Online Speech Has Problems; No Clear Policy, Regulatory Answers Seen

Troubling online speech, from Russian political bots to hate speech, is a problem, said speakers at a Future Tense event Tuesday, but there was no consensus about what regulatory or tech company policy fixes would work best. "It's hard," said former White House technology and policy adviser Dipayan Ghosh, saying algorithms to take down problematic speech raise technological constraint and free speech red flags.

The nation's current regulatory system was built for traditional media and not the internet and online speech, Ghosh said: "It's a catch-up game for government." Yale University Center for Innovative Thinking Executive Director Andrew McLaughlin said the optimal approach would be focus on a substantive issue like privacy and using existing law enforcement as the mechanism for going after bad online behavior -- such as the New York attorney general using laws against impersonation -- instead of "rethinking the administrative state." McLaughlin said there's a general sense government needs to do something about online speech problems, but a danger is massive overblock. He said regulators should focus on ends, like transparency, and let tech companies focus on means.

With 280 days before the 2018 elections, the U.S. can't just ponder election problems anymore, said Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., making a pitch for stronger election infrastructure in the form of updated voting technology and for rules on online election-related advertising. Some online companies adopted voluntary standards of ad disclaimers and disclosures, but those are inconsistent, she said. Klobuchar said the Honest Ads Act (S-1989) she co-sponsored (see 1710190054) has slim chance of passing this year, but it could prompt the Federal Election Commission to act.

A huge challenge in online speech in the past decade has been the rise of curated news experiences such as Google News or Facebook’s news feed, said McLaughlin. The regulatory framework is binary -- either treating platforms as a neutral pipe or as an editorial publisher -- but those news feeds are in the middle as a chooser, not a writer, McLaughlin said.

Citing the Louis Brandeis aphorism about more speech being the solution to false or misleading speech, Rep. Ted Liu, D-Calif., said government not only can’t easily stop Russian propaganda or bots but also shouldn’t look to regulate such speech. He said nothing is keeping the Kremlin from printing and distributing thousands of leaflets advertising a point of view, and there’s no principled distinction between that and it doing so online. He backs the Honest Ads Act and its disclosure requirements. Meanwhile, there has been growing demand for legitimate media outlets, with consumers believing that content is more likely to be true or corrected if wrong, he said.

Washington College of Law associate professor Jennifer Daskal said nations globally are trying to limit online content, from Germany's new online hate speech law and the right to be forgotten in Europe’s general data protection regulations going into effect this year. Daskal said the European rules raise major questions of territorial reach.

The maximum free speech ethos baked into much of the internet creates a false sense that protecting free speech means allowing for the worst kinds of speech, when the end result ends up being less speech by everyone else, said Mercer University literary studies and writing assistant professor Whitney Phillips. "When you give bigots the floor, nobody else is able to say a single word.” Phillips acknowledged limiting content and comments based on hurt feelings "gets into risky territory," yet "if I have 10,000 strangers saying they want me to get raped, that does warrant intervention."