Question

How much responsibility social media should control for hate speech? Do you think we lost our right to freedom of speech if social media get control of our platform?

Answer 1

Hate speech regulation on social media:
An intractable contemporary challenge

The Internet has allowed people across the world to connect instantaneously and has revolutionised the way we communicate and share information with one another. More than 4 billion people were Internet users in 2018, more than half of the global population.

In many ways, the Internet has had a positive influence on society. For example, it helps us to communicate easily and to share knowledge on all kinds of important topics efficiently: from the treatment of disease to disaster relief. But the Internet has also broadened the potential for harm. Being able to communicate with a mass audience has meant that the way we engage with politics, public affairs and each other has also changed. Hateful messages and incitements to violence are distributed and amplified on social media in ways that were not previously possible

Through social media platforms (such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat), 3.19 billion users converse and interact with each other by generating and sharing content. The business model of most social media companies is built on drawing attention, and given that offensive speech often attracts attention, it can become more audible on social media than it might on traditional mass media. Given the growing problem of offensive and harmful speech online, many countries are asking themselves the challenging question whether they should regulate speech online and if so, how they should legislate to curb these excesses.

Hate speech vs freedom of speech:

The regulation of harmful speech in online spaces requires drawing a line between legitimate freedom of speech and hate speech. Freedom of speech is protected in the constitutions of most countries around the world, and in the major international human rights treaties. Of course, we know that despite this widespread protection, many countries do not provide effective protection for freedom of speech. One of the dangers of regulating hate speech online is that it will become a pretext for repressive regimes to further limit the rights of their citizens.

The age of digital media has allowed any online speech or content to be shared by one tap of a screen without a second thought for the consequences

In countries committed to freedom of speech, it is necessary to develop a shared understanding of why freedom of speech is important. O’Regan and Theil suggest that there are three main reasons why we value freedom of speech: because we think being able to speak our minds is part of what makes us free and autonomous human beings, for democratic reasons, because we need to be able to talk about politics and policy freely to enable us to decide as equals how to vote and to hold those in power to account and for truth-related reasons, to enable us to refute false claims. ​
Just as we need to understand why we value freedom of speech, we also need to understand why we should prohibit hate speech. There are two main reasons for outlawing hate speech: the first and most widely accepted reason is that hate speech is likely to result in actual harm to those who are being targeted (“the incitement to harm” principle): so speech that incites violence against, for instance, people of a particular race, sexual orientation or gender identity is outlawed in most countries, including the USA. Many countries also agree that hate speech that is degrading of groups of people should also be prohibited (“the degrading of groups” principle), because it undermines their status as free and equal members of society. Again, many countries, but notably not the USA, prohibit such forms of hate speech as well. Both freedom of speech and hate speech are concepts that give rise to disagreement, both about their meaning and about how they should be applied.