Censorship and activism on the social networks’ era
On August 15, Twitter announced it was putting the accounts of Alex Jones and InfoWars on read only mode for a week for violating its rules. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey initially defended the company’s decision to keep open Jones’s accounts, insisting the conspiracy monger had not broken its rules, but an article by CNN parsing all his Twitter content showed in fact that he had, along with mounting pressure from activists, twisted the social network’s arm and it is now considering what measures to take and what changes to introduce in the service after Jones’s seven-day ban ends.
What’s most interesting in all this is not Jones, but the different reactions to his hate speech and fake news from other social networks. Twitter has taken the longest to react and only after considerable pressure, such as the hashtag #DeactiDay, inviting users to deactivate their Twitter accounts on August 17 and to postpone the decision to reactivate them until 30 days later, after seeing what the company has decided.
Another campaign, which has been around for some time, is by Sleeping Giants, a group dedicated to warning companies that advertise on sites like InfoWars, Breitbart News and, in general, on any page that promotes intolerance, sexism and racism, informing them of the type of content they are funding with their advertising, and encouraging them to think about their corporate image. Sleeping Giants sees what it does as “a service to advertisers”, explaining that many large companies often don’t know where their ads appear. In turn, Breitbart and co. describe Sleeping Giants as an anonymous leftist group that rallies mobs on social networks in an attempt to silence conservative voices”.
A third campaign with a similar approach is #BlockParty500, launched by an activist, Shannon Coulter, who had already created a previous action, GrabYourWallet, which called on companies not to sell products related to Donald Trump. The idea of the campaign is to ask Twitter users to block the corporate accounts of all Fortune 500 companies, to persuade Twitter to close the accounts of Alex Jones and InfoWars. Coulter has created a tool to block accounts automatically without having to search individually, as well as an alternative approach via a toolkit on how to upload a list of accounts to be blocked on Twitter.
All of this is what used to be called a boycott, although the proponents of these campaigns prefer not to use the term, aimed at hitting Twitter’s advertising revenue. These campaigns are perfectly legal — we’re all free to decide what to do with our Twitter accounts and what type of pressure to exercise — and can work if they garner the support of large numbers of people, but they do tend to polarize debate: what happens if opponents use the same measures? It’s not hard to see conservatives launching similar campaigns, and soon, corporations would find themselves deprived of access to a large market. The consequences, for the social networks themselves, deprived of advertising, could be huge.
For the social networks, setting standards and rules and then acting only when they are not complied with is equally difficult: where do they draw the line, given the complexity of language, its nuances and interpretations? Blocking accounts that violate rules or that are the object of complaints by a large number of users is easy enough to do for a social network, but could also soon slide out of control. Doing nothing, as the Twitter’s case shows, is also dangerous, and could make the company a target for campaigners of every hue. In a society like the United States, where the presidential elections have divided society pretty much down the middle, interpreting free speech is not as easy as it may at first seem. Alex Jones has lit the fuse of a conflict that will force us to rethink many things... but please, don’t thank him for that.
(En español, aquí)
