Thread by @evan_greer

THREAD: YouTube just banned Right Wing Watch, an organization working to expose and debunk hate groups.

This should be a wake-up call for the left: calling for more and faster social media censorship will always backfire on marginalized social movements.
thedailybeast.com/youtube-perman…

As always with these cases, we're piecing together what actually happened, cuz Big Tech companies like YouTube have incredibly opaque moderation practices. But this is a perfect example of how pushing for companies to make moderation decisions based on news cycles is a bad idea.

From what's been reported, it seems likely that the Right Wing Watch channel was banned because of videos where they incorporate content from some of the far right assholes they are targeting, for the purposes of exposing / criticizing / debunking their racist disinformation.

This has happened many, many times before. When YouTube first announced they were banning white nationalist content, they also took down a bunch of videos from Southern Poverty Law Center exposing and debunking white nationalist hate groups latimes.com/business/la-fi…

Over & over we see that when progressive groups pressure platforms to simply remove more content faster, without even paying lipservice to the potential of collateral damage, it leads to systematic removal of legitimate content & disproporationately silences marginalized voices.

People will say, "well why can't they just get it right? ban the bad stuff and keep the good stuff. it's easy."

I really, really wish that that were the case. It would make all of our lives easier. But it's just not, no matter how much you want it to be

techdirt.com/articles/20210…

Anytime you set up a system for removing user-generated content, whether it's for copyright enforcement or to address harmful / hateful / false speech, it is going to come with tradeoffs. One can argue these tradeoffs are worth it, but most groups just pretend there aren't any.

Often that's because the voices that are most frequently silenced by Big Tech social media companies are those of people who are deeply marginalized, voices that are often ignored by US-based NGOs like politically active Muslims living outside the U.S., sex workers, etc.

Many people, including a number of prominent people and groups who claim to be "experts" on social media / content moderation / hate speech, are utterly unaware of that fact or conveniently ignore it while continuing to demand more and faster content removal at all costs

Increasingly, groups who are calling for more censorship on social media basically say that those of us who oppose it just don't care about the harm that is being done by hateful speech and disinformation. That's just not true, and I'll say more on it in a minute.

But first, I'd flip the question back on them: why don't you care about the harm done by over-moderation and silencing of marginalized voices on social media? Why aren't you speaking out when payment processors kick off sex workers without due process & Palestinians get censored?

So once we agree on the facts, that any content moderation system that attempts to remove large amounts of controversial content will inevitably lead to silencing of social movements that are working to dismantle oppressive systems, a legitimate question is what do we do instead?

Of course I know and you know that promoting fascism and exposing fascism is not the same thing. But what do we do in light of the fact that centralized Big Tech monopolies have consistently shown they cannot and will not get this right in a consistent manner?

We can keep working the refs in a game that we always lose, or we can actually try to do something about the power of Big Tech companies to artificially amplify and recruit people to hate groups while suppressing social movements that are trying to confront and dismantle them.

Personally, I think it's unacceptable to continue calling for something that will not work, because I actually DO care about the harm that is being done by Big Tech companies and the hate groups and politicians that are using them to mobilize violence & enact oppressive policies

Rather than giving Big Tech MORE power, & demanding that they wield that power more responsibly (knowing that they never will) we should work to strip them of their power, break up their monopolies, and ban the surveillance capitalist business practices at the root of their harm.

As long as we live in a world where the moderation decisions of a tiny handful of Big Tech companies effectively define what gets seen and heard by the masses and what gets silenced, we will never achieve justice or liberation.

Fortunately, there is a lot of low hanging fruit, things that we could do right now to reduce harm while we work toward a more decentralized Internet where individuals have power over their online experience rather than corporations.

Congress could finally pass real data privacy legislation, making it impossible for companies like Facebook to harvest our data, use it to build behavioral profiles, and then shove content down the throats of the people most susceptible to it.

It's one thing to have a communications platform that can be used by anyone, even terrible awful people like nazis. It's another thing entirely to be Facebook, a surveillance platform that abuses data to say "hey you seem like a nazi, want to meet some other nazis in this group?"

Banning business practices like surveillance-based advertising, data harvesting & non-transparent algorithmic manipulation of newsfeeds and content, would do way more to address the viral spread of hateful & misleading content than any amount of begging YouTube etc to "do better"

There are some promising aspects of the House anti-trust package too, including mandating interoperability to reduce the monopoly power of Big Tech companies and make it easier to create alternative platforms with better moderation and privacy practices.

But the bottom line is this: in the current environment where a handful of companies, who care more about PR & protecting profits than human rights, essentially get to decide who can be seen and heard, calls for more censorship without structural changes do more harm than good

And the stakes are incredibly high. Whether or not our children have a live-able planet is dependent on the success of the predominantly youth-led climate justice movement, which is heavily dependent on social media as a tool for mobilizing public support for radical change.

There is immense suffering occurring right now due to oppressive systems like mass incarceration, widespread job and housing discrimination, etc. This is suffering that will continue if social movements, which are increasingly dependent on social media to mobilize, succeed.

So when you say you want to address the harm being done by hateful speech and disinformation on social media, that's fine. But remember that if the things you are calling for end up kneecapping those social movements, you're effectively propping up the harm done by the status quo

So I'm just going to say this as bluntly as possible: if you or your organization is constantly calling for more censorship on social media and you're not actively trying to dismantle Big Tech's monopoly power, you are actively undermining human rights and you should stop.

Okay, and now after a 600 tweet thread (and presumably a flurry of emails from reporters), Google is predictably saying that the Right Wing Watch account was removed "by mistake" and "upon further review" will be reinstated

https://twitter.com/MikaelThalen/status/1409612677190623236

This also happens all the time. But the reality is that most groups & accounts that get banned or censored do not have the resources or media contacts or prominence of a group like Right Wing Watch, so they have nowhere to turn when they get silenced and their appeal is denied.

Something a lot of people don't understand is that when you're using the Internet to mobilize people / engage in activism, having your account suspended even just for a few hours during a particularly pivotal moment can absolutely crush your campaign even if it's reinstated later

If your video exposing a bigoted politician or explaining the dangers of a specific piece of legislation gets censored just as it's going viral, that does measurable harm to your ability to mobilize people. Even when companies later say "oops, our bad," the damage is already done

For every example like this where a relatively prominent / mainstream group gets temporarily banned and then reinstated after a media uproar, there are countless accounts / groups / pages run by more marginalized activists who are permanently silenced because no one defends them

Quick personal example: Facebook flagged one of my posts about the USA Patriot Act as "misinformation," based on a 3rd-party fact checker who cited a former top NSA lawyer as his main source, just as it was going viral days before a key Congressional vote fightfortheftr.medium.com/facebook-told-…

It's hard to prove causation in cases like this, but let's say for the sake of argument that if more people had seen that post, more people would have called their lawmakers, & we would have gotten the votes we needed to pass an amendment reigning in mass government surveillance

That would have concretely benefited millions of people and ended one of our governments most oppressive and discriminatory practices: using the PATRIOT ACT to conduct mass warrantless surveillance of people's Internet search history, particularly immigrants, journalists, and POC

But because Facebook decided to effectively censor it just as it was going viral, that didn't happen. And now the government can still spy on your web browsing activity with almost no limits, which puts vulnerable people in even more danger of repression.

People tend to think of harm that's caused by speech as concrete whereas harm that's caused by suppression of speech is more theoretical. It's just not acceptable to pretend that that theoretical harm is not real when there are so. many. concrete. examples.

Sex workers have been sounding the alarm about this for years and have largely been ignored by DC-based progressive groups, even ones that claim to fight for the most marginalized. vice.com/en/article/g5b…

Palestinian groups have also been sounding the alarm on this more recently, and I've been encouraged to see some more US-based groups listening to them: theguardian.com/media/2021/may…

Now that Google is saying they will reinstate the Right Wing Watch page, this particular instance of content-moderation-gone-wrong will likely recede into the rearview and many will go back to their regularly scheduled programming of demanding more and faster censorship.

But I hope that as instances like this keep happening again and again and again we can start building some real momentum toward actual solutions to address Big Tech's harms, rather than engaging in an endless and largely pointless debate about which content should be up or down.

From SOPA/PIPA to net neutrality to surveillance to SESTA/FOSTA, we've seen time and time again how policies set by both governments and corporations have profound impacts on human rights and freedom of expression globally, and literally shape the future of human civilization

When we talk about complex issues like content moderation & how to address the harms of Big Tech we need to do it with that level of seriousness. This is not just some issue to get more clicks on your petition or raise more money by beating up on Facebook, even if they deserve it

There is an enormous existing body of work looking at content moderation through a global human rights lens, much of it generated by queer folks, people of color, sex workers and others with direct lived experience of censorship, deplatforming, harassment, hate speech, etc.

I would love to see just a tad bit more humility from groups and people who are brand new to the tech policy space but who have suddenly decided that they have the solution to issues like hate speech and disinformation

And finally, just as tech isn't going to solve centuries old injustices, policies around tech aren't going to solve those injustices either. Widespread support for racist conspiracy theories is not a new problem in the United States, & anyone who claims it is is ignoring history

Social media did not create systemic intersection oppression, and demanding more social media censorship isn't going to fix systemic intersectional oppression. The only thing that can is organized social movements, and they'll only succeed if they can be heard.