Tech giants tread lightly on hate text, offensive content
COMPANIES STRUGGLE IN THEIR ROLES AS ONLINE ARBITERS, APPLYING INCONSISTENT RULES
This week, Apple, Google and Facebook erased from their services many — but not all — videos, podcasts and posts from right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his Infowars site.
Twitter left Jones’ posts untouched.
The differing approaches to Jones exposed how unevenly tech companies enforce their rules on hate speech and offensive content. There are only a few cases in which the companies appear to consistently apply their policies, such as their ban on child pornography and instances in which the law required them to remove content, like Nazi imagery in Germany.
When left to make their own decisions, the tech giants often struggle with their roles as the arbiters of speech and leave false information, upset users and confusing decisions in their wake. Here is a look at what the companies, which control the world’s most popular public forums, allow and ban.
Facebook in eye of storm
Of all the tech companies, Facebook has faced the biggest public outcry over what it allows on its platform.
The company has outright bans against violent content, nudity and terrorist recruitment propaganda. The rules on other types of content, including hate speech and false news, are more ambiguous.
When asked about Infowars last month, Facebook’s chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said he wouldn’t remove pages hosting popular conspiracy theories of the type Jones is known for sharing. His awkward explanation prompted outrage, and Zuckerberg offered a public apology. Now, less than a month later, Facebook has banned Jones and removed four pages belonging to him — including one with nearly 1.7 million followers — for violating its policies. The ban means that while Jones still has an account and can view content on Facebook, he is suspended from posting anything to the platform.
In a post, Facebook said it banned Jones and his pages for “accumulating too many strikes.” It has, however, refused to say how many strikes is too many.
Google’s grey area
Of all the major online services, Google’s YouTube is probably the most explicit about what is and is not allowed. But even with its published ‘Community Guidelines,’ YouTube has wrestled with the subjective interpretation of those rules.
Jones incurred two content violations from YouTube over the last year. In February, YouTube said he had violated its policies regarding harassment and bullying when a video claiming that David Hogg, one of the outspoken student survivors of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, was a “crisis actor.” In Jones’ most recent violation, last month, YouTube took down four of his videos that included hate speech against Muslim and transgender people as well as footage of a child being shoved to the ground. YouTube said the videos had violated its policies pertaining to hate speech, harassment and child endangerment.
Twitter’s ‘free speech’
Twitter has been more permissive of controversial content than its social media peers, with executives calling it “the free speech wing of the free speech party.”
In December, Twitter said it would promote “healthy conversation” by using a combination of human moderation and machine learning to detect trolls and minimise the appearance of their posts on the platform. Although the parents of several Sandy Hook shooting victims are suing Jones for defamation, a Twitter spokesman said that neither Jones’ personal account nor his Infowars account are currently in violation of Twitter’s policies. Tweets questioning the school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, remain live on both accounts.