Opinion | Don't make social media tech bro billionaires the arbiters of truth. By anthonyLfisher
Sounds like a cop out, but if the other option is fact-checking politicians, it's the less-worse route.If a conservative insists "life begins at conception" or cites the Bible as evidence the Earth is only 6,000 years old, is that fake news in need of correction? How about a Republican official mischaracterizing a political opponent's position on welfare benefits? When does the referee step in? On the other side, imagine the very likely scenario of a Democratic politician sharing a post that says Michael Brown had his hands up and was saying "Don't shoot" when he was killed by Ferguson PD Officer Darren Wilson —What if that same Democrat regularly got their facts wrong? Would those representsimilar to the pattern of misbehavior that got Infowars' chemtrail-fearing impresario Alex Jones kicked off major platforms? What if that Democrat is Ocasio-Cortez, who in 2019 lamented to "60 Minutes" that too many people are "more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right"? When do incorrect facts become willful distortions endangering democracy? And is that a question you want tech bro billionaires to answer? These are not possibilities that are far out of the realm of possibility, and they are not within the purview of Silicon Valley employeeswith filtering out grotesquely violent or pornographic imagery from social media sites.
In 2018, just after Alex Jones was purged from most of the big social media platforms for seemingly innumerable conduct violations, Ben Wizner, the director of ACLU's Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, warned that whatever relief the Jones ban might provide would come with a cost. "Do we really want corporations that are answerable to their shareholders and their bottom lines being the ones who decide which political speech Americans should see or not see? … Because that's what we're asking for here," Wizner toldTwitter can be as biased as it wants to be and the government has no right to do anything about it
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