The debate about who can say what online is heating up once more globally
Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor and Donald Trump’s chief rival for the Republican nomination, chose to announce his bid for the White House via Twitter. The live audio event, hosted by the social network’s owner, Elon Musk, descended into farce as Twitter’s servers struggled to cope with the few hundred thousand listeners who had tuned in. When he could be heard, Mr DeSantis said he had decided to announce on the platform because, unlike the “legacy media”, Twitter is a “beacon of free speech”.
Policing the online public square is a daunting task. Though things have calmed down a little since Mr Trump left office and covid-19 died down , last year the world’s three largest social media platforms—Facebook and Instagram, owned by Meta, and YouTube, owned by Google—removed or blocked 11.4bn posts, videos and user comments. Automated filters zap the bulk of it, but Meta and Google also employ more than 40,000 content reviewers between them.
Democrats, who accuse tech billionaires of stoking rage and misinformation for clicks, want platforms to remove more content. Republicans, who think woke California busybodies are gagging conservatives, want them to remove less. The result is congressional deadlock. Most controversially, in 2021 Florida and Texas, both Republican-controlled, passed laws restricting social networks’ ability to moderate political speech. Courts have upheld Texas’s law and struck down Florida’s, setting the stage for a return to the Supreme Court, which is expected to take up the cases later this year. “If the court opens up the door to regulation in this space, many [states] will jump at the opportunity,” says Evelyn Douek of Stanford University.
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