There have been increasingly vocal calls for Twitter, Facebook and other Silicon Valley corporations to more aggressively police what their users are permitted to see and read. Last month in The Washington Post, for instance, MSNBC host Ronan Farrow demanded that social media companies ban the accounts of "terrorists" who issue "direct calls" for violence.
Given the savagery of the Foley video, it's easy in isolation to cheer for its banning on Twitter. But that's always how censorship functions: it invariably starts with the suppression of viewpoints which are so widely hated that the emotional response they produce drowns out any consideration of the principle being endorsed.
It's tempting to support criminalization of, say, racist views as long as one focuses on one's contempt for those views and ignores the serious dangers of vesting the state with the general power to create lists of prohibited ideas. That's why free speech defenders such as the ACLU so often represent and defend racists and others with heinous views in free speech cases: because that's where free speech erosions become legitimized in the first instance when endorsed or acquiesced to.
The question posed by Twitter's announcement is not whether you think it's a good idea for people to see the Foley video. Instead, the relevant question is whether you want Twitter, Facebook and Google executives exercising vast power over what can be seen and read.
It's certainly true, as defenders of Twitter have already pointed out, that as a legal matter, private actors -- as opposed to governments -- always possess and frequently exercise the right to decide which opinions can be aired using their property. Generally speaking, the public/private dichotomy is central to any discussions of the legality or constitutionality of "censorship."
Under the law, there's a fundamental difference between a private individual deciding to ban all racists from entering her home and a government imprisoning people for expressing racist thoughts; the former is legitimate while the latter is not. One can, coherently, object on the one hand to all forms of state censorship, while on the other hand defending the right of private newspapers to refuse to publish certain types of Op-Eds, or the right of private blogs to ban certain types of comments, or the right of private individuals to refrain from associating with those who have certain opinions.
The First Amendment bans speech abridgments by the state, not by private actors. There's plainly nothing illegal about Twitter, Facebook and the like suppressing whatever ideas they choose to censor.
But as a prudential matter, the private/public dichotomy is not as clean when it comes to tech giants that now control previously unthinkable amounts of global communications. There are now close to 300 million active Twitter users in the world -- roughly equivalent to the entire U.S. population -- and those numbers continue to grow rapidly and dramatically. At the end of 2013, Facebook boasted of 1.23 billion active users: or 1 out of every 7 human beings on the planet. YouTube, owned by Google, recently said that "the number of unique users visiting the video-sharing website every month has reached 1 billion" and "nearly one out of every two people on the Internet visits YouTube."
These are far more than just ordinary private companies from whose services you can easily abstain if you dislike their policies. Their sheer vastness makes it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to avoid them, particularly for certain work. They wield power over what we know, read and see far greater than anything previously possible -- or conceivable -- for ordinary companies. As The Guardian's Ball aptly noted today in expressing concern over Twitter's censorship announcement:
"Twitter, Facebook and Google have an astonishing, alarming degree of control over what information we can see or share, whether we're a media outlet or a regular user. We have handed them a huge degree of trust, which must be earned and re-earned on a regular basis.
It's an imperfect analogy, but, given this extraordinary control over the means of global communication, Silicon Valley giants at this point are more akin to public utilities such as telephone companies than they are ordinary private companies when it comes to the dangers of suppressing ideas, groups and opinions. It's not hard to understand the dangers of allowing, say, AT&T or Verizon to decree that its phone lines may not be used by certain groups or to transmit certain ideas, and the dangers of allowing tech companies to do so are similar.
In the digital age, we are nearing the point where an idea banished by Twitter, Facebook and Google all but vanishes from public discourse entirely, and that is only going to become more true as those companies grow even further. Whatever else is true, the implications of having those companies make lists of permitted and prohibited ideas are far more significant than when ordinary private companies do the same thing.
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