Facebook's Latest Fake News 'Purge' Terminates Several Accounts Known For Their Criticism Of Law Enforcement

from the something-else-that-works-in-theory,-but-is-a-complete-abortion-in-practice dept

Moderating at scale is a nightmare. Anything you do will be wrong. This doesn't mean you shouldn't try. This doesn't mean you shouldn't listen to criticism. Just be aware every move you make will cause unintended collateral damage. Making everyone happy is impossible. Making everyone angry is inevitable.

Mike Masnick's long, thoughtful post -- springing from multiple platforms' booting of Alex Jones -- pointed out two things that seem to get forgotten when discussing social media moderation:

1. Platforms can remove users with impunity without raising legal or ethical issues. 2. This shouldn't prevent us from expressing our concern about how these moderation issues are handled.

This is raising its head again because Facebook's efforts to eradicate fake news and untrustworthy news sources has removed several pages belonging to controversial news sources. For whatever reason, most of these sites are strongly associated with police accountability efforts. Radley Balko listed these sites on Twitter:

As part of its purge, Facebook has removed the pages of several police accountability/watchdog/critic groups, including Cop Block, the Free Thought Project, and Police the Police. They've also apparently severely restricted activity for the Photography Is Not a Crime page. — Radley Balko (@radleybalko) October 12, 2018

If you can't read/see the tweet, it says:

As part of its purge, Facebook has removed the pages of several police accountability/watchdog/critic groups, including Cop Block, the Free Thought Project, and Police the Police. They've also apparently severely restricted activity for the Photography Is Not a Crime page.

To critics of cop critics, this tweet seemed like hypocrisy. Several quoted an earlier tweet by Balko about platform moderation. That one said:

Private companies like FB and Google have every right to remove content they find objectionable. No one owes Alex Jones a platform.

This is where critics of Balko and others stopped reading. This was the supposed hypocrisy of the anti-Jones, anti-Trump, anti-cop, anti-whatever on full display. But that wasn't the end of the tweet. Here's the rest:

But when politicians demand removal with implied threats, I start to worry. Senators shouldn't be deciding what's offensive.

That's the real issue. When the government starts guiding moderation efforts of private companies, the First Amendment comes under fire. But it seems politicians on both sides would rather see speech they don't like disappear than uphold the Constitution. Case in point, Senator Mark Warner, who took to Twitter to applaud Facebook's purge.

Good step by Facebook. Now that Russia’s playbook is out in the open, more bad actors are going to take advantage. Social media companies are going to have to continue being proactive in identifying and responding to bad actors using their platforms. https://t.co/uu6C8IbbsP — Mark Warner (@MarkWarner) October 11, 2018

If you can't read/see the tweet, it says:

Good step by Facebook. Now that Russia's playbook is out in the open, more bad actors are going to take advantage. Social media companies are going to have to continue being proactive in identifying and responding to bad actors using their platforms.

Maybe so, but the vanishing of a handful of cop accountability-focused pages isn't exactly what comes to mind when someone's talking about Russian interference. Encouraging platforms to engage in further moderation may seem innocuous, but the reality of the situation is there is constant pressure -- applied by people like Senator Warner -- for platforms to do more, more, more because some speech they don't care for can still be found on the internet.

The more politicians push for action, the more collateral damage they will cause. They may feel there's no Constitutional problem since they're not directly mandating moderation efforts. But they are harming free speech, if only indirectly at this point.

Certainly Facebook is free to nuke accounts it finds questionable, but each moderation move expands the definition of untrustworthy to encompass entities who present newsworthy items with biased reporting. Anyone using the platform is free to find more balanced reporting. Senators standing back and applauding bad moderation moves helps no one.

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Filed Under: content moderation, criticism, election interference, fake news, law enforcement, moderation at scale

Companies: cop block, facebook, free thought project, photography is not a crime, pinac, police the police