Should online platforms censor hate speech?

Hi, I’m Ryan Jenkins, a philosophy professor at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo. Back in the day, speech used to be very costly to produce and distribute. Not everyone could own a printing press or radio station. This meant that only some people had the ability to distribute their views far and wide. But as communication technologies have advanced into the digital age, speech has become much cheaper. After all, an Internet connection costs a lot less than a television station. And the fall of these barriers to entry has “democratized” speech, letting billions of new voices be heard globally. Social media platforms in particular have been hailed as places we might all come together into a “global village,” with the hope that by enabling us to exchange ideas and learn about others across the world, these platforms would strengthen our mutual understanding and sense of connection. Facebook’s mission, for example, is “to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.” But as much as communications technologies have advanced, there is still plenty of misunderstanding, cruelty, and downright hatred in the way people regard each other and talk to one another. Why has this happened? Isn’t the ability to communicate supposed to reveal that we are all more similar than we’d realized? Well, it turns out, perhaps unsurprisingly, that some of the many users that can now speak their mind are pretty vile. Thus, the rise of Internet speech has brought with it a rise in harassment and hate speech, especially against marginalized groups. Plato foretold as much ver 2,000 years ago in his book Republic when he discussed the “paradox of tolerance” a society that tolerates every voice will soon be overrun by its loudest, most extreme, and most intolerant voices. Today, Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms have found themselves host to cesspools of bullying, harassment and hatred. Polls have found almost half of Americans, and two thirds of those under 30, have personally been subjected to harassment online, including attacks, threats, and stalking — and it seems to be getting worse. Nor is this a matter of simple “sticks and stones.” Harassment experienced through the Internet can have substantial negative impacts on the victim’s wellbeing. Victims of online harassment are likely to experience symptoms of PTSD and unwelcome, intrusive thoughts. Facebook has faced intense criticism both domestically and internationally. At home, Facebook has been criticized for allowing trolling, Neo-Nazis, racial harassment, and threats of violence. Internationally, Facebook has been implicated in facilitating genocide. Something must be done. So far, social media companies have struggled to tamp down extremism on their platforms. Twitter and Facebook have tried to identify and delete problem accounts and have established “community guidelines” that discourage or ban hate speech. But policing hate speech is fantastically difficult. Not only would this seem to require scrutinizing billions of posts per week in over a hundred languages, but it also presents the vexing problem of how to even define what counts as hate speech. A Facebook training document that leaked to the press several years ago,for example, showcased the tortured reasoning that the company applied to classify hate speech. Categories Facebook does protect include race and gender, but they do not protect age, religion, and occupation, among others. And the intersection of a protected class and non-protected class would not be protected. This meant that slurs against “white men” would be taken down, since race and gender are both protected classes; but slurs against “black children” or “women drivers” would not fall afoul of their community guidelines since each includes an unprotected class. Perhaps even more challenging than the conceptual hurdles are the moral ones. After all, many people take censorship to be a great evil: an affront to their moral rights or their dignity as people. Facebook has fielded criticisms from the left that the company is insufficiently vigilant in protecting minorities and other vulnerable groups, but when Facebook does step in to remove hateful speech, they find themselves criticized from the right that they are revealing their liberal bias and undermining the free speech of conservative voices. It is true that corporations do not owe their customers the same thing that governments owe their citizens: there is no First Amendment right to use Facebook or Twitter. Moreover, hate is bad for business, so placing at least some restrictions on speech is crucial for the growth and maturation of these platforms. Even alternative platforms that aim to keep constraints on speech to a bare minimum still forbid explicit threats of violence. But Facebook and other social media companies do play a crucial role in the public sphere. They have nearly equal power to a government when it comes to deciding who has the practical ability to speak and be heard. Few think that speech is intrinsically good — that is, good for its own sake. Instead, most people support free speech because it leads to something else they consider good, like a flourishing political community or individual expression and fulfillment. But then, just as we sometimes have to weed a garden to let the best plants grow, perhaps we need to stifle hateful speech in order to allow marginalized voices to flourish in the absence of threats and fear? What do you think?