Analysis: What a racist massacre tells us about “free speech” online
This past weekend, Twitter and other major platforms were once again scrambling to take down posts and videos that were legal under the First Amendment but violated their policies. In this case, the videos showed a gunman, allegedly an 18-year-old white supremacist, slaughtering 10 people in a grocery store in a predominantly Black neighborhood of Buffalo. And the posts included the suspect’s racist screed, for which he seems to have intended the massacre to serve as an advertisement.
to remove it, thanks in part to smaller, niche sites with looser content moderation. But those efforts dramatically reduced the number of people confronted by the graphic violence and bigoted propaganda in their feeds.In their earlier years, Facebook, YouTube and especially Twitter cast themselves idealistically as guardians of free expression around the world.
In the view of Musk and a growing number of conservatives, however, the platforms have gone too far. They see a liberal bias in both the rules that the tech companies have set out and in how they enforce them. While these critics tend to support certain categories of content moderation, including efforts to prevent spam and bots, they’re upset by those that seem to have a political dimension, such as policies against misinformation and hate speech.
Of course, the law is different in every country. In Russia, complying with the law would mean banning users from calling the war in Ukraine a war — a policy far more restrictive than Twitter’s existing stance. In fact, Twitter has been largely blocked in Russia for refusing to comply with the government’s censorship demands.
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