Jillian C. York

Increasingly, governments are moving to impose regulatory measures that would require the removal of extremist speech or privatize enforcement of existing laws. But all too often, these regulations infringe on human rights. What should societies be doing to counter extremism while ensuring the rights of the vulnerable are preserved?

Social media companies have long struggled with what to do about extremist content on their platforms. While most companies include provisions about “extremist” content in their community standards, such content is often vaguely defined. Governments increasingly rely on platforms to regulate speech for them, relying on the very same rulesets. These vague policies, coupled with the practice of for-profit commercial content moderation, has led to mistakes at scale that are decimating human rights content on these platforms and threatening our civil liberties. Furthermore, the very idea that censorship can solve the deeply rooted problems of extremism in modern society is a mistake.

Technology companies now hold an unprecedented ability to shape the world around us by limiting our ability to access certain content and by crafting proprietary algorithm that bring us our daily streams of content.

The great waves of change across the epochs have traditionally required a recalibration of society's moral compass. We see the theological and ideological underpinnings of the post-Enlightenment paradigm set out by the Protestant Reformation and the US Civil Rights Movement, we have come to see self determination as a bedrock of civilization. The reach of social media companies has created a class of corporations that are able to influence – if not curate – the world outlook of over a billion people on certain days. This unprecedented capacity gives Facebook power to shape discourse approaching the degree of religious institutions and the state – two of the traditional institutions that we have long relied on for shaping our society-wide morality and values. By compelling users to comply with the arbitrary content standards laid out in their ToS, Facebook is essentially laying out a new global standard for what people can and can not see. This standard, however, is not derived from the same moralistic traditions of previous moral paradigms, but is a calculated business decision crafted in the boardrooms of Silicon Valley. Risk averse, Facebook has created a global content standard that is in place not to contextualize the world for their users, but to meet perceived expectations of acceptable speech in a diverse range of nations. Our project, OnlineCensorship.org, seeks to capture instances of censorship across social media platforms. We will present OnlineCensorship.org and demonstrate how you can help us push companies toward a more open practice.

Other people: Matthew Stender