There is a consensus among media owners around the need to force platforms like Facebook and Twitter to regulate more strictly what is written on social networks.
Posted at 5:00 a.m.
You will tell me that there is nothing very surprising here… and yet I was surprised last fall when I realized that such a consensus was emerging among my peers.
I was then invited as a panelist at the #Enough forum organized by the media industry to reflect on the online harassment of journalists.
All the representatives agreed on the problem, on the need to act… and on the importance of self-regulation by the web giants.
Everyone, but not me. And maybe a few others who didn’t speak. Still, my intervention was greeted with a polite smile and frowns.
Basically, I argued then that the distrust I harbored in Twitter and Facebook extended to this regulatory power that we wanted to give them.
Already that these giants have too much power, do we really want, as press bosses, to ask that we grant them one more: that of deciding who has the right to speak in the 21stand century, and who doesn’t?
Do we really want to appoint them judges of freedom of expression?
Take the example of Donald Trump, who was banned from platforms in January 2021 following the storming of the Capitol.
A good example of screw tightening like there should be more online, in the eyes of forum participants.
Is. But where to draw the line to eject a person from the global public square? And the reprimand, how long does it last? Based on rules written by whom, exactly? And judged by whom?
In Trump’s case, it was so popular at the time that these questions were only asked lip service. And so we let Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey and their teams decide who we censor.
And it doesn’t matter if it concerns an anonymous troll or the elected head of state of a democratic country having received millions of votes.
Why talk about all this today? Because the platform headed by Jack Dorsey could – or not, we’ll see – end up in the hands of Elon Musk, a libertarian who demands absolute freedom… as long as it doesn’t affect him.
Remember his crusade to silence a Twitter user who published the movements of his private jet.
And suddenly, the idea of granting this man the power to decide who has the right to speak and from whom it is taken away seems absurd.
That said, I wouldn’t want people to believe that I have a solution to the problem of online harassment, which affects more than just journalists.
The framing of freedom of expression on social networks “is a very, very big challenge, probably one of the biggest challenges of our time”, as the law professor from the University of Montreal told Radio-Canada. Pierre Trudel.
Only one thing seems clear to me: the stakes are too high to be left to private companies whose business model is based on virality. Not the search for truth or the public interest, like the traditional media.
There seems to me to be a lot more potential for framing in the efforts of elected governments, like here in Canada with the hate speech bill.
You can be for or against such an initiative, you can praise it or criticize it, but at least you can debate it. I am suspicious of the networks, as well as of the government when it comes to freedom of expression.
But there is something untenable in the idea of relying on monopolistic giants whose operation is opaque. Giants who do not want to be assimilated to “media”. Who want even less to be responsible for the content they broadcast. And act thus outside the laws and any framework.
This is what the courts have confirmed in recent days, ruling against Donald Trump, who was suing Twitter for his banishment. According to the judge, the First Amendment to the Constitution (which protects freedom of expression) does not apply to Twitter because it is a private company that can do as it wants, when it wants, without accountability to anyone.
“The First Amendment applies only to government-imposed speech restrictions,” he said.
And this, even if social networks are so-called public places, which bring together billions of individuals, whose agoras have tangible effects in the real world. They have indeed become “public services”, as Alain Saulnier points out in The digital barbarians*and should therefore comply with common rules.
Rather than asking them to play censors, we should ask ourselves how to increase the responsibility of platforms, set up an independent framework, impose obligations to remove harmful content, set fines, etc.
The solution to the growing problem of online harassment is not simple. But granting blacklisting power to Zuckerberg, Dorsey and other Musks is not one.
* The digital barbariansAlain Saulnier, Ecosociety, 2022