Sorry about the first article I posted the link for. Here it is in full:
By Sally Adee
“The remedy is more speech, not enforced silence,” wrote US Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis in 1927 in his defence of freedom of speech. Ninety years on, his position is often taken as read: in the marketplace of ideas, eventually the truth will out.
So it’s no surprise that many were aghast when, last week, Germany’s justice minister introduced a draft law that would fine social media companies, including Facebook and Twitter, up to €50 million if they failed to remove hate speech within 24 hours of a complaint.
“If we were trying to do this with any other media, you’d be talking about taking books off people’s shelves and going into libraries and ripping up magazines,” Vint Cerf – recognised as one of the founders of the internet – told a recent forum on internet and liberty. “We seem to be doing this just because in this medium, we can.”
For people like Cerf and many American companies, who view online speech through the lens of the US First Amendment, Germany’s approach may look like a heavy-handed suppression of the right of free expression. However, it may be a necessary first step in re-establishing a shared moral reality. In the age of bots, misinformation, and anonymity, free speech itself may be used to enact a kind of censorship.
In 2011, Russian citizens took to Twitter to voice their outrage about the contested election results. The hashtag #триумфальная (Triumfalnaya – the name of a Moscow square where a protest took place) quickly became one of the most-used on Twitter, but it didn’t take long for at least 2000 bot accounts to neutralise it by swamping the platform with nonsensical tweets, shutting down constructive debate.
Amplifying the fringe
One could argue that freedom of expression means a person has every right to propagate their ideas using as many bots as they want, and that some people use such bots for “good”, but the result can misrepresent the spread of public opinion, or throw out widely held moral consensuses. This has been noticed by some Jewish communities, who have experienced bot-borne upticks in public anti-Semitism. By artificially amplifying particular views, bots are effectively censoring speech without suppressing it.
The inability to attribute real identities on the internet can also work to distort apparent consensus. There are many examples of governments recruiting people as sock puppets to confuse public opinion. In China, state employees are paid to impersonate ordinary citizens on various forums, to the tune of 448 million comments every year. Because there’s no way to tell who is a real person expressing real opinions, there’s no way to know what “ordinary” people genuinely think – which helps create the illusion of wide approval of the government’s actions.
It’s also difficult to be sure of the sources for the claims people make online. A statement about the safety of vaccines may have originated in a scientific journal, or the blog of a conspiracy theorist without medical training. “On the internet, everything looks like the New York Times,” says Richard Stengel, a former editor at Time magazine. “In my opinion the scariest words in the English language are ‘I read it on the internet’.”
One recent study suggested that the credibility of a statement on Twitter depends most on the number of times it gets retweeted. If those are the rules of the marketplace, the best ideas won’t rise to the top.
Moral suasion
Last year’s US presidential election showed just how outdated Brandeis’s belief in the power of a large volume of free speech now is. The most accurate information did not gain the most prominence. Instead, the mainstream media gave space to many ideas and stories of little relevance to the facts. “A couple of hundred or maybe a thousand people are able to create a ruckus and conflict,” says Gabriella Coleman at McGill University in Toronto, Canada. “And then they’re taken seriously in the major media.”
Together, all this is undermining “moral suasion” – the force that nudges members of a society not to do or say things that are too far outside the accepted norm. Once a society has deemed certain attitudes reprehensible – for example, white supremacy or homophobia – it becomes difficult for individuals to advocate them in public.
But with the moral consensus distorted online, in many countries the internet age has seen a resurgence of views many of us thought we had closed the book on – “scientific” racism, for example. So should Facebook and Twitter decide what constitutes hate speech, and eliminate it as soon as possible?
There are many good reasons to be wary of outsourcing the policing of moral beliefs to private corporations, even if they are only tasked with implementing a country’s national laws, as would be the case with the draft German proposal. But we should focus on the problems of relying on multinationals with corporate interests to police our moral consensus, instead of misguidedly hiding behind the old defence of free speech.
