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Course: Wireless Philosophy > Unit 5
Lesson 4: Should online platforms censor hate speech?Should online platforms censor hate speech?
In this Wireless Philosophy video, Ryan Jenkins (professor of Philosophy at Cal Poly) asks how social media companies should deal with users who express or promote hateful views online. Should even viciously intolerant voices be tolerated, or should restrictions on hate speech be imposed so that marginalized and oppressed voices are also able to flourish? And what counts as “hate speech,” anyway? Created by Gaurav Vazirani.
Video transcript
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?