MAGA’s war on big tech is missing direction – Rolling Stone

Francis Chung/POLITICO/AP

MAGA’s move still had Big Tech in their sights at CPAC 2023 — but they’re not sure how or when they’ll pull the trigger, or if the gun is even loaded.

The ultra-conservative conference has long been dominated by Donald Trump, a perpetual opportunity for the president’s rants and personal rants to become an urgent motivator for his followers. In the year Starting in 2019 and into 2021 and 2022, after the Capitol riots and Trump’s ban on all major social media sites, one of those top directives is cracking down on tech companies that dare him and building alternative platforms that are politically palatable to his supporters.

At CPAC 2023 in National Harbor, not far from Washington, D.C., big tech firms like Google, Facebook and Twitter have been the central villains. An entire panel — “Big Tech: Smashing Apps, Punching Apps, Jailing” — revolved around the need to repeal Section 230, the federal law that protects website operators from lawsuits over user-generated content. Sen. Eric Schmidt and Reps. Marsha Blackburn and Lauren Bobert (imaginary) were among the speakers who called for the removal of 230 protections from major platforms to retaliate against anti-conservative bias.

But during the main event — Trump’s one-hour, 45-minute speech — the list of the former president’s canonical enemies was long, and their focus was mostly elsewhere: complaints about his “deeply embarrassing” handling of criminal investigations, apocalyptic talk about crime and voter fraud, and He promised to block Trans-Certified Health Care and administer it as “punishment” for the 2020 bankruptcy. His skirmishes with Big Tech have come less frequently, and mostly with reference to the line to end an “illegal censorship regime.”

“Big Tech” can mean anything from self-driving cars to wind farms, but in MAGA’s world, it generally refers to the culture-war battlefields of a relative handful of Silicon Valley companies that can expand and monetize. A recurring theme at CPAC 2023 has been complicated by conservative aspirations to build a utopian Internet in which any digital service is a patriotic equivalent built for right-wingers and right-wingers as they struggle to compete with behemoths like Facebook and the like. YouTube. Remember the years of failed or mediocre efforts to create free speech clones of those sites – Parlor? – Contributed to fatigue.

Trump doesn’t have much to complain about when it comes to his ability to dominate the online conversation. The former president hasn’t tweeted since Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter who bent over backwards to please conservatives, lifted a ban on his once-prolific account. His silence on his Twitter timeline has more to do with his binding agreement to post on his own website, Truth Social. Similarly, he was allowed to return to Facebook, and his account remained free of new content.

With conservatives holding only the House, there is no future prospect of repealing or amending Section 230 under Republican leadership. The Trump-appointed Supreme Court is currently weighing a number of cases that could affect the law, but it seems unlikely to crack the Internet.

The CPAC exhibit floor was devoid of big names in conservative-leaning social media, such as Truth Social or former survivor competitor GETTR. Explaining the problem of overfilling: Trump aide Jason Miller quit his job to found GETTR, months later in direct competition with his former boss, when Trump ousted him by founding the Truth Society. Miller recently threw in the towel, quitting GETTR to join Trump’s re-election campaign. A Pew poll conducted a few months before Miller’s release indicated that only one in ten respondents had never heard of GETTR, placing it just ahead of obvious video host BitChute.

Sponsors on behalf of the technology sector are PublicSq. They include a directory of ideologically correct businesses for “liberty-loving Americans” and a Christian cell service provider, EditoMobile. PublicSq., an employee at the CPAC booth explained, is essential to directing right-minded consumers to businesses that support their values. The question of why, exactly, Christians need their own cell phone network remains unresolved; An attendant at the Patriot Mobile booth said they were not authorized to speak to the media.

Around the back, another booth was set up for the real stuff, a Peter Thiel-backed dating app marketing itself as a conservative alternative. “ghetto” Tinder’s merchandise on the stand includes pink T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan “Drop Your Liberal Boyfriend,” helping to convey that the site has an overwhelming shortage of single women.

Co-founder Daniel Huff, a former Trump appointee, said the real thing is important because MAGA types “face hate on all regular apps, both from their own platforms and from users.” He gave a personal example. “I was in love with a girl I met on another app, and she found out I was working for Trump in the White House,” Huff said. She’s not like, “Oh cool, let’s talk about it.” She literally got up and left after two minutes. So this is a real event.

Ignacio Falco stands behind the booth for ignite45, which offers “digital solutions for the patriot economy” such as search engine optimization, web design and advertising on sites like Truth Social and video host Rumble. He notes that digital ad dollars can easily fall into a black hole and that “many small businesses tend to work with left-leaning companies that have no skin in the game.”

But when asked why it shows the importance of web services to conservatives, not just personalized solutions for each customer, Falco’s response was about values ​​rather than price: “Everything we do in life at this point, we talk about it from my own perspective.” My wife, everything we do is for America First… If America First does not win on all fronts, in politics, in school boards, in digital, our own economy will begin to weaken.

ignite45’s signs feature the logos of several MAGA-flavored social media sites that help clients build a presence, including the Twitter clone Gab, popular among white supremacists. When asked how that presence plays into Falco’s advertising strategy for clients, he said, “What I saw at Gab was the Christian community and I liked it.

In the absence of direction, the CPAC audience asked for their take on Big Tech, mostly falling back on a familiar mix of personal sentiment and censorship apocryphal stories.

D.C. resident and podcaster Susan Monk says that despite having nearly 20,000 Twitter followers, she’s faced “a lot of Big Tech censorship,” either shadowing her or other invisible restrictions. “We had the same thing with the Facebook shutdown, I did a couple of cycles about the Covid shutdown, the mandate, the CDC to be honest,” she said. Wearing an “Extreme Ultra MAGA” shirt, Georgia’s Todd Tibbetts, who says his job includes building data centers, blamed big tech companies for their role in the Capitol attack on a live broadcast to Trump supporters. Because of their tweets by Democrat activists.

Pro-Trump rapper Forgiato Blow — real name Kurt Jantz, but who goes by the nicknames “Mayor of Magaville” and “Trump’s nephew” — isn’t famous enough to have his own Wikipedia page. But in the narrow world of CPAC, he can’t walk 10 feet without fielding selfie requests from flag-draped fans. He has 97,000 Twitter followers, over 105,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, and 30 albums on Apple Music, but he claims to be one of the most censored people alive.

“Censorship is ridiculous,” says Blow. “You know, they didn’t censor NWA the day they were talking. [about] Police” (The FBI sent a threatening letter over “Fuck Tha Police” and their second attempt to play the song live in 1989 ended with Detroit cops and a $25,000 fine.)

Blow says he’s made Facebook more than a quarter of a million dollars in advertising and revenue sharing from his verified pages, and he’s eager to show off a silver plate signed by former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki that the video platform sent him. He got 100,000 subscribers. He complained that bans on Instagram and YouTube made it difficult to drive fans to his streaming accounts, and that right-wing diversions like Rumble weren’t attracting traffic. “I’ve paid people $7,000 to $10,000 multiple times to get my page back on Instagram,” he said. When asked if he thought he was a victim of fraud, he said, “No. The man sent me a letter back to the people. [I’m] On the Hate List”

There is tension over the MAGA movement’s relationship with Big Tech: platforms it criticizes as censorship hives controlled by liberals are key to online access. For conservatives, efforts to build a parallel digital ecosystem and thereby break free from social media rules do not exactly measure up to the Republican Party’s obsession with its followers. At CPAC 2023, it was clearer than ever that the MAGA movement didn’t quite know if it wanted its own internet or just tapped into higher participation numbers on the old one.

At the “Break ’em Up” panel on Big Tech, former Pentagon chief of staff Kash Patel urged conservatives to stay away from mainstream social media sites like Facebook. “This is your mission,” he said. “If the deep state and the media don’t light them, they can’t exist.” In the year Tamon Hamlett, a Trump-promised voter in Texas in the 2020 election, argued the exact opposite as he waited for the former president’s speech to begin: “The first way to fight Big Tech is to actually get into Big Tech.”

“People say, ‘Oh, well, if I go online, you’re going to get banned,'” Hamlet continued. “And I say, well, you still have to show up. And you still have to be on those platforms, because even if you go out and make your own platform, you’re not – you’re limiting your reach.