Quotes from Jillian York

This is just as true in the United States as it has been in Egypt, Tunisia, and dozens of other locales around the world, and despite mainstream media's heavy focus over the past few years on the alleged censorship of right-wing populists, it is and has always been marginalized communities most affected by these new forms of censorship.

Facebook, on the other hand, meets regularly with NGOs and other stakeholders, but remains mum about which ones. The company's policy team is also deeply susceptible to government pressure, and, according to more than a half-dozen individuals that I spoke to, it will often speak openly about it to NGOs when meeting about specific policies.

The final conclusion I've made is that we, the people, must decide what comes next. The events of the past decade have brought to the public fore a fairly widespread recognition that certain speech is beyond the pale, but in nearly every instance I have seen, regulatory and legislative proposals to restrict such speech take the wrong aim, punishing companies (and their workers) for errors, or for not moving fast enough, while failing to do anything to address the problems at the root.

There are exceptions to this rule—that is, if a group or individual also appears on the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Asset Controls list of "specially designated nationals"—but this list is short.

They should be transparent about what they censor, provide users with ample notification, and ensure that every user has the right to appeal removals.

Censorship is, as I hope this book makes clear, inherently political, and the more complex the rules, the more difficult they are to apply at scale. On top of that, as the past few months have demonstrated, the individual right to free expression is inherently in tension with public health and freedom from harm. These are not easy problems, and we must be wary of anyone who claims to have easy solutions.

Over the years, lawmakers in several countries have implored tech companies to go above and beyond the law to remove certain designated groups, in particular Hamas and Hezbollah—calls which have at times succeeded.43 Most recently, a 2019 letter from sixteen members of US Congress to Twitter to ban Hamas resulted in the company caving, after first pushing back, and banning accounts from both groups.44

Although I am certain, for example, that the US government should not dictate to companies who is a terrorist, and that widespread bans on women's partial nudity are discriminatory and harmful to the feminist cause, I still struggle to find the right answer to what we should do about suspected bots, or brigading, or how we should handle hateful speech that doesn't quite reach the level of incitement.

Other countries, such as the United Kingdom and the European Union—as well as Twitter—make the distinction between Hezbollah's military wing and its political arm—putting only the former on their blacklists—while still others do not list Hezbollah at all.

For better or worse, Hezbollah remains a major player in contemporary Lebanese politics, as El Masri points out, and the willingness of tech companies to cave to US pressure has an immeasurable impact on the country's political scene.

their hatred for and opposition to the Iranian government so great as to throw all moral conviction out the window.

Twitter and Facebook, had begun to crack down (albeit somewhat reluctantly) on the American far right the summer prior, their attempts to do so pale in comparison to the resources they put into policing extremist groups elsewhere in the world—or, to put it bluntly, extremist groups that happen to be Muslim and invoke the ire of Western politicians.

Algorithms are simply incapable of encapsulating human experience, regardless of what Silicon Valley would have us believe. And once companies have taken humans out of the loop and relinquished the reins to machines, there is no telling the sort of cultural norms they will eventually propagate in the future.

While in general the governance of speech on social media has been on a trajectory of increased transparency and accountability, the policing of so-called terrorist speech is becoming more and more opaque, and decisions about policies are being made by elites, behind closed doors, absent the meaningful inclusion of civil society … and the communities likely to be most affected by such decisions.

As a member of the Global Network Initiative, Microsoft had committed to "protect and advance user rights to freedom of expression and privacy, including when faced with government demands for censorship." Specifically, member companies were supposed to work to "avoid or minimize the impact of government restrictions on freedom of expression.

Facebook and its counterparts don't operate like courts; there is no case law, no checks and balances, and—until recently—no due process. The judges (content moderators) are not appointed or elected by voters, unlike in well-functioning democracies. There are simply no systems of accountability to the process and, as such, the same image that might be banned for one user can be allowed for another.

the global default" of permissible speech, defined by a narrow set of actors and replicated by less powerful ones, that has become the status quo online.

Facebook and its counterparts operate more like churches than courts; they are subject to influence by states and the wealthy, and all too content with disregarding the needs of their subjects in favor of those with power.

Facebook's executives speak often of the platform being a global community, but those whose names do not fit within an Anglocentric idea of what is a name are subject to punitive measures that are not experienced by other users.