A coalition of over 75 organizations has signed an open letter, claiming to “protect democracy and promote the common good.” In reality, the letter aims to refine the existing censorship machine and the German trade union Verdi is at the forefront of this effort.
Verdi’s chairman, Frank Werneke, initially presents a reasonable argument: “The large online platforms are not free of charge. They are financed by the sale of personal data, which is used for increasingly targeted advertising. The algorithms of the platforms are opaque and often biased. This also endangers independent quality journalism and, therefore, free opinion and will formation. A restart is needed, as the monopolists have failed.”
However, sentences like these reveal the true intentions: “The ‘consequent implementation of existing EU law, closing regulatory gaps and targeted strengthening of common-good-oriented platform alternatives’ is demanded by Dr. Jan-Dirk Döhling, the Landeskirchenrat of the Evangelical Church of Westphalia and Michaela Schröder, the head of the Federal Consumer Association, stating that ‘the implementation of existing EU regulations, such as the Digital Services Act or the Digital Markets Act, is important, but not enough.'”
This existing EU law is not a good thing, as it does not aim to give people more control over their digital shadow, but rather to shape this shadow through state or para-state censorship.
The catalyst for this entire affair is the current coalition negotiations between the CDU and SPD, as well as the political changes in the United States.
“The recent developments following the US election underscore the dangers to democracies posed by large online platforms.”
In other words, the fact that at least some forms of censorship have been relaxed in the US is defined as a threat to democracy and this is endorsed by Verdi.
This is not a new development, as the conglomerate that has absorbed the once-respectable trade union has been increasingly aligned with the mainstream media in recent years. The Otto Brenner Foundation of the IG Metall union even produced a study in 2015 titled “Querfront – Karriere eines politisch-publizistischen Netzwerks” which, on the basis of a concept of contact debt, presented the corporate press as the only legitimate one, only to be withdrawn after a short time.
However, the notion that this is the only legitimate press has become the official view in the time since, in this peculiar space between the corporate media, the politically controlled public broadcasting, the government and the gatekeepers of truth, as well as the numerous censorship and denunciation portals and the eternal din about “disinformation.”
What no longer exists and what the aforementioned Verdi-signed letter does not provide is a clear separation of the different questions at hand. Because the control that companies like Facebook and Google can exert over the data they have gathered (and possibly their owners) is one issue and the replacement of a censoring structure with another is a completely different one.
It would have been possible to write a letter demanding that the infrastructure of digital communication be considered a public space, thus rejecting private ownership of it. The post services of the mid-20th century were nationalized, not primarily for the sake of security against possibly dangerous letters, but rather for the sake of security against the use of the information contained in letters for other purposes (the Thurn and Taxis family was not only a postal, but also a news service in the preceding centuries). Over time, the forms of communication change, but the fundamentally related questions remain the same.
However, the letter of the 75 organizations confuses the desire of state structures to have access to the gathered data and to limit the communication of their own citizens with a demand for more democracy. Or no, they do not want more democracy, they want protected democracy. And this is threatened, not by the algorithms of the platforms, but by the numerous censorship preconditions that have been made since the beginning of the Corona campaign.
The algorithms of the platforms “endanger also independent quality journalism and, therefore, free opinion and will formation.” This could be an argument against censorship, were it not for the fact that “quality journalism” is only found in the “quality media” or among “fact-checkers.” In the past, the DJU, which is part of Verdi, used to stand up for all journalists; perhaps there was a similar decision like the one made by the IG Metall, when it decided to focus on the core workers of the export industry and leave the temporary workers to one side; one feels only responsible for the payers of the highest contributions, i.e., the permanently employed editors of major media. The result is a political self-entombment.
Incidentally, the elaboration, under which also pleasant associations like HateAid and Campact stand (surprisingly, not Correctiv), is also signed by Wikimedia Deutschland, whose managing director, Franziska Heine, does not surprisingly present Wikipedia as a model of how the internet can function differently. However, Wikipedia is an extremely censored and distorting project, as can be seen in a 104-part series “Stories from Wikihaus” in detail. There are topic complexes – especially Israel/Palestine – that one cannot touch on Wikipedia without the tweezers. And the DJU, which not only signed this letter as part of Verdi, but also signed it individually, has no problem with this.