How much power should tech companies have to moderate speech on their platforms? (continued)

The regulation of free speech is a job for public representatives, not tech CEOs.

On Thursday Mark Zuckerberg gave a speech at Georgetown University. Among other things, he addressed criticisms of Facebook’s policies on political advertising. The company has come under fire for its decision to allow political ads to run even if they contain false or misleading statements. Zuckerberg’s stance was that tech companies should not play the role of censors, and instead should seek to facilitate open dialogue.

While there are obvious caveats on this argument (for example the large amounts of money Facebook receives for these ads) I believe it’s fundamentally correct. Beyond obvious exceptions for categories such as hate speech, I don’t think Facebook should be getting involved in vetting content this way. To be clear, I’m not arguing that this is unfair to Facebook. I’m saying I don’t want them to have this kind of power. Imagine the kind of world we’d have if the arbiters of free speech were Silicon Valley developers. Furthermore, we already have libel and slander laws in place that allow people to receive redress if they have been defamed. The courts are far better suited for adjudicating issues of free speech than software developers.

Matt Taibbi recently wrote about the current impeachment investigation against US president Donald Trump. Taibbi made the point that, no matter what you may think of Trump, the manner in which these impeachment proceedings came about is troubling. The Trump White House has been the subject of near-constant leaks. These leaks have come from people who are not elected but who are working to unseat a president who was. Taibbi’s contention is that if Trump is removed from office, it will have been as a result of a campaign by a group of unelected security officials and bureaucrats, rather than by the will of the people.

We should look at companies like Facebook the same way. If we empower them to police free speech we entrust one the most sacred institutions of our democracy to a small group of people who are not answerable to the public and are not required to make public the details of how they police content on their platform. Not only that, but this group is not remotely representative of the general population. A report published in October of this year by Wired shows that the demographics of Facebook, Google, Apple and Microsoft are overwhelmingly white and male. This is not to mention the substantial liberal bias that Zuckerberg himself acknowledged in an interview on Fox News. We cannot reasonably expect these companies to appreciate the complexities of decisions about which forms of political expression are acceptable and which are not.

There will always be disagreement about how political speech is regulated. However, we should agree that however this issue is to be addressed, it should be led by people who are answerable to the general public. That way, if decisions are made that harm the general public, we at least have some means to hold those responsible accountable.