Before we rejoice too much that the treasonous and hate-filled messages of Trump and the Proud Boys has been silenced, consider the implications. The Supreme Court has already recognized that social media platforms are the 21st Century equivalent of soap boxes at the corner of public parks. Without access to these platforms, it is almost impossible to communicate one’s ideas and discuss those ideas with likeminded people in this new Age of Algorithms. That means our Freedom of Speech rights are in the hands of private entities, and thus our speech rights have no judicial protection.
To make matters worse, the tools used by these private entities to censor speech are a combination of algorithms and human decisions. Those algorithms have already proven to be woefully inadequate to stop the spread of falsehoods, while at the same time blocking some posts arbitrarily and unequally. Many innocent posts containing certain words or phrases have resulted in people being sent to “Facebook hell” by algorithms. The social media owners admit that the algorithms will make mistakes, but during the Covid pandemic, the humans who might veto algorithmic censoring decisions are not in the office to catch these errors.
Even when those humans are present, there is no guarantee that the censoring will be objective. After all the decision makers are human, who at times will simply adopt the “I know it when I see it’ approach to meting out punishment for “bad speech”. Moreover, both the humans that design the algorithms and the humans that review the algorithms’ censorship can have their own biases for or against certain posts. “Boys will be boys…” is still a standard by which offensive postings are evaluated.
Our First Amendment rights deserve more protection than what private enterprises promises, let alone delivers.
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