Photo: Kon Karampelas Facebook and Twitter can’t make hate go away, and we shouldn’t ask them to, writes John McGuirk
“Hatred,” The Sunday Business Post declared this week, “is still having its say”. The paper’s eye-catching headline referred to a story by its reporter, Aaron Rogan, that Facebook and Twitter were still, as he put it, failing to remove comments inciting hatred and violence in Ireland. He cited several horrible examples of the worst of human behaviour manifested online, from racism to bigotry to just plain nastiness. Facebook, he argued, is not doing enough to remove such content. It’s a seductive argument, but it’s the wrong approach.
Hatred and unpleasantness on social media is not a new phenomenon, but it is a growing one. While Rogan focused, understandably enough, on hate targeted at groups – racism and sectarianism and that sort of thing – but there is also a substantial problem with abuse and bullying targeted at individuals, both well known and unknown.
Digging through the previous tweets and messages of people – often going back 10 years – and then denouncing them for an off-colour joke, or a moment of anger, or a simple case of historic poor judgement, is a hobby growing in popularity amongst those with too much free time and too little common decency.
The further difficulty is that the internet erodes the normal boundaries of human decency. You might hold a simmering anger at a politician, or a particular group, but the chances are that if you encounter them in public, concern for your own dignity and reputation will moderate your behaviour. Online, when nobody knows it is you, you are free to say and do what you want, and smile away in public, like the pillar of the community you believe yourself to be.
Shame
This is a human problem, much more than it is a social media problem. Given free rein to be the worst versions of ourselves, with nobody watching, and no chance of being shamed, far too many of us will indulge eagerly. Nonetheless, it is a human problem exposed, and given the chance to flourish, by social media.
In response, there are growing, and loud, calls for social media companies to more actively regulate and censor the things that people say online. At first glance nearly everybody agrees with this, because when we hear that such companies will crack down on offensive or abusive content, we instinctively imagine that they are talking about content that might offend us, rather than the fact that our own content might be offensive. We are all the heroes of our own story, after all. There is a risk we might be wrong about that.
The main difficulty, of course, is that to solve this problem, we must grant the social media companies an unprecedented amount of power in our society. Not real power, you understand – not the power to lock you up, or take away your liberty – but power, nonetheless.
The very size of these companies – Facebook and Twitter – means that a huge amount of the most important debates in modern society take place on their platforms. Consider Brexit – every day, in the UK, the most important voices on either side of that debate react to, analyse, and shape the news. Social media has rightly made stars out of commentators on both sides. It has done so largely by allowing both sides the freedom to make their case as vigorously as they can.
Facebook and Twitter do not control the Brexit debate. But they could, if they wanted to, and if we gave them the power to do so. By interfering, and shutting down content or posts likely to offend, they could tilt the balance one way, or the other.
The problem in our society is a human problem, not a social media problem”
Many of you will remember last year, in Ireland, when Facebook and Google announced that they would not take ads during the campaign, a decision which those of us on the pro-life side felt was at least somewhat likely to influence the result. Now imagine them having this power on every controversial subject, from immigration, to climate change, to our elections. There is a reason liberals, in particular, are so keen on having them interfere more.
Somewhere, behind a desk in Facebook or Google or Twitter, is a person just like any other. A person who is offended by things, gets angry, and every now and then has strong views.
Unlike other people, we are granting them the power to silence and regulate those who they consider offensive, or just plain wrong. And what happens if we do not like what they decide? You cannot, remember, vote for a new management team in Facebook or Twitter. We risk handing the power to censor over to people over whom we have no control.
The fact that two or three companies have come to control so many important human interactions and have come to have such influence over public debate, is an accident, not a conspiracy. No Government granted them this power, they won it for themselves by being innovative, and attracting users. But the fact that they are so powerful already is an argument against giving them more power, not an argument for appointing them the referees in an increasingly angry society.
If anything, we should be breaking them up, to increase diversity and competition in the marketplace.
When people say things that are racist, or abusive, or just plain nasty, we have a duty as individuals to respond and stand up for what is right. Subcontracting that out to a private company would be a grave mistake. What’s more, hatred does not go away because Facebook deletes a hateful comment.
The problem in our society is a human problem, not a social media problem. The hateful person is still there, even if you cannot see them. The social media companies have not made it worse – their users have. Expecting Facebook to fix it is like expecting a drug dealer to run a rehab course for his customers. There’s a fair chance you’re going to make things much worse, not better.