The Constitution guarantees social media personalities Diamond and Silk, along with every other American, the right to free speech.
What it doesn’t do is promise a megaphone for that speech, whether from Facebook, Fox News, or a local newspaper.
That gap, and how private businesses decide whose views they share and whose they don’t, is at the heart of a dispute between the conservative black activists and Facebook that has prompted Republican members of Congress to raise concerns about censorship of conservative views.
“It’s wrong for social media giants to suppress and disregard people by diminishing and denying them their free speech,” Diamond, whose real name is Lynette Hardaway, said during a House Judiciary Committee hearing Thursday on the filtering practices of social media companies. She and her sister, Rochelle “Silk” Richardson, gained renown for their video blogs supporting President Trump’s candidacy in 2016 and now have more than 1 million Facebook followers.
“If social media is supposed to be a place for all ideas and to express ideas, then algorithms and tactics shouldn’t be in place to suppress some ideas,” Hardaway said. Such concerns have been fueled by Facebook’s revision of algorithms that regulate posts, following claims that its platform was used to manipulate voters before President Trump’s election in 2016.
The company now prioritizes content that it deems “trustworthy, informative and local,” said U.S. Rep. Marsha Blackburn, a Tennessee Republican, a description sufficiently vague that most people don’t fully understand what it means.
“We do know that since then, there has been a significant reduction in traffic from Facebook to some of the most prominent conservative news sites,” she continued. That drop came in tandem with a temporary block on posts from Diamond and Silk that the company later said was erroneous.
Her Republican colleagues largely agreed, though there was less consensus about how and whether Congress should respond. Several of the hearing’s witnesses, including New York Law School professor Ari Waldman and Tech Freedom President Berin Szoka, said any attempt to impose a so-called Fairness Doctrine requiring equal access for all views would be ill-advised and, quite likely, unconstitutional.
Deciding what types of content to publish is what media companies do, Waldman noted. “We all may have a First Amendment right, subject to some limitations, to say what we want, free of government intervention or censorship. But we don’t have a First Amendment right to Facebook’s amplification of our words.”
That poses a novel question for lawmakers, since content platforms like Facebook and Google exercise the total control over digital news that newspapers held over print distribution in decades past.
“They decide what news is delivered and to whom,” David Chavern, head of the News Media Alliance and American Press Institute, told the committee. “The First Amendment prohibits the government from regulating the press. But it doesn’t prevent Facebook and Google from acting as de facto regulators of the news business.”
The two companies aren’t, and have never been “neutral pipes,” he said. “To the contrary, their businesses depend upon their ability to make nuanced decisions through sophisticated algorithms about how and when content is delivered to users.”
Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, the Virginia Republican who called the hearing, conceded that the Constitution offers no clear protection for Facebook, Google or Twitter users whose content is restricted by the companies.
“We must nevertheless weigh as a nation whether the standards they apply endanger our free and open society and its culture of freedom of expression,” he said. “Especially when it is through these channels that our youth are learning to interact with each other and the world.”
Committee Democrats, however, dismissed the idea that a liberal-leaning Silicon Valley is quashing conflicting views. Instead, they, accused their Republican counterparts of exploiting Diamond and Silk to distract from their failure to seriously examine the role of social media in the presidential election or the improper access that a Trump campaign consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica, gained to Facebook user profiles.
“The notion that social media are filtering out conservative voices is a hoax, a tired narrative of imagined victimhood as the rest of country grapples with a feckless president and an out-of-control administration,” said Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York, the highest-ranking Democrat on the panel. “The majority designed this hearing to perpetuate that hoax. Conservative commentary, including conspiracy theories of a conservative bent, regularly rank among the most far-reaching posts on Facebook and elsewhere.”
Executives from Facebook, social media platform Twitter, and search engine Google, declined invitations to testify on Thursday. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, however, told congressional committees earlier in April that the platform is open to all ideas and has safeguards in place to ensure content oversight isn’t biased.
The company reached out to Diamond and Silk to correct its mistaken flagging of their content as “unsafe to the community,” added Zuckerberg.
The two sisters, however, dispute Facebook’s claims about the timeline and level of interaction. They continue to maintain that they have been unfairly targeted and their business model tarnished because of their opinions.
“What’s wrong with the way we believe?” Hardaway asked. “Why is it now in this country that whatever used to be right is wrong and what’s wrong now is right? If I have a belief, that’s my belief. Nobody has a right to censor my free speech. Nobody has a right to do it, and to maliciously and deliberately do it is what really irritates me.”
