Ancillary 10
Back in August I saw a familiar name in the headlines of the Mercury News, the Bay Area’s favorite News Outlet. It referred to Aubrey Huff, a former baseball player I remember from when the Giants won the World Series in 2010. I was a big baseball fan. The article was about how Huff was banned from Twitter after he continuously posted COVID-19 misinformation and claimed that the COVID vaccine actually made you more sick. He said that being banned from Twitter was a badge of honor.
A badge of honor. This indicates some kind of connotation. What Aubrey Huff is most likely referring to is the recent actions by Twitter (and other social medias, but I’m gonna stick to Twitter) to take down harmful posts or users. To right-wingers like Huff, a disproportionate amount of these posts and users are fellow righties.
Curious what Twitter says about their own responsibilities to what goes on their platform, I took a look at their origins in 2006. In San Francisco, no less. When they began, they were solely focused on being a “neutral platform,” where users can say whatever they want to whomever they want whenever they wanted to. This is attractive to a company, because they essentially get to take their hands off and push responsibility onto their users. But years upon years of the platform becoming more and more hateful started to push Twitter in a different direction. In December 2014 Twitter expanded the capabilities of users to report hate speech and abuse. They increased measures against hate speech again in December 2015 and November 2016. But doing so put them on a slippery slope. If they accept responsibility for the misinformation and abuse spreading on their platform — the effects of which are proving to be intense and widespread — then they have to tackle some incredibly difficult questions about what constitutes hate speech or harassment.
Twitter continued getting more involved in policing their platform, though, and today there are many people who feel that they’ve gone too far. That they’ve started to censor free speech.
In an attempt to see if this is true, It’s worth taking a look at these two other cases that might be of use when talking about social media and censorship. The first is a pretty well-known story. Following the January 6th insurrection, President Trump was banned from Twitter, which for him is like peanut butter being banned from jelly. This marked a point of no return for Twitter. They are claiming responsibility for what happens on their platform, no matter how large the user’s following is.
The other is a smaller story, but one that shows a different side of Twitter’s actions. They decided not to ban a tweet from Republican senator from Arizona Paul Gozar depicting a cartoon of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s assassination. I hope to use these case studies to explore where Twitter’s responsibilities lie in policing their content, and also provide some kind of global angle on what constitutes free speech.
