Censorship on social media

 

Student ID (SID): 1742702

We will address the issue of censorship and ideological bias in social networks as in recent years there has been a growing oppression on Youtube, Facebook, Twitter... To conservative or right wing websites and channels which are more critical of the mainstream for supporting other ideas.

All this oppression has always been presented as a fight against hate speech, Facebook is one of the main social networks and owner of others and already announced that it was concerned about the removal of hate content on its platform and it was all triggered by the New Zealand shooting at a Mosque where the perpetrator streamed it live on facebook. If Facebook already had an ideological bias after this its algorithm and its pressure groups that organise en masse to take down certain users has become an everyday occurrence according to (Racism, Hate Speech, and Social Media: A Systematic Review and Critique - Ariadna Matamoros-Fernández, Johan Farkas, 2021, 2021).

It is very understandable that nobody wants videos of murders or any barbarity of this type on their platform, but the problem arises when hate speech is understood as only that which is on one side of the political spectrum, with news as crazy as Facebook censoring white nationalism but not Basque nationalism (part of northern Spain) because they consider that there is an identity in the Basque Country, when the terrorist group ETA murdered 845 people in the name of Basque nationalism.

On the internet there is the discussion between journalist Tim Pool and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey where Tim Pool accused the CEO of allowing liberal ideological bias not only against conservative people but against anyone who disagrees with the dominant ideological line according to (Bote, 2021).

For example, Meghan Murphy, a self-proclaimed TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) who excludes trans people from the women's struggle in the feminist movement because she thinks they are men, was permanently banned from Twitter for writing a tweet saying that men are not women. The Twitter platform says you can't call anyone by their incorrect gender.

It is important to remember that social media is where the public debate is happening right now and serves not only as a source of information but also as an economic source for many people. Even though they are private companies and can establish their own policies we cannot deny that we are talking about a new revolution in communication where if they censor you they are taking away your voice so it is not comparable to a bakery, fishmonger, butcher where private policies can be applied.

With the intervention of algorithms to censor, the context of the person who uses them is lost and encourages the abuse of organised groups of people who are dedicated to denounce en masse political opponents or uncomfortable people who do not defend their ideas, if someone says the word retarded, subnormal, nigger or makes a mistake with a pronoun when treating a trans person, they can be an easy victim for those who want to remove them from social networks, nigger, or makes a mistake with a pronoun when treating a trans person can be an easy victim for those who want to eliminate them from social networks as happened to a Netflix executive who was fired for using the word nigger in a speech where he quoted controversial words to be avoided and among them he quoted the word nigger, so he did not call anyone a nigger but he was still fired.

Many of the big tech companies understand that their target audience is young people who have a more socialist-communist ideology, although this would be another issue to deal with because many people adopt these ideologies in their youth, the problem is that these ideas that defend modern socialism are becoming authoritarian as they consider despicable any person or idea that departs from theirs and consider that their opinion should not be listened to.

Slogans are used by pressure groups to defend their cause but it is not possible to apply it in a legal framework, for example no human being is illegal! which if you don't analyse it may seem to have common sense but if you study the case you realise that it is not realisable in any modern state where borders do not exist, probably the origin of all this is due to what the Scottish historian Niall Ferguson called "Emocracy" today feelings are above truth according to (Ferguson, 2021).

It is logical that social networks as companies do not accept everything that is criminal but that social networks use totally subjective concepts such as "do not hurt minorities", "do not make hate speech" etc.... These are open premises that allow users to depend on the good or bad will of those who manage the social networks who have already assumed that they manage them ideologically, for example Mark Zuckerberg stated before the US Senate that they systematically censor right-wing pages and none from the left because Silicon Valley is progressive.

On the other hand, all these social networks financed Joe Biden's campaign and of course they have the right to do so, but don't keep selling us that there is nothing more democratic and impartial than social networks, because without freedom of expression there can be none of the above. Nowadays you not only need a state that allows you freedom of expression but you also need the owners of the social networks to allow you freedom of expression because it is the channel of communication par excellence in the 21st century, democracy no longer depends only on the state but also on a new power "the fifth power" the social networks on the internet according to (Kirsten Grind, 2021).

One of the main problems is that we cannot separate the internet from social networks as we used to do in the past, since most of the people who connect to the internet today use social networks, so it is not so easy to separate the two. The new thing about social media is that lies can go from the bottom up so it is no longer imposed solely by the powerful. Another problem is that you can have several identities on the internet by having many accounts so it is not comparable to a private company like a pub, in a pub you get kicked out and you can't come back with a different identity or come back with many different identities.

We are facing a new technology in its early stages and we do not know what consequences it may have, so it is important to debate this issue on how we should manage this issue, to what extent the entrepreneurs who run these social networks are responsible for their behaviour, is it the state who should intervene so that they are not subjectively censored? How should we deal with fake news, how should we deal with multi-accounts or multi-identities on social networks, what to do with the presence of bots that try to destroy a person's reputation or even that can be a danger to national security and even disrupt elections according to (Social Media Has Become a Global Battlefield, 2021).

It is an issue that is gaining more and more strength because people no longer believe in the traditional media because they defend their own agenda so people have moved to the social networks where a more democratic and free world was promised but all this myth was broken with the blocking of the account of the President of the United States Donald Trump, if even the president of the first power in the world cannot escape the censorship of this new power, what will be left for us citizens?

                  BIBLIOGRAPHY:                  

- Journals.sagepub.com. 2021. [online] Available at: <https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1527476420982230> [Accessed 26 November 2021].

- Bote, J., 2021. Twitter CEO admits site contributed to Capitol riots. [online] SFGATE. Available at: <https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/Twitter-CEO-Jack-Dorsey-admits-role-Capitol-riots-16053469.php> [Accessed 26 November 2021].

- Kirsten Grind, R., 2021. How Google Interferes With Its Search Algorithms and Changes Your Results. [online] WSJ. Available at: <https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-google-interferes-with-its-search-algorithms-and-changes-your-results-11573823753> [Accessed 26 November 2021].

- Ferguson, N., 2021. Feeling beats truth in our indignant ‘emocracy’. [online] Thetimes.co.uk. Available at: <https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/feeling-beats-truth-in-our-indignant-emocracy-fn2d6rhpg> [Accessed 26 November 2021].

- The Atlantic. 2021. Social Media Has Become a Global Battlefield. [online] Available at: <https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/10/social-media-battlefield-internet/571960/> [Accessed 26 November 2021].