Fang Kecheng: Under the banner of freedom of speech, rethinking what "censorship" is | "Thinking" Issue 42: Interpretation of the Trump Phenomenon

• This article has a total of 2888 words, and the estimated reading time is 10 minutes. Divided into three parts:

1. Content moderation cannot be generalized
2. The Internet Age Empowers Trump's Lies and Fake News
3. stratospheric effect

This article is open to all readers. This is the second part of this issue of the magazine, focusing on the debate, division, and opposition of Chinese liberals caused by the Trump phenomenon. It is hoped that through this series of articles, issues such as left and right, progressive values and conservatism, cultural diversity and clash of civilizations, secular politics and religious background, etc. will be clarified in depth.

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A popular narrative among Trump's supporters is that both the news media and social networking platforms are cracking down on the free speech of Trump and his supporters. The former often conducts fact-checking on Trump's speech, labeling many as "false information", and even a number of TV stations accused Trump of "election fraud" in his speech on the afternoon of November 5, 2020, because The content of the speech was untrue and directly cut off the live broadcast; after the 2020 election, online platforms also marked many of Trump's speeches as "controversial" information, and deleted many posts from Trump supporters. Since January 6, Trump’s own account has also been banned.

It is not difficult to distinguish the nature of "Twitter ban" and "Chinese government's request to ban Weibo", and the former's behavior as a commercial company does not violate the First Amendment of the US Constitution. However, the controversy caused by this topic in China deserves further investigation, because it reflects the biased and blind spots in the understanding and discussion of freedom of speech and censorship in the Chinese intellectual circles - which is in contrast to China's past decades The political and social status quo faced by intellectuals is closely related.

Content moderation cannot be generalized

According to a June 2020 report by the New York University Center for Business and Human Rights Studies, Facebook employs 15,000 content moderators (the vast majority of whom are outsourced jobs outside the U.S. with low pay), who review 300 per day. Thousands of content.

This set of information may surprise many Chinese informants. Many people know that Chinese companies such as Weibo, WeChat, and Toutiao employ huge content review teams, and cities such as Tianjin and Jinan have become “content review capitals.” But in fact, a large-scale content moderation team is a must for any large social media platform.

Many social media cases, including 8chan, 8kun, and reddit, have shown that on platforms with User-Generated Content, if there is no content moderation, there will be a small number of deliberately sabotaged users (bad actors) Continued occupation of child pornography, terrorism, hate speech, etc. On more than one occasion, the shooter of a mass shooting made a manifesto on such a moderation-free platform before committing a crime, which also shows that their thinking may have been influenced by the platform's speech.

Of course, the content review of Chinese internet platforms has its own characteristics, that is, there will be a section that focuses on "political security", that is, according to the government's will, the content that is unfavorable to the government will be deleted.

However, it would be a misunderstanding to assume that there should be no content moderation of any kind on social media platforms in general, in order to oppose this kind of political censorship. Such misunderstandings are also very easy to be exploited by the Chinese government - news of Twitter's account ban has been portrayed in China's state media as evidence that "freedom of speech in the United States is very false."

Scholar Scott Wright once reminded in the British Journal of Politics and International Relations: We need to draw a line between legitimate (legitimate) and improper speech censorship. In his view, to judge what kind of speech censorship is justified, it depends on the specific context. When the reason for a piece of information to be deleted is specific, public, and discussable, and the rules have been discussed and agreed upon by all relevant parties, then such censorship can be considered justified. And when the rules are not public, not discussed, or the rules are not respected in the process of enforcement, then such censorship is not justified.

In the past two decades, Chinese intellectuals have not paid much attention to such distinctions in discussions on freedom of speech and content censorship, but have been accustomed to generalizing various types of deletions and bans, or using Political censorship to refer to any content moderation. This also makes it easy to fall into a passive situation in the discussion: in order to maintain the position of freedom of speech, sometimes even have to endorse other improper speech, otherwise it will be considered to have lost the position. Even when liberal intellectuals block users on social media, someone may raise the banner of "freedom of speech" and ask: Aren't you against speech censorship?

These questions, whether sincere or deliberate, show that public opinion only pays attention to the surface of speech censorship and does not fully understand the power relations behind it. This time, complaints from some Trump supporters in Chinese intellectual circles about censorship on Twitter more or less reflect this.

Proper Content Moderation, Protecting and Not Harming Free Speech

The purpose of advocating freedom of speech and opposing unfair speech censorship is to resist the oppression of power and protect the rights of individuals. However, a phenomenon that may be counter-intuitive is that if any form of speech censorship is rejected, it will be conducive to the oppression of certain powers, but not conducive to the protection of individual rights.

This is because the form of speech censorship is not limited to the deletion of speech. That is to say, depriving a person of the right to speak can not only seal his/her mouth, but also use other methods, such as insulting, harassing and threatening him/her, so that he/she does not dare to express his/her true opinion . Another example is to publish a lot of spam, which is to create noise, drown out his/her voice, so that the audience cannot find his/her speech. Both of these methods can be done without using the power to delete posts.

Margaret Roberts, an American scholar, summed up three forms of censorship in his monograph on China's Internet censorship, Censored : using methods such as deleting posts to create fear, creating resistance in the process of obtaining certain information, and creating a flood of information to drown out speech. This framework also shows that speech censorship is not as simple as deleting posts and banning accounts.

In order to prevent someone from using insults, threats and making noise to achieve the purpose of speech censorship, it is necessary to formulate certain content moderation rules and implement them carefully. This is why Western social media platforms generally attach great importance to the fight against hate speech and disinformation - hate speech is precisely the harassment and threat of minorities and vulnerable groups, and disinformation is precisely by creating noise to drown out other real and useful information.

Therefore, the purpose of these legitimate content moderation is precisely to protect freedom of speech, not to infringe freedom of speech.

Communication Currents published by the National Communication Association (NCA) once published an article discussing the relationship between content moderation and freedom of speech. The article also mentioned: Content moderation is beneficial to the diversity of speech, because some groups on the Internet may undermine the voice of other groups.

Going a step further from this logic, we can also see that sometimes, those who raise the banner of "freedom of speech" may be the real censors, because under the cover of this banner, they use large-scale Create insulting, hateful, and misleading remarks to deprive groups they dislike and disagree with the right to speak, and the right to be heard after speaking.

Therefore, our knowledge of who is the oppressor and who is the oppressed should not equate to the answer to the question "whose content has been removed." Twitter and Facebook have banned a number of far-right accounts for exactly this reason: In the name of freedom, they are harming the rights of others.

Protecting free speech and individual rights requires a more complex picture of content censorship

If we want to better protect the freedom of speech and rights of individuals, then we need to see the complexity of content censorship on social media. In addition to the above-mentioned "deletion ≠ suppression", there is another phenomenon that is often overlooked in China's censorship mechanism, that is: the subject of censorship is not only the government.

Although major Internet platforms must strictly follow the government's instructions when performing post deletion operations, they also have a certain amount of room for self-play - this mainly means that they can delete more content. This also creates a rent-seeking space for these platforms and their editors. It has been reported before that editors of many large Chinese websites have deleted articles criticizing the companies after receiving money from the companies.

It can be said that content censorship caused by commercial interests has always existed in China, but it is often easily overlooked because people's attention is more focused on political censorship.

In the age of print media, business censorship is not an uncommon phenomenon. It is not only the propaganda department that can make a report disappear from the newspaper, but there may also be some companies that put huge advertisements on the newspaper or contribute high taxes to the local government. The fact that newspaper executives suppress certain news after receiving money has also appeared in some media many times. The result, like political censorship, is the harm to the people's right to know and the cover-up of certain issues.

Therefore, when we discuss censorship in the Chinese context, we must focus not only on the government, but also on the media and websites that specifically enforce the takedown. If they are not adequately monitored, the space of speech and the rights of individuals will also be greatly harmed.

The academic book Custodians of the Internet , which studies Internet content auditing, mentioned that Internet platforms are often reluctant to discuss their content auditing work. in order to avoid their own responsibility. Few users know how the platform's content moderation is done, because the platform seldom publicly explains to users, the media and intellectual circles should exert more pressure on the platform.

Ultimately, what we want to see is more legitimate and credible content moderation — based on open, discussable rules that governments and tech platforms alike should follow. In this light, Trump supporters' anger at Twitter and Facebook is also justified: their rules for deletion and banning are indeed unclear, undiscussed, and inconsistent.

But after the anger, the way to move forward is not to let the participants in the speech market enter the jungle of the jungle under the cover of the banner of "freedom of speech", but to call and participate together, discuss and formulate a legitimate and reasonable content moderation rules, and oversee tech platforms' enforcement of those rules.

 Fang Kecheng is an assistant professor at the School of Journalism and Communication of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research interests include political communication, journalism and digital media. Before entering academia, he was a reporter for the Southern Weekly newspaper.