All the President’s men

Broadcasting hate speech and fake news did not originate with Facebook or Twitter. It has been around ever since electronic mass media in the form of radio and movies came into being. The Nazi Ministry of Propaganda was responsible for controlling all information emanating from newspapers, films, books, visual and performing arts, music and radio in Nazi Germany. Joseph Goebbels, who headed Hitler’s Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, described film as “one of the most modern and far-reaching means of influencing the masses”.

Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and Minister for Armaments and War Production, later said the regime “made the complete use of all technical means for domination of its own country. Through technical devices like the radio and loudspeaker, 80 million people were deprived of independent thought.” Trump’s recent tirade against the South African government for stoking hatred against whites and confiscating their farms is strikingly reminiscent of Goebbels’ campaign of disinformation, focusing on alleged atrocities against ethnic Germans in Danzig and other cities.

Unlike in Germany, the attack on freedom of the press in America is being led by the owners of the press themselves. When Katherine Graham took over as the owner and publisher of The Washington Post in 1963, it was under her leadership that the Post’s reputation for fearless reporting and editorial independence was established. The Post’s investigative reporting on the Watergate Scandal and the Vietnam War led to the forced resignation of President Richard Nixon and the withdrawal of US troops from Southeast Asia. Fifty years later, when the third richest man in the world, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, purchased the paper, he promised not to interfere in the editorial decisions of the newspaper – a promise he repeatedly broke by disallowing publication of any material critical of him or his political stances. Bezos and other tech billionaires such as Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sundar Pichai took centre stage at Trump’s inauguration. The newspaper’s motto, “Democracy dies in darkness” has taken on added significance since Bezos’ takeover of the paper.

When the world’s second richest man, Meta’s Zuckerberg, was displeased with the revelations of an ex-employee, Sarah Wynn-Williams, on unsavoury behaviour inside the company, he tried to prevent Wynn-Williams’ tell-all book, Careless People from being sold in the US (it had already appeared in the UK). According to the book, Zuckerberg attempted to sell to China the treasure trove of user data accumulated by Facebook over the years so that the social media giant could operate in China.

Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, purchased Twitter and made it his megaphone to spout whatever nonsense he (or his boss in the White House) could dream up without having to worry about the consequences – much like what Goebbels did when he took control of the radio broadcasting system in Germany just before the second world war to espouse his and Hitler’s antisemitic Aryan nonsense. Trump and Musk, Hitler and Goebbels – different eras but peas in a pod nevertheless. I don’t see any difference between Trump’s ‘America First’ slogan and Nazi Germany’s ‘Deutschland uber alles’ clarion call, do you?

And, as if the Trump-Bezos-Musk alliance were not enough, Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle and fourth richest person in the world, in announcing a $500 billion AI infrastructure plan has, with Trump, urged nations to move all of their data into “a single, unified data platform” so it can be “consumed and used” by AI models. Ellison himself assures us that his plan is diabolical – an AI-based surveillance system guarantees “citizens will be on their best behaviour because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.” Musk, likewise, is already building “a centralised data repository” for the federal government. If China were to mimic Ellison or Musk, it would be labelled totalitarian. When America does it, it will be defended on grounds of national security.

It was democratic principles that once drove net neutrality, enabled the World Wide Web to succeed beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, and made a handful of Big Tech founders enormously wealthy – these same democratic principles are what these billionaires are trying to stifle by forcing us to subscribe to their world-view no matter what. They have even convinced a handful of autocratic leaders such as Argentina’s Javier Milei and Italy’s Giorgia Meloni into doing their bidding. The tide of propagandistic disinformation is upon us – it is too late to stop it.

(Roger Marshall is a computer scientist, a newly minted Luddite and a cynic)