Thread by @daphnehk

This part of Zuckerberg’s testimony is a feat of geopolitical dexterity. 18 months ago, Facebook lost a major case about global content filtering in the EU. So now it’s telling Congress that *every* platform should be held to the standard imposed on FB by European courts. 1/

https://twitter.com/daphnehk/status/1374900616854573058

Platforms are geopolitical vectors. They take laws, including speech laws, from one country and impose them everywhere else. 2/

Historically that meant exporting U.S. 1st Amendment values, to the dismay of countries with different constitutional systems. That’s reversed now. Platforms are net importers of more restrictive speech rules from other countries to the U.S. 3/

That can create rules many Americans actually like just fine. Like when Facebook (and YouTube, Twitter, and Microsoft) formally committed to use their Terms of Service to globally impose European hate speech rules. ec.europa.eu/info/policies/… 4/

Standardizing speech rules is in platforms’ interest generally, since it simplifies global content moderation operations and product design. But it’s *really* in their interest if it sets a standard that incumbents are equipped to meet, and their competitors are not. 5/

That’s where this filtering mandate comes in. I don't know what Facebook's filters cost, but years ago YouTube testified it had already spent $100 million on copyright filters alone. (They still fail a lot, though.) 6/

The CJEU case saying Facebook could be required to filter under EU law was Facebook Ireland v. Glawischnig-Piesczek. curia.europa.eu/juris/document… 7/

In short it held two things.
(1) Austria could order FB to build automated filters to block future posts disparaging a politician (despite having no evidence that this was technically feasible), and
(2) FB could be compelled to deploy those filters everywhere in the world. 8/

I’ve written a lot about the case. Thread here

https://twitter.com/daphnehk/status/1179750220864745472

Article here. academic.oup.com/grurint/articl…
9/

The CJEU had previously held that filters threaten Internet users’ fundamental rights to privacy and free expression, and also burden platforms excessively. It didn’t talk about those things this time, except to indicate that it thought Facebook could handle this burden. 10/

Why no rights discussion? Well, no user rights advocates were before the court. Facebook raised the free expression issues, though not as well as user rights orgs could have. And no party before the court even *mentioned* the serious concerns about user privacy. 11/

Anyhow… fast-forward 3 years, and Facebook is turning its jurisprudential lemons into lemonade. If Facebook has to build costly, flawed, and potentially human-rights-violating filters, then the U.S. Congress should make everyone else do it too. 12/

Global filtering mandate: it’s not a bug, it’s a feature! As long as everyone else has to follow the same adverse ruling Facebook does. 13/

In geopolitical terms, we got into this situation because governments dropped the ball. We badly need treaties or other transnational coordination to set legitimate rules about extraterritorial enforcement (or not) of speech restrictions. 14/

In the absence of such coordination, courts and the biggest platforms will invent the rules, including exporting bad speech rules if they can’t avoid them. Today’s testimony shows who the beneficiaries will be. 15/15

Oops, misstatement in #12/15 of this thread. The ruling wasn't three years ago, it was October 2019. This is a very nimble reversal of course on FB's part.