By Kevin D. Williamson
Wednesday, December 21, 2016
Omar Mateen murdered 49 people in an Orlando nightclub,
and Mark Zuckerberg did not.
But Omar Mateen was an Islamic jihadist who now is as
dead as fried chicken, while Mark Zuckerberg is a Silicon Valley billionaire
who is very much alive.
Hence, the lawsuit.
The families of Tevin Crosby, Javier Jorge-Reyes, and
Juan Ramon Guerrero, three men killed at the Pulse gay club by Mateen in the
purported service of Allah, are suing Twitter (market capitalization $12.5
billion), Facebook (market cap $341 billion), and Alphabet (that’s Google and
YouTube to you, market cap $557 billion) on the theory that these technology
companies did not do enough to keep the Islamic State and sundry Muslim
radicals from using their platforms to recruit and inspire such acts of savagery
as that in Orlando.
This is partly, perhaps mainly, a case of
defendant-shopping: The families in question might plausibly have sued
everybody from the Islamic State to the government of Iran to the FBI in this
case, but good luck collecting on a judgment against any of them. The nerds who
run Facebook and Google have billions of dollars at their disposal, no
sovereign immunity, and no proclivity for cutting the heads off of those who
oppose them.
Suing Mark Zuckerberg because the wack-a-doodle school of
Islam uses social media is a little like suing Johannes Gutenberg for all the
evil that has been done by readers of Mein
Kampf, The Communist Manifesto,
or The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
But at the same time, Zuckerberg et al. are inviting such litigation.
The question here involves the interaction between
distinct but overlapping activities: creating new kinds of communication
technology; creating commercial spaces in which that technology is deployed to
create a platform; producing content on those platforms, or exercising
editorial control over content on those platforms.
A few examples might be illuminating. As I pointed out at
the time, my hometown newspaper, the Lubbock
Avalanche Journal, committed a gross and obvious libel against Rick Perry
when he was the governor of Texas, (the
libelous column is still on the newspaper’s website), falsely claiming,
among other things, that he is a felon. When challenged on this by me and by
others, the newspaper’s editors (who really ought to know better or see if
their insurance plan covers self-respect implants) protested that they assumed
no editorial responsibility for material published on their website, which is,
as a matter of law, absurd. This is not something like, say, Daily Kos, where basically anybody can
write “diaries” or the like, or the intellectual sewers that we call “comments
sections.” The only reason that Rick Perry hasn’t sued the pants off of the
editors and publisher of the Avalanche
Journal is that doing so apparently isn’t worth his time.
Twitter, Google, and, to a much greater extent, Facebook
do exercise some editorial control over their services, usually incompetently.
But what they exercise is mainly either negative control (banning certain
individuals, groups, or points of view, or removing material) and curatorial
control. Conservatives complain, rightly, that they do this in a way that
reflects their biases, which are those of corporate Democrats of the Clintonian
variety. But being biased is neither a crime nor a tort, in spite of the
dearest wishes of the president-elect.
Facebook and YouTube will remove certain kinds of
material, either on their own volition or in response to complaints. (For
YouTube, this is at least as often in response to copyright complaints as to
anything else.) One line of thinking might lead us to believe that in
exercising this editorial control they assume general editorial responsibilities, i.e., that by deleting material
or suppressing jihadist propaganda they acquire a legal liability if they fail
to do so, or fail to do so extensively and quickly enough. Under this model,
these companies are more like a newspaper and less like the companies that
build the newspaper’s presses or manage its fiber-optic networks.
The downside of that model of liability is obvious: If
exercising some editorial discretion
creates a broad and general liability
for content on the site, then Facebook and Twitter have a very strong motive to
exercise no responsibility at all, and to treat NAMBLA, the Islamic State, and
the National Model Railroad Association as though there were no difference
between any of them. Failing that, there is a motive to swing too far in the
other direction, to engage in heavy-handed editorial exclusion of controversial
and radical points of view, to overreact to strong language and powerful
images, and to draw the boundaries of social-media discourse in the narrowest
commercially viable fashion. That would not be a good outcome, either.
As imperfect, biased, and editorially incompetent as
Facebook and Twitter’s ad hoc approaches are, there is not any obviously
preferable alternative to them, and certainly not one that respects our
free-speech traditions and the fact that these very public forums are, after
all, the private property of the firms that create and operate them.
This will continue to be a very delicate negotiation: We
certainly want Alphabet and Facebook to do what they can, including working
with intelligence and law-enforcement agencies, to curtail jihadist recruiting
and radicalization. But we also want them to keep intelligence and
law-enforcement agencies at arm’s length in the service of truly free and open
speech by and among marginal and radical groups, including groups of people who
are engaged in illegal activity, such as prostitutes agitating for the
legalization of their trade or marijuana users advocating the liberalization of
drug laws.
And we should bear in mind that this is not a new
phenomenon: A great deal of white-supremacist and neo-Nazi literature made its
way around the world in the 1980s via mimeograph and fax machine, and PLO
terrorist Yasser Arafat never sent or saw a tweet. The technological means of
radicalization is secondary to the existence of Islamic radicalism and the
activities of organizations pursuing that radicalism through both violent and
non-violent means.
Lightening Mark Zuckerberg’s wallet is not going to do
very much to improve that, and it might create a precedent that would damage
free speech and free enterprise both. And if we take an honest and steely-eyed
look at the facts about the organizations and individuals that fell down on the
job before Orlando, Silicon Valley looks pretty good compared to the FBI.
No comments:
Post a Comment