Should the Platforms Let Trump Back On?
It’s not an easy question to answer. Plus some short thoughts on the Meta/The Wire controversy.
Happy Sunday. I’m writing this while watching the Packers/Jets game which so far seems to be missing both teams’ offenses.
On Friday I had the privilege to participate in a conversation put on by Rick Hasen with UCLA and Nate Persily at Stanford about whether or not former President Trump should be let back on social media platforms. The recording isn’t up yet, but you can read the papers that some of the participants wrote here.
You can read my entire paper here, but I wanted to share a bit about what my thinking is and some reflections from the conversation.
This is not an easy decision. Any way that the platforms go could have some serious short and long-term consequences. We certainly did not come out of the conversation with a clear answer.
Some of the themes we discussed include:
Should politicians’ speech be held to a higher standard even though historically it’s also been amongst the most protected? Who gets to determine what that standard is?
Should platforms be the ones to make these decisions? If not them who?
How should the threat of violence - especially imminent violence - be assessed?
Are there options beyond just leaving him up or taking him down such as reducing the reach of his posts?
What are constitutional restraints?
Not surprisingly, the conversation went in a bunch of different and sometimes competing directions and I thought that Jonathan Zittrain put it well when he said, “We don’t know what we want and we don’t trust anyone to give it to us.”
Given I was one of the few non-law professors there I tried to focus on what could actually be operational within the platforms. I also tried to keep a global perspective rather than just what should be done in the United States.
I made this chart with a list of criteria to consider against three options:
Let him back on
Let him back on but with restrictions
Don’t let him back on
In my paper, I go more in-depth on all of the criteria but based on all of this I landed on letting him back on but with restrictions.
This was not an easy decision as I do think the threat of violence remains high. However, assuming that he does run for President again I worry about the signal that leaving him off sends to others around the world who wish to suppress more speech. I also think the law is vague here about what keeping him off would mean in terms of still providing support to other campaigns.
Katie Fallow with Knight put it well when she said her heart says don’t let him back on but her head says he should be.
When I asked a lot of really smart people this question it was pretty mixed. Many Republicans weren’t wild about the idea of him returning but also thought that he had to be let back on. Many fear the threat of violence remains high and that since he still is pushing that the 2020 election was fraudulent that that is enough for him to remain off.
There’s no doubt this will become a more heated debate over the coming months as Musk takes over Twitter and Meta have to make a decision by January 7. I encourage you to read the other papers and I would be more than happy to discuss this more with anyone.
Meta and The Wire
A quite unusual story continues to unfold in India where this week the Wire published a story claiming that a staffer for Modi’s party - the BJP - was able to immediately remove an anti-government post because he was in the cross-check system. They produced documents to back this claim up.
The story seemed really odd to me from the beginning but then the wire produced documents including a supposed incident report and an internal email from Meta comms person Andy Stone. Those documents did not add up. The English was poor, URLs were used that don’t exist internally and other things did not match how Meta’s internal systems work.
The Wire doubled down with more documents - including a video of this super secret Instagram workplace account - that also did not add up. Today, Meta said that they found the fraudulent account that had been created to make the video.
Meta does need to answer why the post came down, but now this is a back-and-forth on whether or not the Wire has fallen for a hoax. I can say that knowing Andy he wouldn’t send an email like the one they claim he did and that the dashboard they claim to have from Instagram doesn’t match what we would have used internally. I feel bad for the Wire, but they clearly aren’t doing the due diligence they should be and the story now is about something totally different.
What I’m Reading
New York Times: Over 370 Republican Candidates Have Cast Doubt on the 2020 Election
Guardian: Turkey: new ‘disinformation’ law could jail journalists for three years
Tech Policy Press: Looking to the Midterms: The State of Platform Policies on U.S. Political Speech
AP: Poll: Most in US say misinformation spurs extremism, hate
Stratechery: An Interview with Mark Zuckerberg and Satya Nadella
Decipher Podcast: David Agranovich
Platformer: Spotify's about-face on abortion ads
The Verge: Google built a spam backdoor for Republicans — and they aren’t using it
USA Today: Netflix's ad-supported tier will be available to consumers on Nov. 3 for $6.99 a month
Fly on the Wall: Katie Harbath
Tech Policy Press: Model Suggests Digital Media Contributing to “Maelstrom” of Societal Division
Financial Times: Twitter reviews policies around permanent user bans
NBC News: Right-wing disinformation ramps up on WeChat ahead of midterms, report finds
The Verge: Mark Zuckerberg on the Quest Pro, building the metaverse, and more
PolitiFact: Partnership targeted election misinformation, not conservatives
Bloomberg: Twitter Faces Only Bad Outcomes If the $44 Billion Musk Deal Closes
Seattle Times: Judge: Facebook intentionally violated WA campaign finance law 822 times
Axios: Democrats' abortion ad blitz
Financial Times: Crackdowns, lawsuits and intimidation: the threat to freedom of expression in India
Think Tanks/Academia/Other
University of Chicago: Fake News, Fact Checking, and Partisanship: The Resilience of Rumors in the 2018 Brazilian Elections
First Amendment Law Review: Political Advertising in Virtual Reality
University of Amsterdam: Social media polarize politics for a different reason than you might think
Center for Media Pluralism and Media Freedom: The state of media freedom and pluralism across the EU
Calendar
Topics to keep an eye on that have a general timeframe of the first half of the year:
Facebook 2020 election research
Oversight Board opinion on cross-check
Senate & House hearings, markups, and potential votes
October 15 - 22: SXSW Sydney
October 30: Brazil Second Round
November 1 - 2: Frontiers fo Digital Development Forum
November 1: Denmark Election
November 4: Workshop on technology, trust, and coordination
November 8: United States Midterms
November 17: Obama Foundation Democracy Forum
January 7: Meta/Trump Decision
March 10 - 19: SXSW
March 20 - 24, 2023: Mozilla Fest