Platforms: Who should be liable for online hate?
After yet another mass shooting, the founder of 8chan, the internet’s “go-to resource for violent extremists” says the site needs to be shut down, said Kevin Roose in The New York Times. Fredrick Brennan started the fringe site in 2013 “as a free speech alternative to 4chan, a better-known online message board.” But Brennan, who left 8chan last year, said it has devolved into a recruiting platform for violent white nationalists—including the one who murdered 22 people in a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, last weekend after posting a manifesto and urging his 8chan “brothers” to share it. And share they did. The site has become a “megaphone” for mass shooters, populated not only by racists and anti-Semites but also supporters of the dark conspiracy QAnon and “incels”—men who are “involuntarily celibate” and hate women as a result.
It’s not just about 8chan, said Jonathan Taplin, also in the Times— Reddit, YouTube, Facebook, and other big players all provide homes for online hate. And thanks to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, they’re “totally protected from being sued” for it. This safe harbor provision, passed in 1996, shields internet platforms from liability for the content posted on their networks. It’s time to change that. These companies can remove toxic content, just as they found ways to “filter pornography and jihadist videos off their networks using artificial intelligence.” But only revising Section 230 will give them incentive to do it.
The government shouldn’t decide who tech companies must censor, said Scott Shackford in Reason.com. I had no issue when Cloudflare, the web domain provider, booted 8chan off its platform in response to the El Paso shooting. Cloudflare is “refusing to associate itself with a site that hosts messages it finds offensive.” That’s the business’s decision, and it has every right to cut off extremist sites. When politicians get involved, though, censorship usually limits only “speech that has the potential to jeopardize their own power or influence.”
Still, Big Tech must accept some responsibility, said Noam
Cohen in Wired. It rewards users for inhabiting virtual worlds and discourages them from leaving. That’s how minds get warped. “People in such isolated circumstances can become vulnerable to all manner of deception and manipulation, including racist, hate-filled propaganda.” Indeed, the human brain “wasn’t designed to endure the volume of relentless inner-directedness that is driven by these new screens,” said Daniel Henninger in The Wall Street Journal. The modern “life lived online” is the epidemic. It’s too late to put the screen genies back in the bottle, but “maybe the app masters who elevated self-obsession on Instagram and 8chan could turn toward apps rooted in reality.”