Censorship
Posted: Sat Aug 23, 2014 6:12 am
Interesting riff on the decisions of mega-media companies to control what's talked about. If you owned Twitter, would you ban the beheading videos? Would you play god and determine the definition of terrorist and who's message gets banned?
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014 ... -see-read/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;The First Amendment bans speech abridgments by the state, not by private actors. There’s plainly nothing illegal about Twitter, Facebook and the like suppressing whatever ideas they choose to censor.
But as a prudential matter, the private/public dichotomy is not as clean when it comes to tech giants that now control previously unthinkable amounts of global communications. There are now close to 300 million active Twitter users in the world – roughly equivalent to the entire U.S. population – and those numbers continue to grow rapidly and dramatically. At the end of 2013, Facebook boasted of 1.23 billion active users: or 1 out of every 7 human beings on the planet. YouTube, owned by Google, recently said that “the number of unique users visiting the video-sharing website every month has reached 1 billion” and “nearly one out of every two people on the Internet visits YouTube.”
These are far more than just ordinary private companies from whose services you can easily abstain if you dislike their policies. Their sheer vastness makes it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to avoid them, particularly for certain work. They wield power over what we know, read and see far greater than anything previously possible – or conceivable – for ordinary companies. As The Guardian‘s Ball aptly noted today in expressing concern over Twitter’s censorship announcement:
Twitter, Facebook and Google have an astonishing, alarming degree of control over what information we can see or share, whether we’re a media outlet or a regular user. We have handed them a huge degree of trust, which must be earned and re-earned on a regular basis.
It’s an imperfect analogy, but, given this extraordinary control over the means of global communication, Silicon Valley giants at this point are more akin to public utilities such as telephone companies than they are ordinary private companies when it comes to the dangers of suppressing ideas, groups and opinions. It’s not hard to understand the dangers of allowing, say, AT&T or Verizon to decree that its phone lines may not be used by certain groups or to transmit certain ideas, and the dangers of allowing tech companies to do so are similar.
In the digital age, we are nearing the point where an idea banished by Twitter, Facebook and Google all but vanishes from public discourse entirely, and that is only going to become more true as those companies grow even further. Whatever else is true, the implications of having those companies make lists of permitted and prohibited ideas are far more significant than when ordinary private companies do the same thing.
Another vital distinction is between platform and publisher. As Ball explained, companies such as Twitter have long insisted they are the former and not the latter, which means they are not responsible for what others publish on their platform (just as AT&T is not responsible for how people use its telephones). Demanding that Twitter actively intervene in what speech is and is not permissible blurs those lines, if not outright converts them into a publisher. That necessarily vests the company with far greater responsibility for determining which ideas can and cannot be aired.
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