Guest post: Bad effects
Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey at Miscellany Room.
Speaking only for myself, I have no opinion on whether or not Murphy is a bigot or got what she deserved. Certainly I’m aware of the skewed nature of the debate over trans issues and the casual accusations of transphobia; on the other hand, I haven’t scrutinized her writings enough to form an opinion.
For me, it’s just a sense that this kind of thing doesn’t belong in court. I won’t go so far as to say this was a frivolous lawsuit, but it was an utterly predictable and correct result in my opinion, as both a descriptive matter (current law pretty clearly precludes it) and a normative one (that body of law is wise and prudent in this regard).
I don’t know of any principled way to say that Murphy gets to have a judge or jury rule on whether Twitter’s moderation decisions are correct, but Donald Trump and Milo Yiannopolous don’t. Or every Slymepitter who got banned from B&W or Pharyngula don’t get to have a judge decide if Ophelia or PZ acted fairly and consistently. Of course you can say that Murphy’s banning was a bad decision and those other ones were good, and I might agree, but this is a question of who gets to decide that and how.
If disgruntled people can drag social networks and message boards and bloggers into court every time they’re unhappy, you’re not going to like where that leads. The threat of litigation alone is going to make moderation risky, especially for smaller players. People with deep pockets or access to interest groups with free lawyers are going to get deferential treatment from litigation-averse platforms. Terms of service and moderation decisions will get less nuanced so that companies can say “hey, we’re completely consistent, we ban these precise words and nothing else” (or whatever). This is also why I cringe at all the “repeal section 230” proposals from politicians of every stripe.
And all of those bad effects are true even if the courts do a super awesome job of sitting as the Twitter Judicial Review Panel. Which they most certainly would not. I assure you, there are many many judges who you do not want anywhere near these decisions, and here I’m talking less about political or other issue biases and more about simple ignorance — even in 2021, there are a shocking number of judges who are complete Luddites when it comes to the internet.
I don’t know if that makes me a free speech absolutist or not. That terminology gets a little confusing here anyway, in that many people would claim that Murphy is on the side of free speech here because she is fighting against “punishment” for her speech, so then we get into arguments about state action, and free speech rights of platforms vs the rights of their users… and to me that’s all unnecessary, because I think the pragmatic argument against this kind of litigation is so strong that you don’t even need to get into all that.
I generally agree. Twitter’s rules, Twitter’s bullshit interpretation of its own rules and wonky-handed application of punishments. We get to complain…. to Twitter… but I don’t think that higher authorities like governments and judicial systems should be the arbiters of who gets banned.
But having said that, we have a whole bunch of problems here which are new, because nothing like Facebook and Twitter have existed before. They have become de facto standards as means of public expression and banning someone from Twitter or Facebook can amount to banning them from public life. It’s also cruel; it’s banning someone forever from communicating with a group of people they might have begun to call friends or even to rely on. Then there are problems due to bubbles and mobs and malicious purges and shadowbanning… Entire points of view are being erased from public discourse because Twitter wants to make whichever political statement makes it the most money in the short term. The gender critical certainly outnumber the woke, for instance, but you’d never know it by looking at Twitter.
As I’ve said before, it’s the “big” in big tech that’s the problem, not the “tech”. I think governments do need to get involved (and I really hate to say that) but not in arbitrating bans or TOS. I think governments need to force social media platforms to provide better tools for interoperability, so that you can all come to my super paranoid privacy-oriented social media app (let’s call it Fortal) but you can still talk to your friends on Twitter and Facebook. The power of people’s speech should not be limited, but the power of social media platforms to decide what’s heard should. This can only happen by breaking the monopoly, which can only happen through interoperability.
That’s a thoughtful comment. I agree that there are new social problems that we’re facing now because of the proliferation of social media. And I like that you’re thinking about non-censorship-oriented ways of changing it. I have a few quibbles or comments:
“They have become de facto standards as means of public expression and banning someone from Twitter or Facebook can amount to banning them from public life.”
I think this is an overbid. Within the lifetimes of most of us here, you didn’t even know the political opinions of most of the people you interacted with, let alone strangers from across the world, unless they were political figures or celebrities (and even many celebrities stayed apolitical in public). If you wanted to express your political views to a wider audience than your immediate circle of friends, you had to show up at a city council meeting (where mostly only your fellow political animals would be in attendance), or write a letter to the editor of your local newspaper (and hope they publish it). It was a cliche that you weren’t supposed to discuss socially topics like religion, politics, or the Great Pumpkin. If your dentist, or your kid’s hockey coach, or some other loose acquaintance started talking to you about politics, it was often considered a little tacky. Certainly your neighbor from down the street wouldn’t come knocking on your door to demand to know why you had a yard sign for Candidate X, and don’t you know that X is a communist who hates America… but on social media people now take it for granted that it isn’t unusual to know these things about random acquaintances, and that therefore it’s not just normal, but a fundamental part of public life to be able to spout off on these platforms that didn’t even exist until recently.
That old environment was not a lost golden age, obviously. The gatekeepers — the editors and news directors and such — had all sorts of biases, which largely tracked the demographics of those gatekeepers. If I didn’t think there was something to be gained in discussing social issues with strangers across the world, I wouldn’t be here. But I think we need to do much more questioning of this new social norm as we do the question of how to deal with these new gatekeepers.
“The gender critical certainly outnumber the woke, for instance, but you’d never know it by looking at Twitter.”
You’d never know a lot of things about public opinion by looking at Twitter, but I think that has much less to do with moderation policies, and a lot more to do with the fact that relatively few people in the general population use it, while most/all people in some circles (journalism, politics, activism) do.
A recent poll showed that about half of respondents were not familiar with the phrase “cancel culture.” To those of us who follow political Twitter, that’s unthinkable. But we’re the oddballs, not the norm.
Screechy:
But the reality is that some people have access to a platform that can reach the world and others do not. And the same goes for groups and ideologies and points of view, all at the political/algorithmic whim of a company or the actions of a mob with members who know how to work the system. One key thing that’s taken away from people who are banned from social media is an ability to reply and this is one of the most efficient ways for misinformation to spread around a network.Not being an active participant in social media can be harmful to people who have a message and, of course, harmful to that message itself.
A typical misinformation tactic on Twitter is for a disingenuous person to make a lot of bad arguments in a thread. It’s a Gish Gallop, but those individual tweets – and your disinterest in addressing them all – are amplified beyond reason by the dishonest arguer’s followers dishonestly selectively retweeting. And this disinformation propagates around the network without even the need for dishonesty after the first hop. This is one of the reasons JK Rowling has a gagillion haters who haven’t read a single tweet by her. They’ve seen hundreds of quote tweets that make it look as though JKR’s defenders can’t answer simple questions about her supposed bigotry. Nevermind that the questions are nonsensical to begin with or the answers have been taken out of context or whatever. The damage has been done and it spreads unchecked. When people are not around to defend themselves, messages and communities can be erased overnight. It’s not a safe power for anyone to have.
It’s the same thing we’ve been used to for decades but on a scale far more vast than we humans are used to thinking about. It doesn’t matter that this kind of communication is only a generation old, it’s here and it’s an important differential in whether messages can spread and potential recipients reached. If it’s not already the single most important factor, it soon will be.
Well, we’re free to question it and we certainly don’t have to like it (my own feelings on social media are… complicated…) but I don’t think we can do much about it other than trying to address the power imbalance somewhat, which is what I was talking about in my earlier post. It’s not that these platforms are in the wrong hands, as such, I don’t think that’s up to any of us to decide, it’s the fact that this kind of power is in anyone’s hands that’s the problem and that we walked into it far from blindly then pretended not to know what would happen. It’s not that we’ve given people the wrong tools as such, it’s that we threw a crate of cricket bats into a rampaging mob we whipped up ourselves then acted surprised when it didn’t work out for the best.
We now know – and we knew at the time – that there are ways to organise social media platforms so that the power differential is more even and more under the control of the people who use them. I’ve done some work (as have others) on how we might get there from what we have now without too much unpleasantness and the barriers are more easily surmountable than most people expect. There are reasons people start alternative social media platforms (and not just because they’ve been banned) – look at Spinster and Giggle alongside Parler – but they aren’t going to gain traction unless governments do something to break up the monopoly and mandate platform interoperability and a few other things.
True, but that’s only half the picture. When was the last time you saw a news report of any kind without at least one tweet embedded in there? It’s another way Twitter Truth is unduly amplified. Most people who know anything at all about the trans/GC argument know it from conventional news outlets reporting about what’s been said on Twitter, which is almost never on the side of the terven. They’re the same sort of headline that (rightly) enrage Ophelia so much that she posts them here; the ones that begin and end with the assumption that TERFs are evil and that questioning gender authority is forbidden.