Following an unprecedented takeover of Capitol Hill on Wednesday night, big tech companies have finally begun to step up against a wave of violence-inciting misinformation. Twitter led the way, announcing Wednesday night that it was forcing Trump to remove three posts and shutting down his account for 12 hours. The platform threatened to permanently suspend Trump’s account if he continued to violate their rules, and then followed up by enforcing this threat on Friday night. Facebook rolled out a similar response, blocking Trump “indefinitely,” at least until the expiration of his term. Snapchat and Amazon Inc.’s Twitch soon followed suit, intending to limit the spread of violence-inciting misinformation.
While tech companies have demonstrated swift action in the wake of this national crisis, they have, until this moment, primarily been treating misinformation as a spectator sport — one to watch from the sidelines rather than actively get involved. Going forward, tech companies will need to begin taking a much more proactive approach to regulating dangerous and untruthful speech before the consequences of inaction spill into the streets.
Handling free speech on the internet has hardly been a small question for big tech companies these past few decades. Social media platforms in particular have received severe criticism for providing ripe ground for misinformation and political conspiracy theories, which have been peddled by politicians, bots and extremist organizations alike.
Tech giants largely shied away from the conversation, attempting to keep out of the hot water of politics, but it soon became clear that was no longer possible. In 2018, Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed just how easily a third party could exploit personal user data to influence political outcomes. Further episodes — including the proliferation of Russian propaganda by the Internet Research Agency on Twitter and Facebook — also demonstrated big tech’s undue power in political matters.
In recent years, during which time a firebrand president has propagated disinformation on issues ranging from COVID-19 to the validity of the 2020 elections, tech companies have had to consider especially significant changes to their policies. In June 2019, Twitter announced that it would begin flagging politicians’ tweets that violated their rules, a policy notably put to use this past May by hiding one of Trump’s tweets proclaiming “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” on account of it encouraging violence. The platform also announced in May 2020 that it would be flagging content containing misleading or disputed information about the COVID-19 pandemic.
The decision to include such warning messages was not popular among other social media executives. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg abstained from implementing such a policy within Facebook and actively criticized the decision. “I just believe strongly that Facebook shouldn’t be the arbiter of truth,” Zuckerberg responded in an interview with Fox News. While such a fear of arbitrary power has hardly reigned in the giant’s other exploits, it speaks to a significant debate about the responsibilities of tech giants in policing speech. In a Pew Research Center survey, 90% of Republicans responded that it is somewhat or very likely that social media companies censor political beliefs, and Congress Republicans have regularly accused big tech executives of silencing conservative voices. Zuckerberg worked to avoid such criticism, writing in his statement responding to Wednesday’s events: “We believe the public has a right to the broadest possible access to political speech, even controversial speech.”
Considerations of free speech become especially acute when the social media user in question is the United States president. “There’s a degree of balancing that most of these sites have been trying to do between applying their general policies against hate speech or threatening and inciting language and acknowledging that there is significant newsworthiness in what a sitting president says,” Emma Llansó, director of the Free Expression Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology, told CBS News. Llansó added, however, that it was well past the time to define that balance.
Several politicians, corporate executives, and advocates have similarly criticized social media companies for stepping in too late. Rep. Bennie Thompson suggested that the measures Facebook did take might have been opportunistic, taking form only once the company was safely couched in the knowledge that the newly-elected Democratic Congress would look favorably on them. Nonetheless, it seems any opportunity Facebook was hoping to grasp is lost. Ascendant Democratic lawmakers are now looking to hold Google, Facebook, and Twitter accountable for their inaction “until well after there was blood and glass in the halls of the Capitol.”
Others also called for more stringent measures. Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said, “It’s long overdue for Silicon Valley to step up and not just to temporarily take Trump off their platforms but to ban him permanently. He has used their products to incite an act of domestic terror in the heart of our government, in the temple of our democracy. This is a federal crime.” Michelle Obama echoed these sentiments, calling on Silicon Valley companies to permanently ban Donald Trump from using their platforms to sow discord.
January 6 has the potential to serve as an inflection point in the way we regard speech on the internet, but whether anything changes at all depends significantly on the big tech executives setting the parameters of the conversation.
Zuckerberg, espousing Facebook’s characteristic caution on regulating speech, was clear to differentiate his treatment of this situation from usual affairs. He wrote, “The current context is now fundamentally different, involving use of our platform to incite violent insurrection against a democratically elected government.” The statement carves out a separate nook for the incidents of Wednesday, treating them as an isolated incident and refusing to acknowledge the hundreds of inciting posts that led up to it. Nevertheless, Facebook did commit to removing content that incites harm and introduced “emergency content measures” that disable comments or posts in groups featuring a high proportion of hate speech or violence-inciting language.
Google responded to criticism by stating that it took down videos of Trump’s fiery speech on Wednesday but has not yet committed to additional efforts to curb the spread of harm-inciting language or misinformation on its platform. Both Apple and Google Play took a strong stance against Parler, the no-strings-attached platform where many Capitol stormers posted incendiary comments and photographs. Apple pulled the app from iPhone products, and Google Play has suspended the app from its store until it strengthens its policing of hateful and violent language.
From now on, tech companies must commit to stopping the fires of misinformation before they lead to real-world damage, not after. This begins with government action. For years, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 has granted tech companies immunity from harm caused by third parties, but such measures have allowed corporations to enable extensive political damage and escape the consequences. Republican Sen. Josh Hawley introduced a bill in 2020 removing these protections from select political content. President-elect Joe Biden as well has called for fully eliminating the extensive shield provided by Section 230. With Democratic control of the legislative and executive branches, action on this front seems likely.
As Amanda Taub wrote in the New York Times, what happened on Wednesday cannot strictly be considered a “coup,” a formally organized and isolated spectacle. Instead, it came as only the most recent culmination of an “anti-democratic backsliding,” in which a power-hungry leader has slowly cut away at the norms and institutions of a healthy democracy. Social media companies are implicated in this backsliding, and they must change their policies if we are to move toward restoring the democratic institutions this country is built upon.
“United States Capitol outside protesters with US flag” by Tyler Merbler is licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
