{"id":258866,"date":"2014-07-15T15:39:00","date_gmt":"2014-07-15T20:39:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=258866"},"modified":"2024-01-26T15:40:02","modified_gmt":"2024-01-26T20:40:02","slug":"what-happens-when-free-speech-engines-like-twitter-and-facebook-become-megaphones-for-violence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2014\/07\/15\/what-happens-when-free-speech-engines-like-twitter-and-facebook-become-megaphones-for-violence\/","title":{"rendered":"What happens when free-speech engines like Twitter and Facebook become megaphones for violence?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Social networks and platforms like Facebook (s fb), Twitter (s twtr) and YouTube (s goog) have given everyone a megaphone they can use to share their views with the world, but what happens \u2014 or what should happen \u2014 when their views are violent, racist and\/or offensive? This is a dilemma that is only growing more intense, especially as militant and terrorist groups in places like Iraq use these platforms to spread messages of hate<\/a>, including graphic imagery and calls to violence against specific groups of people. How much free speech is too much?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That debate flared up again following an opinion piece that appeared in the Washington Post<\/em>, written by Ronan Farrow, an MSNBC host and former State Department staffer. In it, Farrow called on social networks<\/a> like Twitter and Facebook to \u201cdo more to stop terrorists from inciting violence,\u201d and argued that if these platforms screen for things like child porn, they should do the same for material that \u201cdrives ethnic conflict,\u201d such as calls for violence from Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Jihadist group known as ISIS.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cEvery major social media network employs algorithms that automatically detect and prevent the posting of child pornography. Many, including YouTube, use a similar technique to prevent copyrighted material from hitting the web. Why not, in those overt cases of beheading videos and calls for blood, employ a similar system?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Free speech vs. hate speech \u2014 who wins?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In his piece, Farrow acknowledges that there are<\/a> free-speech issues involved in what he\u2019s suggesting, but argues that \u201cthose grey areas don\u2019t excuse a lack of enforcement against direct calls for murder.\u201d And he draws a direct comparison \u2014 as others have \u2014 between what ISIS and other groups are doing and what happened in Rwanda in the mid-1990s, where the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis was driven in part by radio broadcasts<\/a> calling for violence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In fact, both Twitter and Facebook already do some of what Farrow wants them to do: for example, Twitter\u2019s terms of use specifically forbid threats of violence, and the company has removed recent tweets from ISIS<\/a> and blocked accounts in what appeared to be retaliation for the posting of beheading videos and other content (Twitter has a policy of not commenting on actions that it takes related to specific accounts, so we don\u2019t know for sure why).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The hard part, however, is drawing a line between egregious threats of violence and political rhetoric, and\/or picking sides in a specific conflict. As an unnamed executive at one of the social networks told Farrow: \u201cOne person\u2019s terrorist is another person\u2019s freedom fighter.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a response to Farrow\u2019s piece, Jillian York \u2014 the director for international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation \u2014 argues that making an impassioned call<\/a> for some kind of action by social networks is a lot easier than trying to sort out what specific content to remove. Maybe we could agree on beheading videos, but what about other types of rhetoric? And what about the journalistic value of having these groups posting information, which has become a crucial tool<\/a> for fact-checking journalists like British blogger Brown Moses?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cIt seemed pretty simple for Twitter to take down Al-Shabaab\u2019s account following the Westgate Mall massacre, because there was consistent glorification of violence\u2026 but they\u2019ve clearly had a harder time determining whether to take down some of ISIS\u2019 accounts, because many of them simply don\u2019t incite violence. Like them or not\u2026 their function seems to be reporting on their land grabs, which does have a certain utility for reporters and other actors.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Twitter and the free-speech party<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

As the debate over Farrow\u2019s piece expanded on Twitter, sociologist Zeynep Tufekci \u2014 an expert in the impact of social-media on conflicts such as the Arab Spring revolutions in Egypt and the more recent demonstrations in Turkey \u2014 argued that even free-speech considerations have to be tempered by<\/a> the potential for inciting actual violence against identifiable groups:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s easy to sympathize with this viewpoint, especially after seeing some of terrible images coming out of Iraq. But at what point does protecting a specific group from theoretical acts of violence win out over the right to free speech? It\u2019s not clear where to draw that line. When the militant Palestinian group Hamas made threats towards Israel during<\/a> an attack on the Gaza Strip in 2012, should Twitter have blocked the account or removed the tweet? What about the tweets from the official account of the Israeli military that triggered those threats?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What makes this difficult for Twitter in particular is that the company has talked a lot about how it wants to be the \u201cfree-speech wing of the free-speech party,\u201d<\/a> and has fought for the rights of its users on a number of occasions, including an attempt to resist demands that it hand over information about French users who posted homophobic and anti-Semitic comments, and another case in which it tried to resist handing over<\/a> information about supporters of WikiLeaks to the State Department.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite this, even Twitter has been caught between a rock and a hard place, with countries like Russia and Pakistan pressuring the company to remove accounts<\/a> and use its \u201ccountry withheld content\u201d tool to block access to tweets that are deemed to be illegal \u2014 in some cases merely because they involve opinions that the authorities don\u2019t want distributed. In other words, the company already engages in censorship, although it tries hard not to do so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Who decides what content should disappear?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Facebook, meanwhile, routinely removes content and accounts for a variety of reasons, and has been criticized by many free-speech advocates and journalists \u2014 including Brown Moses \u2014 for making crucial evidence of chemical-weapon attacks<\/a> in Syria vanish by deleting accounts, and for doing so without explanation. Google also removes content, such as the infamous \u201cInnocence of Muslims\u201d video, which sparked a similar debate about<\/a> the risks of trying to hide inflammatory content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[tweet 487569374300360704 hide_thread=\u2019true\u2019]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What Farrow and others don\u2019t address is the question of who should be left to make the decision about what content to delete in order to comply with his desire to banish violent imagery. Should we just leave it up to unnamed executives to remove whatever they wish, and to arrive at their own definitions of what is appropriate speech and what isn\u2019t? Handing over such an important principle to the private sector \u2014 with virtually no transparency about their decision-making, nor any court of appeal \u2014 seems unwise, to put it mildly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What if there were tools that we could use as individuals to remove or block certain types of content ourselves, the way Chrome extensions like HerpDerp do<\/a> for YouTube comments? Would that make it better or worse? To be honest, I have no idea. What happens if we use these and other similar kinds of tools to forget a genocide<\/a>? What I think is pretty clear is that handing over even more of that kind of decision making to faceless executives at Twitter and Facebook is not the right way to go, no matter how troubling that content might be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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

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Social networks and platforms like Facebook (s fb), Twitter (s twtr) and YouTube (s goog) have given everyone a megaphone they can use to share their views with the world, but what happens \u2014 or what should happen \u2014 when their views are violent, racist and\/or offensive? This is a dilemma that is only growing … <\/p>\n

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