Over the last year, attitudes toward social media have turned from ambivalence to hostility, at least according to a new Axios poll. It found that 57 percent of Americans now believe that social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter actively harm both democracy and free speech. This change in viewpoint is most noticeable among Republicans, who were always more antagonistic to social media than Democrats, but are now far more aggravated. Within the GOP, 69 percent now believe that social media causes harm, up from 52 percent last November.
Rising Republican hatred of social media sites has been fueled by both misinformation spread by political leaders and a lack of public understanding of how tech companies actually work. Even if some social media companies are often imperfect, turning against social media as a whole neglects all the good it has done, and poses a threat to our culture of innovation.
In recent months, conservatives have ramped up their criticism of tech companies for perceived progressive bias. President Trump has repeatedly attacked Google and Twitter for censoring conservative speech, without much evidence to back it up. Additionally, pro-Trump media personalities Diamond and Silk were called into Congress to testify on social media filtering practices, after claiming Facebook censored them. They attempted to give voice to a disenfranchised Right, and promoted the narrative that they were targeted for their conservative views.
These conservative criticisms may stem from a failure to appreciate the complexity of moderating content at the scale of most social media sites. In one minute in 2016, Facebook saw 3.3 million posts uploaded, Twitter nearly 450,000 tweets, and 500 hours of video uploaded on YouTube. Since then, surely, these numbers having only increased. Given the enormous amount of content produced and moderated, mistakes are inevitable. Facebook has run into many roadblocks in attempting to automate content moderation, such as accidental classifications of religious material as violent or breastfeeding as sexual. This has led to an increase in human reviewers, many of whom quit rapidly given the disturbing content they see. The difficulty of the task reveals how many cases of supposed censorship result from mistakes, rather than attacks.
Despite the mistakes, sometimes content is intentionally flagged because it violates community guidelines, such as Alex Jones being banned for hate speech. While some may argue that having these community guidelines is in itself a violation of free speech, that assumes a lack of platform competition.
Social media is not monolithic, with different sites having varying degrees of stringency in moderation.
Twitter, for example, often comes under fire from liberals for being too open a platform and refusing to ban all but the most horrendous users. Conservatives must not forget the value in allowing private companies to set guidelines that allow them to craft a particular brand. Failing to moderate any content is not an option, and social media sites should be free to compete and experiment with building better policies. This is a market-driven approach that conservatives have historically supported, though some have found kicking up a fuss more profitable.
Take, for example, the conservative educational nonprofit PragerU, which is appealing a failed lawsuit against YouTube for allegedly violating its free speech rights. In their online petition to YouTube, they claim that more than 80 of their 487 videos are in restricted mode and that this amounts to censorship. But restricted mode just applies to videos dealing with mature themes, and is only designed so parents can create a safe online environment for their children.
The filtering isn’t political: It has similarly come under fire from the LGBT community for censoring videos dealing with sexual themes. While restricted videos themselves cannot earn money from advertisements, the videos are still available online. They can be found by anyone without the content filter enabled, which is most of the YouTube community. Far from suffering harm, PragerU has since only gained in popularity among conservatives as a result of these misplaced accusations.
Hatred among conservatives for Silicon Valley innovators is growing, as evidenced by their turn against social media as a whole, rather than criticizing specific platforms and advocating for others. If Republicans fail to support technology leaders, it looks like nobody will.
The Left’s broader antagonism to large corporations and belief that “fake news” helped elect Trump have lead to an anti-tech sentiment, leaving large tech companies with few friends in Washington.
Conservatives have historically championed innovation, but in their antagonism toward social media they are turning their backs on one of the greatest inventions of the 21st century. Greater interconnectivity is a positive for conservatives and liberals alike. The sad truth is that those peddling anti-social media narratives on the Right are no true friends of free speech or free markets, principles upon which conservatism once stood.
Ryan Khurana is executive director of the Institute for Advancing Prosperity and a technology policy fellow at Young Voices.
