Should Social Media Companies Censor their Platforms?
From the editors:
We asked our columnists the age-old question about new-age platforms.
Pro
Companies use censorship because they have a responsibility to protect their users and deter potential violence. To begin, social media platforms are not subject to the First Amendment because they are private platforms. On a strictly legal basis, social media companies are not violating free speech – the same way Fox News is not violating free speech by not offering as many liberal perspectives as conservative ones. Thus, this argument should an ethical one rather than a legal one.
Scroll through any social media platform, and you will notice it no longer consists of a picture of your neighbor’s dog or a community effort to save the trees. As these platforms grow bigger and bigger, they become legitimate news sources. These platforms are now so large that many dwarf the audiences of most major media companies combined. As a result, they needed greater regulations. These companies have evolved from platforms to full-fledged media companies.
Once we acknowledge that these social media companies are just that – media companies – it becomes easy to see the need for a degree of self-censorship. All media companies have a set of rules and standards that they abide by to verify their content and prevent the spread of fake news. If media companies must abide by strong standards and rules, why shouldn’t these social media companies do the same?
Moreover, these social media companies are rightfully attempting to combat the spread of misinformation by preventing conspiracy theorists from posting on their platforms. This is a noble goal, especially in the aftermath of events like Pizzagate. It has become increasingly clear that malicious third parties are sometimes able to manipulate users’ data. The effects of misinformation on social media are not small; they have tangible, sometimes violent effects on society. Consequently, it is the basic responsibility of social media companies to curb the spread of such incendiary misinformation. Moreover, an accurate platform is a more appealing platform and a better business model.
There is a tradeoff between security and free speech because humans are fallible. If there is no filter on information and anything goes, then there will be consequences. When Alex Jones propagated the Pizzagate story, it added fuel to the fire, resulting in a man firing an assault rifle in a D.C. pizza parlor. When the Orlando shooter was inaccurately associated with Muslim refugees that misinformation endangered all refugees. Speech that incites violence must be removed because it causes direct harm to social media users. Thus, it’s clear that while this step might seem controversial on the surface, it’s a necessary one to protect the sanctity of platforms, their users, and the effects that arise.
– Anonymous
Con
Government censorship is dangerous and antithetical to democratic societies and is rightfully feared by the majority of civilians in the US who recognize its authoritarian implications and associations. However, social media companies are private platforms that are not bound by the First Amendment and have the right to censor information. Consumers use these platforms voluntarily and can cease using them at any point if they dislike the ways in which a company is censoring information. Thus, censorship by social media companies is both legal and appears to be less dangerous than public censorship. However, as ever, appearances can be deceiving.
Governmental censorship is dangerous because it creates an informational barrier between governmental actions, voters’ knowledge of these actions, and the rationale behind them thereby influencing who is elected into office. This is problematic as it allows already elected officials to control dissemination of information for their benefit which gives politicians too much power and leaves them less accountable. But private censorship, particularly well-meaning censorship, is dangerous for similar reasons.
Social media companies with their billions of users have the power to shape the opinions and perspectives of these users. By censoring content, a social media company is at least implicitly claiming to know what information the public ought to know and what ought to remain concealed from them. Any framework that a social media company uses to censor will have its own flaws and shortcomings which may be more damaging than the content which it is attempts to protect consumers from. These flaws arise from the difficulty of discerning what constitutes harmful content. We do not trust governments to decide which content is harmful even though we elect them because we at least implicitly recognize the impossibility of this task. So it makes little sense to trust private, self-interested corporations motivated by factors which have little at all to do with the common good of the people.
These frameworks are also frequently ideologically informed. Consequently, the specific censorial choices that are made are doing as much to influence voter opinion and public opinion generally as governmental censorship because people are increasingly reliant upon social media platforms for receiving information. Media censorship has always been a threat to political freedom, but social media has massively increased the dissemination of and accessibility to media-generated news in the technological age which has expanded social media companies’ abilities to influence people’s perceptions.
Censorship of this kind is additionally problematic because there is little transparency in how companies censor. This makes it easy for a politically or an ideologically motivated CEO or board to actively influence public perception under the guise of removing “harmful content”. Increasingly, it seems that any ideas that run counter to a certain set of accepted ideological assumptions are harmful and are consequently removed. This is problematic because it leads to circumstances in which companies are taking it upon themselves to decide how people should think. But it is also pragmatically problematic for companies as by censoring out certain content they are necessarily ostracizing many of their users who are attached to this content. Thus, censorship, while dangerous on principle, is also a suboptimal business model.
– Anonymous