Who Should Censor Online Speech?

There are few First Amendment issues more pressing today than how online speech should be governed. It impacts our interpersonal relationships, our views of almost every aspect of society and of course our politics. Now, absent an easy solution, Congress wants to dive in and claim that they actually have a clue.

The internet was supposed to set a million voices free...It didn't work out quite that way. In this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast we talk to David Kaye, a UC Irvine law professor and the United Nations’ leading voice on freedom of expression and human rights. He serves as the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right of freedom of opinion and expression.

In our conversation, we examine the balance between free speech and the regulation of the internet and its leading companies, the impact that these companies have on public life, and the question of who should decide whom gets censored.

Facebook’s refusal to take down the recent doctored video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's (D-CA) “slurred” speech shows how social media companies have set their own rules and how the rest of us have no clue what those rules are.

The goals and standards of these profit-making companies, Kaye says,  are going to be almost impossible to reconcile with the wide variety of international and global rules

Kaye expands on the idea that these companies can never have enough people to moderate all their content, and why, contrary to hopes, artificial intelligence is not the answer.

While there has been a lot of talk recently about breaking up these companies, Kaye explains that, in fact, they may just need to be “broken down” — by which he means brought even closer to their end-users. He says that, only if there is a sense of a close and common community among users and the companies can speech be self policed.