Ethics for the Information Age -- Discussion Project on Responsibility for Online Content
Lately there have been calls for the companies that operate social media platforms (like Facebook and Twitter) to take more responsibility for monitoring and restricting the behavior of their users. And those companies have begun to respond by closing users accounts in some cases, and deleting or demoting content in other cases.
Examine Brian Leiter’s argument for removing the ‘safe harbor’ provision that protects online content hosts from being held liable for defamatory content on their sites (Section 230).
Try to decide whether his argument can be applied to the fairness of the following (see links below, if you are not familiar with these events):
a.
The decision of several social media companies to ban Alex Jones of Infowars from their platforms for engaging in hate speech.
b. The decision of Reddit to remove the forum discussing the ‘QAnon’ conspiracy theory and of Facebook to delete all QAnon=related accounts.
c. Facebook’s efforts to diminish the influence of ‘fake news’ and other allegedly harmful content by revising its algorithm and using ‘third-party fact-checkers’ to label some content as false or misleading.
d. Twitter's practice of hidingand/or labelling some tweets posted by By President Trump on the grounds that they violate the platform's terms of service and/or constitute efforts to mislead people about the upcoming election.
Some have complained that these measures amount to ‘a bias against conservatives.’ Is there a danger that these kinds of policies and efforts will squelch legitimate political speech?
Links:
c. https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2019/04/tackling-more-false-news-more-quickly/