Big Tech’s censorship partnership with the left establishment is expanding in ominous directions. The Silicon Valley giants have now partnered with the hyper-partisan Anti-Defamation League to help them decide what content Americans get to read online — and even which Americans get to transfer money digitally.
This year brought news of an effort by Google in association with the ADL and a British firm called Moonshot CVE to “redirect” users away from sites that promote what they considered to be “violent extremism.” Pop-up ads would send readers to other content providers, who would supposedly expose and debunk the haters.
This month, we also learned that PayPal has tapped the ADL to lay out criteria that will allow that payment-services giant to essentially shut down any group it labels “extremist.”
This might not seem all that alarming to Americans who remember the ADL of an earlier era, a venerable organization dedicated to combating anti-Semitism and upholding bedrock civil-rights principles. But under the leadership of Jonathan Greenblatt, a Team Obama alumnus, the ADL has turned into an arm of the progressive movement and a dogged enemy of conservatives.
How doctrinaire and lefty is the new ADL? Consider that when former President Donald Trump tapped Mike Pompeo to serve as secretary of state, Greenblatt’s outfit published a 5,000-word screed framing the former congressman and CIA director as a bigot. Pompeo’s “crime,” to the ADL’s mind? Denouncing Islamist radicalism throughout his career — in terms identical to the ADL’s own, earlier anti-Islamist sentiments.
Pompeo is a mainstream, responsible conservative. An organization that smears him as a hater, then, isn’t exactly the soundest judge of what qualifies as extremism.
The ADL began promoting Internet censorship in 2019, ostensibly to stop Holocaust denial on social media. That earned it much applause. But it’s easy to see how that slope might slide us down into a world of dangerous and unaccountable corporate censorship, in which even a former president can be digitally unpersoned.
And even on its own terms, the ADL-Google program has proved shoddy. In February, the ADL published a study that documented the work it did during a period stretching from September to December 2020, in which it flagged more than 34,000 Internet searches for what it labels hate speech.
In one instance, the would-be high-tech do-gooders sent users to the Web site of an Internet personality who poses as a Southern gun owner with progressive views. But a closer look at the Web figure, whose real name is Justin King, revealed that he is a left-wing anarchist with a serious criminal record, according to the Los Angeles Times. King also regularly promotes anti-Semitism on his site.
It was only by chance that independent researchers already familiar with his activities stumbled across the fact that the ADL was promoting King as an anti-extremism source.
Google executives, quizzed about this at a congressional hearing, had no explanation. Moonshot and the ADL have also refused to comment about it to this day. Corporate media are curiously incurious.
Part of the problem is the lack of transparency. No one involved in this program is willing to talk about the details of the algorithms being used. What we do know from the ADL’s own limited disclosures is that the “redirect” effort is focused solely on hate from right-wing sources.
The PayPal-ADL partnership is arguably more terrifying. Under the program, the ADL will help PayPal refuse service to financial networks that, according to the ADL, “support extremism and hate” or endanger “at-risk communities.” Again, the ADL isn’t saying how it will make its determinations. But given its ideological orientation, there’s little doubt that the ADL will target anyone who dissents from support for Black Lives Matter and other left-wing causes.
You don’t have to be a Trump supporter or have the slightest sympathy for real extremists to understand what this means: Those who claim to defend democracy may prove to be a far more serious threat to our freedoms than the marginal groups they target.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of JNS.org.
Twitter: @JonathanS_Tobin