A project is underway called "Change the Terms: Reducing Hate Online." Sponsors and participants include the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Center for American Progress, Free Press, the National Hispanic Media Coalition, Color of Change, and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and many others.
There is growing comfort on the part of some with instructing social media platforms about what forms of free speech they should and should not allow.
It's a difficult question from any perspective. In this case, the groups say:
While some companies are taking steps in the right direction to reduce hateful activities online, anti-hate provisions in most companies’ terms of service are not enough.
To ensure that companies are doing their part to help combat hateful conduct on their platforms, the SPLC and other organizations in this campaign will track the progress of major tech companies – especially social media platforms – to adopt and implement these model corporate policies."
Social media has every right to block whatever content it wants, of course.
Furthermore, those spouting hateful, divisive and even just plain old unpopular speech don’t get to demand that others supply them a microphone or platform. And vendors are free and must remain free to remove or reject the speech, and to de-platform perpetrators.
Yet the way I remember the left and libertarians like me working together on free speech issues was to say that we should not fear speech, that instead the marketplace of ideas is what mattered most. The premise of all sides was that we may not agree, but we defend one another's right to speak.
While these groups are pressing companies directly to self-regulate the speech they allow, lawmakers are simultaneously forging legislation aimed at fighting “misinformation,” whatever that term ends up meaning to the federal government. This prospect changes the stakes in the debate.
The Changing the Terms coalition provides its own carefully worded definition of the phrase “hateful activities,” which they have every right to do of course. Gauging social media companies by their criteria, they will “track the progress” of social media companies’ compliance.
People can and do differ on what constitutes hate speech, what constitutes misinformation, and what crosses various lines. And the real problem is hate directed at individuals. Will hatred directed at Donald Trump count equally in Changing the Terms? Maybe, but it doesn’t jump out anywhere.
So OK, let’s say these groups get their way in private persuasion of social media to police itself; and, further, that even legislation is passed.
In the groups’ “Recommended Internet Company Corporate Policies and Terms of Service to Reduce Hateful Activities,” the term “hateful activities” appears 86 times.
Pendulums swing. One doesn’t know who will be in power in the future. What if the more aggressive activist lawmakers succeed, and tomorrow we find “misinformation” banned or restricted, let’s say.
Because surely, “hateful activities” are far from the only objectionable things online.
I ran a “search and replace” on a Word version I made of the “Recommended Internet Company Corporate Policies and Terms of Service to Reduce Hateful Activities, substituting the term “misinformation” for “hateful activities.”
Reading it that way is spooky.
To see what I mean, look at “Recommended Internet Company Corporate Policies and Terms of Service to Reduce Hateful Activities” again, but in your mind’s eye, substitute the word “misinformation” for the phrase “hateful activities.”
Do we all agree on what "misinformation" is? Are we all comfortable with whatever future changes in political leadership over the coming years and decades may come to think misinformation (or hate) is?
Next imagine if liberal orthodoxy, swell as it may be, did not dominate the political discourse on this matter.
Imagine instead that hard-fundamentalist Christian orthodoxy did, perhaps of the sort that prevailed in Salem and other eras (and indeed, the Recommended Policies only mentions right-wing extremism as a problem).
What if right wing extremists gained power and said, “Hey, Change the Terms coalition; you’re right!”?
Now look anew at Recommended Policies and in your minds’ eye substitute “blasphemy” for “hateful activities.”
Sure, social media can change its policies as these groups demand; it would not constitute a violation of free speech, nor censorship.
But today’s atmosphere is trending toward getting government to legislate (and that even comes from right-of-center elements seeking to deem social media platforms as "essential facilities"), and to force a yet-unclear conformity in online speech.
Censorship is what emerges when such policies become compulsory, and extend to other kinds of controversial speech besides.
And if we insist upon social media adherence, then the question naturally arises: why not mainstream media, too.
We’ve defended the right of free speech for all sides, and reckon we will continue, and are sure that working together with folks left of center isn’t a lost cause. It is hard to imagine that all left-of-center thinkers are fully comfortable with with the pressure/flirtation-with-legislation approach.
Speech is powerful; coercion exercised over our means of communication is more so. Because then the pen can no longer be mightier than the sword.
