A social network banned support for Trump. Will others follow?
Ravelry’s move to
eliminate white supremacist content might put pressure on its peers
Two quick self-promotional
items: I went on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” on Sunday with one of my
sources for last week’s piece on Facebook moderators, and I encourage you to check it out. I’ll also be doing
a Reddit Ask Me Anything on Tuesday at 9A PT / 12P ET; I’ll tweet the link when
it’s available from my Twitter
account.
Last week, freshman Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley — who is actively
cultivating a reputation for being a hard-ass when it comes to regulating tech
companies — unveiled a deeply misguided idea for promoting free speech on
large tech platforms. Makena Kelly reported the details for The Verge:
Under Hawley’s “Ending Support
for Internet Censorship Act,” companies could be stripped of that immunity if
they exhibit political bias, or moderate in a way that disadvantages a certain
political candidate or viewpoint. [...]
Hawley’s bill would task the Federal Trade Commission with
certifying that tech companies are approaching moderation in a neutral way, a
requirement for any company with over 30 million monthly active users in the
US, 300 million monthly active users globally, or $500 million in global
revenue. Certification would require a supermajority vote, including at least
one minority member, and would occur every two years. If a company over that
threshold could not be certified, it would lose 230 protections and be subject
to intermediary liability litigation.
The bill seems to be dead on arrival. As Mike Masnick notes
in TechDirt, it
would seemingly require platforms to put Nazis on an equal footing with
mainstream political parties. Moreover, he notes, it’s likely unconstitutional on its face. And
that’s before you consider the fact that there is no systematic evidence of bias on social networks
toward anything but the extremes.
But say there was a
social network willing to discriminate on the basis of politics. What would
that look like? And what would it tell us about the state of political
discourse on social networks?
On Monday, a popular knitting community named Ravelry offered us
an answer. Edith Zimmerman reports in The Cut:
The popular knitting site Ravelry
— which has more than 8 million users and is something like a combination
Facebook, Google, Amazon, and public library for knitting and other textile
crafts — announced on Sunday that
it was “banning support of Donald Trump and his administration.” In its words,
“We cannot provide a space that is inclusive of all and also allow support for
open white supremacy.” Support of the Trump administration, the site writes,
“is undeniably support for white supremacy.”
It’s not about Democrats versus Republicans, per the blog post,
and it’s “definitely not banning conservative politics.” It’s that “hate groups
and intolerance are different from other types of political positions.”
On a platform the size of Facebook or even Twitter, a ban like
this would feel draconian, and might well be unenforceable. (It would also give
fuel to lawmakers sympathetic to Josh Hawley, of which there are more than a
few.) We have come to rely on large social networks to host our political
discourse in a way that makes a level playing field for all political parties
feel necessary. And that desire happily aligns with those platforms’ business
models, which benefit from hosting as many people as possible.
Ravelry is much smaller, and therefore less consequential. And
yet I find something deliciously provocative about its decision.
The reason is that our biggest platforms’ policy positions are
already closer to the knitting network’s than you might expect. In March,
Facebook explicitly banned white nationalist and separatist content,
bringing them within a few rhetorical feet of Ravelry’s Trump ban. In a world
where white nationalists are banned, what should a social network make of
content that explicitly praises (for example) concentration camps established after a
lengthy, xenophobic campaign in which Trump repeatedly expressed support for
white nationalist ideas?
In practice, I expect Facebook will have as little to say about
this as humanly possible. But the fact that Ravelry took such a bold stand
highlights why competition among social networks is such a good thing. The more
social networks we have, the more chances founders have to express their values
through policy. It’s notable that Ravelry’s founders say they got their idea
from another miniature social network — the role-playing game forum RPG.net.
It’s enough to make you wonder what might happen if we split the
big tech companies up, and the new companies that emerged fought for users on
the basis of their principles.
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