“The Ethics of Amplification” with Jeffrey Howard

And so the paper we're discussing today is about one part of the regulation of this social media set of platforms that you're describing as having all of these goods.

And so I want to talk a little bit about bad content before we get to your answer.

What's the kind of problematic bad content you want to talk about in this paper?

I think that there are lots of categories of harmful speech that people often post on social media.

It can include bullying and harassment.

It can include varieties of death threats and incitements to violence.

It can include varieties of hate speech that denigrates members of vulnerable groups.

It, of course, can include content like child sexual abuse material, content that tries to coordinate terrorist attacks or recruit people into terrorist organizations.

If you go to the websites of the main social media platforms, you will see a very long list of the different categories of harmful speech that they prescribe.

And I tend to think about these categories as embodying normative or moral expectations that we appropriately place on users of these platforms.

So if you're going to go and be part of these communicative spaces, you have certain obligations as a user not to post certain kinds of harmful content.

And so I see these policies as enforcing rules against this content.

And what's interesting is the most common way that rules are enforced against harmful content is of course by removing it.

So if you post a piece of hate speech or you post a death threat, then it's going to be taken down.

And what's really interesting, though, is that that's not the only way that platforms can go about the activity of reducing harmful content.

And that's really the insight that inspired me to work on this next topic.

And we're going to talk about your alternative to removing in just a second.

But before we get there, what's interesting about some of the examples you've just given us is a lot of it we have existing law to deal with that would apply offline as well, right? So if I go and I say some hate speech in a public forum offline, then there are going to be consequences for me, potentially legal consequences.

Likewise, child sex abuse and all the rest of it.

So what you're saying then is you're saying something like you're interested in what social media platforms should do to help enforce those laws? Or are you interested in a category of speech that falls short of the kinds of stuff that is banned by the law?

So I think that there will be overlap between the categories of harmful content that social media platforms ought to restrict and the categories of speech that are already appropriately criminalized.

So certainly examples like incitement to imminent violence or posting of a death threat or posting child sexual abuse material, posting revenge pornography – will all fall afoul of various criminal statutes.

And so in those cases, it isn't just appropriate for platforms to remove the speech in question, it may even be appropriate for the platforms to report the speech to the relevant authorities.

In other cases, you'll have content that is unlawful, but actually doesn't necessarily violate the platform's policies.

So if you think about defamation, for example, so suppose I post a nasty rumor about you on Facebook, you could sue me in court for posting that nasty rumor about you and therefore defaming your reputation.