Is the internet inherently illiberal?

Scholar Becca Lewis looks back to the dawn of the tech industry to trace how right-wing activists have shaped the way we live our digital lives.

What to make of billionaire X/Twitter proprietor and supposed free-speech absolutist Elon Musk making his support for Donald Trump very public, and the revelation that he had been funding far-right groups to the tune of tens of millions as far back as the 2022 midterms? Or of Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg’s re-emergence as a Musk-inspired right-leaning strongman? What does it mean to society that the new “dark MAGA” Musk arbitrates discussion on one of the world’s biggest platforms — the planet’s “de facto public town square,” as he calls it? Or that Zuckerberg’s Facebook has decided to make peace with Republicans, push back against the Biden administration’s attempts to police Covid disinformation, and seems to have stopped labeling right-wing propaganda?

Scholar and former tech journalist Becca Lewis has been digging into the problem of the way the social media companies that shape our society manage to act both as neutral utilities and highly opinionated publishers — having their editorial cake and eating it too — as part of her research as a fellow at Stanford University’s Program on Governance of Emerging Technologies. Her work has taken her back to Reagan-era battles over media control and the dawn of the commercial internet — and she’s taken away some important lessons for present-day politics.

We talked to Lewis — days after she submitted her dissertation — about how right-wing think tanks, activists, and their political allies influenced the discussions that shaped U.S. communications policy and how Silicon Valley and the “tech” industry would evolve to dominate the economy, how the thinking of those groups is embedded in the very structure of the information systems we depend on every day, and what might be done to reign in the power of platform-owning billionaires and to recapture the notion of a real public internet.

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You’ve been researching and writing about the roots of why social media companies can claim to be thought of as utilities, even as they function more like publishers or media companies with editorial perspectives. How is it that we still don’t seem to understand what platforms are, what kind of power they have, and how the information ecology of the digital world works, given its impact on IRL social and political life?

It's one of the biggest issues. And I've been finding more and more in my research that when you go back to this moment in time that I've been looking at in my research over the past few years — that’s the '80s and '90s — even then, Silicon Valley businessmen were deeply enmeshed in these worlds of right-wing and far-right content creators. There wasn't yet an online media ecosystem of far-right creators, but there was this group of right-wing think tanks who were forming right-wing magazines and radio stations, bringing their conservative ideas and trying to attack information structures and public schools, and were also early adopters of the World Wide Web and at the same time were advocating for tech entrepreneurs to have control over telecom systems. 

We talked to David Sirota recently about the Powell Memo and how it drove the evolution of right-wing institutions. That’s a precursor to what you're talking about as well, right?

That's exactly right. It's all of the institutions that were thriving and flourishing in the wake of the Powell Memo. By the '90s, there was just an explosion. There were all sorts of niche think tanks, and media outlets, mostly producing print media. We often think of right-wing and conservative groups as interested in the past, not interested in new digital technologies. What I'm finding is that nothing could be further from the truth, that actually they were deeply, deeply aware of and excited about the internet and its possibilities.