Social Media and Freedom of Speech: a suggestion in preventing online abuse
Freedom of speech is defined as “the right to express one’s opinion without interference from the government or other people”. Within this definition, it is important to note the following: 1) Free speech is “not an absolute right. Limited by the rights of others to pursue equal interests and needs.” 2) “free speech does not mean that speech is free from regulation.” and 3) “…no expression of opinion should be suppressed because the opinion itself is considered false, heretical, harmful or subversive.” (Boss, 2013). To narrow down on the topic, we need to turn our attention to the importance of freedom of speech and its role in modern democratic societies. Free speech in democratic societies is to guarantee “a culture in which individuals have a fair opportunity to participate in the forms of meaning-making that constitute them as individuals”. The primary goal of a democratic culture is to assure “individual liberty as well as collective self-governance”. (Balkin, 2004). The benefits of modern democracy are that as individuals, we have the means to pursue and to fulfill our needs without interference from an outside entity. Granted that an individual’s choice does not inhibit another person’s freedom nor does it break the law. On the other hand, modern democracy’s laisse en faire attitude regarding their primary assurance does not uphold well in a world of mass inequality. Laws have thus been created to make sure no individual freedoms are being taken advantage of by a more privileged individual or a group of individuals. These same laws are meant to be implemented within the digital sphere alongside both the public and private spheres. The digital sphere does not abide by the same set of laws that are implemented in order to maintain modern democracy, instead, individual websites tend to design their own regulations in order to make this sphere a safe place for people of all types to navigate. Social media platforms thus follow suit, having their own ideas for what it means to have free speech.t seems to fail in maintaining a fair balance of free speech and democracy, but also of free speech and protecting the individual from harm. Considering the definition and the function of free speech in democratic societies, it is important that online platforms also make a conscious effort to uphold these standards. However, these companies need to be held accountable as well for this effort. Social media companies should be given the freedom to enforce their own free speech policies, but they must be strict.
Conventional media has taught us how to understand free speech within mass media and thus in larger conditions. Digital media has also given us the opportunity to see the ethical problems of free speech in different societies. However, by giving some topics more importance than others (depending on a channel’s political affiliation/ownership/biases), free speech is simply manipulated to what suits them rather than what is just and fair. Free speech has been a fundamental shaping right for the development of modern democracy and human history. Where it is oppressed, people rise up in revolution, where it is left unchecked, others fall prey to hate speech. One has to look no further than the modern day to see examples of this. Tumblr has recently banned all pornographic material from its website, people have then taken to pointing out that if the social media company could do that, then they could also take down all the racist posts and blogs as well. On the other side of the spectrum, social media has allowed us to spread information on the injustices, and allowed us to gather our collective voices to stop this. A good example would be the #Metoo movement where women all over the world took to twitter and other platforms to voice their experiences with harassment in ways that it was not addressed before. Social media as a whole is now regarded as a safe space for people to openly display and discuss opinions and thoughts that are otherwise not widely regarded in mainstream media. However, there are both the lack of regulation and legal oversight over content on social media due to the following factors: 1) there is no single legal framework that can be applied to social media, as each sovereign body has a different set of legalities that all contradict each other (specifically in terms of censorship and what is considered to be slander against the state). This gives sovereign bodies the right to enforce their own vague rules on social media. This problem is unique in the sense that there is no physical distance to allow a seperation of these values. These values all clash online, allowing several countries to influence each other without any regulation on what is fair play. 2) When the state enforces no regulations on the content it’s people are allowed to post, these online bodies seem independent of the states influence while still having influence on the state’s affairs. Social media sites only regulate what is considered harmful according to their community guidelines, which can mean the wrong content gets pulled from online platforms due to what their vague guidelines consider offensive. This also gives hate speech a platform to run amok. For example, when alt-right groups are creating and posting content that enforces a racist rhetoric, they may not necessarily be directly attacking another person, but their content is inherently harmful and thus should not be ignored. As a result, this has threatened the core values associated with free speech due to the fact that outside entities and passive hate speech are given the room to either minimize one’s freedom or discomfort one online and prevent them from navigating the digital sphere at their own leisure. What social media networks currently have in place beyond their rules on spam and other general cyber crimes are self-imposed community standards. It has been shown that within the realm of free speech, these standards are not a viable mechanism to prevent hate speech and offensive or discriminatory content due to the fact that within our filter bubbles, only people who agree with our opinions are the primary accessors of our content. Meaning that if someone infiltrates a bubble and begins to spread their ideas there, they may corrupt the safe space created by the people within the supposed bubble. On the other hand, it is beneficial for people to be exposed to new ideas and opinions supported with evidence in order to help people grow as a community. Self-imposed community standards are not taken seriously enough when it comes to reporting ideas and opinions that are not backed by viable evidence and/or harmful to the freedoms of others. In order to adequately protect people’s right to free speech, social media experts and lawmakers should come together and set guidelines for what is deemed appropriate in order to set guidelines that people to should follow when online. Essentially, creating an up to date strict set of regulations but also taking reports more seriously when it comes to ambiguous cases.
In order to further understand the importance of free speech in media, we must look at how conventional media laws have tried to protect free speech as a democratic right. Keep in mind that in each country, they take their own approach to how media upholds free speech. Put simply, each country takes one of three approaches: authoritarian, liberal, and social responsibility. (Ward, 2011). Conventional media laws primarily apply with content creation (or the distribution and miscrediting of), identity theft, defamation and national censorship laws. One country’s laws cannot be applied to a digital global network, meaning that defamation and an individual country’s censorship laws can be used to land someone in a legal conundrum for speaking poorly about a powerful individual/entity (usually those who are heads of state/other major political positions, or even not in cases such as those who are public supporters of BDS). Algorithmic decisions are not as reliable as human decisions when it comes to nuances of inhibitions of one’s rights. Algorithms are good for detecting outright illegal acts, but they do not have the same level of understanding of what is right and wrong and can view the world’s ethical ambiguity the same way a person can. On top of that, the only way an algorithm can even possibly do as such is if a person programs into it their own ethical ambiguity, therefore creating a biased algorithm which is contradictory to its general purpose. Social media companies have to understand that if they do not update their community policies and not rely on algorithms as much to detect subtle forms of hatred, more and more issues will come about and their platforms will not be used as a tool to enhance society but rather as one to inhibit humans from partaking in the comfort of their freedoms. Put simply, there should be stricter guidelines and rules regarding free speech, think how Europe has legislated and implemented stricter rules on hate speech. However, this needs to be applied with the knowledge of what is happening and who is currently being attacked in a global context. So in this case, a specific group should be created in order to properly analyze and give justice to those who are being discriminated against. In reality, due to the political influence of these American platforms, the idea of social media platforms forming an unbiased group to tackle what is hate speech and what is not is quite unrealistic. It is not the most feasible solution, but a similar method can be undertaken to expand on arbitrary and vague guidelines in order to hold more people accountable and responsible for their actions.
In conclusion, social media policies must be stricter and more nuanced to strengthen free speech rights. Twitter’s recent change is a perfect example of such, where they expanded their “hateful conduct” policy to “include content that dehumanizes others based on their membership in an identifiable group, even when the material does not include a direct target.” and thus expanding the conduct page from 374 to 1,226 words. (Molloy, 2018). A utopia would include social media policies being changed to be more inclusive and understanding of the general power dynamics on a global context and thus act fairly and just to those whose rights online are being harmed with full understanding and participation by the users to flag and report inappropriate content. In our reality, this will most likely never be achieved in our current massive digital culture, even when websites like Tumblr are attempting to crack down on child pornography but instead ban nudity in its entirety as previously mentioned. We should not look at free speech on social media websites from Tumblr’s perspective, but rather from Twitter’s and follow their example for all other platforms (with respect to how each site works).
References
Balkin (2004) “Digital Speech and Democratic Culture” in New York University Law review, Vol 79, p3
Boss, J (2013) ‘Freedom of Speech’ in Analysing Moral Issues, New York: McGraw-Hill, p. 509
Molloy, P. (2018, November 29). How Twitter’s Ban on ‘Deadnaming’ Promotes Free Speech.
Ward (2011), ‘Approaches to Media Ethics’ in Ethics and the Media, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, p. 67
