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Photo illustration by Alex Cook
The First Amendment is great, huh? It gives people the right to (mostly) say whatever they like, because the lawyers and landholders who wrote the Constitution recognized that democracy requires people to debate and share opinions without worrying about reprisals or censorship from the government. The cost of this is that you have to allow people to hold racist protests and draw pictures of animals with human sex parts and so on, but allowing people to hold and share beliefs that most people find abhorrent or stupid is how we know we are free. Ayn Rand once said, by way of defending pornography, “Every infringement of human rights has begun with a suppression of a given right’s least attractive practitioners.” We should be free to write and say whatever we want, even if we're pornographers, racists, or fans of Ayn Rand’s books.
We don’t have those same rights on Facebook, however.
Facebook isn’t just a cool place for you to hang out and chat with your buddies and share hot new content you found surfing the World Wide Web. It’s a platform owned by a massive corporation that makes money off of advertising and can do pretty much whatever it likes with the stuff you post on it. Which isn’t to say Facebook is evil, exactly, but it’s not your friend, and it’s not under any legal obligation to protect speech or use its site to say whatever you like. Zuckerberg and company get to decide what is and is not permissible on their property, and since they own the internet’s second-most-popular site, that gives them a lot of power.
In practice, Facebook uses this power to make itself as advertiser-friendly as possible. This means they suspend users for posting NSFW content and remove photos of “offensive” body parts like dicks and female nipples. They’ve also taken down aggressively racist content and videos of extreme violence. The arguments for banning these kinds of content are simple—Facebook is used by children and millions of users who are offended by that nasty stuff, and the website is supposed to be a place that “helps you connect and share with the people in your life,” not a free-for-all where hate groups can organize and broadcast their poison.
But some have alleged that Facebook doesn’t seem all that concerned with banning content that condones sexual harassment and violence against one group in particular: women. This week, activists at Women, Action, and the Media (WAM!) wrote an open letter to Facebook calling on the site to remove “groups, pages and images that explicitly condone or encourage rape or domestic violence or suggest that they are something to laugh or boast about.” These include “photographs of women beaten, bruised, tied up, drugged, and bleeding, with captions such as ‘This bitch didn’t know when to shut up’ and ‘Next time don’t get pregnant.’” In the same letter, the activists asked people to boycott companies that advertised on Facebook and to spread the word using the Twitter hashtag #FBrape. Outlets like the Guardian and Salon picked the story up and highlighted other ways Facebook has disregarded or insulted women—in the past, the site has removed positive, nonsexual images of breastfeeding and mastectomy scars. Facebook responded by removing the pictures that WAM! highlighted, but the activists say that individual offenses aren’t the point and the site needs to do a better job moderating and removing misogynistic content.
Obviously, the stuff WAM! points to in that last link is just fucking awful and if Facebook wants to be in the business of making sure it’s clean and inoffensive, it should get rid of that garbage. But Facebook’s censorship policies aren’t just inconsistent in regards to women—the site hasn’t successfully scrubbed other kinds of hate speech from its a pages either. Potentially objectionable content I found on the site yesterday included a few nasty groups devoted to attacking Muslims, including one called Hindus Against Islam; the official page of the nativist, Islamophobic British National Party; a page devoted to racist “humor” targeted at Gypsies in Romania; a closed group that apparently thinks “Zionists” were responsible for 9/11; a page full of shitty, deliberately offensive jokes; and Shit Black People Never Say, an entity with 13,000 likes and content like this:
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What’s the argument, when you remove the First Amendment from the equation, that any of that above stuff should be allowed to stand? What do you tell the English woman who wants Facebook to ban absurdist gross-out “dead baby” jokes because they remind her of her own dead unborn child? There are several Facebook pages that demand that the site eliminated those jokes, but apparently they aren’t offensive in the same way that nudity is offensive—or at least, they don’t offend the people whose opinions count.
Like all systems of censorship that rely on subjective opinions (which is to say, all systems of censorship), Facebook’s is complicated, sometimes inflexible and sometimes lax, and often frustratingly opaque. It’s not always clear whether a post is being removed by a misfiring antispam bot or a moderator. In one case from last year, an anti-Obama image was taken down every time it was posted for vague reasons. Facebook said it was a mistake, but it wasn’t clear how the picture violated its terms of service, and some people, including Erik Wemple of the Washington Post, thought that the removal might indicate an anticonservative bias on Facebook’s part. Right wingers have suspected for some time that the site leans left, and in March, a Texas man who claimed he was banned from Facebook for making a joke about his friend being a liberal told a radio station, “Our Constitutional rights are being taken from us very slowly, however small this may be.”
Thing is, he’s not in America when he’s on Facebook—he’s on the internet, where the Constitution is just another thing someone wrote that other people get mad about. Unrestrained by the First Amendment, Facebook could ban all Republicans, or all Democrats, or all the people Mark Zuckerberg deemed racially impure. The only thing stopping it from doing those things—besides the goodness of the Facebook overlords’ hearts—is that the company makes money through advertising and wants to keep as many users around as possible. Like Michael Jordan once supposedly said, “Republicans buy shoes, too.”
Facebook isn’t the entire internet, thank God, and other sites have taken different approaches in deciding what is and isn’t kosher:
- Instagram is similar to Facebook in that it doesn’t allow hate speech, nudity, or other “offensive” content. Like Facebook, it hasn’t eliminated all the racist content, and its censorship efforts can be ham-fisted—last year, it deleted a bunch of innocent hashtags in a plan to wipe out profanity, and Tyler, the Creator’s account recently got banned for reasons he didn’t understand.
- YouTube won’t let you post porn, but pro-anorexia “thinspiration” videos are apparently fine.
- Condé Nast–owned Reddit, despite the criticism it’s received for being a hivemind of racist, sexist perverts, still has subreddits devoted to violence against women and vile stereotypes of black people. Just about the only thing they won’t publish is pedophilic photos of young girls, and that’s only because those images caused a media shitstorm.
- Twitter* also gives its users a lot of freedom—you can find people casually sex-tweeting about pooping their diapers—but last year it announced that it would censor tweets that violated the laws of individual governments on a country-by-country basis, which means, for instance, that Chinese users can’t criticize their authoritarian regime. Predictably, the move was endorsed by China’s state-run media, including the Global Times newspaper, which wrote: “Twitter might have… already realized the fact and made a choice between being an idealistic political tool as many hope and following pragmatic commercial rules as a company.”
Those pragmatic commercial rules are what worry anyone who wants the internet to abide by some version of the First Amendment. The platforms that most users take for granted as public playgrounds where they’re free to talk and share whatever they like are actually run by corporations who are only invested in free speech as a strategy for monetizing content. As Aaron Swartz put it in an interview shortly before his death:
As malls became the cool places for kids to hang out [in the 90s], all of these freedoms we had against the government we lost in the mall, because the mall is a private company that can throw people out for saying the wrong thing or wearing the wrong shirt. Now, Facebook has kind of become the mall. It's where everyone hangs out. And so the private company that owns Facebook can tell you, "Oh, don't use those kinds of words, don't use those sorts of pictures, don't talk with those people." All of these Constitutional rights that we take for granted are now being run by a company that doesn't have to answer to the Constitution.
Places like Reddit (which Swartz helped develop) and Tumblr, major platforms that allow users to explore their interests without running into limitations imposed by terms of service agreements, are rare, and could become rarer.
Tumblr, of course, was bought by Yahoo this month for $1.1 billion. The larger company will presumably value making money through advertising more than it will protecting users’ ability to post whatever they like—especially since “whatever they like” includes porn, images glorifying anorexia and self-harm, pictures of underage girls, and racism. Tumblr bloggers are understandably nervous about potential censorship. “I’ll drag my butt over your face, Yahoo ceo [sic] if you ruin this place,” was how a guy named unicornbuttdrag put it.
Maybe Yahoo will listen to the concerns of unicornbuttdrag, and maybe Facebook will pay attention to the campaign started by WAM! and monitor the rampant misogyny as it does other forms of objectionable speech. But it’s entirely up to them how much freedom we have, and in which directions we’re restricted. All we can do is ask the corporations nicely: please will you let us do what you like on your platform, and please will your censorship policies be fair? They have no moral obligation to us and we never elected them. But they are in charge.
*Full disclosure: VICE recently announced a partnership with Twitter and interacts in all kinds of ways with social networking sites and YouTube.
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