Facebook and Twitter are players in global politics now. Are they ready?
— and just when there was nothing left to say, it happened. There were detailed justifications for the ban when it came , but the timing suggests a simpler logic. As long as Trump was president, platforms couldn’t punish him. Once he’d lost the election, he was fair game.
We tend to talk about moderation politics as something that happens between platforms and users , but the Trump debacle shows there’s another side. Like all companies, social platforms have to worry about the politics of the countries they operate in. If companies end up on the wrong side of those politics, they could face regulatory blowback or get ejected from the country entirely.
This kind of realpolitik isn’t what deplatformers had in mind. The goal was to push Facebook and the others to take responsibility for their impact on the world. But instead of making Facebook and the other platforms more responsible, it has made them more unapologetic about the political realities. These are just corporations protecting themselves. There’s no longer any reason to pretend otherwise.
The language of the treaties is purposefully vague, and enforcement mostly consists of public shaming. But you can see the beginnings of an international consensus there, nudging us towards a less oppressive and violent world. Optimists might see the shift towards deplatforming and away from free speech extremism as a step in the right direction. Reddit-style speech libertarianism is very much an American concept, relying on the relatively unusual protections of the First Amendment. But rather than drifting towards an international consensus, York sees platforms as simply cut adrift, doing whatever fits the needs of their employees and users at a given moment.
In practice, most of the Oversight Board rulings trace the line where differences of opinion give way to political violence. Of, 13 are directly related to racial or sectarian conflicts, whether dealing with Kurdish separatists, anti-Chinese sentiment in Myanmar, or a jokey meme about the Armenian genocide. The specifics of the ruling might be about a particular Russian term for Azerbaijanis, but the potential for mass oppression and genocide looms in the background of each one.
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