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 |  Subject: Countries are increasingly willing to censor speech online  Fri Nov 08, 2019 12:39 am | |
| IN 2016 THE World Health Organisation (WHO) declared Britain to be officially free from measles, a highly infectious illness that killed about 110,000 people around the world in 2017. The success was short-lived. After 991 infections were recorded in England and Wales in 2018, the WHO revoked Britain’s disease-free label.
Cases of measles are rising in many countries, fuelled in part by conspiracy theories claiming that vaccines given to children cause autism (they do not). “Anti-vaxxers” have long used internet forums and social media to spread their nonsense. Matt Hancock, Britain’s health minister, would like to see that stopped. In March he said that internet giants such as Facebook and Google should have a “duty of care” to their users, putting them in the same legal position as schools or doctors. If firms would not stop the spread of anti-vaccination messages voluntarily, said Mr Hancock, he would consider changing the law to force them to do so.
An election is due in December, so Mr Hancock may not get his way—though the opposition Labour Party is also keen. But Britain is far from alone. In recent months attention has focused on the threat to big internet companies from trustbusting politicians in America. Now they face a second regulatory assault elsewhere. Citing reasons ranging from combating terrorism to safeguarding elections to discouraging self-harm, politicians around the world are increasingly eager to censor the material that appears on the tech giants’ platforms.
Many authoritarian governments already restrict what their citizens see online. China has heavily censored the internet since its early days; Twitter and Facebook are banned outright. Iran also outlaws Facebook. Saudi Arabia restricts access to information on everything from gay rights and evolution to Shia Islam. Attitudes are hardening in democracies, too. Rather than simply being blocked, big tech firms face a raft of new laws controlling what they can host on their platforms.
This marks a big change for a global industry that has, until now, been run on techno-libertarian assumptions. “Most of the big internet companies come from an American speech tradition,” says Owen Bennett of the Mozilla Foundation, which campaigns for an open internet. There was, he says, an assumption that the liberal attitude to speech embodied in the First Amendment to America’s constitution would spread as the internet did. When the internet was young and unimportant, the frictions that it caused in countries with other ideas about free speech could mostly be ignored. Now that it is enormous and vital, they are pushing back.
In June, for instance, Singapore passed the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act. The city-state’s bossy government presented it as an anti-“fake news” bill. It bars the dissemination of online lies deemed to be against the public interest, on pain of fines of up to $1m or ten years in jail. Singapore’s government defines the public interest expansively. The law penalises falsehoods that would interfere with “public tranquillity” or “diminish public confidence in the performance of any duty or function of…the Government”. Firms can be required to block access to content found to be in breach of the law, and to tell users that such content is false, even to the point of getting in touch with them after they have already seen it.
Britain’s proposed laws are notable for their focus on things that are merely undesirable, rather than downright illegal. Besides demanding more effort to combat child pornography and the promotion of terrorism, they take aim at hard-to-define things such as hate, abuse and misogyny, as well as the glamorisation of suicide. The government envisages a new regulator, paid for by the tech firms, with the power to block offending websites, force other companies—such as payment processors or search engines—to sever ties with offending firms, and perhaps even to hold senior managers legally responsible for their companies’ failings.
Australia’s Sharing of Abhorrent Violent Material bill was rushed through in April following a live-streamed terrorist attack on mosques in New Zealand. Western technology firms fiercely opposed the bill. It requires companies (no matter where they are based) to ensure that anything on their servers depicting such things as terrorism, murder or kidnapping is swiftly made unavailable in Australia (potentially within less than an hour). The penalties for failing to do so include fines of up to a staggering 10% of global turnover and, in theory at least, jail time for executives.
One of the most influential jurisdictions will be the European Union (EU), a market of 500m rich consumers which restricts speech more than America does. Until now, individual member states have done much of the work. Germany passed its “Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz” law in 2017, which gives social-media firms 24 hours to remove fake news and hate speech or face fines of up to €50m ($56m). In July France passed similar legislation.
But Rasmus Nielsen, who runs the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, says one priority of the new European Commission, which takes office in December, will be to beef up such laws and put Brussels, rather than individual countries, in charge. Margrethe Vestager, a Danish politician who made her name levying multi-billion-dollar fines on big tech firms as the previous Commission’s competition enforcer, will probably lead the effort. The Commission’s planned Digital Services Act is likely to contain rules governing everything from political advertising to terrorist content, all of which would be enforced by a new regulator.
Still more consequential will be India’s efforts. It has around half a billion internet users—second only to China—and is adding to that number rapidly. In February its government proposed new powers that would weaken the encryption that protects messages on apps such as WhatsApp, force internet-service providers to install automatic filtering software to prevent users from seeing unlawful information, and require firms to remove posts or videos deemed hateful or deceptive, or which invade someone’s privacy. India’s size means the new rules have caught the attention of Western giants. In September Nick Clegg, a former British deputy prime minister who is now Facebook’s chief PR man, made a speech in Delhi urging the government to reconsider.
Even in America, disquiet is growing about the wisdom of letting internet giants police themselves. Elizabeth Warren, a presidential candidate, has accused Facebook of “taking money to promote lies”, referring to the social network’s decision to exempt politicians from its internal guidelines governing what can be posted. “We do not submit speech by politicians to our independent fact-checkers,” said Mr Clegg recently. “And we generally allow it on the platform even when it would otherwise breach our normal content rules.” Facebook points out, with some justification, that it would look odd for a democracy to rely on a private company to referee what politicians say—although the firm does decide who counts as a politician. The policy is not limited to America: Facebook has said it would also apply in Britain’s coming election. By contrast, Twitter last month banned political ads entirely.
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To grasp the impact of these changes, one useful analogy, suggests an industry insider, is with big banks. Both industries operate in many countries, and both control the flow of vital things—money in one case, information in the other. Banks’ systemic importance means they are hedged about with tough, detailed laws that differ between jurisdictions. That requires vast compliance departments, stuffed with lawyers, accountants and box-tickers. Tech firms, used to having limited staff and to being able easily to operate across borders, are being ushered down the same path.
Monitoring the torrent of content that passes through their servers is a huge task. More than 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute; thousands of tweets are posted every second. For all the hopeful chatter about artificial intelligence (AI), Alex Stamos, a former chief security officer at Facebook, argues that, in the end, human labour—and lots of it—is the only solution. Algorithms already struggle to make relatively straightforward decisions. YouTube, for instance, spent $100m developing ContentID, an algorithm designed to block pirated content. But pirated videos are still available, and legitimate users sometimes see their posts wrongly flagged.
And policing copyright infringements is a cinch compared with other forms of content. An algorithm to regulate political speech would have to master sarcasm and irony. It would need tailoring to local sensitivities in individual countries, and to be made invulnerable to deliberate attempts to exploit its weaknesses. “Regulating political speech basically requires AI that’s as smart as humans,” says Mr Stamos. If that ever comes, it will not be for decades.
Social-media firms do use AI to flag posts for humans’ attention. Exact figures are scarce, but in 2017 Accenture, a consultancy, reckoned tech firms already employ around 100,000 human content-moderators worldwide. Each new law will require more people to enforce it. Facebook doubled the number of moderators from 7,500 to 15,000 between August and December 2018. Its internal guidelines even now run to tens of thousands of words.
Such burdens risk entrenching big existing players, says Mr Bennett, since they can afford to absorb the costs of compliance. And harsh penalties will create incentives for firms to err on the side of heavy-handedness. “You might even see companies thinking carefully about where they want to operate because it’s just not worth the risk of getting it wrong.”
In the long run, though, perhaps the biggest effect of the new laws will be the further splintering of the internet. The idea of the internet as a single global network that looks the same no matter where you are when you log on, is central to its founding mythology. Yet it looks increasingly outdated. Whether that is good or bad is the subject of debate. “It is entirely legitimate for countries to formulate policies that govern their own media environments,” argues Mr Nielsen. However, “at the moment, people in India who can afford phones can see broadly the same things as people in the West,” says Mr Stamos. “The end of that would be sad.”
It is happening regardless. China’s pervasive censorship has long split its internet users off from those elsewhere in the world. Cracks are spreading in the West, too. Some American firms already find it easier to block European users rather than comply with EU privacy laws. “Right to be forgotten” laws compel search engines to remove certain results for European users. Censorship laws will mean another set of walls dividing the global village. ■
This article appeared in the International section of the print edition under the headline "Net loss"
https://www.economist.com/international/2019/11/09/countries-are-increasingly-willing-to-censor-speech-online |
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