The thing about free speech on the internet is it exists and doesn’t exist at the same time. Everybody is entitled to say whatever they want, but other people in the community where you posted it are able to comment on your comment, and either publicly agree with your thought or disagree and tell you why. That is because everybody enters into a terms of agreement when signing up for participation on social media. You consent to a set of rules and regulations to be apart of the community. Then you are able to post and comment and scroll. You are free to post about whatever you like, as long as it is civil. The level of control those who run whatever platform is enormous. They determine what constitutes a violation of terms of service, are responsible for evaluating complaints, and have to make the tough decisions like if a user should be banned or suspended. This is why some states are arguing social media is so important to freedom of speech in the present day, that sites should not be trusted with such power.
The U.S. Supreme Court took up a case this year that could impact whether social media platforms are considered ‘public squares’ protected under the first amendment. Texas and Florida initially filed lawsuits suggesting Big Tech companies were in violation of the first amendment, for discriminating against conservative speech, when some accounts were suspended for posting covid or election misinformation. Some of the Justices are wary of a government entity intervening in business decisions and others are hesitant to give blanket ‘public square’ status to sites that are able to make major changes to the site without the input of the users. It is interesting because it appears the Justices may be leaning to staying out of the fight since each social platform is it’s own public square with it’s own set of rules. If you were to leave one site for any reason, you can sign up for a different one. Or you can do what most people do, and belong to many sites and platforms.
Recently, Elon Musk has been getting a lot of heat for how he runs X, formerly Twitter. For one, changing the name of Twitter to X. Before he bought the site, users had signed up for a site called Twitter, and literally overnight, were users for a site called X without any input. Musk has also been criticized for the amount of control he exerts personally. One example throttling his own X account to appear more frequently on user news feeds, even if they don’t follow him. There are also complaints that Musk is not acting swiftly to take down X posts containing misinformation, as well as suspending users. I believe it is because Elon knows those kinds of posts increase user engagement due to the polarizing nature of some topics. People will argue in the comment sections driving up participation. But one thing Elon introduced to X may be its saving grace. The Community Notes feature that was added in recent months is allowing users to fact-check posts in real time. Users have been able to flag covid misinformation, election denialism, and other misleading posts. A UCSD study found that the Community Notes feature “accurately covid vaccine misinformation 97.5% of the time last year.” Even Elon Musk is getting his posts flagged by Community Notes and arguing with its capabilities. Of course, many believe the Community Notes takes too long to flag some posts, but it is a step in the right direction if you ask me.
What we should not be doing is allowing the government to control social media platforms. These are private companies who are offering a service. Personally, I think free speech does not exist online. If you are paying to to have your voice heard, you are buying in to rules that determine what you can and cannot say on certain sites. If a user gets banned, they probably deserved it, unless an appeal finds otherwise. And to be honest, it is not the end of the world if you are unable to doomscroll and troll.
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