The Mastermind behind Free Speech — Social Media

Written by Vienna Chan

Some say that social media are drowning users in hatred and falsehood. Some accuse the tech firms of false censorship and oppression of free speech These concerns are demonstrated in the controversial actions against a dubious article alleging corruption in the family of Joe Biden. Within hours of the publication of the New York Post article on October 14th, Twitter had identified the link as harmful and restricted sharing of said story. Many Facebook users were not seeing the story at all.

As a private infrastructure that has come to support free expression, social media has been lacking constitutional regulations on its editorial system, which includes algorithmically ranking the content that users upload, and moderating the undesirable content. Are they edging towards being something more like publishers? What speech should be allowed? And who should decide?

Concerns regarding political communication have been widely debated. Twitter banned all political ads last year, and Facebook and Google have said they will ban them around the time of this year’s election on November 3rd. This year, as misinformation about covid-19 flourished, Facebook took a harder line on fake news about health, including banning anti-vaccination ads. And this month it banned both Holocaust denial and groups promoting QAnon, a crackpot conspiracy.

“Frankly, I don’t think we should be making so many important decisions about speech on our own either,” Mr Zuckerberg said in his Georgetown speech.

The question is, can either governments or executives individually make reliable custodians of free speech, what can be done to keep the internet a tolerable place while protecting freedom of expression?

The decision seems to be leaning towards drawing a distinction between freedom of speech and “freedom of reach”: leave posts up, but make them less visible and viral. Platforms are also warning users of content that is potentially misleading.

Facebook took a step on October 22nd and launched an Oversight Board, a watchdog made up of 20 outsourced members who consider only whether deleted posts should be reinstated. Voices urge these ‘social-media councils’ to be expanded to cover all platforms, something like the press watchdogs that in many countries hold newspapers to a voluntary code.

In order to sell more ads, the tech companies’ algorithms send you news and posts that they think will grab your attention. Political cynics, con artists and extremists take advantage of this bias towards virality to spread lies and hatred. The purest remedy for this would be to change the tech firms’ business model. One idea is for people to own their data individually or collectively. The social networks would become utilities that pay a flat fee, while people or collectives earned the rent from advertisers and set the parameters for what was served up to them. At a stroke that would align the gains from advertising with the burden upon the people being advertised to. If users could port their data to another network, the tech firms would have to compete to provide a good service.

Click below for Further Reading!

Social media’s struggle with self-censorship

How to deal with free speech on social media

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