Are social media's recent bannings a freedom of expression issue?

[HMS_Irruncible]

@asahi

What if a large social media company like Twitter gets bought out by Rupert Murdoch, who then insists on moderating with ideological conformity?

If you wonder what that would look like, look no further than Parler. It ended up being a circle-jerk of ideological conformists, not any kind of public square.

@asahi

It would potentially have the same impact on political organizing as it would if a court ruling banned public employees unions.

This is a little bit hysterical here. Look, the so-called public square existed before Twitter, and it still exists. There’s still TV, blogs, print media, myriad ways to facilitate public discourse and get your message out. Many are free, or incredibly inexpensive. Some cost money, but since when is there a guarantee that media outreach is free of charge?

The only reason we’re talking about Twitter is because Trump depended entirely upon it, and didn’t pursue even the lowest-effort alternatives. He didn’t even post on Parler, for crying out loud. He didn’t even have his comms shop or press secretary release statements on his behalf. He made no effort whatsoever, he simply evaporated after his shiny toy was gone.

He didn’t go silent because Twitter is a natural monopoly. He went silent because he has nothing left to say. I fail to see how it’s a crisis of public discourse just because one politician is too lazy, cheap, and/or stupid to put his eggs in any basket besides Twitter.

[asahi]

@HMS_Irruncible

He didn’t go silent because Twitter is a natural monopoly. He went silent because he has nothing left to say.

That might be true in Trump’s case, but consider that social media aren’t just platforms from which people can blather and ramble; they’re advertising platforms, and they’re online communities that people use to organize and mobilize. They inspire action – which we saw on January 6th. Granted, not the kind of action we’re looking for, but that’s proof of what I’m saying. It’s also fair to say that much of the political action that has taken place in places like Georgia and in the national campaigns made use of social media. If Facebook and Twitter had just suspended accounts without warning or explanation, it very well could have impacted the outcomes of elections. It’s naive and not grounded in reality to believe otherwise.

I agree that there’s nothing at present that suggests the major social media companies have largely moderated with an overt bias, but there is nothing that prevents this sort of thing from happening in the future. We should reckon with the kind of impact that social media have and where possible mitigate that impact and put up some guardrails. I would agree that the First Amendment limits what can be done in terms of outright legislation, and I don’t think it’s really necessary. But there should be a way to least hold social media companies more responsive to the public interest without going overboard and I think one way to do that is through regulating the TOS.

[k9bfriender]

@asahi

If Facebook and Twitter had just suspended accounts without warning or explanation, it very well could have impacted the outcomes of elections. It’s naive and not grounded in reality to believe otherwise.

It could have, sure. But twitter and facebook are not the only way to organize, not the only way to get your word out. The Georgia senate race was close enough that I think that it would have impacted the election. If they had suspended Trump, and not had him spouting all his conspiracies about the stolen election, I think that the Republicans probably would have taken it.

If they had suspended Stacey Abrams, I think that that would have caused Democrats to double down in their outreach and voting programs. I think that the Democrats would have won by larger margins had that happened.

@asahi

I think one way to do that is through regulating the TOS.

Do you mean regulating what the TOS can say, how it is enforced, or both?

Should I be able to make my own messageboard that forbids the use of the word, “it”? Should I be allowed to make my own messageboard that doesn’t sanction anything that is not legally defined as illegal speech?

Should someone be able to sue a social media company if they do not feel as though they were consistent in their moderation? Should there be a govt body that investigates complaints of uneven sanctions?

[asahi]

@k9bfriender

It could have, sure. But twitter and facebook are not the only way to organize, not the only way to get your word out.

Sure, and television is not the only way to advertise, nor is YouTube, but few would be happy at losing access to these media, particularly if it came at a critical time during the election. Again, my argument isn’t that social media are the only way to get a message out; it’s that we have to acknowledge that they influence the way we think and how we behave. We can’t avoid acknowledging that fact. If someone wants to have this debate and avoid acknowledging that reality, I won’t take what they write seriously because it’s living in a world of alternative facts.

[k9bfriender]

@asahi

it’s that we have to acknowledge that they influence the way we think and how we behave. We can’t avoid acknowledging that fact.

Of course they do. I would say, however, that Fox News has had more of an impact, should we regulate what they are allowed to say as well?

I don’t know how much they influenced this election, but Newsmax and OANN may well be fairly influential in the future, what restrictions should we put on their content?

The question is not whether they have had an impact, the question is, is that impact great enough to impose regulations?

@asahi

If someone wants to have this debate and avoid acknowledging that reality, I won’t take what they write seriously because it’s living in a world of alternative facts.

I don’t think that anyone is doing anything of the sort, so I don’t know why you feel the need to make this caveat.

What I find to be pretty counterproductive are people having this debate without being willing to say what the remedy is that they would like. It’s hard to take it seriously, because it comes across as just complaints. It seems everyone wants something done, but no one is willing to say what it is that they want.

You said that social media’s TOSes should be regulated. Do you mean what the TOS can say, or do you mean how it is enforced, or both?

[Max_S]

@octopus

How is Twitter different than a text message or a mass mailing?

Think about the way text messages and mail work. I send a message, possibly making a copy for my records (this is automatic for text messages). The carrier physically transports the message to its destination. Sometimes the carrier has to hold on to the message for a few days before it can reach its destination, but once delivered, it’s gone.

That’s the critical difference. Twitter has to keep a big archive of all the messages, and every time you want to look at one, Twitter actually makes a copy, which is a form of expression.

(Voicemail, for another example, is not a common carrier service. But this is not necessarily the definitive bright line between private versus common carrier service)

~Max

[asahi]

@k9bfriender

Of course they do. I would say, however, that Fox News has had more of an impact, should we regulate what they are allowed to say as well?

I don’t know how much they influenced this election, but Newsmax and OANN may well be fairly influential in the future, what restrictions should we put on their content?

The question is not whether they have had an impact, the question is, is that impact great enough to impose regulations?

I’d agree with you that cable and online networks are influential. I don’t think they should be allowed to deliberately push false information and pass it off as news. They can distinguish themselves as entertainers but they shouldn’t, so yes, we should regulate networks when they do this.

And we should regulate social media as well. Just differently.

[Slash1972]

@k9bfriender

Do you mean regulating what the TOS can say, how it is enforced, or both?

Should I be able to make my own messageboard that forbids the use of the word, “it”? Should I be allowed to make my own messageboard that doesn’t sanction anything that is not legally defined as illegal speech?

Should someone be able to sue a social media company if they do not feel as though they were consistent in their moderation? Should there be a govt body that investigates complaints of uneven sanctions?

I don’t think you are ever going to get an answer to this question. I keep waiting for someone to post what they want done, but have yet to see anything concrete.

[DSeid]

@k9bfriender

This is your opinion, and verges on CT territory. You think that it had nothing to do with him inciting an insurrection against the United States?

If what you say is true, they would have cut off his twitter on November 4th, not waited 2 months.

I hardly see that as CT. The posts that allegedly got him kicked off were not incitement even leaning out the window and squinting your eyes. I think it had more to do with Georgia election results than anything else.

@k9bfriender

Should they have cut Trump off during his campaign when he was tweeting and retweeting hate speech?

Yes. If the rule is no hate speech then having power does not place you above enforcement of the rule. What do social media companies think they are? The DOJ?

@HMS_Irruncible

If you wonder what that would look like, look no further than Parler. It ended up being a circle-jerk of ideological conformists, not any kind of public square.

No question that the people who ran it were doofuses. The scary what if is what if they did a more subtle tilt, not stated, not clear, but very real and impactful.

We have been somewhat lucky that our would be autocrat was an idiot and a coward. Imagine someone smarter and more fearless with smarter enforcers.

[Kimstu]

@DSeid

Twitter allowed Trump to post horrific things throughout his presidency. Justification: he’s president.

Still president his tweets of: […]

were suddenly way past the line. Clearly openly violent posts. MUCH worse than all the hateful vile crap he’d posted for over three years with no action at all, because he WAS IN POWER (with a GOP Senate at his beck and call).

Nothing at all to do with the GOP first losing the Executive and then, just a few days before, the Senate.

As I said in the post you replied to:

@Kimstu

I do think it’s reasonable to infer that they figured (doubtless correctly) that hosting Trump’s own account would be less profitable to them in his post-Presidency period, so they had less to lose by booting him at the end of his term. But again, that’s more about profit than about direct antiregulatory influence.

Nobody is denying (and in fact, I explicitly pointed out) that banning Trump the soon-to-be-ex-president is an easier call for Twitter than banning Trump the drama-queen POTUS. But that’s a matter of popularity and marketability for Twitter, not necessarily an attempt to directly influence government regulation.

Where I think DemonTree’s argument goes off the rails is in her jumping to the conclusion that Twitter banning Trump post-Jan. 6 is somehow going to significantly influence the Biden administration’s views on regulating social media companies. I’ve seen no evidence that it has or will, or that Twitter executives think that it has or will.

My guess is that Twitter’s current choices are based, as usual, on what they think will be the most profitable for them. Not on hypothetical efforts to “curry favor” with specific Presidential administrations.

[Slash1972]

@Kimstu

My guess is that Twitter’s current choices are based, as usual, on what they think will be the most profitable for them. Not on hypothetical efforts to “curry favor” with specific Presidential administrations.

Isn’t this what all companies do? Are there people who think these companies are making choices based on some definition of “morals”?

[DSeid]

@Kimstu

As I said …

Yes I read it. It is not that I did not understand what you wrote. I disagree with it.

@Kimstu

…jumping to the conclusion that Twitter banning Trump post-Jan. 6 is somehow going to significantly influence the Biden administration’s views on regulating social media companies. I’ve seen no evidence that it has or will, or that Twitter executives think that it has or will.

My guess is that Twitter’s current choices are based, as usual, on what they think will be the most profitable for them.

You are thinking in terms of some immediate quid pro quo style thing? I see this more as not wanting to provoke the baby Trump and/or his Senate enablers to throw things at them, and then buttering the new boss party.

Yes it is profit but longer term than this quarter. More like getting a rook to control a column or a knight to a center square. No immediate pieces captured but gaining better position on the board.

[HMS_Irruncible]

@DSeid

We have been somewhat lucky that our would be autocrat was an idiot and a coward. Imagine someone smarter and more fearless with smarter enforcers.

And this is exactly why I’m cool with a popular private microblogging platform being able to pull the plug on the President, rather than vice versa as it is in China or other societies.

[DSeid]

And it is why I take the cautions from someone who is dealing with a competent autocrat, surviving an assassination attempt, willing to go to jail, leading dissent from there, very very seriously.

The fact is the popular microblogging platform only pulled the plug on the President after that President lost, was on his way out, his party lost all of the Congressional branch, and public opinion swayed hard against him. Until then they enabled. After that they began to butter up the party that was coming in.

I don’t find that as reassuring as you apparently do, even as my interests are the current toast.

[asahi]

I’ll bite.

To start with, enforcement of TOS is potentially one avenue to explore, but that doesn’t necessarily rule out others. An attorney familiar with federal laws would be better qualified to determine what would and wouldn’t fly in a federal court as far as regulation goes. I’m throwing out ideas at this point. But I reject the idea that we’re left to do nothing in the face of powerful misinformation which, left unchecked, will destroy our democracy. If it means going as far as breaking up big tech companies in the interests of taking away monopolistic powers, I’d rather not go that route, but if that’s the only option we have, then so be it. Data is the new oil, so to speak; if we could break up Standard Oil, we can break up Facebook. I would of course love nothing more than to have big tech do some soul searching itself, even if it means igniting its own civil war – Tim Cook’s recent shot at FB are a welcome development to that end.

Responding to K9’s questions:

Do you mean regulating what the TOS can say, how it is enforced, or both?
I think that what the TOS actually say should be proposed by the company and agreed to by the consumer. What I would propose is having a regulatory agency like the FTC come in and say “Okay, Facebook, these are the terms that you required your users to abide by; you, too, are bound by those terms and must make a good faith effort to enforce those terms consistently.” Now in that scenario, FB would be free to take hate speech out of its TOS but then it would be up to them to deal with the PR fallout. As it is now, FB, Twitter, and other big platforms have a highly inconsistent policing policy, typically only policing speech when their brand has been embarrassed in some way.

Should I be able to make my own messageboard that forbids the use of the word, “it”?
This question would be better if the example were more realistic.

Should someone be able to sue a social media company if they do not feel as though they were consistent in their moderation? Should there be a govt body that investigates complaints of uneven sanctions?

If someone could prove that they were moderated arbitrarily, I don’t know about a lawsuit per se, but perhaps they could submit a complaint to a regulatory body (be it FTC, FCC, or a new agency that deals with social media). I think what would happen over time is that lawyers and legal departments representing these companies would give moderation guidance. Perhaps one preemptive remedy for companies would be that garden variety legal disputes over unfair moderation be resolved through a process that begins internally and then, if it escalates, ends with arbitration rather than litigation, clear regulatory infractions notwithstanding.

No doubt, this would change how social media operate, and the changes would be noticeable. In some ways, these changes would feel noticeably restrictive, but I personally think that the internet needs to be cleaned up for our own good in the sense that the power must be shifted back to the public interest. At the same time, I’d like to see net neutrality tilt some of that power back away from internet providers.

People look at regulation as though it’s going to immediately used to censor and stifle communication on the internet. I see it differently. I think it will reduce the incentive for destructive communication on the internet – communication that everybody knows is harmful but companies that are in a position to stop it refuse to because they don’t want to do anything that interferes with the way they operate and because they don’t want to risk alienating some users who lurk in dark corners of the web.

[BigT]

AFAIK, sites like Twitter are bound to their terms of service–under civil law. The TOS are effectively a contract, and that contract can be breached. However, any subjective parts of the TOS tend to be found in favor of the company in question, so you have to have a pure factual allegation.

If you change this, all that would happen is that the companies would change their TOS to explicitly give them the right to make the sole determination on subjective matters. You’d get the blanket claim they reserve the right to terminate service at any time, which is already used in many places (including the SDMB) to avoid the issue altogether.

As for changing attitudes: you’re telling people to stop being against things like condoning violence, spreading false information, staging insurrections, and so on. Despite claims to the contrary, that remains what conservatives get banned for. They complain that it’s because they’re conservative, but fail to realize those who aren’t banned don’t say those things. It’s not about their views but their behavior.

And, yes, there is no monopoly here, and I’m not too concerned by the evidence we have that Twitter and such would ever be so stupid as to start banning people for things that society in general would consider unfair. The profit motive means they’ll only ban what their target audience wants banned, and their goal continues to be having as many people use them as possible.

Those complaining about not being able to lie, be violent, etc are the minority, and, if that changes, we have a deeper societal problem we’d need to solve first.

[k9bfriender]

@asahi

I don’t think they should be allowed to deliberately push false information and pass it off as news.

I don’t think that they should.

But I do think that they should be allowed to.

Otherwise, we have to have someone get involved in deciding what is true and false, and I don’t know that I really trust anyone with that.

OTOH, they cannot do so entirely without consequence. Note that Dominion has not been too amused about what has been said about them.

[HMS_Irruncible]

@DSeid

And it is why I take the cautions from someone who is dealing with a competent autocrat, surviving an assassination attempt, willing to go to jail, leading dissent from there, very very seriously.

I guess you are talking about Navalny here? I’m sure if I weighted an appeal to authority at all, I could find an equal or greater number of activists who are perfectly fine with Twitter pulling the plug on Trump. Ones who aren’t right-wing xenophobes posturing as crusaders for democracy, when they’re just trying to inherit Putin’s mantle. But I don’t value that type of appeal, so I won’t bother.

The fact is the popular microblogging platform only pulled the plug on the President after that President lost, was on his way out, his party lost all of the Congressional branch, and public opinion swayed hard against him. Until then they enabled. After that they began to butter up the party that was coming in.

Considering what Trump did to the DOJ, USPS, and who knows what other institutions… you don’t see the problem with having a government agency with the power to bless what’s authentic and permissive public speech?

To spell it out, Trump could have subverted the Department of Twitter Regulation to issue a memorandum that any given Trump tweet is compliant with the public interest, but his opposition’s tweets aren’t. His base would consider that rubber-stamp action legitimate and legitimizing of Trump’s actions.

Whatever government organ you’re imagining, imagine the worst possible actor turning it to his own benefit, and you’ll have the vision that the Republicans are no doubt wargaming right now. No thanks.

[k9bfriender]

@DSeid

The posts that allegedly got him kicked off were not incitement even leaning out the window and squinting your eyes.

Combined with what he said in person, and what was happening on his behalf as he was tweeting them, I’d say that they certainly do qualify. Maybe don’t look out the window, and instead put things into some sort of context.

@DSeid

I think it had more to do with Georgia election results than anything else.

I don’t.

It is essentially taking your conclusion that they are currying favor to those in charge, and then assuming that their motives fit your conclusion.

@DSeid

Yes. If the rule is no hate speech then having power does not place you above enforcement of the rule.

Eh, I agree. However, they were in a bit of uncharted water, never having had that situation before. They made a decision that they thought would best serve the public and their users. They are currently rethinking that decision.

@DSeid

What do social media companies think they are?

Companies made of failable people who can make mistakes.

As is the DOJ, and the govt. I’d far rather have twitter make a mistake in how it enforces its TOS than the govt make a mistake in how it enforces how social media enforces its TOS.

We can leave twitter for another social media platform far easier than we can leave the govt for another one.

@DSeid

We have been somewhat lucky that our would be autocrat was an idiot and a coward. Imagine someone smarter and more fearless with smarter enforcers.

Yeah, especially if they have a govt body dedicated to enforcing what they deem as acceptable speech.

[k9bfriender]

@DSeid

The fact is the popular microblogging platform only pulled the plug on the President after that President lost, was on his way out, his party lost all of the Congressional branch, and public opinion swayed hard against him. Until then they enabled.

I don’t know that they enabled. They tolerated him longer than they should have I agree, but if they were enabling, then they would not have been putting disclaimers on his tweets.

That certainly curried no favor with him.