Over the past couple of years hate speech has been the topic of much debate. In the United States, hate speech goes unregulated. This is due to the First Amendment, which “guarantees freedoms concerning religion, expression, assembly, and the right to petition. It guarantees freedom of expression by prohibiting Congress from restricting the press or the rights of individuals to speak freely.” (1) However, many other first world democracies do not have free speech laws in place, such as Germany, Australia and Canada, to name a few. This concept is now pushing its way into some of the largest and most popular social media networks who have been feeling the pressure to change their content policy, and ban users for participating in hate speech, the latest being the President of the United States, Donald Trump, receiving a temporary ban. Why now do these networks move away from freedom of speech?
Right from the beginning it is important to note that Social media networks aren’t subject to things like the First Amendment as they are private companies, platforms where people are able to go to post, socialize, and share ideas. This allows websites to control what they chose to display and with over 2.6 billion monthly active users on websites like Facebook alone, (2) the reach and influence they are able to have is huge and their content policies need to be looked at closely. A good example of recent updated content policy to ward off hate speech would be Reddit, once considered a place with minimal censorship (3) the massive, online, community forum, which boasts more than 430 million active users per month (4) had this to add, “…Marginalized or vulnerable groups include, but are not limited to, groups based on their actual and perceived race, color, religion, national origin, ethnicity, immigration status, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, pregnancy, or disability. These include victims of a major violent event and their families. While the rule on hate protects such groups, it does not protect all groups or all forms of identity. For example, the rule does not protect groups of people who are in the majority or who promote such attacks of hate.” (5). (It is worth noting that after a lot of backlash from users of Reddit, they have changed the wording to remove the mention of the majority. As of 2nd July 2020)
While it seems logical to rid of things such as threats of violence and hateful attacks, the problem we begin to run into is who exactly decides what is hateful, who decides which content gets to stay and which is removed, and in Reddits case, what does it mean to be in the majority and why is hate speech allowed against them? As Tim Pool points out in his video (6), 50.8 percent of the United States population is female, does this allow discrimination against females by Reddits own rules, or what exactly do the Admin mean by majority, it isn’t clearly stated. This creates more problems where it is now up to whoever owns these companies to decide what is allowed, or who might be included in the majority, and does this change case by case? The average person has no way to know for sure if the content they post will be deemed inappropriate.
Confusing or unfair content policies aren’t the end of it, private social media companies rely heavily on advertisements to make money and stay up and running. Facebook makes 98% of its $70 billion annual revenue from advertising (7) and despite Facebook originally holding the stance that it should not be a fact checker, or meddle with political speeches on its platform, it has recently been swayed to apply hate speech rules by some of its largest advertisers leaving in protest, such as Coca-Cola and Unilever (8). Where does this leave something like freedom of speech? When multinational corporations have such influence on things that we use on a daily basis to communicate and share ideas, and even discuss political ideologies.
The Current President of the United States, Donald Trump, and his conservative followers have come under fire on social media as well, with The_Donald, one of his largest fan bases on the internet inside Reddit, being 1 of the 2000 communities recently removed from the site (9). Censorship like this ends up leaving one side or the other with no place to share ideas as they’ve all been removed; it also makes it incredibly difficult to have civil discussion with people who may oppose certain political beliefs under fear of being labeled one way or the other, or having your voice silenced. Jameel Jaffer, the executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute put it clearly when discussing the ban of Alex Jones, “That’s when I think free speech advocates start to get nervous about Facebook excluding people from the platform, especially when there’s an argument that they’re excluding people on the basis of viewpoint.” “You can think whatever you want to about Alex Jones, but I worry not about Alex Jones, but about the next person or the next year. Who is it that Facebook is going to be excluding next year?” (10) What if that person was the President of the United States?
We eventually come to a stage where average people who may consider themselves right wing or conservative, struggle to find places to speak out about their beliefs and are pushed to fringe sections of the internet with no one to counter their arguments. In turn this censorship allows people of both sides to surround themselves in conversation and ideas which re affirm their own thoughts, even though they may not be true. If all topics are open for reasonable debate it allows us all to challenge ourselves and learn.
- Trent Naz
(1) LII / Legal Information Institute. 2020. First Amendment | U.S. Constitution | US Law | LII / Legal Information Institute. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/first_amendment. [Accessed 30 June 2020].
(2) Statista. 2020. • Facebook: active users worldwide | Statista. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/. [Accessed 01 July 2020].
(3)Free Expression on Social Media | Freedom Forum Institute. 2020. Free Expression on Social Media | Freedom Forum Institute. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.freedomforuminstitute.org/first-amendment-center/primers/free-expression-on-social-media/. [Accessed 30 June 2020].
(4) Press — Reddit. 2020. Press — Reddit. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.redditinc.com/press. [Accessed 30 June 2020].
(5) Reddit Help. 2020. Promoting Hate Based on Identity or Vulnerability | Reddit Help. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.reddithelp.com/en/categories/rules-reporting/account-and-community-restrictions/promoting-hate-based-identity-or. [Accessed 30 June 2020]. Policy was changed after backlash, link to original source — https://web.archive.org/web/20200630060415/https://www.reddithelp.com/en/categories/rules-reporting/account-and-community-restrictions/promoting-hate-based-identity-or
(6) Tim Pool, Reddit CEO Is LYING About Banning The Donald Subreddit, New Rules Allows Anti Women Posts??, 30 June 2020 [Accessed 30 June 2020] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvZ8rUeWi9E (7) Hammett, E. (2020). Coca-Cola, Starbucks and Unilever join growing Facebook ad boycott. [online] Marketing Week. Available at: https://www.marketingweek.com/coca-cola-starbucks-unilever-join-facebook-ad-boycott/ [Accessed 1 Jul. 2020].
(8) Paul, K. (2020). Facebook policy changes fail to quell advertiser revolt as Coca-Cola pulls ads. [online] the Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/jun/26/facebook-policies-hate-speech-advertisers-unilever [Accessed 1 Jul. 2020].
(9) Huffman, S. (2020). r/announcements — Update to Our Content Policy. [online] Reddit. Available at: https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/hi3oht/update_to_our_content_policy/ [Accessed 1 Jul. 2020].
(10) Johnson, E. (2018). Should the First Amendment apply to Facebook? It’s complicated. [online] Vox. Available at: https://www.vox.com/2018/11/19/18103081/first-amendment-facebook-jameel-jaffer-freedom-speech-alex-jones-decode-podcast-kara-swisher [Accessed 1 Jul. 2020].
