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Course: Wireless Philosophy > Unit 5
Lesson 3: Should online platforms prevent the spread of false information?Should online platforms prevent the spread of false information?
In this Wireless Philosophy video, Ryan Jenkins (professor of Philosophy at Cal Poly) asks whether there is any role for censorship in creating an environment of healthy and productive speech online. How should companies that operate online platforms balance the value of encouraging and protecting free speech with concerns about the spread of falsehoods and unreliable information? Created by Gaurav Vazirani.
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- Given the level/tone of discourse in the US at this very moment, 9/4/2023, how could we ever decide who the regulators would be?(2 votes)
Video transcript
Hi, I’m Ryan Jenkins, a philosophy
professor at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo. Let’s talk about speech. America has a proud tradition of upholding
the right of its citizens to speak freely. This right is embodied in the First
Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids the government
from restricting just about any speech. The advent of the Internet has been
hailed as the greatest boon to free speech since the invention of the printing press. By lowering the cost of publishing
and consuming information, people can communicate
about the world more cheaply, quickly, and easily
than ever before. However, critics charge
that it would be naive to equate access to
information with wisdom. Going back to the 1980s at the dawn
of the computer revolution, for example, critics have warned that access
to information is nearly worthless without critical thinking skills
to separate truth from falsehood. They have also warned that, while
the Internet is a tool that could be used to increase access to information, its physical design
also makes it very simple for just a few actors to control
the speech that is exchanged. So let's consider: Is unrestricted speech
on the Internet good? How should companies
who operate platforms try to nurture an environment of
productive and healthy speech? Consider social
media, for example, which is a place where many
Americans communicate, interact, and consume news
about the world. Mark Zuckerberg has said
he wants Facebook to provide “the primary news
experience that people have.” Already, most Americans consume “at
least some” of their news on social media, and many Americans “often”
get their news from social media. This raises questions about the role of
these platforms in providing or controlling the information that Americans see that
help them form beliefs about the world. Traditional journalistic
organizations like newspapers have long considered it part of
their solemn duty to the public to report only
reliably-sourced information. Social media companies and
Silicon Valley upstarts? Not so much. If Facebook and other social
media platforms are trying to take over the role of a media
outlet, and are profiting from that role, what obligations to society,
and to the truth, do they inherit? One of the ways Facebook presents news
is through its “trending news” section. In mid-2016, Facebook replaced the
human employees who curated this section with a computer algorithm
to pick trending news stories. Fake news stories began appearing in the
trending news section just two days later. These included stories that
alleged that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex ring
out of a pizza parlor in DC, and that Ireland was taking
in American “refugees” fleeing a possible Trump presidency. Now, someone using social media
only needs to read those headlines to see that they’re
almost certainly false, we would hope. But these were some of the
most-shared stories on Facebook in the run-up to the election. In fact, in the three months
leading up to the 2016 election, fake news stories
outperformed real news stories among Facebook shares,
reactions, and comments. As Winston Churchill said, “a lie can get halfway
around the world while the truth is still
putting its pants on.” No one should be content
with this state of affairs. It’s bad for our ability
to form beliefs reliably and ruinous to our democracy. But is censorship the answer? A deep faith in the value of free speech has led many companies to resist
calls to censor the content they host. It’s un-American, they might say. But at the same time, some companies have been willing to
censor their content in other countries that have fewer protections for speech. Consider Google’s operations in China. According to the New York Times, “The ruling Communist Party
tightly controls media inside China and employs one of the world’s
most sophisticated systems of internet censorship,” informally called the
Great Firewall of China. This includes, for example, censoring information about
the religious sect Falun Gong or the 1989 Tiananmen
Square massacre. Google cooperates
with this censorship by filtering the search results
they show users in China. In their defense, Google has argued, “While removing search results is
inconsistent with Google’s mission, providing no information is more
inconsistent with our mission” If free speech is valuable for Americans, then why is it not also valuable
for the people in other countries? Do social media companies
have the same moral obligations to regulate speech
wherever they operate? Maybe this misses the whole point. Maybe, instead of censorship, the solution
to bad speech is simply more speech: counter falsehoods with the truth. Let the “marketplace of ideas”
sort the good from the bad speech. But if things were this simple, then we would expect there to be a
lot fewer people with ridiculous beliefs: beliefs that the moon landing was faked, that the earth is flat, or that the world is run by a
cabal of alien lizard-people. America has fewer restrictions on
speech than almost anywhere else so how come the truth hasn’t overcome
these kinds of absurd falsehoods by now? Shouldn’t America, with the freest
speech environment in the world, boast the best-informed citizenry? Yeah, right. Anyone who’s had a conversation with
a conspiracy theorist knows it’s unlikely that any amount of speech will
persuade them out of their beliefs. So, at least some regulation
seems acceptable in the interest of promoting the truth or
discouraging falsehoods. And as those platforms become a
critical channel for America's discourse, they cannot help but be thrust
into this role of regulating speech. How should they make these decisions? What considerations,
like social responsibility, civility, or simply
truthfulness, should they weigh when considering what speech to
allow or forbid on their platforms? What do you think?