
Published 8 Mar 2022

Behind Kennedy, in third place, are Ty and Charlene Bollinger, pro-Trump conspiracists who hawk books and DVDs touting their loopy claims, including that vaccines fulfill Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates’s plan to inject people with microchips. Deplatforming these repeat offenders is “the most effective and efficient way to stop the dissemination of harmful information,” the center said. Yet Facebook, Google’s YouTube, and Twitter had to that point failed to enforce their own policies prohibiting COVID misinformation, and most of their accounts remained active. By the end of 2021, that had belatedly begun to change.[11] It’s no accident that Alex Jones failed to make it into the Disinformation Dozen. Deplatformed in 2018 and 2019, his social media presence remains a faint shadow of what it was, despite constant efforts to sneak back on.

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By late 2021 less than 1 percent of all traffic to Infowars’ website came from social media, according to an analysis for the Times by Similarweb,[12] an internet tracking company. Deplatforming blunts misinformation superspreaders’ influence and access to funding. White nationalist Richard Spencer, who rode Trump-era bigotry to stardom, had his social media accounts yanked in the aftermath of the 2017 neo-Nazi violence in Charlottesville. Sued for his role in that violence, Spencer told a judge in 2020 that he was having so much trouble raising money online he couldn’t afford a lawyer.[13] Spencer’s National Policy Institute has closed. He lives in Montana, shunned even by his neighbors.[14] To be sure, deplatforming is a pretty blunt weapon.

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BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 4 Coaston, “YouTube, Facebook, and Apple’s Ban.” BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 5 Casey Newton, “How Alex Jones Lost His Info War,” The Verge, August 7, 2018, https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/7/17659026/alex-jones-deplatformed-misinformation-hate-speech-apple-facebook-youtube. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 6 Brian Stelter, “Reliable Sources: Alex Jones Has Been ‘Deplatformed.’ Now What?,” CNN, August 7, 2018, https://money.cnn.com/2018/08/07/media/reliable-sources-08-06-18/index.html. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 7 Jack Nicas, “Alex Jones and Infowars Content Is Removed from Apple, Facebook and YouTube,” New York Times, August 6, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/06/technology/infowars-alex-jones-apple-facebook-spotify.html.

The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America's Institutions Against Dissent
by Ben Shapiro
Published 26 Jul 2021

His anger at the press translated mostly into increased ratings for his enemies; CNN’s Jim Acosta, who spent every waking minute proclaiming that he was endangered by Trump’s overheated talk, became a household name thanks to his grandstanding. At no point did Acosta fear arrest or even deplatforming. The shock of January 6 was that the guardrails collapsed for a brief moment in time after holding for years on end. And then the guardrails were re-erected, including by some of Trump’s erstwhile allies. Now let’s turn to the other side of the aisle. In the aftermath of January 6, America’s institutional powers swung into action on behalf of authoritarian measures. Establishment media broadly promoted the idea of deplatforming mainstream conservatives and conservative outlets. CNN reported that the Capitol riot had “reignited a debate over America’s long-held defense of extremist speech.”

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John Aidan Byrne, “JPMorgan Chase accused of purging accounts of conservative activists,” NYPost.com, May 25, 2019, https://nypost.com/2019/05/25/jpmorgan-chase-accused-of-purging-accounts-of-conservative-activists/. 42. Dana Loesch,” Mailchimp Deplatforming a Local Tea Party Is a Hallmark of Fascism,” Federalist.com, December 16, 2020, https://thefederalist.com/2020/11/16/mailchimp-deplatforming-a-local-tea-party-is-a-hallmark-of-fascism/. 43. Caleb Parke, “Conservatives call for PayPal boycott after CEO says Southern Poverty Law Center helps ban users,” FoxNews.com, February 28, 2019, https://www.foxnews.com/tech/conservatives-call-for-paypal-boycott-after-ceo-admits-splc-helps-ban-users. 44.

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Leftist interest groups immediately began pressuring other major banks to do the same: American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten said the union would not recommend Wells Fargo’s mortgage lending program to its members because of ties to the gun industry.40 In May 2019, Chase Bank began closing bank accounts for customers deemed radical, including Enrique Tarrio of the Proud Boys and radical activist Laura Loomer. Jamie Dimon, CEO of Chase Bank, said, “Very directly, we have not and do not debank people because of their political views.”41 For now, presumably. This threat extends beyond the financial services industry. When Amazon Web Services, whose sole job is to provide cloud services, decides to deplatform Parler, that’s polarizing. When Mailchimp, an email delivery service, refuses to do business with the Northern Virginia Tea Party, that’s polarizing.42 When PayPal announces that it uses slurs from the Southern Poverty Law Center to determine which groups to ban, that’s polarizing.43 When Stripe announces it will not process funds for the Trump campaign website after January 6, that’s polarizing.44 The question here isn’t whether you like any of these groups.

Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World
by Naomi Klein
Published 11 Sep 2023

Where, in the past, she put out plaintive videos about the unfairness of having her accounts suspended, she now wears deplatforming as a badge of honor, exploiting it as a fundraising pitch. “We really need you,” she tells Bannon, “because since we’ve been reporting on this, we’ve been deplatformed again!… We got bumped off of YouTube so come please to DailyClout.io.” When her Twitter account was reactivated by Musk’s conspiracy-friendly regime, her first salvo back was: “Greetings. Signed, Deplatformed seven times and still right.” She knows that in the Mirror World, only “sheeple” get to speak unhindered, while prophets must battle to be heard.

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“Introducing Unrelated Services or Products” (like that time Colgate got into frozen dinners, only to discover people didn’t want their beef lasagna from the same people who make their toothpaste). “Losing Control of the Brand” (like, oh, I don’t know, having the words and actions of a serially deplatformed conspiracy monger attributed to you amid a deadly pandemic). At the time Hon offered his free advice, brand dilution was making headlines because Nike had announced it was suing Lil Nas X and the art collective MSCHF for that very violation. Without the sports giant’s approval, the marketing-savvy artists had taken 666 pairs of Nike Air Max 97 running shoes, inserted drops of human blood into their soles, renamed the sneakers “Satan Shoes,” and sold them for $1,018 a pair.

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Again and again, she invoked the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—in her fifteen-minute “slavery forever” video, she referenced “the CCP” five times, the same number of times as she said “the West.” “This is literally the end of human liberty in the West if this plan unfolds as planned,” she told Steve Hilton in March 2021. If the passports become a reality, she said in her own video, “there won’t be capitalism.” Already, she said, the tech companies (with their deplatforming of misinformation) and the government (with its various Covid mandates) were engaging in “CCP-type conditioning … conditioning us not to be members of the West.” All the Covid responses, were, at bottom, about “weakening the West, weakening our society, weakening our children.” It was, she said, “un-American.”

American Marxism
by Mark R. Levin
Published 12 Jul 2021

80 This is an extraordinarily appalling letter, intended to intimidate and threaten targeted center-right broadcast and media organizations, for the sole purpose of silencing their speech. And virtually none of the other media and news organizations wrote or spoke against it. The reason: they agree with it. Even more, many news groups, journalists, and opinion writers were the first to propose de-platforming Fox, OANN, and Newsmax and are campaigning for government regulators and these platform companies to shut them down—as with Parler; which brings me back to the American media, where I started this chapter. The intersectional movements that form the core of American Marxism are largely supported by the Democratic Party and promoted by the media.

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Therefore, speech, debate, and challenges to Marxist-centric ideas are not tolerated. The purpose is societal and economic transformation; the means are social advocacy and activism. Opposition must be denounced, besmirched, and crushed. In fact, it is now obvious that the letter to these various corporations resulted from media demands for de-platforming Fox, OANN, and Newsmax, which preceded the letter’s date. On January 8, 2021, CNN’s Oliver Darcy wrote: “[W]hat about TV companies that provide platforms to networks such as Newsmax, One America News—and, yes, Fox News? Somehow, these companies have escaped scrutiny and entirely dodged this conversation.

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And yet we rarely, if ever, talk about them.”82 Notice Darcy’s Alinsky tactics as he attempts to smear the cable networks and certain television hosts, including me: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”83 Neither the networks nor the hosts he mentions had anything whatsoever to do with the storming of the Capitol Building. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof picked up where Darcy left off, Alinsky tactics and all, and joined the de-platforming campaign. He wrote: “We can’t impeach Fox or put [Tucker] Carlson or Sean Hannity on trial in the Senate, but there are steps we can take—imperfect, inadequate ones, resting on slippery slopes—to create accountability not only for Trump but also for fellow travelers at Fox, OANN, Newsmax and so on.”84 Thus, Kristof demanded from his Times soapbox that “we”—the Marxist-like mob—must hold these nonconforming media outlets and hosts to account; that is, they must be silenced.

Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral
by Ben Smith
Published 2 May 2023

Go to note reference in text “You will not replace us”: “Unite the Right Pre Game Torch March,” YouTube, April 17, 2018, video, 8:16, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPPQScy9Z7M. Go to note reference in text He’d been deplatformed: Ignacio Martinez, “The Atonement of an Alt-right Troll,” Daily Dot, May 22, 2019, https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/baked-alaska-atonement-alt-right-deplatforming. Go to note reference in text It was easy to relate: Tasneem Nashrulla, “We Blew Up a Watermelon and Everyone Lost Their Freaking Minds,” BuzzFeed News, April 8, 2016, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tasneemnashrulla/we-blew-up-a-watermelon-and-everyone-lost-their-freaking-min.

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So was a pro-Trump singer-songwriter, Joy Villa, in a tight red, white, and blue dress with the word “Freedom” on the skirt, and the Black Trump supporters known as Diamond and Silk, who had recently won an apology from Facebook, which had treated their political claims as dangerous misinformation. They walked among easels carrying enlarged words like “deplatforming” and “demonetization”—the tools that had begun to be used to chase extreme voices off social media—with their definitions. Another enlarged Trump tweet read, “Social media is totally discriminating against Republican and conservative voices.” Then they took their seats in the Rose Garden, where Trump delivered a broadside against Facebook and Twitter, which had made all of their careers, for taking mild steps to enforce the platforms’ own rules.

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When, in December of 2019, he was arrested in Scottsdale, Arizona, for spraying Mace into the eyes of a bouncer, an officer reported that Mr. Gionet “informed me that he was a ‘influencer’ and had a large following on social media,” according to a police report. By then, Gionet had been subject to the evils that had been denounced at Trump’s social media summit. He’d been deplatformed—thrown off Twitter and Twitch—and had his YouTube videos demonetized. So he was streaming to DLive, a blockchain-based service, when he entered the Capitol on January 6, 2021. He strode around like he owned the place. “America First is inevitable! Fuck globalists, let’s go!” he yelled. At one point he advised other rioters not to damage anything; at another he yelled at a police officer that he was a “fucking oathbreaker, you piece of shit.”

Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody
by Helen Pluckrose and James A. Lindsay
Published 14 Jul 2020

Yes, they’ll concede, we hear stories about campus protests, but students have always protested. They’re young and idealistic. It’s practically a rite of passage. Also, the accounts of intolerant students are overhyped. It’s mostly a few activists at elite universities5 who demand trigger warnings, safe spaces, and the deplatforming of everyone who disagrees with them.6 The majority of students continue to support freedom of speech. Mostly, they just keep their heads down, and focus on their work, particularly at community colleges and other working-class institutions. Why should we worry about the actions of a few entitled students at our most elite universities?

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There have also been more overt attempts to silence certain views on campus. “No-platforming” policies for particular legal or political groups and certain public figures have become common,16 though they often fly under the radar. Certain views—academic views shared by professionals—are considered too dangerous or even “violent” to be allowed a platform. Unlike deplatforming drives—in which someone who has been invited to speak has that invitation rescinded—policies that disallow certain views in the first place attract little attention. In the United Kingdom, more than 50 percent of universities restrict speech, especially certain views of religion and trans identity.17 This problem is expansive.

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During the 1970s and into the 1980s, the radical and materialist feminist viewpoint held sway in the universities, but—following the turn to applied postmodernism and the creation of intersectional feminism, queer Theory, and postcolonial feminism—the intersectional feminists, queer Theorists, and trans activists have gained dominance. This has led to the deplatforming of once-popular feminist figures like Germaine Greer and Julie Burchill for their views on trans identity and sex work. Radical feminists also face fierce criticism from postcolonial and intersectional feminists because they see women as one class and are therefore frequently opposed to cultural relativism.

Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam
by Vivek Ramaswamy
Published 16 Aug 2021

Facebook Business Help Center, Facebook, 2021, www.facebook.com/business/help/2593586717571940?id=673052479947730. 4. Ahmari, Sohrab. “Meet Your (Chinese) Facebook Censors.” New York Post, 21 Oct. 2020, nypost.com/2020/10/20/meet-your-chinese-facebook-censors/. 5. Loesch, Dana. “Mailchimp Deplatforming a Local Tea Party Is a Hallmark of Fascism.” The Federalist, 16 Nov. 2020, thefederalist.com/2020/11/16/mailchimp-deplatforming-a-local-tea-party-is-a-hallmark-of-fascism/. 6. Montgomery, Blake. “PayPal, GoFundMe, and Patreon Banned a Bunch of People Associated with the Alt-Right. Here’s Why.” BuzzFeed News, 2 Aug. 2017, www.buzzfeednews.com/article/blakemontgomery/the-alt-right-has-a-payment-processor-problem. 7.

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Of course, he didn’t bother emailing me afterward once Facebook said it was an error. People said similar things about Marjorie Taylor Greene too, and I doubt they noticed Twitter’s subsequent correction. In both cases, the damage was already done. And even worse, these incidents reveal just how much everyday Americans trust these behemoths. Errors or not, this broad wave of deplatforming didn’t just happen to prominent politicians, who at least had other avenues for voicing their grievances. It happened to ordinary Americans too, in shocking numbers. The message was clear: comply or we’ll shut you up, permanently. It was nothing short of a Soviet-style purge of political dissent.

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All
by Adrian Hon
Published 14 Sep 2022

“Managing Harmful Conspiracy Theories on YouTube,” YouTube Official Blog, YouTube, October 15, 2020, https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/harmful-conspiracy-theories-youtube; Ben Collins and Brandy Zadrozny, “Twitter Bans 7,000 QAnon Accounts, Limits 150,000 Others as Part of Broad Crackdown,” NBC News, updated July 21, 2020, www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/twitter-bans-7-000-qanon-accounts-limits-150-000-others-n1234541; “An Update to How We Address Movements and Organizations Tied to Violence,” Facebook, Meta, updated November 9, 2021, https://about.fb.com/news/2020/08/addressing-movements-and-organizations-tied-to-violence. 36. Will Bedingfield, “Deplatforming Works, But It’s Not Enough,” Wired, January 15, 2021, www.wired.co.uk/article/deplatforming-parler-bans-qanon. 37. “The Numbers,” Lostpedia, accessed November 28, 2021, https://lostpedia.fandom.com/wiki/The_Numbers. 38. Dan Hon (@hondanhon), “re the content generation problem for ‘regular’ ARGs I mentioned above. For every ARG I’ve been involved in and ones my friends have been involved in, communities always consume/complete/burn through content faster than you can make it, when you’re doing a narrative-based game.”

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And because there is no coherent QAnon community in the same sense as the Cloudmakers, there’s no convention of SPEC tags. In their absence, YouTube first annotated QAnon videos with links to the QAnon Wikipedia article, then banned many entirely; Twitter banned 7,000 accounts and restricted 150,000 more, NBC reported; and Facebook banned all QAnon groups and pages.35 These are useful steps. Deplatforming works.36 It reduces the reach of extremist content and destroys the delicate network of connections between followers. Even if some migrate to surviving social networks and forums, many won’t bother. Still, technical fixes cannot stop QAnon from spreading in social media comments or private chat groups or unmoderated forums.

Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason
by Dave Rubin
Published 27 Apr 2020

The left’s vision is a new social order that despises our hard-fought freedoms (eroding the First Amendment in favor of hate-speech laws), promotes socialism (through the redistribution of wealth), and denies scientific fact in order to weaponize the power of feelings (by asserting that there are more than two genders, for example). Worse still, they implement all of these things with brute force: violence, censorship, character assassination, smear campaigns, doxing, trolling, deplatforming, and online witch hunts. Tricks that are deliberately designed to leave people down and out. Ideally, jobless and without the resources to push back. If you see no problem with all of this, or even condone it as part of a greater “good,” then we have some serious work to do. You’ve got Stockholm Syndrome and need urgent intervention.

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The article about YouTube radicalizing people to the far right ends with the subject becoming a lefty. You can’t make this shit up. Cain also later admitted that he had never considered himself “alt right” anyway, so The New York Times fabricated a narrative in yet another attempt to intimidate YouTube into deplatforming creators. These three examples combined (which are just a drop in the bucket) help explain why trust in mainstream media is at an all-time low. According to a 2018 poll by the Gallup and Knight Foundation, the overwhelming majority of Americans distrust the media. Specifically, 90 percent of Republicans, 75 percent of independents, and 66 percent of moderates.

Practical Anarchism: A Guide for Daily Life
by Scott. Branson
Published 14 Jun 2022

Anarchist approaches to relationships fit into these traditions of naming harm, from Black feminist, queer/trans, and Indigenous practices—all approaches that work outside or beyond of the state’s purview. And I would add this doesn’t preclude an understanding that some people will not transform, be held accountable, or stop harming, and that there is a need for collective self-defense against these people, whatever that looks like, from ostracization, deplatforming, or revenge. But again, this is a messy business. One might object that maintaining relationships and building community in this way involves a huge amount of work. We are often so tired out and absorbed by the basic labor of making money to pay for subsistence, there’s not much time left for anything else.

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The untold side of the “civil rights” or Black freedom movement of the 1950s and 1960s is the story of this kind of protection, especially since the existence of Black freedom fighters was an immediate threat to the state. In a different context, we see this kind of mobilization today on a larger scale in countering fascist demonstrations globally. A lesson of antifascism is deplatforming, kicking them off the streets, trying to stop any hold they can get. This type of confrontation goes back to the beginnings of fascism, but it has persisted in subcultural spaces when fascism creeps in, and now in a larger global fascist rise it results in street movements. But the other side of this kind of self-defense against the state, and its deputized agents like fascists, is a kind of care work.

System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot
by Rob Reich , Mehran Sahami and Jeremy M. Weinstein
Published 6 Sep 2021

If you care about privacy, this all sounds appealing unless you are the head of the FBI, trying to track down terrorist sympathizers who are plotting an attack in a major US city or a human rights campaigner in India who has discovered that political gangs are using encrypted communication technologies to organize anti-Muslim violence in advance of an election. Just to underscore the enormity of this challenge: After the siege of the US Capitol and the deplatforming of President Trump, downloads of end-to-end encrypted applications exploded. As the plotters of the insurrection decamped for smaller but completely private messaging platforms, the task of tracking and disrupting the activities of domestic terrorists became far more difficult. How should we weigh the value of privacy against other important benefits?

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In a post justifying the decision, it noted that “the President’s statements can be mobilized by different audiences, including to incite violence.” Dorsey later further defended the decision, writing that “Offline harm as a result of online speech is demonstrably real, and what drives our policy and enforcement above all.” The decision to deplatform the sitting president of the United States brought swift reactions worldwide. Between declarations that it was a long-overdue action to stop a fountain of dangerous misinformation and heated cries by others of censorship and left-wing bias stands the central issue of how social media platforms actually deal with the millions of daily posts containing hate speech, misinformation, and disinformation.

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For example, a number of companies agreed to pull ads from Facebook in 2020 as part of the #StopProfitForHate campaign when the company refused to take down or limit exposure to Trump’s post “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” Of course, the inverse is also possible. Some users might choose platforms with looser content moderation, as we saw with the migration to Parler after the deplatforming of President Trump. However, the data so far suggest this will be an attractive option for a relatively small share of total users. Government should get involved when organized efforts to spread misinformation and disinformation threaten the integrity of the democratic process. We already recognize an appropriate role for government when we want to stop child pornography, human trafficking, copyright violation, and radicalization.

Giving the Devil His Due: Reflections of a Scientific Humanist
by Michael Shermer
Published 8 Apr 2020

What criteria are used to censor certain speech? Ideas that I disagree with? Thoughts that differ from your thoughts? Anything that the majority determines is unacceptable? This is another form of tyranny, a tyranny of the majority. 3. It is not just the right of the speaker to speak but for listeners to listen. When colleges deplatform speakers or students succeed in silencing a speaker through the heckler’s veto, the right of the audience to hear the speaker’s ideas is violated. 4. We might be completely right but still learn something new in hearing what someone else has to say. 5. We might be partially right and partially wrong, and by listening to other viewpoints we might stand corrected and refine and improve our beliefs. 6.

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In my case, my devils include creationists who reject the theory of evolution, Holocaust deniers who reject the theory that the Nazi regime intended to exterminate European Jewry, scientists who risk their reputations and careers to study such radioactive topics as racial group differences in IQ and gender differences in cognitive abilities or career preferences, and conservatives and centrists who challenge the far-left dogma on college campuses and find themselves deplatformed before speaking or vetoed by hecklers while speaking. These are the devils of Part I of this book, The Advocatus Diaboli: Reflections on Free Thought and Free Speech, and I try to give them their due through a fair hearing of their opinions, even when I reject them. Even the Catholic Church employed an Advocatus Diaboli – a Devil’s Advocate – tasked with arguing “against the canonization (sainthood) of a candidate in order to uncover any character flaws or misrepresentation of the evidence favoring canonization.”9 The position was established in 1587 by Pope Sixtus V when it became apparent to the church that many claims of miracles – offered to elevate favored candidates to sainthood – were bogus, such as pieces of the true cross, saints’ relics, weeping statues, bleeding paintings, and especially miraculous healings that might have happened by chance or through the natural healing capacities of the body.

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Since I matriculated as an undergraduate in the early 1970s on the wave crest of the Free Speech Movement of the late 1960s, I was taken aback that the anyone would doubt this central tenet of liberty. I shouldn’t have been, given that signs had appeared the previous few years – starting around 2013 – with the deplatforming (disinvitation) of controversial speakers; the emphasis on protecting students’ feelings from ideas that might challenge their beliefs; the call for trigger warnings about sensitive subjects in books, films, and lectures; the opening of safe spaces for students to retreat to when encountering ideas they find offensive; and the dispersal of lists of microaggressions – words, phrases, statements, and questions that might offend people.

Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy
by Talia Lavin
Published 14 Jul 2020

In a sense, I began to enjoy deceiving them, taking an acrid pleasure in my own duplicity. But anger at these bigots was only part of what I felt. Some of my rage became directed at the people who oppose strong action against neo-Nazi organizing. I raged against white moderates—the people who don’t believe in de-platforming Nazis from every perch they get, or facing down their marches, depriving them of audience and influence and a safe pedestal from which to spread their bile. The people who say: Ignore them! Let them march! Let them tweet, let them speak on campus, let them have their say and they will be defeated in the marketplace of ideas.

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“Whether the demonstrations turn into riots or another damp squib of hammer & sickle flag-waving idiots chanting moronic, mindless slogans before going home having achieved absolutely nothing remains to be seen,” he wrote. At the time, InfoWars’s influence over the conspiratorially minded right-wing sphere was nonpareil. “Around 2017, pre-deplatforming, InfoWars was best understood as acting as an amplifier,” Anna Merlan, author of the 2019 book Republic of Lies, which focuses on American conspiracy theorists, told me. Driven into the superheated heart of conservative paranoia by Watson, the “Antifa Civil War” myth began to effloresce in earnest.

The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire
by Jeff Berwick and Charlie Robinson
Published 14 Apr 2020

Hillary Clinton is pretty good at this, as evidenced by her speech to Goldman Sachs where she explained that she thought it was always important to have one opinion for the general public, and another one for the people listening to her paid speeches. Crimethink - This is a thought crime against the State, which included thinking anything that conflicted with the principles of IngSoc. They believed that all crimes began with a single thought, so if they could control thoughts then they could control crime. The de-platforming of social media accounts that run counter to the views of the government by their partners in Silicon Valley is Version 1.0 of the Crimethink concept. Fake News Words Some terms that are thrown around by the corporate media are so Orwellian and nonsensical that one really has to laugh at their audacity of using them in their nightly news broadcast with straight faces.

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The “alternative media” has been making things more difficult for the controllers over the past half-decade, starting with the revelations from Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, both were rewarded with sequestration and isolation in foreign countries for their troubles. It is a horrible thing in the sense that the controllers do have the ability to switch off those voices that dare to stand up to their plan for an Orwellian Ministry of Truth by de-platforming them one at a time, or in the case of Alex Jones, colluding to remove him from multiple platforms all at the exact same time. Not everyone in the alternative media had their channels taken away, but most faced some version of digital censorship that comes in a variety of flavors. The first salvo in the information war on social media came in the form of demonetization, where the videos or content that were uploaded onto the platform were prevented from showing advertisements, thus removing any financial benefit that might have been associated with a particular video or post.

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The most common method of deleting video channels and social media accounts is to accuse the content provider of a “Violation of Community Guidelines”, a catchall phrase that makes the accusation that the content provider has posted something against their rules and subsequently the entire channel has been terminated from the platform effective immediately. No discussion, no appeal, no judge, no jury, no rights, and no more channels. What is crazy about these cases, and there are many, is that what sometimes gets a channel de-platformed is a video that had lived on that channel in peace and love for the past three years without any issue but now all of a sudden was so offensive that not only is that video deleted, but every video the person ever created is gone as well. Facebook might put a content creator in “Facebook Jail” for 30 days where their content cannot be seen or modified, before popping back up after a month.

Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, From the Ancients to Fake News
by Eric Berkowitz
Published 3 May 2021

(The book actually celebrated student battles against the Klan, but someone saw the cover and found it offensive.)139 Such standards should be embarrassing for the schools. Yet the overall trend toward such micromanaging of speech is in decline. A report by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education found a 50 percent decrease from 2009 to 2020 in the number of American colleges earning its most restrictive “red light” rating.140 As for the “deplatforming” of controversial speakers at colleges that gets so much attention, it occurs far less often than news coverage implies. A BBC survey of 120 UK universities found just six canceling speakers from 2010 to 2018 because of what the speakers were anticipated to say,141 while in 2018, American college administrations disinvited eleven speakers142—not good, but also not enough to man the freedom-of-speech barricades.

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He had tossed some tasty red meat to conservatives, and the narrative of victimization by the Left was advanced. It goes beyond campuses. Trump’s son Donald Jr. advocated the dismantling of the “technology giants,” which he called “the greatest threat to free speech and our democracy today” because they “deplatform people at the behest of liberals.”147 This grievance was leavened into a threat when the president tweeted that the “radical left” is in “total command” of the major Internet platforms. “The administration,” he continued, “is working to remedy this illegal situation.”148 The result was the executive order attacking Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

Men Who Hate Women: From Incels to Pickup Artists, the Truth About Extreme Misogyny and How It Affects Us All
by Laura Bates
Published 2 Sep 2020

If ads are being served on their videos, chances are good, depending on how many views, they’re making ad revenue based on Google, Facebook, YouTube, serving ads against their content. So, in that sense, de-platforming is good. It does slow them down quite a bit.13 When social media companies have been brave enough to take these steps, the impact has been significant: Milo Yiannopoulos saw his influence and platform greatly reduced after his ban from Twitter, with reports of his finances plummeting and tours being cancelled. ‘If you look at [far-right conspiracy theorist] Alex Jones, for example,’ Davey points out, ‘when he got de-platformed, he lost a zero off his regular viewing figures.’ As I write this chapter, the news comes in that Facebook, having taken many months to pluck up the same courage as Twitter, has decided to permanently ban Yiannopoulos and Jones, alongside five other high-profile extremist figures.

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power
by Jacob Helberg
Published 11 Oct 2021

Others continued to doubt whether disinformation and foreign interference were much of a problem. There were substantive concerns, of course. In the wake of Twitter banning President Trump’s account, calls for restraint on content moderation have grown louder. Prominent tech figures such as David Sacks have cautioned against “decisions to permanently ban or de-platform individuals and/or businesses with no ability to appeal.”66 As someone that has spent years working on content moderation issues, I am still confident and hopeful that conduct-based approaches can be effective ways of addressing platform abuse while simultaneously upholding foundational free speech principles.

…

An American intelligence agency (perhaps alerted by a tech company) might determine that Russian intelligence operatives are spreading disinformation to influence an American election, with all of their posts across Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit coming from the same few IP addresses in St. Petersburg. That information could then be shared across allied nations—similar to how information about terrorist accounts is disseminated—allowing the intelligence operatives to be de-platformed across the free Internet. Get caught conducting an influence operation, and you’re not just banned from one platform in one country—you’re essentially banned by the entire free online world. We could similarly use this system to detect and punish firehosing—once again, sanctioning malign foreign actors based not on content but on patterns of nefarious conduct.

The Powerful and the Damned: Private Diaries in Turbulent Times
by Lionel Barber
Published 5 Nov 2020

My sole criterion is that he is a force in British politics and our audience of businessmen and -women will find him interesting and entertaining. At any rate, the award is about boldness and this is a bold choice as speaker. The argument over Farage pertained to my own editorial judgement but it also foreshadowed the debate about ‘de-platforming’ speakers because of their controversial views. Farage was not a proto-fascist, even if some UKIP members were unsavoury, swivel-eyed loons. That night Farage connected to his audience, sticking it to pro-Europeans like me who, he said, were on the wrong side of history. I was slow to grasp Farage’s everyman appeal.

…

W. 54, 63, 188, 314 Bush, George W. 31, 54, 55, 56, 63, 106, 110, 169, 188, 233, 435 Buttigieg, Pete 413 BuzzFeed 258, 395 Cadbury 263 Cambridge Analytica 394, 394n Cameron, David ix, xvi, 81–2, 97, 98, 125, 148, 151, 152, 158, 159, 161–2, 164, 174, 177, 180–81, 191–2, 193, 195, 196, 198, 203, 204, 205, 209, 222, 223, 226–7, 244, 259, 260, 263, 267, 283, 286, 288, 289, 290, 304–5, 308–10, 316, 319, 320, 321, 323, 326, 333, 344, 345, 374–5, 382–3, 388, 389, 414, 417, 427, 438 Cameron, Samantha 81–2, 161–2, 198, 304 capitalism: liberal capitalism model xi, xii, 117, 147n, 276, 312, 330, 334, 335, 339, 353, 355, 401, 419, 434, 436, 439; reform of 352, 353, 410, 439 Carnegy, Hugh 321 Carney, Mark 122, 323–4, 327, 341, 365–6, 371, 412 Catalan independence movement 219, 226 Cayne, Jimmy 24, 25, 85 Centre for European Reform 388–9 Chan, Andy 393 Charles, Prince x, xii, 264–6, 267, 268–70 Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack (2015) xv, 281 Cheney, Dick 54, 56, 233 Chidambaram, P. 38 China xi, 30, 31, 31n, 98–9, 117, 120, 123–4, 123n, 133, 140, 162–3, 169, 182–3, 206–7, 213–14, 228, 233, 241–2, 271, 303–6, 309, 344, 347–8, 351–2, 366, 374–5, 376, 390, 392–3, 395–8, 399, 410, 414, 434, 436, 439, 440 China Entrepreneur Club 233 Chubais, Anatoly 229 Churchill, Winston 24, 24n, 95, 128, 314, 310, 364, 422 Citigroup 68, 69, 85, 113, 114, 228, 404 City Lecture, Cambridge University 264 City of London xii, xiii, 25n, 106, 180, 224, 259, 297, 334, 365, 366, 429 Clark, Pilita 379 Clegg, Miriam 151, 195 Clegg, Nick 151–2, 158, 159, 162, 195–6, 275n, 286, 321, 394, 395, 414 Clinton, Bill 82, 150, 206, 208, 233 Clinton, Hillary 82, 96, 133, 233, 315–16, 331, 332 Clooney, George 204–5 Coalition government, UK 156–7, 158, 159–60, 193, 195–6, 209, 258–60, 275, 275n, 288, 289, 290, 354; austerity policies 209, 210, 259, 273, 289, 319, 438; Big Society concept 152–3 Cochrane, Alan 273 Cohen, Jared 332 Cohn, Gary 341–2 Cold War 96, 233, 314, 354, 395, 396, 398, 436, 438 collateralised debt obligations (CDOs) 45 Collins Stewart 14–15, 17–18, 19–20 Colloque (Anglo-French forum) 255–6 Colombia 140–42 Comcast 268 Communism, collapse of Soviet 88, 129, 137, 228, 344 Conservative Party 67, 71, 97, 106, 128, 139, 148, 151, 152–3, 156–8, 158n, 159, 174, 180n, 195–6, 217n, 223n, 227, 227n, 232, 244, 260, 273–5, 275n, 283–4, 287, 288, 289–90, 309, 310, 327, 333, 343, 345–6, 353–4, 358, 359–60, 365, 381, 388, 410, 410n, 411, 412, 414, 423 Corbyn, Jeremy 11n, 303, 340, 341, 345–6, 354, 363, 399, 402, 410, 427 Costolo, Dick 210–11 Coulson, Andy 191, 223, 223n Covid-19 xi, xvii, 123, 130, 383, 398, 433, 434–6, 438–9, 440–41 Cox, Jo 319 Crabtree, James 247 credit derivatives 37, 62, 66, 186 credit-rating agencies 62, 62n, 84 Crimea 91, 91n, 237n, 239, 275, 277 Crosby, Lynton xvi, 283–4, 287–8, 290, 345–6, 388 Crosby, James 18–19 Cummings, Dominic xv, 313–14, 420n, 423–4, 438 Dacre, Paul x, 76, 192, 195, 196–7, 220, 221, 227, 233, 239, 257, 331, 331n, 357, 363 Daily Mail x, 41, 67, 126, 151, 152, 192, 195, 220, 221, 239, 316, 327, 331, 334, 363 Daily Mirror 11, 32, 100 Daily Telegraph 32, 35, 51, 67, 126, 135–6, 135n, 192, 197, 273, 358, 358n, 359, 422 Dalian Wanda 213 Dalton, Stephen 148, 150 Danone 263 Darling, Alistair 69–70, 83n, 101, 101n, 136, 273 Darroch, Jeremy 267–8 Davidson, Heather 83 Davies, Howard 76–7, 76n, 190 Davis, David 362–4, 363n Davis, Ian 122, 197 DDB (advertising agency) 34 deflation 39, 391 Dell, Michael 120–21 Delors, Jacques 83, 341 Democratic Party, US 82, 98, 99, 187–8, 330, 332, 396; convention (2004) 82, 99; convention (2008) 98, 99; Democratic National Committee (DNC) 330 see also US Presidential Election Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) 157, 157n, 399, 425 Deng, Wendi 191 Deng Xiaoping 124, 129, 183 ‘de-platforming’ 262 Deutsche Bank 295, 383, 404, 410 Diamond, Bob x, 167–8, 212 Dickie, Mure 185 Dickson, Martin 13, 18–19, 102, 106–7, 431 Dilenschneider, Robert 84–5, 332 Dimbleby, Jonathan 340 Dimon, Jamie xiv, 24, 24n, 93–4 Dinmore, Guy 162 Disney 213, 214, 268 Doerr, John 215–16 Döpfner, Mathias x, 283, 291–3, 295, 407 dotcom crash (2000–2001) 4, 16, 76, 84, 184, 228 Dow Jones 59–60, 65, 66, 135n, 282 Dowler, Milly 190 Draghi, Mario xiv, 178–9, 198–9, 200, 212–13, 223, 226, 320, 341, 367, 368, 402, 412–13, 415 DreamWorks 213 Dubai xiv, 102–3, 111, 112, 135, 168, 175 Duberstein, Ken 188 Dudley, Bob 163, 239 Dumfries House 264–5, 269 Duque, Iván 142 Economist, The 26, 205, 221, 238, 258, 282, 294, 354, 381, 389 Edano, Yukio 185–6 Edelstein, Jillian 208 Edinburgh, Prince Philip, Duke of 304 Edward VIII, King 198, 201 Egypt 54, 107, 177, 331 El-Erian, Mohamed: When Markets Collide 113 Elizabeth II, Queen 23, 271, 303–4, 305 England, Andrew 260–61 En Marche 353 Entwistle, George 217–18 Epstein, Jeffrey 7, 7n Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip 335 euro xiii, 61, 64, 84, 100, 172–3, 178, 179, 180, 198, 212, 223, 228, 413, 429 European Central Bank (ECB) xiv, 61, 69, 84, 100, 178–9, 179n, 188, 198–9, 203, 212, 223, 226, 367–8, 402, 412–13, 415–16, 436 European Commission 83, 84, 84n, 179, 274, 343, 344, 363, 402, 406 European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) 274 European Economic Community (EEC) 227 European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) 198–9 European People’s Party (EPP) 97 European Round Table of Industrialists 409 European Union 437; Brexit see Brexit; Covid-19 and 436, 437; Customs Union 328, 339, 354; euro see euro; fatal flaw in 99–101; ‘fiscal compact’ proposal 198; free movement of people 324; Lisbon treaty 64, 64n, 67, 381; Maastricht treaty 64n, 342, 389, 426, 433; Single Market 196, 315, 324, 328, 339, 341, 354, 366, 425; sovereign debt crisis 100–101, 148, 153–5, 172–3, 177, 179, 180, 188, 198–9, 212, 219, 224, 226, 238–9, 253, 341, 368, 413, 415–16 European University Institute, Fiesole 178 Evans, Harry 6–7, 10 Evening Standard 126, 136–7, 138–9, 345 Exxon Mobil 155 Facebook xi, 178, 200, 215, 216, 222, 247, 347, 394–5, 394n, 439 Fairhead, Rona 29, 66 ‘fake news’ 41, 346, 347 Fallon, John x, 251–2, 257, 281–3, 292, 294, 295, 296, 297, 302 Farage, Nigel 253, 259, 262, 266, 284, 349, 412 ‘fast’ and ‘slow’ news 240, 255 Federal Reserve, US 76, 85–7, 86n, 88, 94–5, 114, 199, 241, 415, 436 Federal Reserve Bank of New York 87–8 Felsted, Andrea 235 Ferguson, Jason 247 Ferguson, Alex 247–8, 251, 389 Fidler, Stephen 21 Fillon, François 205 financial crisis, global xi, xiii–xiv, 19, 22n, 25, 31n, 37n, 44, 62, 66, 69–72, 74–7, 81, 83–8, 92, 93–5, 96, 100–107, 108, 109, 110–13, 114–16, 117–23, 123n, 124, 125, 127–9, 130, 131, 133, 134, 138, 144, 154, 173, 174, 186–7, 228, 232, 245n, 364, 401, 434, 435, 436; Bear Stearns collapse 25, 85, 87–8, 93, 98, 104; Lehman Brothers collapse xiv, 5n, 37, 81, 101–2, 104, 105, 107, 121, 160, 199, 432 financial liberalisation, era of 129 Financial Services Authority 76n, 106, 138 Financial Times xi; ‘A List’ contributors 189–90; advertising revenues 4, 9, 26, 255, 288; advertising/marketing campaigns 4, 33, 34, 70; alpha-male problem 209; app 137–8, 214; ‘B2B’ business 118–20; Boldness in Business awards 262; Bracken House, headquarters move from One Southwark Bridge to 373, 391, 404, 411; Bracken Room 24, 25, 101, 398; ‘Brighton’ meeting 73–4; British Press Awards newspaper of the year (2008) 92; British Press Awards newspaper of the year (2018) 379; Business Book of the Year 112–13, 166, 243–4; Business of Luxury Summit, Monaco (2009) 156; circulation 4, 26, 312, 379, 401, 406–7, 431 see also subscriptions, digital; code of conduct 201; Collins Stewart libel case 14–15, 17–18, 19–20; Commodities Summit 286–7; core mission 9; cost cutting 16, 26, 147–8; ‘digital first’ journalism 224–5, 240, 255, 403, 440; digital transformation of xi, xv, 10, 17, 43, 74, 92, 117–18, 147, 201, 218, 224–5, 240, 241, 255, 257, 272, 285, 394, 395, 401, 403, 432, 440; editorial independence, principle of 60, 93, 251, 282, 288–9, 292, 294–5, 297, 299, 311, 394; editorial leader conference 209–10; FastFT 224; FT Alphaville financial blog 27; ft.com 6, 69–70, 114, 117–19, 167, 240, 321, 380; Future of Capitalism series 129, 133; Future of News conference 379–80; gender balance at top of, plans for 340; Gulf, edition for the 135; ‘Here Day’ 202, 202n; hiring of staff/power to shape through appointments 5, 6, 12–13, 16, 26–7, 43, 51, 158, 189–90, 255, 403; House and Home, Weekend FT supplement 174, 264, 270; How to Spend It 104; in-house lawyer 20n, 200–201, 258, 405; independent sources, stories supported by two 9, 20, 56, 201; ‘Inside Blair Inc’ feature 142; investigations team 291, 368–9, 381–2, 405; Latin America coverage 140–42; LB accepts Nikkei request to stay on as editor 300; LB appointed editor 3–10; LB daily routine as Editor 35–6, 175–6; LB hosts team leader summer event 296–7; LB leaves post as Editor of 430–32; LB news editor of 9, 15; LB rotates top team 147, 302; LB’s essays for 355, 381, 427, 429; LB’s New Year note to staff, LB’s 224–5; LB’s overseas trips see individual nation name; LB’s second term as editor of 197–8, 202–3; LB succession planning at 252, 312, 391, 395, 401, 404, 426, 428, 429–31; LB US managing editor of 3–5; LB ‘walking the floor’ of 431; letters to the FT editor 83; Leveson inquiry and see Leveson inquiry; Lex Column 99–100, 361; Lunch with the FT 72–3, 120, 175, 176, 188, 229–30, 325, 326, 343; Magazine, weekend 208–9, 219, 302, 381, 401, 429; managing editor, change of 26n, 117, 147, 203, 224, 403; mid-morning meeting of commentators and ‘leader writers’ 103–4; motto, revival of original 58; Nikkei and see Nikkei; 125th anniversary 224, 225, 228–30, 234, 235; 1 million paying readers by 2020 target 312, 379, 401, 406–7, 431; origins 24–5, 25n, 224; Pearson and see Pearson; Pearson sells to Nikkei xiv, xv, 281–3, 284–5, 288–9, 291–300, 301–3, 304, 305–6, 310–11, 312, 403, 407, 428; pensioners’ lunch 277; Person in the News 21, 21n; Person of the Year 166–7, 223, 314, 357–8; publishing system 15–16, 26; ‘rebrush’/redesigns 34, 58, 254–5, 272; self-regulation, system of 257–8, 258n; sponsors 166, 243, 262; subscription business 26, 92, 118, 119, 229, 285, 312, 322, 339, 346, 379, 401, 406–7, 431; ‘thought leader’ brand 172; union members 202–3, 202n; US managing editor 5, 5n, 130, 147, 389; US, move into 3–4; ‘We Live in Financial Times’ marketing slogan 34, 44; Weekend FT 127, 174, 194, 208–9, 219, 302, 381, 401, 429 Fischer, Hartwig 377, 377n 5G technology 184, 375 Five Star Movement 203, 380 Flanders, Stephanie 42–3 Fleurot, Olivier 8, 9, 15–16, 25–6, 29 Ford, Jonathan 158 Fowler, Susan 357–8 Fox, Liam 274 Foy, Henry 417, 419 France x, 62, 69, 91–2, 95, 172, 177, 185, 198, 205, 255–6, 263, 326–7, 339, 341, 343–4, 353, 355, 366, 380, 408, 412–13 Fraser, Simon 319–20 Freeland, Chrystia 12–13, 12n, 85, 130, 147, 147n Fridman, Mikhail 90, 275 Friedman, Alan 27–8, 27n Frost, David 45, 137, 245 Frost/Nixon (Morgan) 45 FT Group 29 Fukushima nuclear reactor disaster (2011) 181, 185 Fuld, Dick x, xiv, 46, 85–6, 105 Fu Ying x, 124, 125–6, 241, 242 Gaddafi, Muammar 142, 177, 180, 259 Gandhi, Indira 407 Gandhi, Mahatma 408 Gandhi, Rahul 245 Ganesh, Janan 205 Gapper, John 43, 70, 88, 104–5, 190, 209–10, 221, 432 Garrahan, Matthew 213, 357, 379, 384 G8 237, 237n General Election, UK: (1992) 157, 228, 261; (1997) 12, 101n, 157; (2001) 12, 157; (2005) 12, 157; (2010) 148, 150–53, 156–9, 158n, 174, 173; (2015) 11n, 274, 283–4, 286–8, 289–90, 345; (2017) 343, 345–6, 353–4, 363, 388; (2019) 402 General Electric (GE) 66, 162–3 General Motors (GM) 221, 376 George, Eddie 138 Georgian National Theatre Company 192–3 Germany ix, xiii, xv, 31, 67, 69, 90n, 95, 101, 149, 172, 173, 179, 180, 188, 198, 199, 203, 219, 228, 237–8, 238n, 242n, 274, 283, 291, 292, 309, 331, 339, 343, 358–9, 368, 401, 404, 405, 406, 407, 413, 415, 416, 419, 421, 427, 433–5, 437 Ghosn, Carlos 375, 375n Giampaolo, David 233 Gibbs, Robert 131, 359 Gibson, Janine 395 Giles, Chris 210 Glasenberg, Ivan 287, 428, 428n Glastonbury Festival 322 Glencore 286, 287, 428n globalisation 34, 116, 228, 312, 333, 335, 348, 434 Gnodde, Richard 429–30 Gold, Dore 109, 109n Goldman Sachs xiv–xv, 24n, 31, 31n, 37, 55, 84n, 86, 87, 112, 122, 166–7, 178, 179, 243, 341, 342, 429 González, Felipe 225 Goodwin, Fred 22–3, 22n, 72, 75 Google xi, 137, 160–61, 178, 214–15, 326, 332, 439; Google Camp conference, Sicily 422; Mountain View headquarters 73–4; Street View 160–61 Gorbachev, Mikhail 90, 136–7, 138, 250, 344 Gordon, Sarah 209, 287, 383 Gove, Michael 255, 315, 316–17, 318, 323, 362, 410 Gowers, Andrew 5, 5n, 7–8, 12, 13, 26, 46, 105, 160 Grade, Michael 65 Grant, Charles 388–9 Grauer, Peter 212–13 Grayling, Chris 274 Great Depression 94, 114, 130, 335 Greece 99–100, 148, 153, 154, 172–3, 177, 211, 212, 238, 253, 341, 413 Greenberg, Maurice ‘Hank’ 36 Green, Damien 362–3 Green, Philip x, 162, 167, 235, 371 Greenspan, Alan 76–7, 88, 94, 129 Greig, Geordie 265 Grimes, Chris 403 Grove, Andy 420 G20 92, 117, 123, 123n, 131, 143, 408, 419, 420 Guardian 27, 35, 76, 82–3, 151, 161, 165, 190, 191–2, 197, 236, 237, 255, 258, 290–91, 318, 395, 440 Guerrera, Francesco 102 Guha, Krishna 94 Guinness, Sabrina 300–301 Gu Kailai 206 Gunvor 286, 287 Guthrie, Jonathan 361 Haass, Richard xvi–xvii Hague, William 274–5, 275n Hall, Jerry 317 Hall, Tony 217 Hamas 54, 108, 108n Hammond, Philip 324, 342–3, 345, 362, 365, 373, 420, 420n Hancock, Matt 413 Hannigan, Robert 149, 149n Hanson, Nigel 20n, 200–201, 258, 405 Harding, James 28, 192, 389 Harding, Robin 181, 284, 391 Harry, Prince 422 Hastings, Max 126–7 Hastings, Reed 398–9 Hayward, Tony 160, 163 HBOS 18–19, 104, 122, 127, 128 Heinz 263 see also Kraft Heinz Heywood, Neil 206 Heywood, Jeremy 258–60, 342, 364–5, 414–15 Hill, Andrew 244 Hill, Dave 11 Hille, Kathrin 183 Hill, Fiona 342, 349, 349n Hill, Jonathan 342–3, 342n Hilton, Steve 345 Hiroshima, Japan 284 Hitchens, Christopher 56–8, 57n, 72–3, 205–6 Hizbollah 107, 249 HK National Party 393 Holbrooke, Richard 57, 132–3, 132n, 148n, 170 Hollande, François 255–6 Hong Kong xvi, 60, 217n, 304, 350–52, 390, 392–3, 414 Hornby, Andy 19 Hoskins, Carine Patry 201 House of Commons 152, 193, 259, 343, 363n, 399–400, 423; Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee 216n, 239–40; Treasury Select Committee 127 House of Lords 72, 158, 229, 275, 275n, 349, 363, 363n, 394, 438 House of Representatives, US 106 Howard, John 283 HSBC 22, 22n, 121, 122, 237 Huawei xii, 182–4, 375, 398, 399 Huffington, Ariana 99 Huffington Post 99, 258, 380n Hu Jintao 99 Hunt, Jeremy 274, 410, 411–12, 413, 425 Hussein of Jordan, King 102, 110 Hussein, Saddam 28, 57 Hutton, John 71 Hyon Hak-Bong 253–4 Ignatius, David 276 IMF (International Monetary Fund) 118, 123, 219, 246n, 402, 412 Immelt, Jeffrey 162–3 immigration xi, 67, 203, 283–4, 309, 313, 318, 319, 334, 335, 343, 354, 410, 420 Inagaki, Kana 181 Independent 32, 41, 192 Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) 257, 257n India ix, 30, 37–40, 123n, 129, 168–70, 203, 228, 244–7, 309, 348, 383, 407–9 inequality xiii, 193, 273, 410 inflation 30, 52, 95, 138, 251, 415, 435 Instagram 200, 347, 395 interest rates 30–31, 61, 70, 86, 100, 138, 323, 415 International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) 149, 150 Iran 54, 245n, 248–9, 249n, 250, 251, 251n, 259, 307, 377, 425; US nuclear deal with 248–9, 250, 251, 259, 307 Iraq 28, 108, 111, 243n; US-led war in 11, 12, 54, 55, 56, 57, 108, 110, 111, 142, 206, 208–9, 228, 330, 377, 387 Ireland 148, 188–9, 212, 425 ISIS 378 Islam, radical xv, 107, 108n, 170, 171, 248, 249, 251, 281, 378, 397 Israel xiv, 102, 107–9, 109n, 141, 208–9, 250, 251, 292, 319, 378, 382 Italy 27–8, 27n, 99, 100, 162–3, 178–9, 196, 203–4, 212, 214, 238, 239–40, 367, 380, 400, 413 Ivanov, Sergei 329–31, 417 Jackson, Andrew 348 Jacobs, Emma Gilpin 201 Jacques, Jean-Sébastien 386–7 Jain, Anshu 295 Jaitley, Arun 244–5 Jang Song-thaek 253–4 Japan ix, xv, xvi, 17n, 69, 181, 185–6, 281, 283, 284–5, 296, 298–9, 300, 301–3, 304, 305–6, 308, 325, 334, 359, 367, 371–2, 374, 390–92, 402, 403–4, 408, 411, 420, 427–9 Javid, Sajid 410, 420n Jenkins, Antony 285–6 Jenkins, Patrick 166 Jio 40, 247 jishuku (‘self-restraint’) 185–6 Johnson, Boris xvi, 37–8, 38n, 40, 98–9, 138, 139n, 158, 159, 200, 242–3, 244, 310, 315, 323, 325, 344, 345, 358, 359, 362, 371, 373, 388, 402, 410, 410n, 412, 420, 420n, 421, 422, 423, 425–6, 435, 437 Johnson, Jo 37–8, 38n, 40, 244, 373 Johnson, Woody 364 Jones, Claire 416 Jonsson, Martin 240 Jordan 102, 107, 108, 110 JPMorgan Chase xv, 24n, 88, 93–4, 98, 142 Judge, Igor 194–5 Juncker, Jean-Claude 274–5, 343–4, 406 Kagame, Paul ix, xvi, 142, 340, 354–6, 380 Kaiser, Bob 332 Kalanick, Travis 357 Karzai, Hamid 149–50 Kasparov, Garry 89, 91 Katzenberg, Jeffrey 213–14 Kaufman, Henry 186–7 Kazmin, Amy 407 Kellaway, Lucy 159 Kelly, General John 366n, 367, 367n Kelner, Simon 32, 41 Ken Hu 183, 398, 399 Kengeter, Carsten 193 Kennedy, John F. 96n, 380–81, 381n Kenny, Enda 188–9 Kerr, Simon 112 Kerry, John 68, 222 Keswick, Henry 304, 304n Keynes, John Maynard 88, 129 Khalaf, Roula x, 29, 102–3, 110, 111–12, 135, 177, 209, 248, 250, 302, 306, 308, 321, 322, 339, 371, 379, 390, 392, 428–9, 430, 431, 432 Khan, Imran 170–71 Khan, Sonia 420, 420n Khashoggi, Jamal 308, 392 Kim Jong-un 253, 374, 397 King, Mervyn 30–31, 31n, 71–2, 76, 106, 128–9, 173, 212 King, Rodney 148 King, Stephen 237 Kinnock, Neil 157, 261 Kissinger, Henry 54, 207 Kita, Tsuneo 298, 299, 300, 301, 302, 310–11, 312, 321, 391, 401, 402, 404, 411, 428–9, 430, 432 Klerk, F.W. de 229–30 Knight-Bagehot fellowship programme, Columbia Journalism School 46 Kock, Gerhard de 51 Kohl, Helmut 344, 426 Kosovo 89, 89m Kraft Heinz 263, 352, 353 Kushner, Jared 367 Kuwait 111, 142, 206, 208 Kynge, James 124, 303, 393 Kyriacou, Kristina 268, 270 labour market, growth in size of world’s 228 Labour Party 11, 11n, 12, 30, 41, 64, 68, 71–2, 101n, 127, 128, 151, 157–8, 158n, 159, 162, 163–4, 193, 207, 228, 239, 259, 273, 284, 287, 288, 290, 303, 319, 340, 341, 354, 377n, 402, 438 Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford 395 Lambert, Richard 115–16, 244, 252, 297, 411 Lam, Carrie xvi, 350–51, 393, 414 Lamont, James 168, 203, 224, 302, 403 Lansley, Andrew 180, 180n Lavrov, Sergei 237 Lawson, Nigel 229 Lazard 121, 121n Leahy, Terry x, 23–4 Lebedev, Alexander 137, 138–9 Lebedev, Evgeny 136–7, 138–9, 139n, 376–7 Lee Jae-yong (J.Y.

The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America
by Victor Davis Hanson
Published 15 Nov 2021

Or, to put it another way, in an age of instant global connectiveness and increasing homogeneity of ideas, there remain limits to Americanized elasticity: the more regional concerns, the more languages, the more transnational issues, the more lands, the more customs that America must oversee, the more its original core is attenuated. The more Silicon Valley looks westward across the ocean for its talent, the less it seems to look eastward to invest in its kindred Americans; the more it seeks to synchronize global norms of censorship and deplatforming, the more it will come into conflict with the Bill of Rights. The more the United States puts its money, its military, its people, and its resources at the disposal of others, the fewer such assets will be available to serve the interests of its own citizens. And the more Americans recalibrate their values with those of the wider world, the less resonance their own constitution will have.2 We should keep these incongruities in mind as we seek to harmonize the world in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in our own image.

…

Whether all fifty Democratic senators would remain unified enough in efforts to end the filibuster—the key to enacting a subsequent radical reset of American institutions—became the political question of early 2021. Not in doubt was that private companies judged the controversial end of the Trump administration would mean a free license to ban, deplatform, and censor both use of social media and the users themselves. Soon after, thousands of Trump followers had their social media accounts censored or frozen. Those who had posted evidence of attending a rally to support challenges to the acceptance of the Electoral College vote—and yet did not participate in violent protests with other splinter groups—were sometimes fired from their jobs, or banned from travel, or had their businesses boycotted.

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 7 Sep 2022

I kept asking myself, how could someone so smart have come to join this cult, believe this stuff, and engage in these antics? But maybe I was confused because I was seeing it the wrong way. Cult members aren’t usually actively angry, but pacified and complacent. After all, they’ve found The Truth. They’re smiling, not griping or complaining that their griping has been de-platformed. No, this wasn’t really a cult so much as a case of classic internet addiction. Do we ever ask, “How could someone so smart have become an addict?” No, because addiction is triggered and maintained by a whole different part of one’s physical and emotional makeup. If anything, addiction enlists a person’s intelligence to maintain the supply of drugs and fend off all efforts at intervention.

The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time
by Yascha Mounk
Published 26 Sep 2023

According to Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, at least four warning signs help to distinguish healthy instances of what he calls a “critical culture” from worrying indications that people are being “canceled” for their views: Punitiveness: Cancellations often involve severe punishments such as suffering the revocation of titles or honors or being fired from a job. Deplatforming: Cancellations often involve demands to “deplatform” offending individuals so that they cease to be able to express their views. Organization: Cancellations often involve collective efforts to punish offending speakers through coordinated petitions or social media campaigns. Secondary boycotts: Cancellations often seek to exert pressure on any institutions or publications with which the person who is being criticized is affiliated, aiming to render that person “radioactive.”

Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy
by David Frum
Published 25 May 2020

It is getting close to the time when, per America’s founding documents, citizens will start forming into well-regulated militias in preparation for the lawful defense of the Constitution. And maybe I’m the right person to sketch out how that should work. You know, maximum cell size. Encrypted comms. Like I said, I abhor violence. But civil war is coming, and, if it does, well-meaning but poorly informed and relentlessly de-platformed conservatives are going to need a handbook.14 Weird right-wing street gangs have formed in the Trump years, Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer, that seek out confrontations with black-masked anarchist groups, often dubbed Antifa, for “antifascist.” (“Antifa” is antifascist in the same sense that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is a democratic people’s republic.)

The Smartphone Society
by Nicole Aschoff

Black Lives Matter has yet to achieve measurable police reform and few police officers have gone to jail for murdering Black people. The right, too, has had its own failures. The jubilant tiki-torch-wielding fascists who marched in Charlottesville have been driven back into their holes as Richard Spencer, Alex Jones, Gavin McInnes, and numerous other representatives of the right have been “deplatformed” by the major social media companies. Criticisms that paint the digital-analog political model that has emerged in the past decade as primarily an artifact of filter bubbles, virtue signaling, and slacktivism have some validity. The power that the tech titans have to shape and censor our political reality, particularly because these platforms have become a primary source of news, is deeply concerning.

The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success
by Ross Douthat
Published 25 Feb 2020

And much of the right-wing revolt against the system has a similar attention-seeking quality: conservative populists talk about overthrowing what they see as a left-wing system of surveillance and cultural control, but their specific demands often circle back to a desire for their own place within the system—a space to monetize their YouTube videos and to circulate their pro-Trump memes, free from fears of shadow banning and deplatforming and banishment to obscure apps or social spaces. In other words, Trump-era populism draws a certain kind of energy from moving back and forth across the safety/danger line, but when pressed, it prefers to appeal to the system as a client demanding services, or as a subject demanding its rights, rather than accepting the options for exile—understandably enough, since most of the extrapanoptical options are crawling with white supremacists, and the provocateurs who actually get banished from the social media monopolies soon find themselves unable to monetize their provocations.

Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World
by James Ball
Published 19 Jul 2023

All of this together means that the conversation about what to do about QAnon and movements like it is, in Phillips’ view, in the wrong place. It focuses on individual fixes and on symptoms, and ignores the broader systems changes that would need to take place. ‘The conversation is about moderation. It’s about deplatforming, it’s about demonetisation,’ she concludes. ‘It’s not about all of the underlying stuff that gives rise to all of those other symptoms. So, we really miss a lot when we’re not thinking about it all in those ecological terms.’ What does that mean? It means if you want to cut off something like QAnon, you need to cut it off from the things that sustain it – tackling the grounds where it breeds, the hate that feeds it, the incentives for politicians to play along, the online advertising model that can make feeding conspiracies lucrative.

Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters
by Abigail Shrier
Published 28 Jun 2020

And they believe that “affirmative therapy” is either a terrible dereliction of duty or a political agenda disguised as help. All of them read Lisa Littman’s paper with great interest, believing she was onto something. All suspect that this epidemic may be the result of peer contagion. They also have all suffered ostracism, deplatforming, and public censure for having insisted that gender dysphoria ought to be treated—and not merely facilitated. They believe that it is wrongheaded to regard helping a patient overcome gender dysphoria as “conversion therapy.” They are dissidents from the current order, by dint of therapeutic duty and the Hippocratic oath.

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class
by Joel Kotkin
Published 11 May 2020

Even today, some Marxists long for “a fully automated luxury communism” where technology has ended scarcity and created a “post-work society.”23 Sadly, such utopian visions can lead to frighteningly dystopian results. Technology may connect people in unprecedented ways, but it appears to be constraining intellectual debate under the control of a few powerful companies. The widespread censorship and “de-platforming” of unapproved views already being practiced, notes law professor and author Glenn Reynolds, could presage a new form of technologically enhanced thought control.24 The rewiring of society could be accelerated by an even more remarkable, and somewhat terrifying, biological transformation. For a half century, scientists have been dreaming of engineering humans to limit reproduction, or to transmit information directly into the brain.

Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking
by Michael Bhaskar
Published 2 Nov 2021

The Index looks at ‘the amount of procedures, vertical layers, interface structures, coordination bodies, and decision approvals within organizations’. 70 Kirsner (2018) 71 See for example Cummings (2014) 72 Erixon and Weigel (2016), p. 153 73 Storrs Hall (2018) 74 Nichols (2017) 75 See for example O’Mahony (2019), p. 199 76 Drezner (2017) 77 Ibid. 78 Ibid. 79 Lukianoff and Haidt (2018), p. 110 80 Ibid., p. 111 81 Ibid. 82 Bannerjee and Duflo (2019), p. 1 83 Ibid., p. 127 84 O’Connor and Weatherall (2018) 85 Haidt and Lukianoff (2018), p. 77 86 It is curious that many of the pioneers of a previous generation, from Peter Singer to Peter Tatchell, have been ‘cancelled’ and deplatformed from speaking engagements. 87 Thompson and Smulewicz-Zucker (2018), p. 132 88 Tollefson (2020) 89 See for example Belot (2018) 90 Kaufmann (2010) 91 Drezner (2017) 92 Williams (2018). Alternatively: go on Twitter. 93 Davies (2019) 94 Thanks to Erixon and Weigel (2016) for these two insights. 95 O’Mahony (2019), p. 256 96 See for example Goldin and Kutarna (2017), p. 264 97 O’Mahony (2019), p. 256 98 Erixon and Weigel (2016), p. 142; see also Roy (2012). 99 Grush (2019) 100 Brennan (2019) 101 Storrs Hall (2018) 102 Wallace-Wells (2019), p. 7.

The Ones We've Been Waiting For: How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America
by Charlotte Alter
Published 18 Feb 2020

Reporting from the Young Women’s Leadership Summit, hosted by the conservative group Turning Point USA, New York Times reporter Astead Herndon observed that “more than any political ideology, the women at the summit appeared united by their criticism of recent social movements.” To them, he wrote, “there was nothing worse than being labeled racist, sexist or homophobic by ‘the left,’ because liberal name-calling was worse than any sin that could precede it.” (Of course, Turning Point USA did its own fair share of de-platforming, hosting a “Professor Watchlist” of left-leaning academics for conservatives to boycott.) That’s why young conservatives loved Dan: he attacked the outraged mob of “woke police” that seemed to be always attacking them, but unlike Trump, he wasn’t always digging them into an even deeper hole.

England: Seven Myths That Changed a Country – and How to Set Them Straight
by Tom Baldwin and Marc Stears
Published 24 Apr 2024

He chaired both the BBC and the Conservative Party when both were more certain of their place in the national story than they are now. His speech, delivered a year before he announced his retirement in 2024, lamented everything from Brexit and political interference with ‘un-corrupt’ elite institutions and the ‘de-platforming’ shadow hanging over the cherished principle of free speech. Insisting the university was still very much a ‘going concern’ despite facing some ‘headwinds’, the chancellor wheeled out a quotation from The Leopard − a novel about a disintegrating kingdom − that has become the well-worn maxim of England’s Establishment over the years: ‘Things have to change in order to remain the same.’82 The occasion was the inauguration of Irene Tracey as Oxford’s 273rd vice-chancellor, effectively the chief executive of the university.

Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections
by Mollie Hemingway
Published 11 Oct 2021

In 2016, shortly after Trump’s election, Huffman was so angered that he used his database privileges to edit comments from r/The_Donald members making fun of him. When evidence surfaced showing what he’d done, Huffman issued an apology.33 After 2016, numerous other sites were scrubbed from the web, hidden from Google searches, banned from social media, or otherwise de-platformed. Popular conservative social media accounts were banned for their political views, cutting them off from access to their users. Carpe Donktum, the internet handle for a prominent pro-Trump meme maker with 270,000 followers, was kicked off Twitter for copyright violations in June 2020.34 For anyone who’s spent any time on Twitter, where millions of memes using preexisting images are floating around constantly, it was an absurd excuse.

The Long Game: China's Grand Strategy to Displace American Order
by Rush Doshi
Published 24 Jun 2021

The UN’s highest leadership has repeatedly praised the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI); BRI has been inserted into the critical Sustainable Development Goals; BRI and the Community of Common Destiny have appeared in UN resolutions; and a wide range of UN bodies—such as UNICEF, UNESCO, UNHCR, and DESA—have either endorsed BRI or funded and collaborated with it.32 In other cases, China has used its leverage in the ICAO and the WHO to marginalize Taiwan. It successfully de-platformed some NGOs critical of Beijing’s human rights record and platformed its own “government-organized” NGOs (i.e., GONGOs) that follow Beijing’s lead on key issues. And its top officials, like former DESA head Wu Hongbo, have been unapologetic about putting national over international obligations: “as a Chinese-national international civil servant, I don’t yield in matters concerning China’s national sovereignty or security interests and resolutely defend the interests of my country.”33 He once boasted of using UN security to “drive out” a Uyghur activist that he declared was not part of an “approved NGO” and had been the subject of an INTERPOL “red notice”—factors for which Beijing was itself responsible, and a useful case study in China’s efforts to “deliberalize” UN architecture.

The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning With the Myth of the Good Billionaire
by Tim Schwab
Published 13 Nov 2023

combating “misinformation”: Examples include $100,000 to the International Center for Journalists, $960,000 to BBC Media Action, and $1.5 million to Media Ecosystems Analysis Group. power over the pandemic: Schwab, “While the Poor Get Sick, Bill Gates Just Gets Richer.” Paris Marx: Other Twitter users have told me that they have also been suspended for sharing information about the Gates Foundation. I also use Twitter, and I’ve never been deplatformed or suspended. CHAPTER 6: LOBBYING Chris Cole: Chris Cole, LinkedIn,” n.d., https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-cole-1158ba96/; Licea et al., “Insiders Say Bill Gates Was an Office Bully Who Pursued Sexual Affairs.” Sen. Lindsey Graham: James Fontanella-Khan, Mark Vandevelde, and Simeon Kerr, “Bill Gates Vehicle Buys $2.2Bn Stake in Four Seasons from Saudi Royal,” Financial Times, September 8, 2021; “Ben Affleck, Bill Gates Urge Foreign Aid for Congo,” Washington Post, March 26, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/politics/ben-affleck-bill-gates-urge-foreign-aid-for-congo/2015/03/26/dcf4f7b0-d3df-11e4-8b1e-274d670aa9c9_video.html.