the times | Tuesday May 17 2022 27
Comment
Buy prints or signed copies of Times cartoons from our Print Gallery at timescartoons.co.uk or call 020 7711 7826Texan free for all points to a digital wild west
An extreme example of hands-off policing illustrates the merits and difficulties of the government’s Online Safety Bill
these debates. Elon Musk’s
determination to buy Twitter (which
may now be lagging) was born out of
his conviction that the internet was
becoming inimical to free speech.
What, though, is his solution? “By
‘free speech’, I simply mean that
which matches the law,” he tweeted
back in April. And, “If people want
less free speech, they will ask
government to pass laws to that
effect”. Another eight seconds of
thought should have told him that
this was less a free speech argument,
and more a call for state censorship.
The one thing I like about our
Online Safety Bill is that it really
does try very hard to solve this
frankly unsolvable dilemma. There is
a weirdness, clearly, in the way that it
is a Conservative government that is
hellbent on passing it, while their
natural political bedfellows on the
other side of the Atlantic want the
opposite.
It still seems to me, though, that
the only workable solution is one in
which tech companies continue to
make these calls for themselves,
much as newspapers do, subject to
the same slings and arrows of
reputational, political and litigational
damage when they get them wrong.
And yes, I know that’s nowhere near
being a perfect solution, either. But
maybe, considering the obvious
pitfalls of all other directions, it’s as
close as we’re going to get.blowback into the real world.
Yet the idea that the answer to this
is to outlaw online curation
altogether seems to me to be the sort
of thing that somebody of even
average intelligence would throw out
after about, ooh, eight seconds.
Because the upshot would not be a
robust marketplace of ideas. Rather,
it would be abuse and nonsense. It
would be your teenage daughter
being bombarded with dick pics and
slimming ads. It would be your spamfolder, but with more Nazis.
Fascinatingly, the major legal
problem with the Texas free speech
law may be that it is anti-free speech.
In December, when it was first
blocked by a federal judge, it was
done so on the basis that it, itself,
was censorship in violation of the
First Amendment. As in, a state-
backed ban on banning is still a
state-backed ban. Right? If this feels
counterintuitive, it shouldn’t. I
remember making similar arguments
back in 2012 about why newspapers
shouldn’t be forced by statute to print
articles that they didn’t want to.
This sort of head-scratching
circularity has become a hallmark offirst surfaced in September, before
being struck down by a court. Now,
though, it has been struck up again.
The law stems from concern that
tech firms have too much power and
can abuse it. This, too, is a valid
worry (see Rifkind, ibid). On the US
right, particularly, many believe that
tech firms are of a liberal bent, and
are playing dirty. Given that the last
Republican president was banned
from both Facebook and Twitter, you
can see why they think this.
Obviously, though, views on online
partisanship are themselves deeply
partisan. According to a 2020 study
by Pew, 90 per cent of Republicans
think that right-wing users are
disproportionately censored.
According to one by New York
University the following year, they
actually aren’t. According to a clutch
of other studies, meanwhile, they
might be, but only because they’re
also more likely to share stuff that is
incendiary or flatly false.
To me, unscientifically, it does look
a lot like big platforms now fairly
routinely axe or at least downgrade
views on things like race, religion
and gender that don’t even come
close to meeting the threshold for
prosecution. When you look at
stories like, for example, yesterday’s
one about British police
overzealously involving themselves
in online opinions, it’s hard to deny
that this does, indeed, have majorH
ooray for Texas. In a way.
As in, hooray for Texas for
being absolutely, entirely
and one hundred per cent
wrong. Because isn’t it
sometimes incredibly useful when
people are?
This is about social media
regulation. Sorry. It’s important,
though. We have our own Online
Safety Bill looming and concern
about it is growing. Partly, this is
because the bill rests within the
bailiwick of the culture secretary,
Nadine Dorries, which is about as
reassuring as the flying of your
jumbo jet resting within the bailiwick
of your hamster. Or, perhaps, of
Nadine Dorries.
Also, though, because it has as its
central principle the concept of
speech that is “legal but harmful”
and what should be done about it.
This could be abuse or hate speech
that doesn’t quite meet the threshold
for prosecution, or it could be
pornography, or it could be stuff
liable to damage the vulnerable, such
as the promotion of eating disorders
or self-harm. Very roughly, the
government’s approach is that the
companies which host this stuff
(Facebook, Twitter, YouTube,
Instagram, whatever) should be
obliged to take it down. This
concerns free speech campaigners,
who worry that it either covertly or
clodhoppingly (take your pick) opens
the door to state censorship of the
sort that the British press
successfully fought off after the
Leveson Inquiry. These people have
a point, and to understand what that
point is, feel free to read my columns
for the past decade. Now, though,
along comes Texas, with a plan to do
the exact opposite. And that’s even
worse.
There are nuances here, becausethey have those even in Texas. Pretty
much, though, rather than banning
harmful content, the Lone Star State
wants to ban banning it. To quote
directly, state law HB 20 makes it
illegal for any platform above a
certain size to “block, ban, remove,
deplatform, demonetise, de-boost,
restrict, deny equal access or
visibility to, or otherwise
discriminate against expression”. ItContent short of the
prosecution threshold
is being routinely axed
How weird that it is a
Tory government that
is trying to pass this
Hugo
Rifkind@hugorifkind