How Government Pressure Has Turned Transparency Reports From Free Speech Celebrations To Censorship Celebrations

from the this-is-not-good dept

For many years now, various internet companies have released Transparency Reports. The practice was started by Google years back (oddly, Google itself fails me in finding its original trasnparency report). Soon many other internet companies followed suit, and, while it took them a while, the telcos eventually joined in as well. Google's own Transparency Report site lists out a bunch of other companies that now issue such reports:

We've celebrated many of these transparency reports over the years, often demonstrating the excesses of attempts to stifle and censor speech or violate users privacy, and in how these reports often create incentives for these organizations to push back against those demands. Yet, in an interesting article over at Politico, a former Google policy manager warns that the purpose of these platforms is being flipped on its head, and that they're now being used to show how much these platforms are willing to censor:

Fast forward a decade and democracies are now agonizing over fake news and terrorist propaganda. Earlier this month, the European Commission published a new recommendation demanding that internet companies remove extremist and other objectionable content flagged to them in less than an hour — or face legislation forcing them to do so. The Commission also endorsed transparency reports as a way to demonstrate how they are complying with the law. Indeed, Google and other big tech companies still publish transparency reports, but they now seem to serve a different purpose: to convince authorities in Europe and elsewhere that the internet giant is serious about cracking down on illegal content. The more takedowns it can show, the better.

If true, this is a pretty horrific result of something that should be a good thing: more transparency, more information sharing and more incentives to make sure that bogus attempts to stifle speech and invade people's privacy are not enabled.

Part of the issue, of course, is the fact that governments have been increasingly putting pressure on internet platforms to take down speech, and blaming internet platforms for election results or policies they dislike. And the companies then feel the need to show the governments that they do take these "issues" seriously, by pointing to the content they do takedown. So, rather than alerting the public to all the stuff they don't take down, the platforms are signalling to governments (and some in the public too, frankly) that they frequently take down content. And, unfortunately, that's backfiring, as it's making politicians (and some individuals) claim that this just proves the platforms aren't censoring enough.

The pace of private sector censorship is astounding — and it’s growing exponentially.

The article talks about how this is leading to censorship of important and useful content, such as the case where an exploration of the dangers of Holocaust revisionism got taken down because YouTube feared that a look into it might actually violate European laws against Holocaust revisionism. And, of course, such censorship machines are regularly abused by authoritarian governments:

Turkey demands that internet companies hire locals whose main task is to take calls from the government and then take down content. Russia reportedly is threatening to ban YouTube unless it takes down opposition videos. China’s Great Firewall already blocks almost all Western sites, and much domestic content.

Similarly, a recent report on how Facebook's censorship of reports of ethnic cleansing in Burma are incredibly disturbing:

Rohingya activists—in Burma and in Western countries—tell The Daily Beast that Facebook has been removing their posts documenting the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya people in Burma (also known as Myanmar). They said their accounts are frequently suspended or taken down.

That article has many examples of the kind of content that Facebook is pulling down and notes that in Burma, people rely on Facebook much more than in some other countries:

Facebook is an essential platform in Burma; since the country’s infrastructure is underdeveloped, people rely on it the way Westerners rely on email. Experts often say that in Burma, Facebook is the internet—so having your account disabled can be devastating.

You can argue that there should be other systems for them to use, but the reality of the situation right now is they use Facebook, and Facebook is deleting reports of ethnic cleansing.

Having democratic governments turn around and enable more and more of this in the name of stopping "bad" speech is acting to support these kinds of crackdowns.

Indeed, as Europe is pushing for more and more use of platforms to censor, it's important that someone gets them to understand how these plans almost inevitably backfire. Daphne Keller at Stanford recently submitted a comment to the EU about its plan, noting just how badly demands for censorship of "illegal content" can turn around and do serious harm.

Errors in platforms’ CVE content removal and police reporting will foreseeably, systematically, and unfairly burden a particular group of Internet users: those speaking Arabic, discussing Middle Eastern politics, or talking about Islam. State-mandated monitoring will, in this way, exacerbate existing inequities in notice and takedown operations. Stories of discriminatory removal impact are already all too common. In 2017, over 70 social justice organizations wrote to Facebook identifying a pattern of disparate enforcement, saying that the platform applies its rules unfairly to remove more posts from minority speakers. This pattern will likely grow worse in the face of pressures such as those proposed in the Recommendation.

There are longer term implications of all of this, and plenty of reasons why we should be thinking about structuring the internet in better ways to protect against this form of censorship. But the short term reality remains, and people should be wary of calling for more platform-based censorship over "bad" content without recognizing the inevitable ways in which such policies are abused or misused to target the most vulnerable.

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Filed Under: censorship, filtering, free speech, transparency reports