Do you use Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, or Snapchat to keep up with the world?
68% of Americans get at least some of their news through social media,
and for the under-30 set that figure is a lot higher.
The tech giants are private companies,
and for the most part have the freedom to determine what's posted on their platforms.
But are their choices about what content to remove, and who to evict really being made free from government pressures?
It's not enough to just give people a voice.
We need to make sure that people aren't using it to harm other people or to spread misinformation.
Can you define hate speech?
Senator I think that this is a really hard question.
We should be particularly worried about
asking platforms to take things down if they're over in this realm
where it's very hard to tell what's illegal,
and where what you're taking down might be important public political speech.
Daphne Keller is a former Google attorney who's currently a law professor at Stanford.
She says that the tech giants are facing pressure from governments worldwide
to clamp down on a variety of content on their platform.
From terrorist propaganda to disinformation to hate speech.
The European Union is currently debating new so-called Terrorist Content Regulations,
which would mandate that tech giant's prohibit so-called violent or extremist speech and propaganda on their platforms.
Keller says the worst versions would empower police to inform tech companies
when they see posts violating the terms of service social media users agree to when first signing up.
The European Commission has looked to terms of service as
a means of getting platforms to take down content
without going through the process of passing a new law or a regulation.
The hate speech code of conduct was negotiated between
Microsoft, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and the European Commission, and that
commits those platforms to using their terms of service to prohibit hate speech
under a definition that's derived from European law.
But because they're using their terms of service to do it
that means that the prohibition is global.
So are we in a sense living under
European Union internet regulation right now in America?
To a certain extent.
Things that would be politically difficult and perhaps unconstitutional,
or in some cases certainly unconstitutional, to mandate here
we don't have to even consider because they get mandated in Europe and then companies apply them globally.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey says that his company follows a speech code developed by the United Nations.
Doesn't the UN declaration guarantee the right of all people through any medium to express their opinion?
It does—and why do they have hate speech—it does, and it also has conditions
around particular speech inciting violence, and
some of the, some of the aspects that we speak to as well.
And it protects specific categories.
Whether it's religion, race, gender, sexual orientation,
those are all also protected under the UN covenant.
Article 20 of the United Nations Covenant on Civil and Political Rights that Dorsey references
says that so-called hate speech, which it defines as
any advocacy of national, racial, or religious hatred that
constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility, or violence
shall be prohibited by law.
The First Amendment by contrast prevents the US government
from regulating speech based on content.
People might be airing legitimate grievances
about something their government is doing,
or something that a foreign government is doing.
They might be engaging in conversation
that is very important in their political context.
If that gets mistaken for terrorism
by a sort of trigger-happy employee sitting in California,
that's going to disrupt really core political speech.
Keller calls this effect "collateral censorship",
and says we've seen it on the internet before
when strict copyright enforcement led to unnecessary takedowns.
We've found that there are a lot of bad faith notices
you get things like the government of Ecuador
using a nonsense copyright claim
to get journalistic criticism taken down.
The Church of Scientology used some spurious copyright accusations to get criticism taken down,
and there's research showing that some platforms just don't even bother to try to decide
which allegations are true and which allegations are false.
They just honor all of them.
I am optimistic that over a five to ten year period
we will have AI tools that can
get into some of the nuances, the linguistic nuances,
of different types of content to be more accurate and flagging things for our systems.
Does that solve the problem?
No.
AI does not solve the problem.
Everybody who claims that there are filters, or AI, or machine learning
that can solve these problems,
has something to sell.
The public has very little information about how well any of it is working.
There are two major studies I'm aware of
about the efficacy of filters in identifying unlawful content,
and both of them cast serious doubt.
One study out of Reggie University Amsterdam found that AI designed to catch hate speech on Twitter
misclassified at 80% of the time.
Another joint study out of China and the UK found that hate speech "lacks unique discriminative features"
and is "difficult to discover."
And after Europe reached an agreement with the tech companies to build a terrorism hash database
that used a AI to automatically flag and remove extremist propaganda,
YouTube took down an entire archive meant to document war crimes in Syria.
These lawmakers and policy makers are motivated by
wanting to stop the spread of terrorism,
wanting to stop what's become known as self-radicalization.
What's the big deal that a few things get taken down accidentally if we're stopping people from joining ISIS?
Right now we don't have any clear information telling us that
taking down all of these videos really is making us safer.
In fact, a lot of people who are expert researchers on security are
concerned that this will effectively drive more people into darker corners of the internet,
into echo chambers where they only ever hear from people who agree with a violent agenda.
There are people in law enforcement who would prefer sometimes to leave things up
so that they can monitor what's going on and go after the the perpetrators of real-world violence.
So it's not clear what the security upside is.
At the same time,
it's not entirely clear what the speech and expression down side is.
We know there's a downside,
we know those 100,000 videos from the Syrian archive
that were documenting violence in Syria for future prosecution disappeared.
We know there's harm to speech,
but we can't quantify that either,
because we don't have the data and transparency
from platforms or from governments to understand that side of the calculation.
Back in the US,
Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren has publicly called
for the breakup of the tech giants.
And the Federal Trade Commission and Justice Department
are gearing up for antitrust investigations into Facebook and Google.
And conservatives like Republican Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz
have called for social media companies to be treated more like public utilities
that have to treat all content as neutral, or lose their liability protection.
Right now big tech enjoys an immunity from liability
on the assumption that they would be neutral and fair.
If they're not going to be neutral and fair, if they're gonna be biased
we should repeal the immunity from liability so they should be liable like the rest of us.
I don't even know what being neutral would mean.
Would it mean allowing every single thing to be uploaded and just showing it in chronological order?
Can you be neutral if you have search features?
Can you be neutral if you allow people to mute things?
A truly neutral, meaning showing everything that is legal, social media platform
would be full of content that most users don't want to see.
And that certainly advertisers don't want to have next to their ads.
Keller says that the best way to reduce the power of Google, Facebook, and Twitter
is through new competition which regulation can stifle.
So when Mark Zuckerberg requests a more active role for governments
in monitoring his own company
perhaps his underlying motive is to protect Facebook from competition
by raising the barriers to entry.
There does seem to be the sense that Twitter and Facebook
are controlling the conversation in a way at this point, the public conversation.
Do you think that is going to continue to be the case going forward,
or are we on the verge of something different?
If we're on the verge of something different, I don't know what it is.
And I think if we continue seeing laws passed that more or less entrench incumbents,
by making requirements that only they can afford to comply with,
that makes it much less likely that we ever get to this other future
where we get away from the the current "information gatekeepers"
having the role that they do now.