from the a-waste-of-everyone's-time dept
FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson begged Donald Trump for his job by promising he would “end Lina Khan’s politically motivated investigations.” And, yet, one of his first orders of business upon getting the job was to… kick off a politically motivated investigation regarding “big tech censorship,” which he (falsely) claimed was potentially illegally targeting conservative speech and violating the policies and promises of these platforms.
It was an odd decision for many reasons, not the least of which is that it seemed to be discussing not just a fantasy world scenario that never existed, but even if it had ever existed, it certainly no longer did. The biggest social media platforms of the day are now all controlled by the ultra-rich who lined up (literally) behind Donald Trump and have agreed to do his bidding. ExTwitter is owned by Elon Musk, Donald Trump’s largest donor and his right-hand man in destroying the government. Mark Zuckerberg is now running content policy changes by Trump’s top advisor Stephen Miller.
If there is any “bias” in content moderation, it is very much in favor of MAGA Trump views. Which, to be clear, is their right to do under the First Amendment.
But the entire premise of the inquiry seemed to simply misunderstand nearly everything about content moderation. So, yesterday, the Copia Institute filed our comment with the FTC highlighting the myriad problems and misunderstandings that the FTC seemed to embrace with this inquiry.
The crux of our argument:
We then go into much greater detail on all three points. You can read the whole thing if you want, but I wanted to call out a few key things. Lots of comments address — as we did — the obvious First Amendment problems, but there were a few points we thought were unique.
For example, the entire premise that there’s a “censorship” problem is bizarre, given just how much the internet — through its variety of private platforms — now enables and encourages speech. We’re in a golden age of speech, not some censorial hellhole:
It remains bizarre to me that, in this much more expansive speech universe, so many people act as though their speech is restricted. To highlight this absurdity, we point to how ridiculous it would be if this same inquiry were directed at traditional media:
Also, we highlight that content moderation rules are inherently subjective and can’t be any other way. Ask multiple people how to deal with specific content moderation decisions and they will all give you different answers. So much of the misunderstandings around content moderation are based on the myth that there is a single right answer to questions regarding moderation.
We probably should have pointed out that even the FTC inherently recognizes this. After all, it was moderating and restricting access to many of the comments that came in, claiming they were “inappropriate.”
And finally, as a service that regularly relies on a large number of third-party intermediaries to host, distribute, promote, and monetize our speech, we wanted to make clear that these efforts would inevitably limit ours (and others’) ability to speak, by destroying the intermediary services we rely on.
Thousands of comments were submitted to the FTC (though, admittedly, many of them are angry screeds from people about how their conspiracy theories and threats of violence were moderated and just how unfair it all is). I have little faith that anyone at the FTC will take our comment seriously.
But they should. What they are looking to do would be an outright disaster for free speech. And, yes, that might be Ferguson’s real goal. Just like FCC Chair Brendan Carr, he may wish to use the language and trappings of “free speech advocacy” to make himself a government censor. But, we should use the tools at our disposal today to call that out, and try to prevent that kind of actual censorship from being allowed.
Filed Under: 1st amendment, andrew ferguson, content moderation, editorial discretion, free speech, ftc, intermediaries
Companies: copia institute, techdirt