The fight against misinformation needs a hero like you.
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A paper by Dan Trottier states, "Surveillance practices result in privacy violations (boyd 2008), but also compromised social relations..." For example, online surveillance led Edward Jordan to kill himself after he was falsely identified as being a cat killer.
According to Facebook’s Government Requests for User Data, there were more than 50,000 total requests in the U.S. from January 2019 to June 2019—more than ever before. Censoring users means guilty people can't post legal but distasteful and incriminating information.
According to a survey of 1,221 federal, state and local US law enforcement, 4 out of 5 officials used social media to gather intelligence. Censoring people presents a sanitised but inaccurate view of society, making it harder to spot criminals on social media.
A ProPublica investigation found that Facebook’s rules are opaque to users and inconsistently applied by its thousands of contractors. It concluded, “The company’s hate-speech rules tend to favor elites and governments over grassroots activists and racial minorities.”
Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, stated in 2020 that his social media platform of 2bn+ people should not become the “arbiter of truth,” as that would concentrate too much power in its hands and entangle it in partisan political debates (forcing it to choose sides).
According to a 2020 Pew Research Center survey, 90% of Republicans believed social media sites censored political viewpoints, while 59% of Democrats held the same view. This erodes trust in speech on these platforms, making political discourse on them more polarised.
In Germany, a correlation was found between anti-refugee Facebook posts and attacks on refugees. Karsten Muller and Carlo Schwarz observed that upticks in attacks followed spikes in hate-mongering posts. Social media companies should ban this type of speech.
In Myanmar, military leaders and Buddhist nationalists used social media to slur and demonize the Rohingya Muslim minority ahead of and during a campaign of ethnic cleansing. Facebook admitted it had done too little after seven hundred thousand Rohingya were driven to Bangladesh.
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The Fairness Doctrine, which required broadcasters to air both sides of controversial issues, was repealed in 1987. This was celebrated by Republicans as a victory for free speech. So, social media companies should be allowed to decide which content stays on their platforms.
In 2018, Judge Buchwald of the U.S. District Court ruled that president Trump violated the First Amendment rights of users he blocked on Twitter, by engaging in viewpoint discrimination. This foreshadows how governmental censorship powers could be abused by a despot.