WSJ: The Google-Facebook Duopoly Threatens Diversity of Thought

A political website pulled an article after Google’s AdSense team threatened to withdraw advertising

‘A mo­nopoly on the means of com­mu­ni­ca-tion,” Robert Shea and Robert An­ton Wil­son wrote in “Leviathan,” their 1975 novel, “may de­fine a rul­ing elite more pre­cisely than the cel­e­brated Marx­ian for­mula of ‘mo­nopoly in the means of pro­duc­tion.’ ” Bear that in mind when you hear this next sta­tis­tic: In 2017 Google and Face­book have ac­counted for 84% of all digi­tal ad­ver­tis­ing out­side China, in­clud­ing 96% of its growth, ac­cord­ing to an in­dus­try fore­cast this month from Zenith, Magna and GroupM.

Google is used for nearly 90% of on­line searches in the U.S. A Pew sur­vey this sum­mer found that the four most pop­u­lar so­cial-me­dia sites for get­ting news are Face­book, You­Tube (owned by Google), Twit­ter (which has a Google part­ner­ship), and In­sta­gram (owned by Face­book). No more than 5% of Amer­i­cans use an­other so­cial-me­dia plat­form to get news.

In a No­vember speech, Ajit Pai, chair­man of the Fed­eral Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Com­mission, ar­gued that “edge providers” like so­cial-me­dia web­sites and search en­gines “rou­tinely block or dis­crim­i­nate against con­tent they don’t like.” Mr. Pai cited You­Tube’s de­ci­sion to place age re­stric­tions on and pull ads from videos by con­ser­v­a­tive com­men­ta­tor Den­nis Prager’s Prager Uni­ver­sity, in­clud­ing a video by Alan Der­showitz on Is­rael’s found­ing.

He also pointed to Twit­ter’s sus­pen­sion of a pro-life cam­paign ad from Rep. Mar­sha Black­burn, an ac­tion that would have been il­le­gal if done by a TV or ra­dio sta­tion. Twit­ter has re­fused spon­sored tweets from im­mi­gra­tion op­po­nents, say­ing its hate-speech pol­icy is trig­gered by mes­sages such as “the fis­cal cost cre­ated by il­le­gal im­mi­grants of $746.3b com­pares to to­tal a cost of de­por­ta­tion of $124.1b.”

Google, Face­book and Twit­ter place stricter con­tent poli­cies on ad­ver­tis­ers than gen­eral users. There are le­git­i­mate rea­sons for this. The tech com­pa­nies are sen­si­tive to ac­cu­sa­tions that they not only profit from con­tro­ver­sial con­tent but also fund it by giv­ing its cre­ator a slice of the ad rev­enue.

When vir­tu­ally all on­line ad­ver­tis­ing goes through two com­pa­nies, how­ever, they have the power to harm web­sites ar­bi­trar­ily. One po­lit­i­cal blog that posted an ar­ti­cle try­ing to dis­tin­guish the “alt-right” from white na­tion­al­ism re­ceived a warn­ing email from Google’s Ad­Sense team. An ed­i­tor took the ar­ti­cle down, ex­plain­ing to read­ers that the blog “needs rev­enue from the Google ad plat­form in or­der to sur­vive.” You needn’t agree with the ed­i­to­r­ial de­ci­sion to pub­lish the ar­ti­cle to be trou­bled by Google’s ve­to­ing it.

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