Cheap Speech by Richard L. Hasen

Author:Richard L. Hasen [Hasen, Richard L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300265255
Publisher: YaleUP
Published: 2022-09-15T05:00:00+00:00

Pressure on the Platforms

The 2020 election season demonstrated both that public pressure can get social media companies and other platforms to respond to the serious democracy problems caused by cheap speech, and that some of the voluntary measures the companies took may have done more harm than good. At the very least, 2020 showed that the platforms can be pressured, but they face a serious learning curve in dealing with the effects of cheap speech on American elections.

Russian interference in the 2016 election cast a shadow over the 2020 race, even if the foreign influence efforts we know of paled beside the work of the campaign organizations, parties, outside groups, and other domestic actors. Perhaps Russian interference was relatively minor in 2020 because one of the presidential candidates was far more effective at disinformation than Russian hackers operating out of a St. Petersburg boiler room could ever hope to be. Perhaps the Russians were so concerned with their 2020 “Solar Winds” hack into U.S. government computers that they did not want to draw more attention to themselves with a disinformation campaign.10

The platforms engaged in a great deal of self-regulation before 2020, including the removal of pornography, threats, hate speech, and more. Even with the protection of Section 230, the major companies recognized that certain steps are necessary to prevent their sites from becoming unpleasant and even dangerous.11

But 2020 brought a new level of self-regulation, as the platforms responded to criticism from the left and right. Facebook and Twitter restricted “coordinated inauthentic behavior” from foreign and domestic actors, revealing and removing accounts when they found a central actor coordinating groups of individuals or bots to create the appearance of organic grassroots activity. That summer, for example, Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit took steps to remove clusters of accounts pushing the QAnon conspiracy theory.12

The platforms dealt with political ads and disclosure differently. Facebook set up its own private disclosure rules. They proved both overinclusive, including journalists who should be exempt from disclosure, and underinclusive, allowing people to hide their true identities behind other persons or entities, such as Vice News’s successful efforts to pretend to be all one hundred U.S. senators and to post ads falsely in their names. Facebook also refused to remove even obvious lies from political ads, as Senator Elizabeth Warren, then a presidential candidate, neatly demonstrated when she bought a Facebook ad falsely claiming that Facebook’s head, Mark Zuckerberg, had endorsed Donald Trump. It is no wonder, given its failed efforts at self-regulating disclosure and its dominant market position, that Facebook has vaguely supported calls for government regulation.13

Twitter would not run Senator Warren’s ad because it was not accepting political ads, and Google did not run it because it contained an unsubstantiated claim. Twitter banned all political ads during the 2020 election season, but its ban did not apply to unpaid statements made by politicians on their own pages. This left Trump free to make false claims about election fraud and to make other political statements directly to tens

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