Why Silicon Valley’s doublespeak doesn’t translate in Europe
Sometimes it seems like the European Union is just being mean to Silicon Valley. Between GDPR, which nobody still really understands, and vague laws against the delightfully German-sounding Volksverhetzung (incitement to violence), it seems like old, stodgy Europe is ganging up on scrappy, innovative America. The New York Times posed this question in a recent article, suggesting that the regulatory advances coming out of Brussels and other European states are causing some consternation among free speech and human rights activists.
In otherwise straightforward reporting, a statement that Twitter issued to the Times caught my eye, and should catch yours, too.
In Adam Satariano’s story, Twitter said “freedom of expression is our fundamental guiding principle.” It added, “regulation needs to strike an appropriate balance between keeping people safe online and preserving their inalienable human rights, and protecting the nature of a free, open internet.” Google and Facebook declined to comment.
As someone who has written many statements like these, let me translate it for you:
Statement: “Freedom of expression is our fundamental guiding principle”
is a public relations translation of:
Business decision: “We do not want to be in the business of moderating content”.
Statement: “Regulation needs to strike an appropriate balance between keeping people safe online and preserving their inalienable human rights, and protecting the nature of a free, open internet”
is a public relations translation of:
Business decision: “It is not our job to keep people safe online, instead you keep doing you and we’ll keep doing us until someone else figures this puppy out”.
These high-minded statements make it seem like Twitter is defending the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, or at least the American First Amendment. Let’s face it, as a publicly-traded company with shareholders: Twitter has a lower calling than that.
See, Twitter (and to a lesser extent, Google and Facebook) would like to fashion itself as the torch of Lady Liberty, riding high in New York Harbor showing the world America’s commitment to freedom. Yet the danger of this statement is that companies like Twitter can’t (and don’t want to) modulate for the very important differences in how the culture and the laws of free speech differ around the world.
Silicon Valley gives China and some Middle Eastern countries (ahem, investors) a pass because they give their citizens next to no rights to free expression. That leaves us with Europe, which broadly shares America’s commitment to freedom of expression, but is the only other region that has the market power to significantly challenge Silicon Valley’s businesses.
Europe has a different experience with freedom of speech online and offline
Complaining that he had no way of knowing how to address a problem with the whole of Europe, Henry Kissinger may or may not have groused: “Who do I call if I want to call ‘Europe’”? A similar question resounds today on issues of freedom of expression. The EU Charter of Fundamental Rights echoes the UN’s charter, but we all know that there are dozens of different realities, legal regimes, and cultural standards of free expression across the Continent.
What qualifies as hate speech in Germany may not qualify as hate speech in Spain. Anyone who has spent time in media knows that what qualifies as libel in the United Kingdom may not qualify as libel in France (and certainly won’t qualify in the United States).
Unlike the United States, whose principles of free expression were born of a revolution, an independence movement, and 240 years of jurisprudence, some of Europe’s guarantees of free speech have only been developed and tested over the 30 years since the fall of the Soviet Union.
Each individual country’s laws and attitudes respond to different stimuli as well. Where Baltic states like Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania formulate their laws to defend liberal values against Russian encroachment in the 21st century, countries in Southern Europe like Italy, Spain, and Greece have laws born of the fights between the fascism and communism of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Germany has obvious reasons for why it controls certain types of hate speech more closely than other countries in Western Europe, and there are still countries in the EU where you can (theoretically) go to prison for blaspheming the church.
It is precisely because of these differences, born of history, nuance, and necessity, that Europe is striking back so hard. Americans have spent the good part of the last two years uncovering foreign influence in the 2016 elections. Meanwhile the same Americans are baffled by why Europeans are so resistant to the chaotic consequences of political speech on Silicon Valley’s platforms.
Europeans are seeing their political landscapes, social cohesion, and futures challenged by information traded on American platforms. And they’re also seeing a fierce resistance by these same platforms when they’re asked to take steps to uphold local laws and customs. That makes Silicon Valley’s high-minded willingness to blast those differences right open in the name of free expression about as intellectually responsible as those in the White House gunning to blast longstanding economic alliances apart in the name of free trade.
So pause the next time you read something that asserts that Europe is bullying Silicon Valley into restricting free speech online. And think about how Europeans may be feeling that their laws and cultural standards are being bullied by platforms they did not create, do not control, and cannot regulate by themselves.
