WikiLeaks, led by Russian hackers, released emails from Hillary Clinton in 2016 that changed the route of an American election. This year, Facebook and Twitter have vowed to stop the spread of misinformation and hacked material to protect users from foreign intervention in the elections. This has led to widespread flagging and deleting of misinformative posts with shady sources.
Censoring posts on social media has taken center stage not only in the United States, but globally. A New York Times article states, “Europe’s lawmakers… have shifted to a new stage in their battle to limit the power of the world’s biggest tech companies.” Concerns of the growing spread of misinformation is the main reason behind this shift.
A major event involving censoring in recent weeks happened Wednesday, Oct. 14, 20 days before Election Day. The New York Post published a front-page article that allegedly exposes incriminating emails and photos on a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden. Questions rose about how the information was obtained.
Twitter and Facebook took different approaches to taking down this post. The New York Post article was banned on Twitter’s platform, and any account that shared that link was locked for a period of time. Twitter said that the post went against the company’s policy of distributing hacked material.
Facebook, on the other hand, did not completely delete the post off its website, but it reduced the visibility of the article to its users. The company said that the article would be fact-checked by a third party to determine if it was appropriate to share on its platform. Facebook has also used this method on multiple posts previously.
Last Thursday, YouTube announced that it plans on banning content related to QAnon, a group known for sharing false conspiracy theories. This follows after a crackdown from various websites on QAnon and its adherents. With that being said, the Associated Press (AP) found more than a dozen prominent QAnon accounts, maintaining a following of nearly 1.5 million users on Twitter.
Vanita Gupta, chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, an assembly of civil rights groups, has praised YouTube’s efforts to ban QAnon content. However, this crackdown on misinformation has worried some.
Republicans have called for Facebook and Twitter to be sued due to their silencing of accounts on their platform. Senator Josh Hawley has called for Twitter and Facebook to be subpoenaed by Congress. He tweeted that they should testify about censorship and accused the websites of trying to hijack American democracy by covering up the news and manipulating the expression of Americans.
The president had already issued an executive order early this year arguing that free speech and expression are the bedrock of American democracy; therefore, accounts must be able to share information freely. However, websites did not back down on banning misinformation. For example, they’ve hidden a number of the president’s own tweets, quoting a danger to communities due to spreading false information about the virus.
A poll by Pew Research in June found that three-quarters of US adults thought that social media sites intentionally censor political viewpoints that they find objectionable. The percentage of US adults that believe social media should label information from elected officials as misleading is split right in the middle.
There are differing opinions on the issue of censorship. Whether it benefits the community by stopping misinformation from running free or whether it is an outright infringement on the First Amendment is a question largely up for debate. Only time will tell if technology companies had made the right decision by picking accuracy over unconstrained tweeting.
