![]() ![]() The platform versions of “due process” or legislative “sunshine laws” will be pale reflections of the originals. Platforms can take down lawful but hateful, harassing, misleading, or offensive posts, and do so very swiftly-even with appeals, they resolve in minutes disputes that might take courts months or years.īut the same lack of democratic or constitutional accountability that makes platforms so effective as content regulators makes them very hard to constrain in other ways. Increasingly, platforms such as Facebook rely on software that can monitor everything we write, route it for review, or just automatically delete forbidden words or images. They can’t jail dissenters, but they can silence them. Major platforms can restrict our speech more effectively than any government in history. We should pay close attention to those differences before urging platforms to take on greater roles as arbiters of speech and information. ![]() And they are far less accountable than elected officials for their choices. Compared with democratic governments, platforms are far more capable of restricting our speech. But we should not fool ourselves that mimicking a few government systems familiar from grade-school civics class will make internet platforms adequate substitutes for real governments, subject to real laws and real rights-based constraints on their power. Those are all good developments-up to a point. Some advocates-concerned that “ behind-the-scenes lobbying,” to borrow The Wall Street Journal’s phrase, is shaping platforms’ speech rules-are calling for the same kind of transparency we would expect from real legislators about their interactions with lobbyists. Advocacy groups have demanded appeals or other due-process-like rights for people accused of violating those rules. Other rules that are being retrofitted for private internet platforms also sound like the mechanisms that keep real-world governments accountable to the public. The existence of private Supreme Courts and constitutional conventions makes it possible, even easy, to imagine that this do-over will be governed by the same constraints as real-world governments: constitutional rules to protect individual rights, and democratic processes to set the laws we live under. The prevailing framework for free expression is getting a do-over. Messages we might once have heard from a soapbox in the park-including very troubling ones about dangers of vaccines, conspiracy theories, or racist agendas-can be banished from social-media platforms. That’s exactly why they are free to do what so many people seem to want: set aside the First Amendment’s speech rules in favor of new, more restrictive ones. We should care deeply about the rules these companies apply to our speech and behavior-whether PayPal should process donations to WikiLeaks, for example, or whether the security provider Cloudflare should protect neo-Nazi sites or 8chan, or whether Facebook should have taken down the famous Vietnam War photo of a naked girl fleeing her village.īut private platforms aren’t really the public square, and internet companies aren’t governments. People whose posts are removed from major platforms say they are being excluded from the most important communication channels of our age. That description understates the platforms’ importance for the many people who use them in place of newspapers, TV stations, the postal service, and even money. Internet platforms such as YouTube and Facebook have been called the modern public square. We don’t usually use sweeping terms such as Supreme Court and constitution to describe the operation of private companies, but here they seem appropriate. The announcement came after extended deliberations that have been described as Facebook’s “constitutional convention.” This past week, with some fanfare, Facebook announced its own version of the Supreme Court: a 40-member board that will make final decisions about user posts that Facebook has taken down. ![]()
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