[NCAC] PRIVATE CENSORSHIP – FIGHTING SUPPRESSION OF SPEECH BY NON-GOVERNMENTAL ACTORS

conclusion to above:

Perhaps some conservatives instead hope tech bias can all be handled in the courts instead of at agencies. But that also is a horrible approach . To begin with, the wheels of justice grind very slowly, and so waiting months (or years) for the resolution of speech disputes isn’t going to help conservatives much in the short term. Meanwhile, empowering the courts means empowering lots and lots of lawyers—not traditionally a solid conservative base, to say the least.

Perhaps conservatives hope that, if all else fails, putting enormous public pressure on private platforms will help force them to be more open to conservative perspectives. Sometimes that sort of intimidation (often called “jawboning” or “regulation by raised eyebrow”) works at the margins to alter the behavior of private actors in subtle but important ways. This has not been a strategy that conservatives have traditionally favored, however. To the extent that jawboning really works, it often subverts traditional policymaking safeguards and leads to more unaccountability and extraconstitutional behavior by regulators in particular. This can undermine the statutory intent of Congress and the due process rights of private parties.

The better answer here is for conservatives to push—as they long have—for more competition and choices, not more regulation and litigation. The administrative state is not the friend of conservative perspectives and it is a real stretch to imagine that existing or new regulatory agencies and bureaucrats are suddenly going to become more sympathetic in coming years.

Toward that end, conservatives should remember what President Ronald Reagan said in his 1987 veto of legislation to reestablish the Fairness Doctrine: “History has shown that the dangers of an overly timid or biased press cannot be averted through bureaucratic regulation, but only through the freedom and competition that the First Amendment sought to guarantee.”​

 

while I lean libertarian, I'm not an absolutist by any means. And this particular issue is absolutely fascinating in its complexity as regards competing public purposes. No clean answer here, I'm trying to understand the arguments on multiple sides of the issue.

That said, in ethics and political philosophy, there comes a time when one must try to determine and articulate a 'priority principle,' i.e., you need to figure out which public purpose rises to the top and trumps or overrides the others. In this my leaning is almost always in the direction of free speech and freedom of expression/belief. While I'm not a "free speech absolutist" either, I come pretty damn close to free speech absolutism.

So if I were eventually convinced it required government intervention of some sort to protect free speech and freedom of expression, I might be inclined to favor such intervention--even if there is a risk that such intervention is clumsy and/or heavy-handed. I think free speech is that important. And I would be less risk-averse than I normally would be about the likelihood of government screwing things up--I think free speech is that important.

***
So on the "gov't ...telling private businesses what content they must allow on their platforms" question, I guess I'd say (provisionally of course) I'm open-minded about the idea of treating these particular kinds of speech-oriented businesses (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, Instragram, etc etc) as quasi-public utilities. I'm not entirely convinced the public utility/common carrier analogy holds up, but there are lots and lots of very thoughtful and very smart people exploring the same possibility.

How will it end up? not sure. If these extremely large and extremely successful and extremely important and extremely wealthy and extremely influential "private businesses" continue to flaunt their wealth and influence and continue to one-sidedly censor viewpoints they don't agree with, then I think there's a pretty good set of arguments for government to step in and intervene (think Roosevelt and Progressive Era trust-busting).

but again I'm not sure how it will play out. I'm torn between decent arguments on both sides. I am however leery of the argument I keep seeing people offer here (I paraphrase): "these are private businesses, so they can do anything they want." I don't think the people who make that argument really believe that private businesses "can do anything they want," generally. If they do believe that, then I fear how that argument could be misused if and when it is applied in other contexts.

 

I think there's a huge difference between Fox news and social media forums like Facebook and Twitter.

I don't know that you're "controlling speech of private entities" . . . I think that's the whole point. We tolerate hate speech and groups like the KKK precisely because we value freedom of expression and freedom of belief

don't have easy answers here. But again I think Facebook/Twitter etc are very different as "publishing venues" (if that's an appropriate way to describe them) than UPS as package delivery service--regardless of its size or number of employees

 

not sure I understand your analogies to either Fox News or UPS

 

sure. freedom of speech is freedom of speech. and I think it's difficult to differentiate between hyperbolic calls to "overthrow the Capitalism system" and legitimate threats. That's what we pay Interpol and other intelligence agencies to figure out

that may be so; on the other hand Facebook has 2.8 billion users, YouTube has 2.3 billion users, and Twitter has 192 million users. These companies have as much likelihood of going the way of MySpace as amazon.com does at this point.

we don't really know "why" Twitter banned Trump

free speech might not be profitable. I'm still for free speech

 

this is precisely what this conversation is about. See the original post with the statement from NCAC. Congress would have to address this legislatively or direct relevant agencies to deal with it via regulations; and then the principle would have to be defended and debated in court. That's how antitrust law developed 100 years ago. We are in uncharted waters here

 

couple of quick thoughts because that's all I have time for at the moment

question the premise--in this as in many ethics cases, folks will jump to most difficult cases on the absolute fringe of an issue to call into question the entire issue. Example of abortion: critics will go straight to late-term abortion in the 9th month to call into question the entire issue abortion in toto.

I believe that's what's happening here.

Now, there are related questions that I've read of (would have to go back to find some of this). Some argue censoring ISIS and the like actually STRENGTHENS these organizations. not sure I have much more to add to that in agreement or disagreement, I just know I have encountered those claims.

The other thing I would add before I have to run is that there is a significant distinction between social media posting that advocates and/or publicizes clearly illegal acts and political speech. With that said, even clearly illegal acts in some contexts are 100% morally defensible and should be tolerated if not encouraged on social media--the case of dissidents in repressive societies, whose activities are illegal but for whom garnering and attention via social media is extremely important. Hong Kong activists, say.

anyway. can't say more at the moment

 

couldn't help myself--quick search yielded this

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...online-propaganda-isnt-working-out-very-well/

Censoring ISIS’s online propaganda isn’t working out very well
A lock icon, signifying an encrypted Internet connection, is seen on an Internet Explorer browser. (Mal Langsdon/Reuters)

By
Henry Farrell
Contributor, Monkey Cage
June 18, 2015 at 2:43 p.m. EDT

David Fidler has a new brief for the Council on Foreign Relations examining U.S. public and private sector efforts to counter the online propaganda of the Islamic State, a militant group also known as ISIS and ISIL. He finds that there is a lot of uncoordinated activity but not much evidence that it is doing any good.


“Radicalization usually involves more than consuming extremist tweets”

Many policymakers argue that online propaganda helps to radicalize young people. Fidler points out that there isn’t much strong evidence to support this claim. Internet-based communication is plausibly much less important than ISIS’s wins (and losses) on the ground in recruiting converts for the cause. The United Kingdom has put a lot of work into removing terrorist content from the Internet. However, the U.K. remains a major recruiting base for ISIS. It’s hard to evaluate the success or failure of programs such as this, and it could be that the U.K. situation would actually be worse in the absence of these censorship efforts. However, there’s no real evidence to support this theory. Other proposed countermeasures — such as responding with counter-narratives and counter-propaganda — don’t have a demonstrably better track record. While Fidler doesn’t say this, it is plausible that policymakers fixate on Internet-based responses to ISIS recruitment strategies because they are visible, politically salient and relatively cheap. Unfortunately, this does not mean that they are effective.

Censorship sits awkwardly with free-speech values

Fidler points out that both public and private efforts to remove terrorist content can clash with free-speech values. This is most obviously a problem for the United States, which has been highly reluctant to engage in censorship, given the willingness of the Supreme Court to strike down laws that could impinge directly on free speech. Accordingly, the United States has effectively delegated out much of the job of censorship to private businesses such as Google’s YouTube and Facebook, which are allowed (and indeed encouraged by laws such as the Communications Decency Act) to have their own codes of conduct over which content they will host and which content they will take down. The government, furthermore, sometimes requests that companies take down content. In principle, these requests are nonbinding, but in practice they may be hard for businesses to ignore.

As Fidler indicates politely, this has created a terrible mess. There is very little transparency around government requests for censorship (by coincidence, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has just published a short piece complaining that Facebook does not provide any information on U.S. government censorship requests). In addition, different private actors, with different codes and standards, engage in private forms of censorship on their own behalf that generate confusion and inconsistency. Companies have to make complicated judgment calls. For example, I’m aware from my own conversations that YouTube initially censored footage from pro-democracy protests in Iran in 2009 showing the violence perpetrated against the protesters, on the grounds that this violated its code of conduct. After thinking through the political implications of this censorship, YouTube changed its mind — but it could (with different leadership) have opted for the opposite choice.

More transparency might help, but it won’t solve the underlying problem

Fidler proposes a set of modest reforms aimed at introducing greater clarity and transparency. He suggests that the U.S. government should issue a presidential directive setting out the circumstances under which the government will request that private companies take down content. He also pushes for private companies to explain their policies and to get independent experts to review them, and for the government’s Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board to review the requests made by the government and report on them to Congress and the public. As Fidler notes, government and business are under pressure to “do something” about online propaganda, to counter ISIS’s success in recruiting foreign fighters. It’s not at all clear that anything that the government and private business can do will be effective. Fidler doesn’t have any silver bullet solutions to this problem — but he does propose ways to minimize the damage that the patchy U.S. anti-terrorist censorship regime could do to civil liberties and transparency.


Henry Farrell
Henry Farrell is SNF Agora Institute Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, 2019 winner of the Friedrich Schiedel Prize for Politics and Technology, and Editor in Chief of the Monkey Cage blog at the Washington Post. Follow​