Happy Father's Day To Roy, My Mean Old Daddy

Once upon a time, the internet was going to save the world. The first dot-com boom in the 1990s popularized the idea of the internet as a technology for maximizing human potential and spreading democracy. The Clinton administration’s 1997 “A Framework for Global Electronic Commerce” put forth the vision: “The Internet is a medium that has tremendous potential for promoting individual freedom and individual empowerment” and “[t]herefore, where possible, the individual should be left in control of the way in which he or she uses this medium.” The smart people in the West mocked the naive efforts in other parts of the world to control the flow of information. In 2000, President Clinton scoffed that China’s internet crackdown was “like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.” The hype continued through the Bush administration, when internet companies were seen as crucial partners in the state’s mass surveillance program and its plan to bring democracy to the Middle East.

But the hype really went into overdrive when President Obama was elected through a “big data”-driven campaign that prioritized social media outreach. There appeared to be a genuine philosophical alignment between Obama’s political style as the “Hope” and ”Change” president whose guiding principle in foreign policy was “Don’t do dumb shit” and the internet search company whose original motto was “Do no evil.” There were also deep personal ties connecting the two powers, with 252 cases over the course of Obama’s presidency of people moving between jobs at the White House and Google. From 2009 to 2015, White House and Google employees were meeting, on average, more than once a week.

As Obama’s secretary of state, Hillary Clinton led the government’s “Internet freedom” agenda, which aimed to “promote online communications as a tool for opening up closed societies.” In a speech from 2010, Clinton issued a warning about the spread of digital censorship in authoritarian regimes: “A new information curtain is descending across much of the world,” she said. “And beyond this partition, viral videos and blog posts are becoming the samizdat of our day.”

It is a supreme irony that the very people who a decade ago led the freedom agenda for other countries have since pushed the United States to implement one of the largest and most powerful censorship machines in existence under the guise of fighting disinformation.