Analysis: How fighting political disinformation could collide with the First Amendment
Some of the Facebook and Instagram ads that the House Intelligence Committee has linked to a Russian effort to disrupt the American political process during the 2016 presidential election. By Deanna Paul Deanna Paul Reporter covering national and breaking news Email Bio Follow March 30 at 8:00 AM When it comes to social media, government officials and the American public have grown wary of outside actors — and rightly so.
“They shape and distort public discourse through their decision-making,” Jaffer said. “But how do those decisions affect the integrity of the democratic process?”President Trump has helped fuel a conservative movement that increasingly alleges it is being suppressed by social media platforms. But the law is beginning to reconsider whether social networking sites function as modern-day equivalents of public squares.
“The ability to use Twitter is a vital part of modern citizenship. … That is because Twitter is not merely a website: it is the modern-day town square,” he said in the complaint, though he failed to address the wide-ranging implications of viewing tech giants as extensions of the government.So what does that mean for the companies, for trust in the platforms and for the law?
“They do just enough, or promise to do just enough, to take the wind out of the sails of regulatory proposals, yet come up shy of effecting the needed change,” he said. The challenge, then, becomes how to enforce an internal monitor with no external regulator.Politicians across party lines will complain of bias when a platform makes a decision averse to them, even if the decision is correct.
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