Beware the Digital Censor
Maybe you’re glad Alex Jones is gone, but content moderation also hurts human rights.
By David Greene
We’re finally having a public debate about the big Internet platforms policing content and suspending accounts. But it’s a serious mistake to frame the debate about content moderation around right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s Infowars and not around the thousands of other moderation decisions that have been made by such online giants as Apple, Facebook, Google-owned YouTube and Spotify.
Internet companies have removed millions of posts and images over the past decade and suspended hundreds, perhaps thousands, of user accounts. These silenced voices span the political spectrum and the globe: Moroccan atheists, women discussing online harassment, ads featuring crucifixes, black and Muslim activists reposting racist messages they received, trans models, drag performers, indigenous women, childbirth images, photos of breast-feeding. Platforms have taken down documentation of war crimes in Syria, Myanmar and Kashmir, arrests in North Dakota and police brutality across the United States.
We should be extremely careful before rushing to embrace an Internet that is moderated by a few private companies by default, one where the platforms that control so much public…
