Should online platforms prevent the spread of false information?

Hi, I’m Ryan Jenkins, a philosophy professor at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo. Let’s talk about speech. America has a proud tradition of upholding the right of its citizens to speak freely. This right is embodied in the First Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids the government from restricting just about any speech. The advent of the Internet has been hailed as the greatest boon to free speech since the invention of the printing press. By lowering the cost of publishing and consuming information, people can communicate about the world more cheaply, quickly, and easily than ever before. However, critics charge that it would be naive to equate access to information with wisdom. Going back to the 1980s at the dawn of the computer revolution, for example, critics have warned that access to information is nearly worthless without critical thinking skills to separate truth from falsehood. They have also warned that, while the Internet is a tool that could be used to increase access to information, its physical design also makes it very simple for just a few actors to control the speech that is exchanged. So let's consider: Is unrestricted speech on the Internet good? How should companies who operate platforms try to nurture an environment of productive and healthy speech? Consider social media, for example, which is a place where many Americans communicate, interact, and consume news about the world. Mark Zuckerberg has said he wants Facebook to provide “the primary news experience that people have.” Already, most Americans consume “at least some” of their news on social media, and many Americans “often” get their news from social media. This raises questions about the role of these platforms in providing or controlling the information that Americans see that help them form beliefs about the world. Traditional journalistic organizations like newspapers have long considered it part of their solemn duty to the public to report only reliably-sourced information. Social media companies and Silicon Valley upstarts? Not so much. If Facebook and other social media platforms are trying to take over the role of a media outlet, and are profiting from that role, what obligations to society, and to the truth, do they inherit? One of the ways Facebook presents news is through its “trending news” section. In mid-2016, Facebook replaced the human employees who curated this section with a computer algorithm to pick trending news stories. Fake news stories began appearing in the trending news section just two days later. These included stories that alleged that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex ring out of a pizza parlor in DC, and that Ireland was taking in American “refugees” fleeing a possible Trump presidency. Now, someone using social media only needs to read those headlines to see that they’re almost certainly false, we would hope. But these were some of the most-shared stories on Facebook in the run-up to the election. In fact, in the three months leading up to the 2016 election, fake news stories outperformed real news stories among Facebook shares, reactions, and comments. As Winston Churchill said, “a lie can get halfway around the world while the truth is still putting its pants on.” No one should be content with this state of affairs. It’s bad for our ability to form beliefs reliably and ruinous to our democracy. But is censorship the answer? A deep faith in the value of free speech has led many companies to resist calls to censor the content they host. It’s un-American, they might say. But at the same time, some companies have been willing to censor their content in other countries that have fewer protections for speech. Consider Google’s operations in China. According to the New York Times, “The ruling Communist Party tightly controls media inside China and employs one of the world’s most sophisticated systems of internet censorship,” informally called the Great Firewall of China. This includes, for example, censoring information about the religious sect Falun Gong or the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Google cooperates with this censorship by filtering the search results they show users in China. In their defense, Google has argued, “While removing search results is inconsistent with Google’s mission, providing no information is more inconsistent with our mission” If free speech is valuable for Americans, then why is it not also valuable for the people in other countries? Do social media companies have the same moral obligations to regulate speech wherever they operate? Maybe this misses the whole point. Maybe, instead of censorship, the solution to bad speech is simply more speech: counter falsehoods with the truth. Let the “marketplace of ideas” sort the good from the bad speech. But if things were this simple, then we would expect there to be a lot fewer people with ridiculous beliefs: beliefs that the moon landing was faked, that the earth is flat, or that the world is run by a cabal of alien lizard-people. America has fewer restrictions on speech than almost anywhere else so how come the truth hasn’t overcome these kinds of absurd falsehoods by now? Shouldn’t America, with the freest speech environment in the world, boast the best-informed citizenry? Yeah, right. Anyone who’s had a conversation with a conspiracy theorist knows it’s unlikely that any amount of speech will persuade them out of their beliefs. So, at least some regulation seems acceptable in the interest of promoting the truth or discouraging falsehoods. And as those platforms become a critical channel for America's discourse, they cannot help but be thrust into this role of regulating speech. How should they make these decisions? What considerations, like social responsibility, civility, or simply truthfulness, should they weigh when considering what speech to allow or forbid on their platforms? What do you think?