3 ms·
Unless it's directly inciting violence, yes. By this standard, Facebook must allow everything that you can find on Pornhub and Liveleak. Plus much of the mater
by philipkglass 6y ago
Unless it's directly inciting violence, yes.
By this standard, Facebook must allow everything that you can find on Pornhub and Liveleak. Plus much of the material published in Al Qaeda's magazine Inspire. Telling people "crusaders should die" and "here's how to make a bomb from over the counter materials" aren't direct incitements to violence. Reddit could never have banned r/WatchPeopleDie or r/jailbait. (Although it could be hard to spot any actual jailbait in r/jailbait once torrents of MLM schemes and cryptocurrency scams flood every subreddit.)
The First Amendment protects a lot. That's why back in 2014/2015 American legislators who were unhappy with Islamist terrorist propaganda circulating on social media called on social media companies to do something instead of passing a law. A law that says "it's illegal to publish photos of dead Americans or their allies with gloating commentary" wouldn't survive the First Amendment. But social platforms could and did deplatform groups cheering for ISIS, to bipartisan approval.
You may sincerely believe that only direct incitements to violence should be suppressed on social media. I don't think that there is legislative support for that state of affairs, though. Not even among the conservative legislators who are currently the most critical of social media moderation decisions. If legislators managed to pass a law that said "social media platforms cannot suppress anything that is legal to publish under the First Amendment," I think that they would regret that choice a month after seeing the consequences.