Social media platforms face reckoning over hate speech
Far-right and white nationalist groups are increasingly gathering on encrypted apps and social media sites that do not monitor for offensive speech or violent content.
Sophie Bjork-James, Vanderbilt University
For years, social media platforms have fuelled political polarisation and hosted an explosion of hate speech. Now, with four months until the US presidential election and the country’s divisions reaching a boiling point, these companies are upping their game against bigotry and threats of violence.
What’s not yet clear is whether this action is too little, too late — nor whether the pressure on these companies, including a growing advertiser boycott, will be enough to produce lasting change.
Reddit, an online comment forum that is one of the world’s most popular websites, yesterday banned a forum that supported President Donald Trump as part of a crackdown on hate speech.
Also yesterday, live-streaming site Twitch, which is owned by Amazon, temporarily suspended Trump’s campaign account for violating its hateful conduct rules.
YouTube, meanwhile, banned several prominent white nationalist figures from its platform, including Stefan Molyneux, David Duke and Richard Spencer.
Social media companies, led by Facebook, now face a reckoning over what critics call indefensible excuses for amplifying divisions, hate and misinformation on their platforms. Civil rights groups have called on large advertisers to stop Facebook ad campaigns during July, saying the social network isn’t doing enough to curtail racist and violent content.
Companies such as consumer goods giant Unilever — one of the world’s largest advertisers — as well as Verizon, Ford and many smaller brands have joined the boycott. New companies have been signing on to the boycott almost every day.
While some are pausing ads only on Facebook, others have also
stepped back from advertising on Twitter and other platforms.
Yesterday, Ford Motor Co put the brakes on all national social media advertising for the next 30 days. The company says hate speech, as well as posts advocating violence and racial injustice, need to be eradicated from the sites.
While the ad boycott has dinged Facebook’s and Twitter’s shares, analysts who follow the social media business don’t see it as having a lasting effect.
Raymond James analyst Aaron Kessler noted that YouTube has faced several ad boycotts in the past over hate speech and other objectionable material. Each time, it adjusted its policies and the advertisers returned. In addition, July is generally a slow month for advertising.
Companies have also been cutting their ad budgets due to Covid-19, so the spending declines are not a surprise for investors. Kessler called Facebook’s stock pullback — its shares fell more than 8 per cent on FridaySaturday, then rallied a bit Monday yesterday
— a “buying opportunity”.
Reddit’s action was part of a larger purge at the San Francisco-based site. The company said it took down 2000 forums, known as the site as “subreddits”, most of which it said were inactive or had few users.
The Trump Reddit forum, called The_Donald, was banned because it encouraged violence, regularly broke other Reddit rules and defiantly “antagonised” both Reddit and other forums, the company said in a statement. Reddit had previously tried to discipline the forum.
Despite optimism from some critics, others said it is not clear if such measures will be enough. For years, racist groups “have successfully used social media to amplify their message and gain new recruits”, said Sophie Bjork-James, an anthropology professor at Vanderbilt University who specialises in white nationalism, racism and hate crimes.
“However, limiting access to a broader public will have unintended negative consequences.
“Far-right and white nationalist groups are increasingly gathering on encrypted apps and social media sites that do not monitor for offensive speech or violent content,” she added.
“This shift allows for co-ordinating more violent and radical actions.”
The algorithms tech companies developed to keep users glued to their services “have provided perhaps the biggest boon to organised racism in decades, as they help racist ideas find a much larger and potentially receptive audience”, Bjork-James said, adding that she is hopeful the same companies that “helped this anti-democratic movement expand” can now help to
limit its impact.