A new era of internet regulation is about to begin.
Years after Facebook and Google went public, regulators in the United States and abroad are finally taking a closer look at the internet behemoths. And they’re not only looking at the way these companies have come to dominate markets, but also examining the heart of the two firms’ business models. What they decide will have powerful implications for the way we do business on the internet.
Most people associate Facebook with cute family photos and think of Google like a semi-reliable encyclopedia. But these services have only a tangential relationship to the way either company actually makes money. The twin Silicon Valley titans rely on two closely intertwined technologies, customer surveillance and advertising, to maximize shareholder profits. The pair control 63 percent of the U.S. digital advertising market, and in 2016, they secured 99 percent of all digital advertising growth. That profit-making combo is exactly what regulators are focused on in 2018.
Many of the companies’ difficulties stem from the European Union’s tough new stance on privacy. The biggest threat to their business model comes from the General Data Protection Regulation, new data privacy rules set to go in effect in the EU in May. For the most part, Facebook and Google prevent you from using their products if you decline to agree to their entire terms of service. You cannot pick and choose what to agree to and still use their free services.
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Joshua Roberts / Reuters
Congress grilled representatives from Facebook, Twitter and Google over their advertising and privacy practices in November 2017. (Pictured from left to right: Colin Stretch, Facebook general counsel, Sean Edgett, Twitter acting general counsel, and Richard Salgado, Google director of law enforcement and information security.)
Back in September, Vox Day, a Gamergate holdover who has assumed the position of racist alt-right figurehead, published a handful of brief excerpts from what he described as the “Andrew Anglin” style guide. For the blissfully unaware, Anglin is a neo-Nazi troll and propagandist who runs The Daily Stormer, one of the more prominent sites of the white supremacist web. The passages selected by Vox Day in his blog post suggested that Anglin is persnickety about detail and presentation ― except on the subject of the Jews, who are to be blamed “for everything.”
HuffPost has acquired the 17-page document in its entirety, as well as transcripts from an IRC channel where the document was shared in an effort to recruit new writers. It’s more than a style guide for writing internet-friendly neo-Nazi prose; it’s a playbook for the alt-right.
The style guide, according to Vox Day, was a set of directives for whoever might be writing under Anglin’s name, the idea being that Anglin’s army of ghostwriters need to maintain some sense of consistent style. But the guide appears to be for all of the site’s writers, many of whom write under their own names (or at least their own pseudonyms).
President Donald Trump on Wednesday retweeted a series of overtly Islamophobic videos shared by a controversial British far-right activist.
The videos, posed Britain First Deputy Leader Jayda Fransen, claimed to show various violent crimes committed by Muslims. Britain First is widely known in the U.K. for spreading Islamophobic and racist videos, including many proven to be fake.
Fransen’s first tweet shows a boy beating another boy on crutches. The caption says: “Muslim migrant beats up Dutch boy on crutches!” Yet the video’s original caption, released with the video in May on a Dutch website, mentioned neither race nor religion. A 16-year-old pictured in the video was charged with provoking the fight, and a 16-year-old who shot the video also was charged, local media reported.
In post-Charlottesville America, any large gathering of racists and fascists becomes both spectacle and specter. The threat of violence is omnipresent. Locals must “brace” themselves for “chaos and bloodshed.” Everyone dreads “another Charlottesville.” Dread is what Nazis want.
In two small cities near Nashville in Middle Tennessee, the fear was palpable ahead of two “White Lives Matter” rallies here on Saturday.
“So … what brings you to town?” a wary clerk asked guests as they checked into a hotel in Murfreesboro, home to Middle Tennessee State University and 132,000 residents, where one rally will be held Saturday afternoon outside the Rutherford County Courthouse. I heard some version of this question three times before I’d even found my room.
In nearby Shelbyville, a town of 21,000 south of Murfreesboro in Tennessee horse country, another rally ― organized by the same racists and fascists ― is scheduled for Saturday morning. Many Shelbyville residents will stay indoors or clear out altogether, according to local police.
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Justin Ide/Reuters
Matthew Heimbach, seen here after the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, is head of the Traditionalist Worker Party.
I returned to work on Sunday to find three envelopes from you on my desk. They must have arrived sometime last week when I was in Wisconsin with my family for Thanksgiving.
In the letters, which were all identical (I’m not sure why you felt the need to send three), you claim to be someone I went to high school with. You say you love Donald Trump because “he’s anti-semitic and anti-Islamic” and you think I’m a “stupid Jewish faggot.” I can’t be sure we really went to school together but the envelopes were postmarked with a stamp from Milwaukee so I suspect, sadly, that you’re telling the truth.
Apparently you started a petition to get me fired because of my anti-Trump posts on Facebook and because you “don’t like Jewish people” and you “don’t like” me. You claim to be circulating the petition amongst alumni from our high school “and various people across the United States.” You’ve supposedly already secured 500 signatures and, not only that, you are planning to file a “civil suite” (whatever that is) against me and The Huffington Post as well.
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