Free speech and the responsibilities of social media companies: When should political speech lose its protection? – ABC News

Soon after the anti-democratic mob violence which occurred recently at the US Capitol, I wrote an opinion piece for these pages arguing that much of the debate in the Australian media covering the decision by Twitter to suspend Donald Trumps account permanently was seriously missing the point. Media coverage, including that of the ABC, had covered the views of some Coalition MPs including Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg, and backbenchers Dave Sharma, George Christensen, and Craig Kelly. They had expressed concern over what they described as censorship, said that everyone should be entitled to express their views even if they differ, and cited free speech principles as the basis for these views.

I argued that, to the contrary, there was no free speech defence to the speech that Donald Trump gave in Washington, DC on 6 January. This was because of the key issue of the incitement of violence. No coherent free speech argument has ever suggested that its protections extend to the incitement of violence. There is no free speech protection for speech that is imminently and causally connected to the incitement of a mob to violent lawlessness. This is because such speech is evidently, immediately, and virulently harmful. We saw this with the loss of five lives at Capitol Hill that day. There have been subsequent reports that improvised explosive devices were left in the building, and suggestions that some of the insurrectionists had planned (including by bringing along equipment) to take hostages and to execute them.

The idea that the incitement of violence is not protected free speech is not new. In the nineteenth century, John Stuart Mill, the founder of liberalisms ideal of free speech, gave an example of protected free speech writing in a newspaper that corn dealers were robbing the poor. But he stressed that there was a limit on free speech, which is harm to others. He gave as his example the incitement of a mob to violence outside the house of that same corn dealer. In January, Donald Trump incited a mob outside the United States house of democracy, spurring them on to engage in violence against individuals inside the building, and against democratic institutions of governance. There is no free speech defence to this kind of speech.

Want the best of Religion & Ethics delivered to your mailbox? Sign up for our weekly newsletter.

Your information is being handled in accordance with theABC Privacy Collection Statement.

But there are other, very significant free speech concerns that the event raises. With the benefit of the peaceful transition behind us, it is important to pay attention to them.

The first of these is the sheer power of social media to determine what people may, and may not, say. Social media is privately owned. Their highly profitable business model has relied to a large extent on eschewing the responsibilities that inhere in their power to facilitate speech. They have, by and large, profited enormously from facilitating speech while simultaneously avoiding the responsibilities of responding to harmful speech.

Their platforms facilitate harms in new ways, and with a new scope. One need only think of doxing (publicly revealing personal documents online for the purposes of harming someone), revenge porn (publicly revealing intimate photographs online without their consent for the purposes of harming someone), cyberstalking, and disinformation (the deliberate purveying of misinformation for the purposes of harming people or democratic institutions) to understand that online speech facilitates new types of harm, and facilitates a larger scope for old types of harm, such as hate speech.

Platforms are coming under increasing pressure to respond to these, and other, harms and to take action in transparent and consistent ways. This has resulted in the publication of community standards, and of regular reports on the material that is removed by the platforms in violation of those standards. Facebook has even created a new, independent, Oversight Board for the purposes of adjudicating disputes over material that it has taken down.

But there is a long way to go. Just a few points among many make this clear. First, the platforms goal is an international standard that can be applied consistently in any country across the globe. This is a forlorn hope. One of the reasons the platforms get their content moderation wrong is that they do not understand the local contexts that ultimately determine the meaning and force of speech online. Those contexts matter. Second, the platforms are too large to do this work meaningfully they need to be broken up into smaller components that are more easily regulable and can respond to the local contexts that matter. Third, they need to invest much more in, and significantly improve, the training they give their content moderators, with input from the communities and community managers who know how to do this work well.

And fourth, they need to take advice and implement that advice from scholars and practitioners who understand that free speech is not one-sided. Like any human right, free speech carries with it commensurate responsibilities. The responsibility that inheres in freedom of speech is the responsibility not to harm others with ones speech. Everyone is entitled to hold their own views. But when they express these views in public discourse, they have a responsibility to do so in a way that does not harm others. This lesson appears to have been entirely forgotten by those who use the mantra of free speech in increasingly meaningless, or selective, ways.

Another important question raised by the Trump ban is that of the importance of political speech. Trump was given a lot more leeway by social media platforms than ordinary citizens are, during his term of office. There is a good rationale for this. Political speech is at the core of speech that ought to be protected speech in a democracy. Although it is notoriously difficult to define, it includes the speech that is vital to citizens ability to self-govern. This is much broader than just the decision of whom to vote for it includes what to believe, and decisions on how to live a good life.

The speech of the president of the United States is inherently political, and therefore warrants a very high degree of protection. Nevertheless, what we saw in January was the recognition that even political speech is not limitless. Where political speech crosses the line into harming others in this case through the incitement of lawless violence it may lose its special protection. It is my hope that the severity of what we saw on 6 January gives pause to those who seek to establish a limitless understanding of free speech, who view all expressions as simply one persons opinion, who view all opinions as just alternative views of the facts.

There are lines that, when crossed, cannot be defended on free speech grounds. Free speech is not unlimited. Free speech carries with it commensurate responsibilities. When we treat all claims to free speech as having equal merit, we lose sight of the meaning of this fundamental, core freedom and instead of understanding it as a human right, we see it used as a weapon to enable harm.

Professor Katharine Gelber is the Head of the School of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland. You can hear her discuss the limits of free speech and the nature of harmful speech with Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens this week on The Minefield.

Original post:
Free speech and the responsibilities of social media companies: When should political speech lose its protection? - ABC News