Monthly Archives: February 2021

Demonstrators in New Delhi shout slogans during a protest against the arrest of climate change activist Disha Ravi for allegedly helping to create a guide for anti-government farmers protests. Sajjad Hussain/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Demonstrators in New Delhi shout slogans during a protest against the arrest of climate change activist Disha Ravi for allegedly helping to create a guide for anti-government farmers protests.

On Feb. 1, the editor of an award-winning Indian magazine got a call from his social media manager: The magazine's Twitter account was down.

"I said, 'Are you sure? Can you just refresh, and check again?' " recalled Vinod K. Jose, executive editor of The Caravan, which covers politics and culture. "But she said, 'No, no, it's real.' "

Jose went online, and instead of The Caravan's tweets, he saw a message: "withheld in India in response to a legal demand."

It was one of more than 500 accounts belonging to Indian activists, opposition politicians and media that Twitter blocked that week, on orders from the Indian government.

Days earlier, farmers who'd been rallying for months against the deregulation of Indian agriculture clashed with police in the capital New Delhi. The mayhem overshadowed a military parade on India's Jan. 26 Republic Day holiday. Twitter was flooded with angry posts from both sides. The rhetoric was intense. People were using hashtags accusing Prime Minister Narendra Modi of genocide against farmers.

Indian law prohibits the publication online of any material authorities deem as defamatory, or that could incite violence. It allows the government to issue emergency blocking orders against tech platforms. In the wake of the Jan. 26 violence, Modi's government asked Twitter to block hundreds of accounts. At first, Twitter complied.

But after an outcry over press freedom, the tech company reinstated The Caravan's account and several others. The government then retaliated and slapped Twitter with a non-compliance notice.

Now Twitter is caught between complying with Indian law and defending free speech, in what could eventually be its biggest market a tech-savvy country with nearly 1.4 billion people.

"It depends on how you read the law, but I think that's a pretty difficult position to be in," said Radhika Jhalani, a lawyer who volunteers with the Software Freedom Law Center in New Delhi.

"What happens to your stated policies and values?"

Jose was never told why his magazine's account was suspended.

"The Caravan did not use any of those hashtags the government was taking objection to," Jose told NPR. "I can imagine some activists using it, but no respectable media outlet would."

He knew, however, that the Indian government had not been pleased with The Caravan's recent reporting. Days earlier, Jose, his publisher and other prominent Indian journalists had sedition cases filed against them, over their reporting about the farmer protests. A Caravan contributor was arrested in Delhi while covering the story.

Still, Jose was surprised that Twitter complied with the government's order. The tech company says it "exists to empower voices to be heard," and that it values an "open internet" and "free expression." In January, Twitter banned then U.S. President Donald Trump, after the Capitol insurrection, for repeatedly breaking its rules against incitement of violence and false claims of election fraud.

"We just saw Twitter getting a lot of appreciation for the way it handled former President Trump's way of using Twitter to lie, to use disinformation and so forth," Jose says. "But when it came to India, it was a surprise as well as a shock to see such an important social media company actually getting bullied here."

"What happens to your stated policies and values and what you stand for?" Jose asked.

In a blog post about the situation, Twitter said it will "continue to advocate for the right of free expression on behalf of the people we serve."

"We remain committed to safeguarding the health of the conversation occurring on Twitter, and strongly believe that the Tweets should flow," it said.

The social network reinstated the Caravan's account in less than a day. It kept some others blocked though, and it took what it called "a range of actions" against more than 500 accounts "for clear violations of Twitter's rules." It reduced the visibility of some hashtags. It suspended some accounts only inside India, allowing them to remain visible from other locations. None of the accounts that continue to be suspended belong to activists or media, Twitter said.

"Because we do not believe that the actions we have been directed to take are consistent with Indian law, and, in keeping with our principles of defending protected speech and freedom of expression, we have not taken any action on accounts that consist of news media entities, journalists, activists, and politicians," the company said. "To do so, we believe, would violate their fundamental right to free expression under Indian law."

But how do you define an activist, or a journalist? And what happens when Twitter's definitions are different from the government's?

"How do we make sense of companies that have such enormous power?"

The standoff in India shows the difficult balance Twitter is trying to strike between its professed values, its business interests in a fast-growing market, and increasing pressure to remove speech that governments don't like, not just in India but in other countries around the world.

"Turkey is a good example where you have a nominally democratic country with some severe pressures on the fundamentals of democracy, basic human rights protections," said David Kaye, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, who previously served as the United Nation's special rapporteur on freedom of expression. "The government of Turkey will quite regularly make demands that Twitter take take down content of journalists, of activists, of Kurdish reporters."

India and Turkey both rank in the top five countries that requested Twitter remove content in the first half of 2020, along with Japan, Russia and South Korea, according to the company's latest transparency report. The Indian government sent nearly 2,800 removal requests in that period, more than twice as many as it sent in all of 2019. Twitter says it complied with 14% of those requests.

Social media has given people who traditionally have not had much power a voice and a way to organize, from the Arab Spring protests a decade ago to the Black Lives Matter movement today.

But Twitter, Facebook and other platforms have also become a potent megaphone for people in power including India's Modi, who is now the most followed world leader on Twitter, since Trump was banned.

The uproar that accompanies any decision social media companies make about what gets posted to their platforms and who gets to post it reflects the role they now play as de facto gatekeepers of public conversation, Kaye said.

"Fundamentally, what we're talking about is, how do we make sense of companies that have such enormous power that they can stand up to governments and serve as a kind of protector of rights?" he said. "But at the same time, they have this massive impact that can undermine democratic institutions. And we see that in disinformation, we see that in how they deal with hate speech."

Twitter and other social media platforms have grown large enough that they can appear to be acting at the scale of governments but without the accountability of democratically elected leaders or true transparency into their decisions, Kaye said.

"As a matter of democratic principle, we don't want government to be saying what views are legitimate and what views aren't," he said. "Why should we want a company to do that?"

Threat of jail time hovers over Twitter employees

After a virtual meeting between Indian diplomats and Twitter executives, the Indian government issued a statement Feb. 10 defending its actions. It said the problem was not only hashtags about "farmer genocide," but support for certain Twitter accounts from Sikh separatists and India's archrival, Pakistan. It offered no proof publicly. (Many of the protesting farmers are from the Indian state of Punjab, where a majority of residents follow the Sikh faith.)

"Freedom of expression is not absolute and it is subject to reasonable restrictions," the statement said.

Twitter says it has complied with Indian law and is exploring its options. But the Indian government is probably the ultimate arbiter of whether the government's order is legal, says lawyer Jhalani.

"Basically, if the government of India sends Twitter a notice that says this is defamatory content, or this is inciteful speech, the platform is bound to take it down," she explains.

Platforms don't have much choice. India can jail their employees for up to seven years, levy fines or shut them down altogether. Last year, India banned the Chinese video app TikTok, amid a border dispute with Beijing. India was TikTok's biggest market.

"Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn you're all welcome to make money here," India's IT minister, Ravi Shankar Prasad, told parliament last week. "But you have to follow Indian law."

There have been cases, however, of Indian law being applied unevenly. Last year, Facebook was accused of failing to censor illegal hate speech by politicians from Modi's ruling party, in order to preserve relations with his government.

India's Supreme Court is weighing a petition, filed last May, seeking to clarify the Indian government's powers to regulate content on social media platforms. Clarity from India's legal system could help resolve this latest matter with Twitter too, says Kaye, the law professor.

"It's a real opportunity for Twitter's challenge and basically the challenge that all platforms face in India right now to have that resolved by courts rather than by government ministries that are just making demands that are not subject to the same kind of rule of law requirements," he said.

But, he warned, that outcome is not assured. "You could imagine the court saying, 'Look, we're not in a position to judge whether the government was correct here. And so we'll defer to the government.'"

Wariness of foreign interference complicates situation

Modi's Hindu nationalist government in India is particularly touchy about criticism from foreign companies, and even celebrities. It lashed out when climate activist Greta Thunberg, pop star Rihanna, and the U.S. vice president's niece, Meena Harris, all tweeted support for farmer protests.

"The temptation of sensationalist social media hashtags and comments, especially when resorted to by celebrities and others, is neither accurate nor responsible," a government spokesman told reporters Feb. 3.

Last weekend, Indian police arrested a 22-year-old local leader of Thunberg's climate movement, for allegedly sharing a social media toolkit with tips on how to drum up support for the farmer protests.

In parliament, Modi himself railed against "foreign destructive ideology" last week.

"To protect the country, we all must be more aware of this," he told lawmakers. In a speech to tea-growers in northeast India, he warned, somewhat cryptically, of a foreign conspiracy to malign the image of Indian tea.

That's the mood among India's leaders, as Twitter challenges the Indian government over its own laws.

India has slipped in global rankings of tolerance and pluralism. The question is whether tech companies like Twitter are willing to look past that.

At stake, Jhalani says, are a host of values that Twitter and India the world's biggest democracy both purport to want to uphold.

"Your right to dissent, right to freedom of speech and expression, your right to access content," she says. "Basically, all the rights that make you a democracy."

Link:
Twitter In Standoff With India's Government Over Free Speech And Local Law - NPR

Facebooks recent decision to block its Australian users from sharing or viewing news content has provoked a worldwide backlash and accusations of hubris and bullying. The row has also exposed the fragility of Facebooks founding myth: that Mark Zuckerbergs brainchild is a force for good, providing a public space for people to connect, converse and cooperate.

An inclusive public space in the good times, Facebook has yet again proved willing to eject and exclude in the bad times as a private firm ultimately has the right to do. Facebook seems to be a bastion of free speech up to and until the moment its revenue is endangered. At that point, as in the case of the Australian news ban, it defaults to a private space.

My recent paper explores social medias spatial hybridity, arguing that we must stop seeing companies like Facebook as public spaces and platforms for free speech. Equally, given their ubiquity and dominance, we shouldnt see them solely as private spaces, either. Instead, these companies should be defined as corpo-civic spaces a mixture of the two and regulated as such: by internal guidelines as well as external laws.

The recent Australian news block is part of a new set of laws developed in Australia to counter big techs monopoly power. The law in question responds to news companies complaints that they are losing advertising revenue to dominant content-sharing platforms such as Facebook. The law compels Facebook to agree a fee with news companies in an effort to reimburse them for the advertising revenue they lose to Facebook.

After lengthy negotiations during which Google threatened to withdraw from Australia, the company eventually chose to agree to those fees. Facebook didnt follow suit. Instead, as if by the flick of a switch, the company turned off the news in Australia. Caught in the crossfire and also finding themselves blocked on Facebook were charities and government organisations, as well as Pacific communities outside of Australian jurisdiction.

The news block has played poorly for Facebook. Having claimed impotence in the face of growing disinformation for years, Facebooks new-found iron fist has raised eyebrows. But this apparent inconsistency can be explained though perhaps not justified when we see Facebook as a public space with private interests.

Social media firms arent the only organisations straddled between the private and the public. Shopping centres are a common example in the offline world. So are some apparently public spaces like New Yorks Zuccotti Park where, in 2011, Occupy Wall Street protesters found themselves evicted both by police and by the parks private owners, Brookfield Properties.

Social media platforms operate similarly. Just as a shopping centre relies on footfall, Facebook profits from active users on its platform. For Facebook, this profit is generated almost entirely via the revenue provided by online advertising.

It shouldnt surprise us that, when confronted with the choice of whether or not to hand over some of that revenue to other companies, Facebook chose not to even if that decision deprives Australian users of news content and a civic space to share and discuss it.

The Australian news block is the latest example of a social media company falling short of its own principles. Governed by community standards that are effectively in-platform laws, platforms such as Facebook have a history of enforcing their rules on an ad-hoc basis. For years, researchers have argued that this system is inadequate, inconsistent and open to abuse.

Most glaring is social medias inconsistent enforcement of its own community standards. Facebook and Instagrams moderation has previously targeted womens nipples and has forced sex workers offline, while self-professed Nazis were only forced from Facebook after their participation in the US Capitol riots on January 6 2021.

During the run-up to the US election in 2020, Mark Zuckerberg actually invited regulation from the government, which seemed to be an admission that Facebook had grown beyond its ability to regulate itself. Yet, as weve seen with events in Australia, the corporate half of these online civic spaces baulks at any external regulation that might be bad for business.

So how should we regulate these hybrid spaces with competing and sometimes contradictory interests? My recent paper turns to third space theory for answers. Third space theory has been used to understand spatially ambiguous places, like when peoples homes become their workplaces, or when people feel a tension between their ancestral and adopted homes.

When applied to ambiguous spaces between the corporate and the civic, third space theory can help us better understand the unique regulatory challenges associated with social media companies. Facebook, for instance, is neither a wholly corporate nor a wholly civic space: its a corpo-civic one.

A corpo-civic governance approach would recognise that to heavily penalise and restrict social media companies would be to risk dismantling valuable civic spaces. At the same time, to see Facebook solely as a platform for free speech gives it licence to place maximising profits above ethics and human rights.

Instead, a corpo-civic governance model could apply international human rights standards to content moderation, putting the protection of people above the protection of profits. This is not dissimilar from the standards we expect of shopping centres, which may have their own private security policies but which must nevertheless abide by state law.

Because social media platforms are global and not local like shopping centres, it will be important for the laws that govern them to be transnational. Facebook may have blocked the news for Australians, but it wouldnt make the same decision for hundreds of millions of users across several different countries.

Australia might be Ground Zero for laws aimed at reining in big tech, but its certainly not the only country drafting them. Having those state regulators work together on transnational policies will be crucial. In the meantime, events in Australia are a warning for tech companies and state regulators alike about social medias hybrid nature, and the tension between people and profits that emerge from corpo-civic spaces.

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After blocking Australian news, Facebooks free speech myth is dead and regulators should take notice - The Conversation UK

Last Monday, following over a month in exile after being dropped from Amazon Web Services, Googles Play Store, and Apples App Store, the social media app Parler returned to life with a new hosting service and new content guidelines. Parler has become popular among the pro-Donald Trump right, as tech companies have increasingly cracked down on far-right content over the last year, and it now boasts 20 million users on what it calls the worlds premier free speech platform. Parler is just one part of a mass conservative reaction to increasing social media scrutiny of Republican commentators and politicians, culminating in Twitters permanent ban of President Trump. But although legal experts agree the social media bans that have led to the migration to Parler do not violate free speech, the fact that so few companies control the dissemination of speech in America should concern those across the political spectrum.

It is generally accepted by legal scholars that freedom of speech does not mean that social media platforms cannot ban or restrict the speech of whoever they like, just as any business can deny service based on non-demographic categories. This is explicitly encoded in the Section 230 provision of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which allows platform hosts to restrict user-submitted content as long as they are doing so in a good-faith attempt to remove objectionable content. But free speech, in common parlance, is more than just a legal principle. It is an important principle of an open society. The idea that everyone should be able to have a say no matter their opinion is central to the functioning of a liberal democracy, and most Americans agree.

When it comes to hateful speech in particular, though, opinions are more split. Philosopher Karl Popper popularized the paradox of tolerance, the idea that a society that is limitlessly tolerant would be eventually destroyed by the intolerant, and therefore that intolerance should not be protected. But this idea is far from universally accepted. John Rawls wrote in A Theory of Justice that any intolerance, even towards intolerance itself, is unjust, except when it materially limits the liberty of others; for Rawls, the right to equal liberty of speech superseded the harms of intolerance.

Of course, as weve already established, none of this takes away the right of corporations like Facebook or Twitter to restrict speech as much as they like on their own platforms. But in the 21st century, when fewer and fewer companies have oligopolies over avenues of user-submitted speech, these restrictions have shifted from a free-speech issue to one of corporate control. It isnt a new phenomenon for speech to be controlled by corporations the average person has a far greater likelihood of getting a message out to people today than they did before the Internet but now the same handful of companies control speech everywhere in the country. This includes platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and YouTube, but weve also seen drastic actions taken by web hosting companies like Amazon (as with Parler), or payment service companies like Mastercard and Visa.

In a pre-Internet world, it was clearly reasonable that the local newspaper or a journal of amateur fiction could restrict what users could submit to their pages. But what if youre a long-form video creator, and theres only one platform that most Americans view videos on? Social media platforms, which now serve as leading forms of entertainment, news, interpersonal interaction, and activism, are increasingly becoming a public square for our collective expression. It should then be concerning that we could count on two hands the number of companies it would take to effectively wipe content off the Internet.

Unfortunately, the defense of social media speech is a hard line to walk in Washington, since it requires defending the people you despise most across political lines. (Even as I write this article, its difficult to defend controversial social media posts when the ones that precipitated post-Jan. 6 social media takedowns were mostly conspiratorial, anti-democratic nonsense.) Theres a reason that social media CEOs keep getting hauled into congressional hearings, and its because theyre the few unlucky people in America that both Democrats and Republicans agree to dislike. Both Trump and President Joe Biden have expressed interest in repealing Section 230 protections, which would make social media companies legally liable for content posted on their platforms.

Yet while many Democrats see Section 230 as protecting social media companies from having to remove objectionable content, and Republicans see it as protecting social media bans of conservatives, a repeal of Section 230 is a misguided move that would get neither side what they want. To the GOPs point, repealing the bill would make platforms legally liable for user-submitted statements on their platforms, which is patently ridiculous when there are billions of posts made every day and no feasible way to screen them effectively. Platforms would effectively be forced to prevent any speech that could legally damage them, leading to speech restrictions far outstripping what we see today. (Its also ironic that the pro-business Republicans would endorse a Section 230 repeal that would be far more threatening to corporate independence than any law the Democrats could even dream of passing.)

To the Democrats objections, though Section 230 does keep social media companies from being legally responsible for hateful or violent user posts, a repeal of Section 230 would remove the law that gives those platforms the right to safely remove that content without expecting a costly First Amendment suit. In summary, no matter how bad the Internet might seem now, a regime that makes Internet companies legally responsible for the content they do not create and cannot feasibly review is not just unjust, but also unwise.

One of the reasons that this issue is so difficult to solve is that our interests in freedom of speech usually do not extend to speech by the other side. While liberals and leftists have had a tendency to rejoice when social media platforms take down the accounts of prominent conservatives, they have reason for concern as well. Not only do bans of conservatives help fuel the sorts of alt-right platforms that have radicalized so many, but left-wing groups have also been the target of mass social media bans. Its not hard to see that escalating, especially as Amazon battles against efforts to unionize. Even if many on the left might agree with social media companies bans of conservative figures, they would be wise to doubt whether international megacorporations are the best actors to be handing them out.

Of course, that selective attention to speech rights isnt restricted to liberals. Take Parler, for example, which touts itself as a bastion of free speech and intellectual openness. Meanwhile, in its actual policy, Parler is actually a far more restrictive social media network than its competitors: it has forbidden content such as fecal matter, obscene usernames, unrelated comments like f you, and the promotion of marijuana, all of which are allowed on Twitter. Furthermore, Parler has banned parody accounts and accounts critical of Parler, and the platform has conducted mass purges of left-wing accounts and of those supporting Antifa. For all the cries of social media censorship from the right, the network they promote to counter this is far more restrictive, except for the sorts of content that Parler has actually become the new home for far-right conspiracy theories, conservative echo chambers, and a collective dissociation from reality.

If not Section 230 or alternative platforms, what are the actual answers to free-speech issues on social media? Unfortunately, there arent any easy ones. Its not legally reasonable to mandate platforms to host content they do not want to, nor is it reasonable to repeal Section 230 and hold them responsible for the content they do host. The former would be a massive overreach into companies rights, and the latter would, as discussed, end up changing the Internet for the worse. At the end of the day, this is a constitutional dilemma that requires us to weigh our societys value for free speech and expression with the right to deny service. Both these rights are stretched to their limits, as mainstream political speech has increasingly radicalized, and that denial of service has ever-greater consequences due to corporate centralization.

So even if they cannot solve our legal issues, it would help us all if we returned to the aforementioned dialogue on the paradox of tolerance. Is it indeed the case that we as a society cannot tolerate intolerance, lest that very intolerance destroy us? Or should we only restrict speech when it violates others liberties and did Trump violate our liberties by attacking democracy? The answers to these questions are not legal, or even rational, but moral. But it is only with these answers that we can come up with consistent guidelines around speech and, one way or another, save the Internet.

Art by Andrew Diep for the UC San Diego Guardian.

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Social Media Bans Are About More Than Just Free Speech - The UCSD Guardian Online

I read with alarm about the proposed free speech law and the governments plans for a university free speech champion (Proposed free speech law will make English universities liable for breaches, 16 February).

I want to highlight the significant work of students to promote free speech, including hosting speakers drawn from a broad political spectrum and facilitating debates about the most controversial issues of the day, such as interpretations of feminism, Islam, and gender identity.

I encourage the government to engage with our work before passing legislation that replaces it. This is not the first attempt of its kind Toby Youngs bid to co-opt students for his Free Speech Union ended in failure when students realised the agenda: the claiming of free speech as property of the political right.

Indeed, it was after a recommendation from Prof Eric Kaufmann, an adviser to the Free Speech Union, that the free speech champion policy was proposed. I fear this means a carefully chosen arbitrator, to preside over free speech on campus, serving to further a free-speech land grab. Benjamin Mulready-Carroll Vice-president, Bristol Free Speech Society

Last autumn, Gavin Williamson threatened universities with cuts to funding if they did not adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism, the expanded definition of which includes accusing Israel of being a racist endeavour. Now he proposes that universities allow people to sue for alleged breaches of free speech. If I have this right, the governments position is that if I say in a lecture that I believe Israel to be an apartheid state, then my university should sanction me. However, I will then be able to sue my university for infringing on my right to express my political opinions.

Also, the policy would appear to prevent questioning the existence of the state of Israel among academics and students, but also enforce the right of fascists to be invited to speak on campus. These inconsistencies suggest, perhaps, that none of this is about actually protecting free speech or combating antisemitism, but is instead a cynical exercise in weaponising both for political gain. As a Jew and an academic, these government proposals send a chill down my spine. Dr Simon Behrman Associate professor of law, University of Warwick

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Hidden dangers in the proposed free speech law - The Guardian