A little over a month before the U.S. midterm elections, social media giant Facebook announced it has “purged” more than 800 pages and accounts based on the premise of clamping down on “inauthentic behavior”. The company’s official statement reads: “Today, we’re removing 559 Pages and 251 accounts that have consistently broken our rules against spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior,” explained Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy and Product Manager Oscar Rodriguez, in a blog post. “Many were using fake accounts or multiple accounts with the same names and posted massive amounts of content across a network of Groups and Pages to drive traffic to their websites. Many used the same techniques to make their content appear more popular on Facebook than it really was” (Facebook, 2018).
Facebook wielding the hammer on these accounts begs the question of how much power these tech giants can and should be able to wield over the first amendment freedom of speech rights of Americans. Fake news is certainly bad, but who is to decide which news is fake and which news is inauthentic is a slippery slope. Sites like Facebook, Twitter Instagram, and Reddit are new forms of the public square and many critics of big tech state that these sites should be regulated as public utilities. In addition, the vague user terms of agreement on these sites leave little clarity pertaining to what constitutes a violation of spam and inauthentic behavior.
Facebook claims some of the pages and accounts were “ad farms” that used Facebook and other sites like Twitter to mislead audiences into thinking they were forums for open and legitimate political debate. But should the American society really except free speech censorship from a private corporation? Facebook claims its move is being driven by the behavior of these social accounts, as opposed to their content, as well as by reported Russian meddling in U.S. politics, but critics staunchly protest the move is more driven by the desire of both democrats and republicans to have big tech censor anti-establishment media.
Early in 2018, Facebook came under criticism for how it collects personal data, as well as how it has dealt with accounts peddling reported fake news and misinformation campaigns. Pages Facebook removed fell on both sides of the political spectrum, although there were more pages taken down on the right than left. Facebook and other social media company’s recent behavior begs the question of what the future of free speech looks like in the United States of America. The world is now playing a dangerous game of private censorship at a time where the political discourse is as polarizing as it has ever been.
References:
https://www.pcmag.com/news/364336/facebook-purges-800-accounts-pages-for-political-spamming
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