Threats to Democracy: Social Media Implicates Free Speech Values
(Opinion Piece)
It was Louis D. Brandeis who best articulated the leading free speech philosophy of the 20th century. Brandeis posited;
“If there be time to expose through discussion, the falsehoods and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”
In contemporary debate, this conviction is heavily challenged by voices on either side of the political spectrum. According to the findings of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “fake news spreads six times faster online than real news.” Social media promotes the amplification of emotionally charged, harmful, false, and misleading speech over that of expert-backed speech. Within the framework of digital platforms, Brandeis’ conviction is no longer effective in ensuring the dissemination of evidence-based information, nor does our digital environment foster dissenting opinions, productive debate, or safe spaces for marginalized groups to be protected against hate speech and doxxing. The ill effects of social media have infiltrated the health of our information ecosystem, destroyed the public’s trust in paramount civic institutions, initiated what scholars have called “the post-truth era” and have shown its ability to undermine our democracy. The control of our public sphere has shifted from the hands of formally entrusted institutions like universities and news organizations into the hands of revenue-driven tech company moguls. This transition of power has resulted in a misguided debate and re-evaluation of the democratic values of freedom of expression. The current structure of social media platforms –designed to facilitate engagement above all else–is what I believe to be the single greatest threat to free expression.
I would like to begin by being sure to emphasize that my claims against our digital platforms are in no way to suggest that social media is inherently bad, nor am I of the growing demographic of people who support content regulation. I am simply attributing the blame to its rightful owner, the designers of these algorithms and platforms who are responsible for sabotaging our public sphere and catapulting fringe mob rhetoric from the sidelines into the mainstream. Facebook was a pioneer in the development of our social platform’s architecture and functions. Communications scholar Nick Couldry writes, “Facebook configured its products to maximize the measurable ‘engagement’ that drives its advertising profits.” As aforementioned, “falsehoods travel faster, more deeply and more widely than truths.” Therefore, explains Couldry, “optimizing for ‘engagement’ automatically optimizes for falsehoods too.” In a recent article for the Atlantic, social scientist Johnathan Haidt expands upon the phenomenon of social media structure to facilitate the spread of combative speech. Haidt reveals that “later research showed that posts that trigger emotions — especially anger at out-groups — are the most likely to be shared.”
Social media has effectively destroyed the public’s trust in institutions formally responsible for informing and preserving our democracy, organizing conversation, facilitating civic engagement, and curating public opinion. Universities, news organizations, libraries, and governments were once the institutions that, with a reliance on free speech values, framed our public sphere. Jack M. Balkin defines a public sphere as “a set of social practices and institutions in which ideas and opinions circulate” that is “crucial to democracy.” Scholars, among them Jonathan Haidt, point out that academic discourse has revealed “social media is indeed corrosive to trust in governments, news media, and people and institutions in general.” Furthermore, the implications social media have had on trust are described in a report authored by social scientists Philipp Lorenz-Spreen and Lisa Oswald as “detrimental for democracy.” Freedom of the press is essential to an informed citizenry. Our digital information landscape is the arena within which 67% of Americans consume their news. A French poll of journalists published by Cision found “94% of them [journalists] use social networks, especially Facebook and Twitter, in the course of their work.” This reality illustrates the journalism industry’s reliance on social media. And yet, it is within this setting that journalists experience harassment, censorship, and chilling effects that impede their ability to fulfill their paramount role in democracy. In a report about the epidemic of online harassment against the press, Reporters Without Borders highlights:
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) sheds light on the latest danger for journalists — threats and insults on social networks that are designed to intimidate them into silence. The sources of these threats and insults may be ordinary ‘trolls’ (individuals or communities of individuals hiding behind their screens) or armies of online mercenaries. Harassing journalists has never been as easy as it is now. Freedom of expression and bots are being used to curtail the freedom to inform.
The interconnected networks produced by social media curate mobs, bots, and trolls. These players work in tandem to expedite the propagation of harmful speech and misinformation that curtail journalistic efforts and result in a chilling effect on the press. This chilling effect pervades many disciplinary,–namely academia. Haidt argues that “participants in our key institutions began self-censoring to an unhealthy degree” thanks to the “the new omnipresence of enhanced-virality social media meant that a single word uttered by a professor, leader, or journalist, even if spoken with positive intent, could lead to a social-media firestorm, triggering an immediate dismissal or a drawn-out investigation by the institution.”
The dissolution of an accurately representative, or functioning democratic public sphere has sparked new free speech debates. Contemporary free speech ideologies represent a stark dissent from previously deep-rooted beliefs. The enduring liberal perspective on speech held that freedom of expression was crucial in protecting “historically persecuted minorities against outbreaks of majoritarian intolerance.” According to Jacob Mchangama, this position has assumed the back burner as “many now point to unmediated disinformation and hateful speech on the Internet as evidence that free speech is being weaponized against democracy itself.” I would argue that those in support of this position, although motivated by genuine concerns for democracy, are misguided in their condemnation of speech. It would be more prudent to address social media design, the vehicles responsible for the amplification of fringe speech that is in no way representative of the majority of moderate Americans. Examples in case law demonstrate the Supreme Court’s history of ruling against limiting expression, based on the awareness of how such a precedent could weigh on further decisions and First Amendment law as a whole. In US v. Playboy Entertainment Corp, the court held that statute 505’s content-based restriction on speech violated the First Amendment. This affirmed the court’s long-held position that restrictions on speech “must be narrowly tailored to promote a compelling Government interest, and if a less restrictive alternative would serve the Government’s purpose, the legislature must use that alternative, ” and that “when the Government restricts speech, the Government bears the burden of proving the constitutionality of its actions.” Some contemporary free speech discourse advocates for government-imposed restrictions on speech. These proponents perceive such proposed regulation, particularly in online environments, as a promising solution to the ills caused by social media. But the Supreme Court has avoided this position, based on awareness of how speech restrictions could implicate further cases, resulting in the limitations of other expression-based rights, and ramifications for First Amendment law. It is my hope that contemporary free-speech scholarship rejects solutions that rely on speech-restrictive content-based regulation.
