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At this stage of the game, there needs to be an open scoping
of ways in which companies can operate more effectively in the
public interest and be more transparent and accountable.
Just imposing regulation without that sort of negotiation doesn't
advance the cause of developing those public interest principles or
actions, or ways of reporting – or even just forums for discussion.
This might lock them into something that needs to change later.
That had been the argument in Germany, which quite early on
introduced its Network Enforcement Act, which can penalise social
media companies up to $50 million euros ($80.5 million) if they
don't remove illegal speech within 24 hours. What you're seeing
there is quite a backlash against the constraints of that law.
There is one benefit: we've seen Facebook move to introduce
about 8 per cent of its moderation labour force to Germany.
They're operating out of Berlin and Essen. So it's had one spinoff
in that Germans get far better moderation of Facebook than most
other countries.
However, I don't think it helps us understand any better how social
media companies are moderating content – what sort of processes
they use, how we can get them to be more responsive to us when we
report content we find violent, sensitive or hateful, and what we do if
someone takes our content down, how we get redress.
In Europe, the European Commission introduced a voluntary
non-binding agreement and code of conduct on illegal hate speech.
It got the major social media platforms to agree to look at ways to
approve moderation. And, over 18 months, they did improve their
responses to reports about hate speech.
Věra Jourová, the European Commissioner for Justice, did say
that one of the things social media companies could be doing
better is responding to their users. So, when users complain that
their content is being taken down. The companies still need to
work more on those sort of responses: telling people why their
content is being removed, exactly how they’ve breached standards,
how they can seek redress, and so on.
What do you see as the primary challenges for the Christchurch Call
going forward?
The bottom line is that social media platforms don't want any
regulation which is going to affect their bottom line. They are going
to push back on anything that is going to cost them a lot more in
moderation. At the same time, most Western governments aren't
keen to regulate. We've had a long period of ‘light touch' regulation,
neoclassical, neoliberal economics.
This is a difficult moment for a lot of Western governments.
They're having to rethink how they regulate in the public interest.
That's causing a lot of debate, for example, in the UK, where there
are various proposals at the moment about how to regulate social
media platforms.
At the same time, governments need to be seen to be acting to
reduce violence in societies that are quite polarised. So, we've got
both dynamics going on.
Then you've got the issue of populism – populist governments
who use these platforms to fan hate, and I think that's where one of
the chief problems is.
You've got governments that aren't interested in supporting this
call and who would rather be using social media to get at their
enemies and make sure that historical divisions are well fanned in
order for them to keep control.
industry & research
Would you suggest this is the case with the Trump administration?
That is one of the chief reasons why we've seen Trump back away
from signing this agreement. A lot of his supporters are on the ultra-
conservative side of politics and are absolute free speech supporters.
Trump has condemned, for example, some of the moves by social
media companies to censor people like Alex Jones – a hatemonger
and misinformation merchant of the worst kind. And yet, Trump was
bemoaning the fact that the platforms acted to remove his content.
I think there you have a regime that is very clearly populist in the
right-wing sense and interested in keeping social media as a place
where divisions can be fanned in order to maintain its fan base.
Facebook in particular has received scathing criticism over the
years for being a conduit for hate speech and extremism. Are you
confident Facebook is committed to the agreement, or is it just
a PR stunt?
I think there's a certain reluctance on the part of Silicon Valley as a
whole to see regulation of their business as justifiable and necessary.
The leaders of these companies come from a free speech paradigm.
They have grown up with the First Amendment, with the idea that
restrictions on speech are dangerous in themselves.
For so long in the US, the argument has been that good speech
will triumph over bad speech, and that counter-speech will act to
somehow balance dangerous speech. But there’s a lot of evidence
now to show that, with the scale, intensity and degree of spread
of messages on the internet, hate speech, dangerous speech
and bad speech can drown out good speech, because there are
organised means of ensuring that it does. That's what we saw with
Christchurch.
The man that live-streamed his attack very deliberately liaised
with other people to redistribute that stream. This was not a lone
attacker. There's more and more evidence showing that he had,
for example, contacts with the far-right in Europe. This was very
strategic. It was the weaponisation of social media, which we’ve
seen in numbers of ways over the last five or six years. Speech
becomes a battleground on social media.
The other issue is that Silicon Valley also sees regulation as a
constraint on innovation. That is certainly a line they've pushed, for
example, with getting net neutrality laws revoked in the US.
It goes way back to Ithiel de Sola Pool, one of the fellows who
was instrumental in MIT, who called the internet and personal
computing ‘technologies of freedom’. And, he argued that they
were going to overwhelm all attempts to control them. This is the
kind of ideal democratic language that says regulation is bad, and
the marketplace is good, and that we will see ourselves set free
through the market.
This is the crux of the problem: we've seen that the market
doesn't deliver that freedom. We've seen that the market instead
is constraining the way we act, and constraining it through all
sorts of different ways, including trading our data and enabling
misinformation to spread during elections.
So, is Facebook committed to the agreement? They have
to be, because governments are going to step in. Democratic
governments are going to step in more and more. They are going
to be faced with different jurisdictional demands, in different areas.
It's going to cost them a lot more.
If they can commit to global agreements, or at least transnational
agreements, it's going to make it easier for them to operate in the
long run. ■
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