Social media sites must learn responsibility
Pity poor Facebook. The social media company that has made billionaires out of its founders and has more than two billion members is being held accountable for what you say and do on your pages. Whose pages, again? Yours? Or Facebook’s? Facebook want you to believe your pages belong to you, whether it’s your personal page, your business page, your non-profit group page, your fundraising page or whatever.
Facebook wants you to believe in that ownership because you like to be in control of what you tell the world about yourself.
Furthermore, Facebook wants you to believe that you can do and say what you want on Facebook without any accountability. Except that’s not true. Facebook is no more a public space than a shopping mall, which is private property with owners that can close the door to any customers any time it chooses.
Facebook allows you to set up a page, in exchange for all sorts of personal information about you, along with your eyeballs on all of the advertising and sponsored content it sells.
Yet it has the right to restrict any or all of your posts any time it chooses. Complaining about your free speech being violated is irrelevant because Facebook isn’t violating your right to have an opinion. It is merely declining you the opportunity to share that opinion on its network.
Simply put, it’s your life story, but Facebook is the one broadcasting it and can shut down your personal channel whenever it feels like it.
As a Washington Post story explained, Facebook is struggling with how to stop hate speech and other immoral and/or illegal content being spread through its pages (now that we’ve established its pages, not your pages).
Traditional media outlets — newspapers, magazines, radio and TV stations — have been held responsible for decades for their content, regardless of whether the outlet produced the content itself or had the content submitted.
People are free to write letters to the editor, for example, but the newspaper does not have to publish any of them.
Furthermore, the newspaper will refuse to publish any opinion that may violate any hate speech or libel laws.
Courts have found the broadcaster, be it electronic or print, to be far more legally responsible than the actual writer for spreading harmful views because it’s just one intolerant person’s opinion until a broadcaster shares it with its large audience.
Facebook has for far too long been immune to this responsibility, as has Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and all of the other social media platforms.
In the Post story, Facebook promises to hire another 3,000 content moderators by the end of the year, bringing its total contingent up to 7,500.
First, content moderator is a fancy title for censor and second, even at 7,500 human censors, that still only works out to one person keeping tabs for every 267,000 Facebook users.
Facebook doesn’t want to invest in censorship for numerous obvious reasons. Hiring all those extra people cuts into profits, it ruins the illusion to users that they are in a “free” space and, most of all, it is terrified of being held legally accountable for broadcasting harmful content.
The day a court finally does that will be the day order is restored to the Wild West of social media and the internet. Don’t be holding shares in Facebook when that day comes. It’s not just Facebook, of course. If you ask Google for help on how to build a bomb, how to find ISIS recruitment videos, how to learn some new racist jokes, to find pornography involving children or evidence that the Holocaust didn’t happen, Google is aiding in your efforts to commit illegal activity.
Like Facebook, Google offers its search service for free, in exchange for personal data and advertising revenue.
Like Facebook, Google has every right to refuse to conduct your search and even refuse you access to its website (as well, as other sites it owns, like YouTube).
Like Facebook, Google doesn’t want to censor its searches because the cost would destroy its revenue stream and because it certainly doesn’t want any legal responsibility for the harm people cause with their searches.
Facebook, Google and all of its online counterparts refuse to share the same burden of social responsibility that traditional media outlets have, even though their audiences are far greater.
How much social and individual harm has to be caused by Google and Facebook before governments force them to be accountable to their users and to the broader public?
How many more people have to have their murder broadcast on Facebook Live and YouTube? How many more terrorists and child pornographers does Google have to assist?
Most importantly, how much of your online freedom are you willing to sacrifice in exchange for Google and Facebook to finally be accountable for the real world damage their products cause?
Neil Godbout is the managing editor of the Prince George Citizen and former reporter at The Herald.