I’m going to cheat a bit this week and write a short post. The reason is that I want you to read the article titled “Should Facebook and Twitter Be Regulated Under the First Amendment?” by Lincoln Caplan. It does a better job than I ever could at explaining the seeming contradictions (e.g., President Trump can announce U.S. government policy on the Twitter account @realDonaldTrump and these announcements must be preserved under the Presidential Records Act, but the president can block other accounts from responding to his tweets because some lawyers agree that the account @realDonaldTrump is the person and not the president, and thus his actions on Twitter are protected under the First Amendment) and significant differences between the United States’ and Europe’s free and hate speech laws (and the resulting effect on social media companies and their different approaches).
What a quagmire.
As we discussed this week, what happens online matters. It matters to our wellbeing as individuals, our ability to productively interact with each other in the real world as communities, and as the article states, our “ability to [have] an informed citizenry” as a democratic nation. The more we discuss these topics, the more convinced I become that social media companies aren’t wires, “passive conduits,” or simple gathering spaces. They are collections of algorithms that have real effects on us and the world in which we live.
What do you think? What will you do?