{"id":258799,"date":"2014-10-08T12:59:00","date_gmt":"2014-10-08T17:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=258799"},"modified":"2024-01-26T13:00:07","modified_gmt":"2024-01-26T18:00:07","slug":"for-better-or-worse-twitter-and-facebook-are-the-guardians-of-free-speech-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2014\/10\/08\/for-better-or-worse-twitter-and-facebook-are-the-guardians-of-free-speech-now\/","title":{"rendered":"For better or worse, Twitter and Facebook are the guardians of free speech now"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

One of the most famous free-speech cases in U.S. history, the one that allowed publishers to live without fear of being bankrupted by a libel or defamation suit, involved a newspaper \u2014 namely the New York Times<\/em>, which was sued in 1964 by an Alabama legislator named Sullivan. But any protection free speech gets in the future is more likely to come from [company]Twitter[\/company], [company]Facebook[\/company] and [company]Google[\/company] than it is from the Times<\/em>, according to a recent essay in the Harvard Law Review.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Marvin Ammori, an American lawyer who specializes in net neutrality law, wrote about where free speech legislation stands<\/a> now in the June issue of the magazine, and made the case that social platforms are far more important than the New York Times<\/em> is now \u2014 and in fact are probably more important than the paper was even at the time of its landmark case.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In the next decade, if the Supreme Court hands down a landmark decision about freedom of expression, it is more likely that one of the parties in the case will be Google or Twitter than that it will be the New York Times. Traditional media organizations are no longer the only place to find news or make political arguments.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

How strong is their commitment?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The rise of social media, Ammori argues, has created a world where freedom of the press \u201cmeans freedom not just for an institutional press, but freedom for all of us.\u201d Those platforms have created what Harvard\u2019s Yochai Benkler \u2014 who testified in the case against<\/a> document-leaker Chelsea Manning \u2014 has called \u201cthe networked fourth estate\u201d or the networked public sphere, one that allows journalistic speech to occur anywhere, at any time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"free<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In terms of their reach, platforms like YouTube and Facebook and even Twitter dwarf the New York Times<\/em>, Ammori argues \u2014 YouTube alone gets as many unique visitors in a day as the New York Times<\/em> gets in a month. This says nothing about the quality of the content they are consuming, of course, but Ammori\u2019s point is that when Google makes decisions about whether to take down<\/a> a video like The Innocence of Muslims, it has far-reaching implications.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But are these new stewards of free speech as committed to that principle as the Times<\/em> and its ilk were? My colleague Jeff Roberts raised that question in a recent post, and some of the legal experts he spoke to weren\u2019t sure of the answer<\/a>. But Ammori argues that for Twitter and Google at least, a commitment to those ideals is baked into their DNA.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Twitter\u2019s Lee speaks about his company\u2019s founders as one would speak of intrepid newspaper owners: \u2018Our legal team\u2019s conceptualization of speech policies and practices emanate[s] straight from the idealism of our founders \u2014 that this would be a platform for free expression, a way for people to disseminate their ideas in the modern age. We\u2019re here in some sense to implement that vision.\u2019<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Trying to protect free speech globally<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Each of the major platforms has been tested in various ways, Ammori notes, from Google\u2019s attempts to resist censorship in China several years ago to Twitter\u2019s struggles with the laws of other countries in which it operates \u2014 including France\u2019s desire to prosecute anti-Semitism<\/a> and homophobia and other forms of hate speech, and the crackdown on free speech in places like Turkey and Ukraine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Blue<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In fact, one of the biggest differences between the current free-speech landscape and the one that existed for the New York Times<\/em> in 1964, Ammori says, is the fact that companies like Google, Twitter and Facebook are having to try and blend U.S. free-speech principles with laws in other countries. That has driven Twitter, for example, to implement a kind of localized censorship<\/a> where tweets can be hidden from users inside a specific country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Strictly speaking, of course, the lawyers who litigated Sullivan also faced such a world. But they did not need to be constantly aware of it. In 1964, the New York Times barely operated in Alabama, with only a few hundred subscribers. Today, fewer than half of leading tech companies\u2019 users are within the United States. Their users come from dozens of countries and regions, each with different national and subnational laws, with different cultures, histories, and local community standards.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

One thing that Ammori mentions in his essay but doesn\u2019t really flesh out is how much the companies he talks about \u2014 including Tumblr, WordPress and others \u2014 make decisions based on their own interests, and in effect restrict speech far more than they are required to by law. Facebook in particular routinely removes content that the site has decided might offend its users or advertisers, and it rarely says how it arrived at that decision.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Free speech has been privatized<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

This isn\u2019t just an academic issue \u2014 removing that content, as Facebook has done with images related to the war in Syria, can have very real effects on what we as a society know about important issues, as the investigative blogger Brown Moses<\/a> has pointed out. Even the algorithmic filtering that Facebook does can have a real impact on what we know about certain events, as sociologist Zeynep Tufekci argued in the wake of the riots in Ferguson.<\/a> Said Ammori:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Companies generally forbid sharing speech that is illegal and unprotected (such as defamatory comments or copyright-infringing videos), but they also prohibit some content that would be fully protected under the First Amendment. For example, Facebook\u2019s terms state: \u2018You will not post content that: is hate speech, threatening, or pornographic; incites violence; or contains nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence.\u2019 The First Amendment would protect, with limited exceptions, all this content.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

As free-speech advocates like Jillian York of the Electronic Frontier Foundation have pointed out a number of times, the current structure of the social web means that we have essentially given our free-speech rights<\/a> to a collection of private corporations, who are not bound by the First Amendment. Their commitment to freedom may or may not be sincere, but in the end we get the version of freedom that they choose to provide \u2014 and can justify to their shareholders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock \/ Aaron Amat<\/a> and Pond5\/ Cienpies<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

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One of the most famous free-speech cases in U.S. history, the one that allowed publishers to live without fear of being bankrupted by a libel or defamation suit, involved a newspaper \u2014 namely the New York Times, which was sued in 1964 by an Alabama legislator named Sullivan. But any protection free speech gets in the … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “For better or worse, Twitter and Facebook are the guardians of free speech now”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":true,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-258799","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gigaom"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258799","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258799"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258799\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":258800,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258799\/revisions\/258800"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258799"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258799"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258799"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}