There are a couple different issues at play regarding technology, censorship, and free speech, so we should be clear about our distinctions between the rights citizens have, the rights companies have, and the rights governments have. I bring this up to help explain that government censorship is not the same as Facebook taking down a post–these entities reside in different domains of authority and purpose.
Looking at the spectrum of political beliefs, it is clear that one one extremity endorses uncensored and unfettered free speech while the other extremity favors suppressed and censored speech. Importantly, the reality, baked into place through decades of Supreme Court cases and litigious battles, is somewhere in the middle. The standard of unprotected speech today is speech “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action.” Note that this actually doesn’t mean yelling fire in a crowded theater is illegal, but still shows that speech can be legally restricted.
Of course, much of this has to be decided on a case-by-case basis. Our government is structured to promote truth not through censorship or jailing a person for speaking, but by promoting the overwhelming counterbalance of more speech. Former Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes sums up this view of the Constitution in one of his cases:
“The ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas — that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out.”
In other words, community action is paramount. It is up to the community of people rather than a single, opaque “censorship unit” to determine what is acceptable speech or not. There are platforms that allow uncensored, unfettered, (and anonymous) free speech–and there’s a reason a lot of people stay away from them: they tend to turn into echo chambers of vitriolic hate speech.
Thus, what is a company like Facebook to do to retain its users, protect their rights to free speech, but also protect users from violent speech? Facebook needs some form of speech suppression to function. Unlike the government, which only restricts speech that promotes imminent lawless action, Facebook can restrict speech that is mean, false, or obscene if it wants to. What is the ethical approach?
I think Facebook should do three things to ensure people are happy and safe on their platform. First, continue to primarily police its feeds through the community–empower people to self-report posts that violate community standards. Second, Facebook should offer significant transparency with their post-removal guidelines. For instance, terrorist activity needs to be acutely defined so that there is little confusion about policy. Finally, Facebook should actually encourage people to unfollow someone who upsets them. These steps offer transparency and allow the public to make their own decisions about speech.
I think tech companies were right in restricting access to the Daily Stormer because they set out policies that were clearly violated.