No, Facebook Shouldn’t Be the Arbiter of Political Speech
By A. G. HAMILTON on National Review
Those attempting to cajole Facebook to censor political speech do not want these same standards applied to them.
Misinformation, spin, and false claims have been part of politics since America’s founding. To secure the 1800 presidential election, Thomas Jefferson infamously hired a hatchet man named James Callender to spread false rumors about John Adams wanting a war with France. The American approach to political speech has always been to promote more speech to counter such attacks, with the media tasked as the institution responsible for informing the public of the truth. But some appear ready to try a new approach.
As Facebook has been updating its policies regarding ads, it’s met with backlash focused on their refusal to ban political ads with false content. Some in the media, and many Democrats, are demanding that Facebook police the content of political ads on their platform. Facebook responded with proposals of its own — including a planned policy of labeling false posts as such and providing users with links to other sources — but that wasn’t enough for its critics. Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren accused the company of “taking money to promote lies”.
News organizations have framed the story as on in which Facebook is allowing politicians to lie to voters on its platform. That narrative relies on the dubious presumption that the platform should be tasked with determining the veracity of political speech, and that has never been the way we have treated political ads. In fact, some of the people complaining about Facebook’s treatment of political ads work for networks such as ABC, NBC, and CBS, which often run political ads that can be considered false or misleading. Of course, they don’t really have a choice: The FCC has interpreted the Federal Communications Act to mean that stations cannot generally reject political ads because they believe them to be false.
POLITICS & POLICY
No, Facebook Shouldn’t Be the Arbiter of Political Speech
By A. G. HAMILTON
October 25, 2019 6:16 PM
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at a House Financial Services Committee hearing in Washington, D.C., October 23, 2019 (Erin Scott/Reuters)
Those attempting to cajole Facebook to censor political speech do not want these same standards applied to them.
Misinformation, spin, and false claims have been part of politics since America’s founding. To secure the 1800 presidential election, Thomas Jefferson infamously hired a hatchet man named James Callender to spread false rumors about John Adams wanting a war with France. The American approach to political speech has always been to promote more speech to counter such attacks, with the media tasked as the institution responsible for informing the public of the truth. But some appear ready to try a new approach.
As Facebook has been updating its policies regarding ads, it’s met with backlash focused on their refusal to ban political ads with false content. Some in the media, and many Democrats, are demanding that Facebook police the content of political ads on their platform. Facebook responded with proposals of its own — including a planned policy of labeling false posts as such and providing users with links to other sources — but that wasn’t enough for its critics. Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren accused the company of “taking money to promote lies”.
News organizations have framed the story as on in which Facebook is allowing politicians to lie to voters on its platform. That narrative relies on the dubious presumption that the platform should be tasked with determining the veracity of political speech, and that has never been the way we have treated political ads. In fact, some of the people complaining about Facebook’s treatment of political ads work for networks such as ABC, NBC, and CBS, which often run political ads that can be considered false or misleading. Of course, they don’t really have a choice: The FCC has interpreted the Federal Communications Act to mean that stations cannot generally reject political ads because they believe them to be false.
So why the outrage over Facebook applying the same standards as those television networks?
First, right-leaning news sources have been very successful at spreading their message on Facebook. Outlets such as Fox News and the Daily Wire regularly place among the most shared news outlets on Facebook.
Second, many Democrats (and their allies in the media) view the Facebook kerfuffle as an opportunity to outsource censorship of their political opponents to a private company. That became rather obvious during Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony at a congressional hearing this week. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) used her time to badger Zuckerberg, insisting that Facebook was choosing to allow politicians to use their platform to spread falsehoods. She also demanded to know what Zuckerberg said to allegedly “far-right figures” at private dinners, using her platform as a member of Congress to shame Zuckerberg for associating with people she disagrees with politically. Some of the people who the Congresswoman attempted to portray as beyond the pale include mainstream conservative media figures such as Townhall’s political editor Guy Benson, former Washington Free Beacon editor Matt Continetti, and CNN commentator Mary Katherine Ham. The exchange was telling. The real source for the pushback against Zuckerberg on the left is the desire to force online platforms like Facebook to censor its political opponents.
It is worth noting that those attempting to cajole Facebook to censor political speech do not want these same standards applied to them. After all, Ocasio-Cortez is the same congresswoman that famously asserted that being “morally right” was more important than being “factually accurate” when confronted with several examples of her false statements. Mainstream media fact-checkers have noted her falsehoods on numerous occasions. Yet there’s been silence among the members of the media outraged over Facebook’s current approach when it comes to these claims.
In keeping with the American tradition, Facebook is taking the right approach by providing users with more speech instead of trying to police speech it does not believe is accurate. More speech is always the answer to bad speech. But Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or her media allies will be hard to convince of that bedrock proposition, because it forces them to debate people they disagree with. One could be forgiven for thinking all they really want to do is silence their political opponents.
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I support completely unfettered free speech. I support whatever hate speech is. I even support call to violence. It all creates a digital trail if anything culminates in a crime.
For example.. Fuck hillary and obama.. will someone please torture them? Oh, and James Younger's mom also. Rip that slut's uterus out with a hanger.
DanielEvans
Level 7
Oct 25, 2019
2
We have had that discussion before. Read up on Rwanda genocide and rethink your hate speech comment.
@Hanno No thanks. Unfettered. Period. Don't care about following or using a nation of savages as a template for my society. I walk the walk, too. I'll antagonize anyone with the truth. And I'll call out anyone hiding behind what they believe is a consensus as to how we are to behave and speak. I hear a black guy calling another black guy a nigger, then I'll interject myself and ask why they call each other nigger, while actually saying that very word- nigger.
I'll speak out agaisnt cultures I hate and throw a put-down the way of someone I'm completely indifferent to. I'm a former Catholic and my family still is. I flat out tell them they're wrong on a huge list of things pertaining to the Gospel.
I constantly tell smokers my swampass smells better than being within 50feet of them. I flip the middle finger to all motorcyclists. Wednesday I cat-called a woman as she entered our county courthouse. I went around the corner and sat in a bench in the shade. Twenty minutes later a sheriff comes out to asked me if I said something. I told him exactly what I did and said, "Newsflash ya white-knight. Men flirt with women." He blabbed something about her being uncomfortable and I said that's her problem as I changed my position on the bench to put my feet up. He knew he had nothing and that I called him out for posing macho to protect a woman. I said, "I won't be Kavanaugh'd or metoo'd." He knew I was NOT being intimidated and just turned to walk away. I said, a little louder, "If you need help being confident without a gun just let me know." He paused but didn't turn around. Then he kept walking.
Same fucking day a few hours later I'm at our downtown grocery store and cross paths with the judge who granted a PFA order to my ex wife because I embarrassed her for her slutting ways on a Facebook post. He warned me about social media posts and that I can't use her name on social media for 3 years. So, to be a total jerk I asked him if he's been monitoring my 4 Facebook profiles as I laughed and kept walking past him.
No entity of any kind at any time will in any way curb my speech you pussy booger.
@DanielEvans
Hate speech is simply speech someone doesn't like.. It's all free Speech. Period.
@DanielEvans thanks for the honesty, now I know what you are.
@Hanno I understand your worries about "hate speech " I guess the term is so undefined as to be useless. I may hate somebody and call them a stupid bastard, but that shouldn't be criminal. Now the US Supreme Court has really gone into depth defining political speech and what is not protected and I believe they have set up a pretty good test. I agree that someone saying "go kill Joe" is a criminal act and should be punished. It is not political speech, it is an order for a criminal act. The problem is so much speech can be interpreted by different people in different ways. The vagueness of language is a problem when one tries to decide what to punish. Just like Kathy Griffin with Trump's faux head cut off. That was political speech and not a call to action. She had the right to do it and she should not have been punished. Rwanda is a difficult and messy situation in which huge numbers of people ended up dead. But, people lying about a group of people and having followers murder them partially as a result of that is not a reason to limit free speech. The best cure for lies is more unfettered speech setting out the truth and making the liars look as the pathetic losers they are. Freedom is not clean, it is a chaotic mess, but giving our freedoms to bureaucrats to manage is not a better solution. People will still end up dead, but it will be because of internment camps and phony criminal charges invented by a ruthless government protecting it's power.
@Hanno Yes. I am the ballsiest person you'll ever know. Fuck Elijah Cummings. It's a good thing for his machine he's dead. If he had been forced to testify he'd have exposed more corruption than he was involved in. He was a disgusting human and legislator. Maybe only his family is missing him.
@Hanno I guess my problem is criminalizing a vague idea of what speech is bad. Political speech is not harmful in that ideas are just being expressed. Disagreement with those ideas should not be a reason to imprison anybody. Threats of harm, orders to harm somebody are already criminal so why invent a new speech code?
@JimbobNE because you can do great harm with what you say without actually telling someone to go kill someone.
Repeatedly telling young people of one race or religious group that their lives suck because another race or religious group “stole” their happiness and success in the long term has the same effect.
Resentment followed by ‘justified’ crime and at no point does anyone take responsibility.
Obviously what constitutes hate crime needs to be discussed, however stating that their is no such thing is not just wrong, it is dangerous.
@Hanno again, inane commentary is justified in making. It maybe stupid, it maybe wrong, but a person's opinion can be countenanced by facts evidence and the truth. Foul baseless comments like those need strong and intelligent people on the other side to show how stupid they are and the whole movement will shrink because it has no real base. If government decides what is hateful, Kathy Griffin could be in jail because she had a picture taken with a fake Trump head. Throwing people in jail for such commentary only gives that crap credence because the speakers will say the government is banning it because it is true.
@JimbobNE again I completely agree with you.
However in the real world the number of strong intelligent people are vastly outnumbered by the stupid and lazy and they are manipulated by the wicked.
None of your arguments support the statement that hate speech does not exist though, That is my issue, the claim that hate speech does not exist. It is like saying racism does not exist because most racist claims are BS and a little bit of racism is OK.
The fact that claims of hate speech today are mostly false, does not negate the the existence and harm real hate speech causes.
@Hanno what I mean by hate speech does not exist is that it is a made up term with no real definition. Do people say hateful things? Yes, but because different people find things hateful, a person who says something meaning it in a positive fashion could be considered using hate speech because another person takes it to mean something hateful. You can't base crimes on opinions. A criminal act must be clearly defined. It is like drawing up a contract you would not say Joe agrees to sell Bob a good car for some money, because everyone would disagree as to what good and some money mean. So you say Joe agrees to sell the motor vehicle with VIN 466887655444668 to Bob for 2500 dollars. Hate speech is a varied and meaningless term. If you say no nobody can say untrue things, we all would be criminally liable due to confusion, just being wrong or a mistake. Putting people in jail for those reasons is not the path of a just government. If you say a person can be punished for knowingly lying in public, we end up trying to prove a person knew what he was saying was false. Look at laws against false statements to a court, they exist, but are so rarely used they are almost pointless. I think you want to punish speech like the Klan is famous for "Colored people are too stupid to be of use and too dishonest to be tolerated." Again, while that abominable statement is vile, banning it serves to limit freedom for everyone. The Klan has made that and other statements like it for more than a century, and it is the strong people fighting the ignorance with intelligence which won out. If the government gets to decide what is a quality statement and what is banned what happens when people who support an issue you despise take over and claim your statements are not valid any longer. Government is a dangerous guardian, because power does corrupt.
Someone should build a new platform to counter Facebook
shj648
Level 6
Oct 25, 2019
2
Exactly, with all of the money Facebook brings in you would think some serious competition would be out there.
Imagine the start up capital you would need competing with FB. Honestly Zuckerberg handled that dim bulb AOC & her cohorts better than I thought. Those " progressive" members of Congress really imagine that White Supremists are everywhere. They have conjured up this Boogie man in their heads . That statistics do not bare out. If they weren't potential law makers it would be hilarious. But the level of delusion they have is dangerous.
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