new piece by @jacklgoldsmith & @andrewkwoods on internet speech! lots of great stuff. but i want to take on the assertion that "China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong" on freedom-versus-control.
as jack and andrew correctly describe it, #China's censorship is political/social - protect the Party & 'social stability'. China censors, and forces WeChat & all other platforms to censor, *exactly* the kind of speech that free expression law most protects and values.
its model of a 'managed internet' involves (inter alia) blunt instruments to control/censor/surveil. the question the Chinese government wants to win: is their managed internet better than the prevailing 'cesspools' left by democratic regulation?
the super-dominant companies also manage speech & surveil users. the US platforms apply increasingly detailed rules, often opaquely implemented, that create unending governance problems at scale. obligatory book plug: amazon.com/Speech-Police-…
democratic governments are putting pressure on the platforms - legal & extra-legal - to censor hate, disinfo, terror, etc. but what govts end up doing is outsourcing public law evaluation (what is legit speech?) to these private actors, strengthening monopolizing tendencies.
so in that sense, of course, yes, everyone seems to believe in internet regulation in a way that was unfathomable in the US & Europe a decade ago. (except for jack maybe, who wrote a book on this with @superwuster basically predicting this move.)
but for all the pressure on the companies to censor - which is also pressure on individual freedom of expression - #China has not won this debate over control versus freedom. in part that's because *the question should not be binary* - censor or permit, punish or promote, etc.
the better question than the binaries is: how can democratic values prevail so as to deal with 'problematic' speech (whatever that is) while promoting free speech? ***what does smart regulation of the platforms look like?***
the debate is happening now - it's a debate that opponents of blunt censorship must win. we need radically better transparency, government-legislated if necessary, to give the public the tools to make appropriate evaluations of company practices.
democratic oversight of the companies is also warranted. maybe that's through government regulatory measures or, to start, social media councils as proposed by @article19org article19.org/social-media-c…
this is a longer thread than i intended, mainly b/c i respect the authors' work so much! if you want to get into the details of human rights compliant regulation of online speech, check out my reports to the @UNHumanRights Council at ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Free…
back to regularly scheduled programming.
