Facebook’s ban of users Alex Jones of Infowars and Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam has reignited claims of social media censorship, demonstrating the thin boundary Silicon Valley must negotiate between free speech and harmful content.
The expulsion of the two, along with far-right political commentator Milo Yiannopoulos and four other incendiary posters, was one of the broadest steps the Menlo Park, Calif.-based company has taken to punish online provocateurs. Facebook attributed the decision to its long-standing policies on acceptable posts.
“We’ve always banned individuals or organizations that promote or engage in violence and hate, regardless of ideology,” a Facebook spokesman said. “The process for evaluating potential violators is extensive, and it is what led us to our decision to remove these accounts.”
Social media’s biggest players have struggled for years to balance the proliferation of online hate and false content with a desire, and a financial incentive, to permit free speech. Some lawmakers see Facebook’s action as a much-needed step toward rooting out racism and xenophobia.
[Opinion: Facebook doesn’t have to be a forum for open speech, but it should be]
Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., a leading voice on digital privacy, said a portion of the Communications Decency Act he authored two decades ago that provides a legal shield to websites publishing third-party content is tailored so that companies don’t assume responsibility for all posts by merely policing the most extreme.
“I wrote Section 230 so Facebook and other companies can take down bad actors without being saddled with frivolous lawsuits,” Wyden tweeted in response to Facebook’s decision. “Platforms need to be much more vigilant about weeding out hate. This is a start.”
The move nonetheless opens Mark Zuckerberg’s company to claims that liberal-leaning employees are quashing opinions with which they disagree, an argument made by conservatives ever since social media platforms began trying to weed out content posted by agents from Russia and other hostile nations to influence U.S. voters.
Intelligence officials in the U.S. have said the Kremlin used such tactics to promote President Trump’s candidacy in 2016, an assessment backed up in a recent report from special counsel Robert Mueller, who was tasked with investigating whether the campaign knowingly cooperated.
[Related: Facebook bans white nationalist speech]
“Once you start banning people for speech, inevitably you’re picking and choosing which speech you approve, and we don’t believe the social media companies should be trusted to do that,” said Dan Gainor, vice president of the Media Research Center’s TechWatch. “They have policies that are liberal, staff that are liberal, and inevitably we think conservatives are the ones who suffer for that.”
“Censoring people is like eating peanuts,” he added. “Once you eat one, you just can’t stop.”
Chief among Facebook’s critics is President Trump, who tweeted in the wake of its announcement that he is monitoring and watching “the censorship of AMERICAN CITIZENS on social media platforms.”
“This is the United States of America — and we have what’s known as FREEDOM OF SPEECH!” he tweeted.
The president warned in subsequent posts that social media is “getting worse and worse for conservatives” and signaled support for one of the people kicked off Facebook, right-wing internet personality Paul Joseph Watson.
Joining the president in his attack on Facebook was his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., who accused the tech giant of mounting a “censorship campaign” that could result in platforms systematically purging conservatives.
“The purposeful and calculated silencing of conservatives by [Facebook] & the rest of the Big Tech monopoly men should terrify everyone,” Trump Jr. tweeted.
But Paul Barrett, deputy director of the New York University Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, said Facebook “hesitated for a long time” before its action.
“I’m sure they don’t relish doing it, but eventually if someone is repeatedly violating the standards you’ve set out as governing behavior in your privately owned platform, you’re going to bid that person farewell,” Barrett said.
Facebook’s issues, he said, are symptoms of its reach and influence, and have been exacerbated by its own technologies that boost widely shared posts.
“The extremist and sensationalistic and conspiracy-oriented expressions of people like Alex Jones, at least in part, reflect Alex Jones’ understanding that his posts will get more circulation on Facebook and on Twitter because of their very nature,” Barrett said. “That’s because of the algorithms Facebook and Twitter use that encourage sharing of sensationalistic material, because that keeps people’s attention, and attention is what Facebook sells to its advertisers and that’s the business model.”
Jones, a 45-year-old community college dropout, stirred controversy when he pantomimed shooting Mueller and was sued by parents of some of the 20 children killed in a December 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., over his claims the shooting was staged. In 2002, he wrote a book linking the George W. Bush administration to what he said was a conspiracy behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
To address hate and fearmongering on Facebook, some lawmakers have suggested Congress could step in, which Barrett warned could lead to government overreach.
Lawmakers’ criticisms of Facebook and other platforms reached a fever pitch in March after a gunman whom police said killed 50 in an attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, livestreamed the shooting.
The 17-minute video was flagged by a user but remained on Facebook for roughly 30 minutes before it was taken down. Facebook subsequently removed 1.5 million videos of the massacre in the first 24 hours, of which 1.2 million were blocked at upload.
The events prompted the House Judiciary Committee to hold a hearing last month on hate speech that included representatives from Facebook and Google. Republicans used the session to accuse tech companies of censoring conservatives, while Democrats noted the First Amendment prohibits the government, not private companies, from restricting freedom of speech.
The potential for federal involvement in content regulation is a “prime reason why Facebook, Twitter, YouTube need to devote a ton of resources right now to figuring out how to better govern themselves,” Barrett said.
He believes social media companies need to invest more in algorithms that identify false material, backed up by staff who understand the affairs of other nations. Facebook has done both, but Zuckerberg has welcomed more regulation, arguing that social media companies shouldn’t make such sweeping decisions on their own.
Gainor, however, wants Facebook and others to “embrace the First Amendment, not to embrace global censorship.”
“Freedom of speech is uncomfortable sometimes,” he said. “Ultimately, the way to look at this is people should be able to determine what they want to see, not Facebook determining what they want to see.”
