Censorship in Social Media

There seems to be some confusion today about what social media should do to censor its own content.  This being after Twitter and others decided to cut off Alex Jones and his INFOWAR stream of nonsense.  Now, some of the same people who were clamoring for censorship have decided the social media are not very good at it.  Not a surprise to anyone.

We have already forgotten what this effort to sanitize social media was really about.  Russia hired some people to run ads and support divisive issues in our social media channels. It was not just the content of this material that was at issue, but the source of it.  It was Russian intelligence services who were doing it and not some lady in Iowa who thought Black Lives Matter needed more help in its organizing.  Focusing on that would be a better approach.  This is not a free speech issue, since the Russian intelligence services don't get rights under the US Constitution, even though they claim them.

Social media did a lousy job of trying to discover what accounts had been established by Russian firms.  They used payment in rubles as one of the measures of sources of funding, and otherwise grossly underestimated the extent of the trouble.  Let's face it - they really didn't want to know how much of this was going on.  They saw themselves as not being responsible for content unless it went over the legal line of child porn or ISIS propaganda.  They didn't do very well with either one of those either.

That's because social media still sees itself as not responsible for content.  Whether we believe they should be is something that has to be debated because it is not a simple matter.  It is a little like automobile vendors being responsible for the driving habits of those who buy their cars, or gun dealers getting the blame for how their guns are used.  At the same time, we don't want the Russians doing what they did or ISIS continuing to do their pieces.  But let's not confuse this with free speech.

Social media cannot do what they need to do without some help, which they do not want.  This is about foreign governments making up issues to present to the world's people who use social media, as part of an Information Warfare campaign.  In order to do that, social media outlets need to know who these people are and get them off their outlets, a much harder problem.  They kill one account and those same people get new accounts.  It is a whack-a-mole game for them.  Even intelligence services find it hard to keep up with this kind of attack, but they are the only ones trying to do that.  IF the social media wants to make progress they are going to have to work together to ban certain sponsored activities from their media.  The only way they can do that is start their own intelligence service to identify the targets, or use the ones governments allow them to use.  They don't like either option, but we are not going to live with the results of their clumsy attempts to clean up a problem they are not capable of identifying or doing anything about.