Hillary Clinton Says Either Crack Down on Social Media or ‘We Lose Total Control’
Control over and the effective use of the online space has proven crucial over the past two US election cycles, with a groundswell of pro-Trump memes helping propel the candidate to victory in 2016, and unprecedented censorship of a damaging story about Hunter Biden by tech companies aiding Joe Biden in his quest for the White House in 2020.
Former first lady, secretary of state and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has called on social media companies to ramp up the moderation and monitoring of content on their platforms if the powers that be want to maintain control of the information space.
“There should be a lot of things done. We should be, in my view, repealing something called Section 230 [of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, ed.], which gave, you know, platforms on the internet immunity because they were thought to be just pass-throughs – that they shouldn’t be judged for the content that is posted,” Clinton said in a surprisingly frank interview with CNN on Saturday while promoting her new book.
“But we now know that that was an overly simple view, that if the platforms, whether it’s Facebook or Twitter/X or Instagram or TikTok, whatever they are, if they don’t moderate and monitor the content, we lose total control. And it’s not just the social and psychological effects, it’s real harm, it’s child porn and threats of violence – things that are terribly dangerous,” Clinton said.
Calling for Section 230 to be repealed (which would deprive social media companies of legal immunity to liability over content generated by users), Clinton urged “guard rails” and “regulation” to be put in place.
“We’ve conducted this big experiment on ourselves and particularly our kids, and I think the evidence is in that we’ve got to do more,” Clinton said. Praising efforts by some states, including New York and California, to address the “problem,” Clinton urged “national action” to be taken, saying that “sadly, our Congress has been dysfunctional when it comes to addressing these threats to our children.”
This is the second time in less than a month that Clinton has appeared on television to address the political impact of online content. Last month, she told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow that Americans engaged in the spread of so-called “Russian propaganda” in support of Donald Trump during the 2016 race “should be civilly or even in some cases criminally charged.”
The power of social media on politics became evident from the early 2010s onward, with protesters during the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ violence of 2010-2012 actively using Facebook* and Twitter to organize and coordinate protests which culminated in a series of regime change operations across the region benefiting the United States. A 2016 media analysis revealed that the Clinton State Department played a key role in training radical groups in the effective use of social media for disruption and regime change operations in the Middle East.
The tool proved highly effective again in 2013, when a Facebook post by a Ukrainian TV journalist-turned activist triggered the Euromaidan protests in Kiev, which ultimately culminated in the violent overthrow of the Ukrainian government in February 2014. A similar campaign targeting Iran was tried in 2022, but was squashed in time by the Iranian government.
The United States first witnessed the power of social media on its own political space during the 2016 election, with scores of news and academic articles written about Trump’s effective use of Twitter to break through establishment media narratives, first in the Republican primaries and then in the general election. The effective use of pro-Trump, anti-Clinton memes targeting young voters has also been discussed at length.
Aware of the importance of social media in the 2020 election and taking advantage of increasingly stringent rules on online “misinformation,” censorious actors were able to rein in organic, user-generated online discussions related to the election, including Trump’s allegations going back to the summer of 2020 about mail-in ballot voter fraud, which Meta kept in place until earlier this year. As the election neared, the ‘October Surprise’ series of bombshell New York Post reports revealing that Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s son Hunter engaged in an alleged pay-to-play scheme trading access to his powerful father for cash was heavily censored online.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologized to Americans in August for deranking the Hunter Biden story at the FBI’s behest. Twitter founder Jack Dorsey admitted in March 2021 that censoring the story was a “total mistake,” but did not elaborate on who made it. Tech billionaire Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter in 2022 was followed by the publication of the Twitter Files – a series of reports detailing the FBI’s direct role in the moderation of content on the platform during the 2020 race and afterward.