As Facebook stepped up its efforts to remove content it deemed as hate speech in recent months, such content moderation practices, which could be viewed as censorship, is unlikely to be effective in resolving the problems associated with hate speech, a US civil liberties expert told Sputnik
MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 25th September, 2020) As Facebook stepped up its efforts to remove content it deemed as hate speech in recent months, such content moderation practices, which could be viewed as censorship, is unlikely to be effective in resolving the problems associated with hate speech, a US civil liberties expert told Sputnik.
Mass protests against racial injustice broke out in a number of cities in the United States following the tragic death of George Floyd in May. As the protests turned increasingly violent, a number of right-wing groups responded on social media platforms with racist comments and even threatened to use violence.
In response, US social media giant Facebook began to remove more content that was categorized as "hate speech" from its platform.
According to Facebook's community standards, it defines hate speech as "violent or dehumanizing speech, statements of inferiority, calls for exclusion or segregation based on protected characteristics, or slurs." These characteristics include race, ethnicity, national origin, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, caste, sex, gender, gender identity, and serious disability or disease.
The latest Community Standards Enforcement Report from Facebook showed that the company took 22.5 million actions to remove hate speech content from its platform in the second quarter of this year, more than doubling the 9.6 million actions it took in the first quarter.
However, US experts on civil liberties and freedom of expression argued that Facebook's content moderation practices could be viewed as a form of censorship, which would be not very useful in curbing the kind of hateful and discriminative content it aimed to combat.
"We think individuals are entitled to certain basic freedoms that nobody, who's big enough, powerful enough or influential enough to infringe those freedoms, should have the power to do so, whether they're the government or not the government. It's just when you're not the government, you can't rely on the constitution as a tool to protect your freedoms. You have to look for other tools. I absolutely oppose the enormous amount of censorship that Facebook is doing very openly," Nadine Strossen, a John Marshall Harlan II Professor of Law at the New York Law school who served as the national president of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) from 1991 to 2008, told Sputnik.
The First Amendment of the US Constitution prohibits the US government from making laws that would "abridge the freedom of speech." In a number of high-profile cases in US history, the Supreme Court usually defended controversial speech, including the ones that could be viewed as "hate speech."
For example, when Simon Tam, the lead singer of a rock group, decided to use "The Slants," which was a derogatory term for Asian persons, as the group's name in 2017, the US Supreme Court ruled that Tam's decision should be protected under the First Amendment.
"Speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground is hateful; but the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express 'the thought that we hate'," Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the majority opinion on the case, quoting a famous phrase that Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes used in 1929.
Only under certain emergency situations, when the speech would lead to imminent harm to a specific individual, such speeches would not be protected by the First Amendment.
Nevertheless, the former ACLU president acknowledged that the First Amendment could not dictate Facebook's content moderation practices.
"What Facebook does doesn't violate the First Amendment, because it's a private sector actor completely free of First Amendment constraints. And moreover, it's almost its First Amendment right," she said.
LESS TOLERANT YOUNGER GENERATION
According to a report from The Verge, Facebook employees, who were mostly liberal-leaning, voiced frustrations and demanded that CEO Mark Zuckerberg take decisive actions in removing the content they viewed as hate speech.
Although the idea of freedom of speech has been widely accepted and treasured in the United States, general public opinion has always favored suppressing controversial speech, such as hate speech, professor Strossen explained.
"The fact of the matter is I don't really see a change. Throughout my adult life time, there has always been enormous pressures from the public to censor various kinds of controversial speech. What exactly is considered the most controversial and receives the greatest pressure for censorship varied somewhere overtime. But certainly, one category of speech that has always been deeply unpopular among the public, including liberals and even many civil libertarians, is the so-called hate speech," she said.
The expert gave an example that the ACLU's membership dropped by 15 percent in 1978, after the organization took the controversial stand to defend a neo-Nazi group's plan to march through the Chicago suburb of Skokie, where many Holocaust survivors lived, on the grounds of protecting freedom of speech and assembly.
The civil liberties expert noted that the younger generation, including many employees at Facebook, became less tolerant of controversial speech.
"When you say even Facebook employees are calling for suppression of messages that are inconsistent with their political views, I would say, no. I'm not surprised about Facebook employees because they're predominately liberal and predominately young. Unfortunately, patterns through the last several decades have shown, starting with college campus, students, especially students on the left, have become increasingly intolerant of the expression of ideas that are inconsistent with their political views," she said.
Instead of censoring and removing hateful speech, engaging with those who expressed such opinions on a personal level could make it possible to change their views, professor Strossen suggested.
"I do believe that the best way to respond to ideas that are hateful is by responding to them, but also in reaching out to individual people. I think we have to do both and use the wholesale approach of putting out information that will counteract any myths, misconceptions or disinformation that persuade people to join organizations and extremist groups. But we also have to take opportunities to engage in one-on-one dialogue with people who have those ideas. There're famous examples that even leaders of extremist right-wing groups that have been 'redeemed,' because they were treated with empathy and compassion," she said.
The expert explained that many people's hateful views could have resulted from their social conditions, family problems and drug problems. Solving those underlying problems could help the person abandon the hateful ideology organizations, she added.
