I had friends whose writing and teaching have been shadow banned on Facebook, removed from YouTube, and banned from Twitter. One very egregious example is the removal of the presentations of the famous Jewish commentator, Dennis Praeger. The reason given is hate speech. The material removed or banned was due to conservative viewpoints, and in some cases promoting traditional views of marriage, family, and sexuality, indeed Biblical teaching. The accusation is that traditional values promote homophobia and transphobia. The large media companies are monopolistic and have great control over speech in general. They are given special favor because they claim to be neutral platforms for sharing information, viewpoints, and personal connections among people. They are not neutral platforms.
A more recent commitment was made by a Facebook giant to remove content that goes against COVID 19 recommendations by the World Health Organization. Contrary scientific opinions will not be tolerated. This now makes Facebook an arbiter of what counts as scientific truth. Twitter has now taken to fact-checking President Trump’s tweets, though some say when he speaks contrary fact his Tweet should not be allowed. The President is now furious about this. One humorous situation has now developed. The WHO has now recommended that people no wear masks outside to prevent COVID 19 transmission. The Centers for Disease Control, that bastion of establishment health policy, still recommends wearing makes outside. Now, what will Facebook do? According to their stated policy, they should ban recommendations from the CDC! Being the arbiter of what counts as scientific truth is a dicey business.
Recently President Trump has decreed an end to the special protection for these media giants and has removed their status as neutral platforms. This would then define them as news services with editorial decision making etc. This opens them up to the kind of responsibility and to lawsuits that the press faces. I don’t know that it will do much good. I think the big giants need to be broken up. They are monopolies. There needs to be multiple platforms, many of them. If there is to be a neutral platform, then here is my list of rules.
- Only calls for violent actions and lewd pornographic material should be banned. This last would be in coordination with the FCC. This would ban all terrorists and their organizations.
- Hate speech will not be a criterion. If people want to claim that traditional morality is hate speech, traditionalists can claim that calling them homophobes and transphobes is hate speech. It is not hate speech to say that if one does not repent of sin the person will go to hell. It is not hate speech to say that all religions but the Biblical faith are false religions. It may not be very tolerant, but it is to be tolerated. The communicator will claim to be acting in love to save a person from hell. All hell, fire, and brimstone preachers in history claimed this. Control freaks want to control all who are not acting in the tolerant way they define.
- The answer to wrong speech is more speech. No one should police a neutral platform beyond these two standards. People will have to grow up and learn to check different material, judge which sites are trustworthy, and reject false claims and conspiracy theories. A neutral site must be an arbiter of truth. There are government agencies that deal with false advertising and fraudulent products.
- There should be many non-neutral sites that simply set the parameters of what they will or not. One would choose those services according to one’s purposes and agreeing to their standards. They can censor anything they want and promote anything they want, and more or less control the information posted. There could be sites for people of different views. Competing sites and competing information would be a great thing.