US Reporter Ronan Farrow Calls On Internet Companies To Censor Speech Of People He Doesn't Like

from the fascinating dept

Well this is fascinating. Ronan Farrow, the well-known MSNBC reporter who is also an attorney and former State Department official (and, at times, a subject of much parental speculation), apparently has come out in favor of blatant censorship. Following in the dangerous footsteps of Joe Lieberman, Farrow is apparently angry that internet companies like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter aren't taking down accounts that he believes are used by terrorists.

Of course, what Farrow ignores is that it's not at all difficult to find Americans using social media for similar calls to action. For example, how about a Fox News contributor announcing that it was time to "Muslims are evil. Let's kill them all." Or a Breitbart News contributor calling for people to "start slaughtering Muslims in the streets, all of them."

I find both of those statements abhorrent, but the point is that idiots will make stupid incendiary statements on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube all the time -- and most people look at them and realize that they're ignorant crazy people talking. No one is actually incentivized to run out and actually follow those arguments. Yet Farrow seems to think that the people who follow those other groups on social media immediately accept what is said and follow through?

Just because people are saying stupid stuff on social media, doesn't mean internet companies should step in and decide what is and what is not appropriate. Where do you draw the line? Farrow breezily admits that it may be difficult to figure out what to take down and what to leave up, but... then just assumes it's kind of easy anyway... because child porn.
See how limited types of censorship almost always lead to calls for greater and greater censorship> It's fairly amazing that an attorney, former State Department official and a reporter would so blatantly call for censorship, but that appears to be Farrow's bag. Besides, he's apparently rather clueless about why his call for censoring "terrorists" is so different from child porn (an absolute liability situation, where it's generally immediately obvious if something is illegal) and copyright (where the system is already quite problematic, and involves a detailed notice-and-takedown process that has massive dangerous unintended consequences). He also ignores the fact that all of these companies already do pull down extremist content (something many folks think already goes too far). Apparently, Farrow's not big on details.

Farrow does mention Section 230 of the CDA, but apparently is ignorant of how that law actually works as well:
First of all, this is wrong. The "as long as they don't know about it" is flat out wrong. Section 230 actually is explicit that if you do know about it, it's entirely the company's discretion whether or not to remove. If they do, that imposes no additional obligations on them to remove other content. However, the final comment is more accurate -- though, amusingly, it contradicts Farrow's own earlier statement about how these companies already know how to stop copyright-covered content from appearing.

The point is that determining who is and who is not a "terrorist" isn't so easy, and that slope is very slippery. Should those Fox News and Breitbart contributors be cut off as well for their "terroristic" threats? Remember that after then-Senator Joe Lieberman went on a similar crusade to get YouTube to take down "terrorist" videos, it resulted in YouTube disabling the YouTube channel of an important Syrian watchdog group that had been unveiling atrocities in that country.

Farrow keeps going back to the genocide in Rwanda to prove his point. But under his logic, anyone documenting that genocide and getting the news out to the world would likely be censored, allowing that kind of genocide to go on.

Yes, if you think simplistically about things, it must seem so easy to just say, "Well, censor the bad guys." But you'd think that someone with Farrow's training and background would actually know that simplistic solutions to challenging and nuanced questions often result in very dangerous policies with serious unintended consequences.

Filed Under: censorship, free speech, fud, ronan farrow, social media, terrorism
Companies: facebook, google, twitter, youtube

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  1. icon
    Richard (profile), 15 Jul 2014 @ 10:05am


    Huh - what rock does he live under?

    Youtube crowd sources the removal of offensive material via the report button - it's not an algorithm and it is already available for the purpose of removing this stuff .

    The Copyright thing (Content ID) IS an algorithm but can only remove near identical copies of an existing, known file. It cannot detect original offensive material.

    He should do his technical research before he speaks.

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