Fluid ImaginationFrom Trolling for Truth on Social Media:
Redesigning social media for timely, local, relevant and authoritative information requires a commitment to design justice, which sees technology not as a neutral tool but as a means for building the worlds we want.
A friend messaged me recently to discuss Plandemic, the 26-minute video that went viral last week due to its conspiracy mongering. My friend didn’t want to discuss the video, per se — he said he knows the idea that “the coronavirus was planned by billionaires to enforce worldwide vaccinations” is nuts — but he was concerned about major social-media companies such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Vimeo preventing people from watching it.
In a free country, he argued, all ideas — even (and especially) bad ones — should be out in the open for debate and discussion.
He didn’t get any argument from me, but he did get it (not directly) from the social-media companies. Travis Andrews spoke to them for The Washington Post and learned the companies took the video down because it violated their terms of service. While the legal language is different for each company, the gist is the same: the companies reserve the right to remove a video if it spreads harmful and misleading health information to the public.
Of course, they weren’t quick enough. Before Facebook could remove the video, it was viewed over 1.8 million times and shared over 150,000 times.
This was not the first viral video to be taken down for violating “community guidelines” around harmful and misleading health information. This NBC News report, for example, focuses on videos by doctors who “downplayed the risk of coronavirus and asserted that stay-at-home measures were unnecessary. They also promoted a conspiracy theory that doctors were falsely attributing unrelated deaths to COVID-19, the disease associated with the coronavirus.” These videos have been watched more than 9 million times. As Matt Taibbi reported, the videos provoked the American Academy of Emergency Physicians and American College of Emergency Physicians to issue a joint statement condemning the videos.
Taibbi’s article, The Inevitable Coronavirus Censorship Crisis is Here, explores the issue of coronavirus censorship in detail, connecting several dots, including WMDs in Iraq, Russiagate, and Tom Brady’s Deflategate, to make this point:
[T]he functional impact…is to stamp out discussion of things that do actually need to be discussed, like when the damage to the economy and the effects of other crisis-related problems – domestic abuse, substance abuse, suicide, stroke, abuse of children, etc. – become as significant a threat to the public as the pandemic. We do actually have to talk about this. We can’t not talk about it out of fear of being censored, or because we’re confusing real harm with political harm.
In general, I agree with my friend and with Matt Taibbi. The first donation I ever made as an adult was to the American Civil Liberties Union, and I’ve long told my students that when it comes to the First Amendment, I’m an extremist.
At the same time, I have no problem with these private companies taking down misleading and harmful videos. Among other things, the First Amendment recognizes the right of Americans to be free from governmental interference of speech, but it doesn’t compel corporations or individuals to follow the same rules. Removing these videos from Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc. does not violate the rights of these citizens. It may reduce the impact of their ideas, but it does not stop them from having or expressing them.
With today’s technology (and access to the computers in public libraries), every individual in the United States is able to record their thoughts, develop their arguments, or post their memes to the Internet, where every node is (by design) equally accessible.
While blocking access to the major social-media networks limits the potential audience, it doesn’t cause any more harm than when someone had a great idea in pre-Industrial Europe and could only post a pamphlet on the door of his local church: Martin Luther’s 95 theses went viral, and he didn’t even have a blue checkmark to help him out.
So yes, while I adamantly support the right of all Americans (all people, really) to express their opinions without fear of retribution from their government(s), I also support the right of private companies to determine their own terms of service (in accordance with their government’s laws).
The danger is not YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter preventing someone from sharing ideas on their social networks, nor is it the political and social condemnation that comes from airing one’s minority opinions in public (such is life); instead, the danger is a government that silences its critics.
On that front, things don’t look so rosy.
According to Reporters Sans Borders (RSF), the United States ranks 45th in the 2020 World Press Freedom Index, mainly due to “Trump-era hostility.” One item RSF highlights is the placement of an American journalist on the U.S. government’s “kill list.” Another is the U.S. government’s prosecution of whistleblowers. A third condemns the U.S. government’s seizure of a journalist’s phone and email records going back several years.
If YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter prevent an individual from using their services, that’s their right, but when the U.S. government is the one doing the censoring, then that’s the loss of our right, and we ought to do something about it.