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On Wednesday, “YouTube [said] it will start removing newly uploaded material that claims widespread voter fraud or errors changed the outcome [of the presidential election].” AP News
“The U.S. government and 48 states and districts sued Facebook Wednesday, accusing it of abusing its market power in social networking to crush smaller competitors and seeking remedies that could include a forced spinoff of the social network’s Instagram and WhatsApp messaging services.” AP News
The right is critical of tech censorship.
“What I find impossible to grasp is how YouTube and its Alphabet/Google parent fail to comprehend the scope and size of the backfire this will create… the tech giant wants to rebut conspiracy theories by, er, suppressing all arguments that don’t agree with their own bias. That’s like trying to put out a grease fire with water. Or, perhaps more accurately, putting out a grease fire with gasoline. Nothing promotes conspiracy thinking more than pre-emptive speech regulation. The response will be, What are they afraid of? And then the response will be to just go elsewhere to post the content…
“The best remedy for bad speech is more speech, not speech codes, deplatforming, and quasi-censorship. Efforts by tech giants to silence dissent — even wild, uninformed, and erroneous dissent — will only feed the conspiracy thinking in society rather than reduce or eliminate it. If the tech giants want to keep interfering in free speech, they should not be surprised when government comes to interfere with their business operations. At the very least, it might awaken conservatives to the necessity of using anti-trust legislation to keep economic power from consolidating too much, as it quickly transforms into political power — and there’s no telling how it will get used.”
Ed Morrissey, Hot Air
“The Trump legal team still has active challenges to the election results in several states… There are many, many witnesses who have signed affidavits alleging voter fraud in various states. But, according to YouTube, you don’t have a right to see that evidence or be told that fraud even occurred. Your ability to view content and make your own decision about the evidence is superseded by their desire to keep you in the dark about not just mere allegations, but evidence as well. Will YouTube not allow live-streaming of hearings alleging ballot fraud too? Should the Supreme Court take up any of the current challenges, will any coverage related to those challenges be allowed on their platform?”
Matt Margolis, PJ Media
“While YouTube preemptively tears down content it disagrees with, a number of other conspiracy theories abound on the platform uncensored, ranging from Democratic claims that Russia successfully hacked the 2016 election to decrying the 20th century moon landings as a hoax… [They also include fringe theories] like the idea that the terrorist attacks on 9/11 were an inside job… [and that] aliens built the pyramids… YouTube’s own code on misinformation ought to rip [these] off the site if its philosophy on fake news was applied consistently.”
Tristan Justice, The Federalist
In addition, “[Facebook is] telling its robots to focus on ‘the worst of the worst,’ according to internal documents the paper obtained: ‘slurs directed at Blacks, Muslims, people of more than one race, the LGBTQ community and Jews.’ Bigotry against men, whites and Americans won’t be automatically flagged, as they’re ‘low sensitivity.’…
“The old algorithms apparently auto-deleted posts in which blacks were simply recounting experiences of racism. But rather than rectifying that problem, Facebook decided that racism against whites either isn’t racism — or doesn’t really count. You can write ‘whites are stupid’ for instance, and not get flagged… How is this the answer? If Facebook feels its algorithms aren’t finding hate speech, improve them. But how does flagging less of one thing mean you’re going to find more of another? This doesn’t seem like a fix at all: It sounds like Facebook’s employees have decided that only certain kinds of bigotry matter.”
Editorial Board, New York Post
“There is a backlash against [Facebook] from the left and right but the reasons are very different. The right is upset with Facebook for limiting conservative voices on the site. The left is upset the company doesn’t do more to stifle them. I do wonder if this lawsuit would be happening if not for the consensus on the left that Facebook was too friendly to President Trump.”
John Sexton, Hot Air
The left calls on tech companies to do more to combat misinformation and supports the antitrust lawsuit.
The left calls on tech companies to do more to combat misinformation and supports the antitrust lawsuit.
“Twitter's label on Trump's [46-minute video last week] perfectly captures how outgunned the companies still are. Trump didn't just make one claim about election fraud in the video. The speech contained a multitude of debunked allegations, baseless conspiracy-mongering and unproven complaints. Characterizing Trump's claims as merely ‘disputed’ by unnamed actors — rather than as being overwhelmingly rejected by federal, state and local authorities — simply gives oxygen to discredited rumors, said Alex Howard, a democratic governance advocate…
“Going forward, Howard said, the companies should consider placing repeat misinformation peddlers in a kind of informational quarantine, where their posts would be previewed for policy violations before appearing on social media, not after. Tech platforms should also display trustworthiness indicators on verified users' profiles based on their track record of spreading misinformation, Howard added. And labels must be more aggressive, he said, drawing a connection to surgeon generals' warnings on cigarette labels. ‘When you put pictures of mouth, throat and lung cancer on cigarette packs, that creates a different kind of disincentive than just saying, 'This is known to cause cancer,'”
Brian Fung, CNN
Regarding the FTC lawsuit, “Venture capitalists are so fearful of Facebook’s ruthless tactics they simply won’t fund startups that Zuckerberg might view as competition, no matter how insignificant… Zuckerberg has apologized a dozen times or more for some Facebook missteps and promised to do better. Nothing much changes. Facebook agreed to a settlement with the FTC in 2012 over what the agency called ‘privacy-related violations’ — and then had to pay a $5 billion fine seven years later for violating the terms of that settlement. One reason to break up Facebook is that less onerous remedies have simply failed to make a difference.”
Joe Nocera, Bloomberg
“The best response to many of the problems Facebook poses would be to have real, vibrant competition among social networks that gives users better options for privacy, reliability and authenticity…
“To give competition a chance to blossom, the courts or regulators have to find a way to breach Facebook’s moat. Its users need to be able to switch easily to unaffiliated apps and services while retaining their connections to one another, just as customers of the local Bell telephone companies needed to be able to choose an unaffiliated long-distance carrier or phone manufacturer after the breakup of AT&T. Innovative rivals need to be able to establish footholds in social networking without being cut off from Facebook’s users… The lawsuits filed Wednesday could spark a burst of competition and innovation, but only if the remedies they produce are the right ones.”
Editorial Board, Los Angeles Times
“Free speech is not well protected or served when a small handful of companies control a few platforms that most Americans depend upon for information and political discourse. It is vital for regulators to foster more robust competition so that people have more choice across a much broader range of different types of platforms with different rules and business models. Only then can we keep the public discourse from being dominated and even manipulated by particular groups of people…
“Good policy ideas will need public support across partisan divides in order to overcome the brutal partisanship that now dominates Washington policymaking. To that end, the new bipartisan commission on free speech and civil rights should be led by people with deep ties to a range of communities and constituencies across the country. Policies affecting online speech need to be based on a shared commitment and understanding that free speech and civil rights are interdependent and intertwined.”
Rebecca MacKinnon, Slate
