The Guardian’s view on free speech online: a messy compromise
Alphabet, the company that owns Google and YouTube, has quietly become one of the most powerful gatekeepers of permitted speech on the planet, along with Facebook and – within China – the Chinese government. This isn’t entirely a bad thing. Everyone agrees there are some things that have no place online, although different cultures and different countries have varying and often entirely incompatible rules about permissible speech. But an entirely uncensored internet would be a disaster for society, as everyone now acknowledges. Governments want their rules enforced, and the advertising businesses that have become the giants of social media are the players who can enforce them. If Google, Facebook, and Twitter all decide to ban a person their public profile will be extinguished and they will, in effect, disappear. Such a person may still exist on the internet, but only on the margins.
There is a halfway house between complete extinction and freedom: YouTube can choose, as a private company, not to show any advertisements against a particular channel, and even to keep for itself the donations some people make to see their comments prominently featured below a video. These sanctions were last week imposed on Carl Benjamin, the Ukip candidate for MEP, who has repeatedly discussed raping the Labour MP Jess Phillips; it is right that he should not be able to profit from such disgusting misogyny.
Such advertising bans, known as demonetisations, can be financially disastrous. The stars of social media can make thousands of pounds a month from their performances even when they are not at the very top, where real fortunes are made. This must itself tend to drive more extreme and attention-grabbing stunts, just as the companies’ notorious recommendation algorithms do. After all, no one is forced to watch YouTube: we go there for entertainment.
The cleverness of the alt-right movement has been to adopt the techniques of the entertainment industry into selling opinions in the same way that personalities are used to sell anything else on social media. They turn extremism into a community soap opera. This isn’t a matter of slick production. Just as television pioneered the idea of news and opinions delivered by a friendly presence in the family living room, social media, on