Faith-based leaders should “develop media relationships” and have a list of reporters likely to disseminate news of any de-platforming or service interruption.
The power of major internet companies like Facebook, Amazon, YouTube, and Twitter over public life is a particular threat to religious groups that focus on controversial issues like abortion, marriage, and sexuality, several commentators said at a roundtable last week. These groups should prepare for the possibility of censorship and organize effective countermeasures, they said.
“You might not know the hour nor the day you will be censored,” Joshua D. Holdenreid, vice president and executive director of the California-based Napa Legal Institute, said at a roundtable on internet censorship.
Holdenreid said those involved in public debates “need to plan ahead and assume that if they are a religious organization or faith-based organization operating in the public square and focused on an issue that’s related to pro-life (topics), marriage, sexuality, Christian anthropology, they should just assume that they will eventually run afoul of these vague and arbitrary terms and conditions that exist with these Big Tech platforms.”
The Ethics and Public Policy Project (EPPC), a D.C. thinktank that aims to apply “the Judeo-Christian tradition to contemporary questions of law, culture, and politics,” hosted the Aug. 26 roundtable “How Big Tech Censors Religious Voices, and How to Fight Back.” The roundtable follows years of debate and discussion about how major technology and media companies treat some religious voices.
The most likely to suffer, Holdenreid said, aren’t necessarily organizations running soup kitchens or homeless shelters, but those who are “weighing in on the most important cultural issues” and “speaking the truth about certain issues that doesn’t align with what folks in Silicon Valley think should be appropriate for the digital public square.” His organization, the Napa Legal Institute, provides legal and financial education to faith-based non-profits on corporate, tax, and philanthropic issues.
Another roundtable speaker, EPPC president Ryan T. Anderson, saw one of his books delisted from Amazon in February 2021. The book, “When Harry Became Sally,” offers a philosophical and moral critique of transgender advocates’ claims.
Anderson said his book ranked highly on bestseller lists and was listed for sale on Amazon for three years. In removing his book, he charged, the company did not follow its own procedures, such as contacting the author and publisher first to notify them and attempt to reach a solution.
He also questioned Amazon’s claim that the book violated its content policy.
“Well, how did the book not violate the content policy for the first three years?” he asked. “I didn’t go back and rewrite anything.”
The book’s title refers to a popular 1989 movie When Harry Met Sally, which dramatized an argument that men and women are so different that they can’t just be friends.
“Whereas today the argument is that men and women are interchangeable and that the concept of male and female is on a spectrum,” said Anderson, who is also the John Paul II teaching fellow in social thought at the University of Dallas.
Those who have not read the book, Anderson suggested, might see him as “some bomb-throwing bigot who wrote a book making fun of transgender people” which in their view might justify a company like Amazon refusing to sell “hate speech.”
Anderson characterized his arguments as measured and careful. He warned that policies that silence the voices of writers like him encourages more radical voices to see moderation as a failure.
“It silences reasonable voices and then it radicalizes more extreme voices, which would have a really, really bad polarizing effect,” he said.
Anderson said that while he understands when small bookstores or bookstores with a special focus decide not to carry certain books, Amazon has near-monopoly power. The company controls about 80 to 90% of all e-book sales and advertised itself and built market dominance as an “everything store.” It put many small booksellers out of business, then cited “an unarticulated content policy” to remove books retroactively, he charged.
Anderson suspected the removal of his book was related to a congressional vote on the Equality Act. If this becomes law, it would recognize sexual orientation and gender identity as protected classes, akin to race, in anti-discrimination law.
In his view, it is “an abuse of market dominance to try to control public speech, in particular on a matter of huge public import.” Companies like Amazon and YouTube have become “so dominant in their spheres that there really aren’t alternative options,” he said. While the notoriety of the delisting incident gave Anderson’s book a sales boost, he warned that this was likely temporary and the removal would affect which books a publisher chooses to publish in the future.
“What publisher is going to want to publish a book, knowing they might miss out on the market controller who has 70% to 80% of market share, right?” he asked. “We won’t even know what books never get published, which authors censor themselves, which publishers spike proposals, all out of fear that Amazon won’t sell it.”
Also joining the roundtable was Carl R. Trueman, a fellow at the EPPC Evangelicals and Civic Life Program, a professor at Pennsylvania’s Grove City College, and the author of several books. He worried he was censored for his Aug. 7 lecture livestreamed on the YouTube channel of the Sacramento, Calif.-based Immanuel Baptist Church. The livestream was repeatedly flagged for violating terms of service. It was first halted for alleged copyright violation, due to background music, then halted again for alleged content violation, “apparently relative to something I had said.” He believes the actions stemmed from a complaint from an online viewer, rather than an algorithm.
“The lectures are now up in an unedited form, which would seem to indicate that nothing I actually said violated content,” he said. In his view, YouTube automatically assumes the guilt of many subject to complaints and does not give them opportunities to respond.
Trueman said a similar incident took place in May when he was giving the same set of lectures to a Christian high school faculty in the U.S. South. The lecture was advertised on Instagram accounts but the accounts were suspended, reportedly until all references to Trueman and his lecture were removed.