Quotes from Jillian York

many around the world were beginning to find their voices online. The world before social media was different, as only certain voices were able to rise to the top, creating a skewed perception of what is globally tolerable. But when nearly everyone has equal access to the same platforms, the simple fact that not everyone thinks alike—and certainly not everyone shares the same values as those in the United States—becomes strikingly clear.

Policymakers have demonstrated a predilection for giving the greatest amount of deference to state and other elite actors, rather than to their users. Increased complexity has led to a greater propensity for inconsistency and error, as the following chapters illustrate. This, combined with ever-increasing scale, has created a crisis of legitimacy and, for many individuals for whom these platforms constitute a vital tool, an untenable situation.

What stands out for me in this story is the seeming fact that Mark Zuckerberg and co. only pay attention to internal resistance when it reaches critical mass, which it only seems to do when the cause is American. I am aware of a number of attempts Facebook employees have made over the years to raise concerns about the handling of, for example, wrongful takedowns of Palestinian content or inattention to the growing problem of harassment … all of which were dismissed.

the restriction of speech by social media platforms was not yet a well-known phenomenon.

When pages that promote female pleasure are hidden, we understand that our pleasure is invalid,

When drawings of vaginas are removed, we learn that we should be ashamed of our bodies. When female nipples are censored but male nipples are not, we know that we must police our own bodies to ensure we do not arouse men … The bodies, sexualities and desires that are allowed online, translates itself into the bodies, sexualities and desires that are accepted in society.

So it's not American values, per se, that are being exported to billions of users around the world, but the values of a very particular demographic—perhaps not incidentally the same demographic that made up Facebook's first set of users.

Whereas once upon a time, YouTube defended the free speech rights of al-Qaeda, today the company's policy is to remove any content produced by government-listed terrorism organizations—even if the public might have an interest in seeing that material.

Algorithms of Oppression

Freedom of expression in Athens, as readers well know, was not without limits: the vote to convict Socrates may have been democratic, but it nonetheless resulted in the ultimate silencing of his speech.

The problem, of course, lies in companies viewing governments and citizens as equals, while in fact governments are, by and large, using their power to implement policies where passing laws is impossible without also changing the national constitution. By remaining neutral, corporations are acting as conduits of the state. They are today's censors, not unlike the religious institutions and governments that came before them.

And although it may seem that governments and citizens (in the form of NGOs or civil society organizations) are given somewhat equal access, the truth is that no citizen, not even a director of a powerful NGO, can simply pick up the phone and dial Mark Zuckerberg to complain about a policy decision the way that Israeli prime minister Netanyahu has been known to do.62

The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated the failures of American (and of course many other) institutions. But it has also shown us something interesting: although Silicon Valley companies have for years only wrung their hands as calls for genocide, death threats, and misinformation have proliferated globally on their platforms, now, in the face of widespread disease and death in the United States, they suddenly found the will to moderate certain expression.

The specific line here is that you must never question Morocco's sovereignty over the Western Sahara, the land claimed in 1975 when 350,000 Moroccans marched into the then-Spanish territory, kicking off a war that lasted sixteen years and only strengthened the Moroccan government's resolve.

Whereas corporate leaders once spoke about the power of their platforms to help citizens topple governments, today they meet in secret with authoritarian leaders to create backroom deals that stifle citizen expression.63

The result? An increasingly stratified online world in which the rules about what we can say are determined by a motley crew of elected officials and non-elected elites, some of whom have alarmingly close ties to government.

in the middle of the decade, three revolutionary technological developments created the conditions for anyone to create and share videos: the smartphone, video-sharing platforms, and fast internet speeds enabled millions of people to capture, distribute, and consume video

Israel was among the first governments to secure a backdoor deal with a social media company, but it's far from the last.

Announcements of collaboration create a mirage of progress, without necessarily furthering the resolution of underlying issues," wrote scholar Evelyn Douek in a 2020 piece critiquing what she's dubbed "content cartels," or multi-stakeholder partnerships involving more than one company and, typically, state partners.

By the end of the decade, governments had grown savvy to the fact that companies readily responded to their takedown demands. In 2009, when Google issued its first transparency report documenting government requests for takedowns and user data, the company had received more than one thousand content removal requests in just a six-month period, a number that has only increased over time.

In the early years of my work in this field, I observed as an elite crew of law professors and media experts, State Department officials, and corporate executives sought solutions that centered free expression issues that aligned, almost perfectly, with the goals of the US government.

Dozens of articles took aim at pundit Malcolm Gladwell after he dismissively wrote in the New Yorker: "Please. People protested and brought down governments before Facebook was invented.

The third conclusion I've made is: if governments are collaborating, so must we. When it comes to expression, one thing remains certain: no one will moderate the speech of governments or their officials. Sure, Twitter will fact-check Trump, and Facebook will boot members of foreign governments (and maybe someday even the president of the United States), but in the grand scheme of things, we might be watching the watchers, but no citizen has the power to silence them.

One particular Facebook policy, which the company has dubbed the "newsworthiness exemption," has come under fire from activists, who believe it privileges politicians' speech above their own. The policy allows posts that otherwise violate community standards to remain on the platform if the company believes the public's interest in seeing it outweighs the risk of harm.