More Internet Censorship – National Review

PayPal this week banned at least 34 organizations for promoting hate, violence or racial intolerance, including Richard Spencers group and others apparently involved in the Charlottesville riot. PayPals announcement mentions KKK, white supremacist groups or Nazi groups that have violated its acceptable use policy.

Its a private company (thats not yet regulated as a utility) so it can do as it pleases, and the Nazi/Klan creeps certainly arent going to evoke any sympathy. But as someone whos been at the receiving end of hate group smears, it would be good to know how such decisions are made. PayPals announcement notes that our highly trained team of experts addresses each case individually highly trained in what? Sniffing out heresy? (No one expects the PayPal Inquisition!) When PayPal goes beyond the objective standard of banning activity prohibited by law to banning those it simply doesnt like (however loathsome they might be), all dissenters are vulnerable.

PayPals highly trained experts havent yet targeted my organization, but Twitter has, albeit in a small way so far. You can pay them to promote a tweet thats already been posted, as a form of advertising, and here are three that we submitted for promotion that were rejected:

All three were rejected on the grounds of Hate:

They contain nothing hateful, obviously, but the common thread appears to be that all three refer to the costs to society of illegal immigration, and all three contain the word illegal two refer to illegal immigrants and one to illegal aliens.

When you look at Twitters Hateful content in advertising page, it looks like the very word illegal is indeed prohibited with regard to immigrants (as opposed to the U.S. Code, where its common). It mentions Hate speech or advocacy against a protected group or an individual or organization based on, but not limited to, the following including Status as a refugee and Status as an immigrant.

This is merely a nuisance for me, so far, but it does point to the broader issue addressed by Jeremy Carl in his piece on the homepage this week about regulating the big internet firmsas public utilities. Carl writes What is needed is not regulation to restrict speech but regulation specifically to allow speech regulation put on monopolist and market-dominant companies that have abused their positions repeatedly.

One internet company this week abused its position but at the same time practically begged for the government to step in. Cloudflare is a sort of middleman facilitator between users and the web sites theyre visiting. Because of the companys position in the infrastructure of the internet, its CEO, Matthew Prince, was able to simply shut down the Daily Stormer neo-Nazi website: Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldnt be allowed on the Internet. He explained his decision by noting that the people behind the Daily Stormer are assholes, which they no doubt are.

But to Princes credit, he continued: No one should have that power:

We need to have a discussion around this, with clear rules and clear frameworks. My whims and those of Jeff [Bezos] and Larry [Page] and Satya [Nadella] and Mark [Zuckerberg], that shouldnt be what determines what should be online, he said. I think the people who run The Daily Stormer are abhorrent. But again I dont think my political decisions should determine who should and shouldnt be on the internet.

As Prince wrote in a blog post on the incident, Without a clear framework as a guide for content regulation, a small number of companies will largely determine what can and cannot be online.

The internet is now a utility more important than phones or cable TV. If people can be denied access to it based on the content of their ideas and speech (rather than specific, illegal acts), why not make phone service contingent on your political views? Or mail delivery? Garbage pickup? Electric power? Water and sewer? (I hope Im not giving the SPLCs brownshirts any ideas.)

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More Internet Censorship - National Review