The speech struggle

Freedom of Expression is an essential pillar of any equitable society

What are the limits of Freedom of Expression (FoE)? FoE is an essential pillar of any equitable society. But even the most evolved democracies place some restrictions on FoE. These restrictions differ vastly from nation to nation, for historical reasons.  

The dynamics of social media (SM), and its amplifying power change the game. Any random anonymous individual can set up social media accounts, and if that person understands the algorithms of SM influence, he/she/they can connect directly to millions.

As a result, social media platforms have had to develop their own FoE moderation techniques — and they have struggled. Hate speech, racism, doxxing (revealing the private data of an individual), incitement to violence, threats of violence, threats of self-harm — these are some categories, which lead to blocking of content, or banning of users. However, many filtering decisions are subjective and the first line of moderation is usually a machine.

An entirely new FoE conundrum has arisen because the social media platforms depend on engagement for bread, butter and jam. Engagement equals eyeballs, and ad-revenues. But engagement is also orthogonal to the truth.

An astrophysics lecture on the where and how of Saturn and Jupiter in conjunction will draw less engagement than some nonsense about how that conjunction affects sex lives. Affirmation is also important for engagement. If a chunk of social media users believe the world is run by a cabal of child-abusers, fostering the delusion will keep them more engaged than offering a reality check that debunks their fantasies.

The truth can hurt. But lies eventually hurt even more. It is no accident that populist governments with obscene agendas have come to power in many countries, via the ballot box. Those authoritarian governments are led by demagogues who have learnt the art of lying fluently and virally, via social media.

There’s the old trope that described the dictator Stalin as “Genghis Khan with a telephone”. The 21st century version would describe an entire rogues’ gallery of contemporary politicians as “Wannabe Hitlers with Twitter and Facebook”.

Last month we saw an amazing demonstration of the malignant manipulative power of social media. A man who lost an election by 8 million votes convinced many supporters that he had won and incited a riot where at least five people died.

At the same time, social media has an enormous power for good. It can force authoritarian governments to pullback from certain excesses because it allows citizens to present antithetical news and views.

We’ve seen plenty of examples of this too. The most recent are the resistance to the coup in Myanmar, and the farmers’ protests. In both instances, people on the spot have successfully countered the official narratives, via social media. Indeed, both protests have gone global solely due to social media networks.

The usual response to this is for the government in question to try and shut down the embarrassing social media voices, or failing that, to shut down the internet totally. Even that drastic solution doesn’t necessarily work.

News has continuously trickled out of Hong Kong, for instance, and out of Kashmir, despite internet shutdowns and high levels of physical and internet surveillance.  Somebody with a smartphone always smuggles footage out.

One of the cornerstones of pushback against an inimical regime, via social media networks, is anonymity. Hong Kong has been a spectacular case-study. The tech-savvy population there created an amorphous resistance network, with anonymous leaders who have obscured their identities.

There is a conundrum for authoritarian governments taking flak from social media. If social media is completely shutdown, the authoritarians lose the enormous investments made to use those channels to disseminate lies. If, however, they can persuade the platforms to shut down the voices they don’t like and turn social media into a one-way street, it’s a win-win deal for the authoritarians.

This is where the eyeball-to-eyeball confrontations are currently taking place, in talks between the social media platforms and the governments asking them to ban thousands of accounts. The platforms have investments, the authoritarians have investments; who blinks first?