ACLU: Alex Jones ban could set dangerous social media precedent
ACLU: Alex Jones ban could set dangerous social media
precedent
BY MEGAN KELLER - 08/21/18 04:31 PM EDT
Ben Wizner, the director of the American Civil Liberties
Union’s (ACLU) speech, privacy and technology project, warned Monday that bans
against Alex Jones and Infowars could set a dangerous precedent.
Wizner told HuffPost that the hate speech policies many
social media companies cited when they banned Jones can be “misused and
abused.”
Earlier this month, Jones’s content was pulled from
Facebook, YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Vimeo for violating policies
related to hate speech. He was later hit with a temporary suspension by Twitter
as well.
Wizner said companies had a constitutional right to
regulate speech on their platforms, but added that hate speech “turns out to be
an extremely subjective term.”
“If [Attorney General] Jeff Sessions, for example, were
deciding what’s hate speech, he would be less likely to think KKK and more
likely to think [Black Lives Matter],” he said.
In particular, Wizner told HuffPost that he is worried about
massive private companies holding the power to define that ambiguous category.
“I have some of the same concerns about platforms making
those decisions,” Wizner said.
“Governments at least purport to be acting solely in the
public interest, but platforms are making these decisions based on what’s in
their financial interest,” he continued. “So their interest might be in
avoiding controversy, but do we want the most important speech platforms in the
world to avoid controversy?”
Some platforms have attempted to expand their policies
beyond the limitation of hate speech to preclude fake news as well, while
others resist doing so.
President Trump has also expressed his own concerns about
platforms’ attempts to police content. On Monday, he told Reuters that it is
“dangerous” for Facebook and Twitter to limit who can and cannot speak on their
platforms.
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