Transcripts For CSPAN Discussion On Social Media The First

CSPAN Discussion On Social Media The First Amendment July 13, 2024

Georgetown university hosted this 90 minute event. [applause] thank you. We are very proud of our partnership with the night First Amendment institute of columbia. Startedus have projects by the Knight Foundation and now have other supporters as well. I want to pick up with the notion of the marketplace of ideas. I think that is what a lot of people think the internet was going to be, some people of believe it really is. Kara do you believe socialmedia is performing effectively as the market place of ideas . Kara no, i dont, all i read about is how it doesnt. It is a cesspool. Sanford i sort of knew what your answer would he. Kara it is not completely a cesspool, it is just the way it has evolved has created dust she brought up the idea of the Public Square present everybody thinks that twitter is a Public Square, or facebook is a Public Square, or reddit, or any of these sites. The fact of the matter is that both of them are Public Squares owned and to the benefit of millionaires. So it is not a Public Squares. We have deemed them the rights of a Public Square but they arent taking the responsibilities of any public space. The metaphor i tend to use, which i would love to know what you all think, is that you have built these great cities, which cities are wonderful and full of tolerance and diversity, they have built these cities which may run, etc. They havent provided police, fire, street signs, streets sanford trash collection kara trash collection. None of the functions of a major city. It is sort of like the purge every night. [laughter] and maybe will survive. At the same time, i dont know that there is responsibility. One, i dont think they are capable of it, two, i dont think they have the responsibility. Where has the federal government been in catching up to this medium and its impact on society . Sanford jeff, what is your view on how the marketplace of ideas is functioning online . Jeff i will take her metaphor and add to it and that is, first, i think it is correct that we are not policed by any services that were built with socialmedia. However, i think they are trying to build it now, and that is really hard, because of these services were built around the premise of not having a lot of these functions. I think it is complex in that they are trying, but i dont know how we solve the problem. What i would liken it to, is that the internet is like a house built without a basement, and that theyre trying to did the basement after they built the house. That happened on my street, and it didnt work out too well. Sanford how is it going . Jeff not too well, the house has been on the market of our five years. I dont think there are any perfect solutions, but i am glad you are at least having this discussion to come up with Better Solutions and to improve things. I think we have a long way to go. Jeff sarah jeong, your opinion on this . Sarah i will go with a different analogy. I think the marketplace of ideas is a good phrase for understanding what was going on with socialmedia right now, because, have you seen Online Marketplaces . If you are talking about the ebay of ideas, you already start to see the danger to read you are seeing all the problems of social media have a direct corollary to the literal financial marketplace on the internet. As human beings, especially organized through these algorithmically determined to marketplaces, we are susceptible to scams. Anything these giants have created, anything funded or motivated by taking personal information and reorganizing a page to attract as much attention as possible, you end up getting very perverse incentives that promote juice cleanses, weird teddy bears that advertise themselves as being 10 feet tall and just have legs that are seven feet tall and arms that are 1 foot. And you take a picture of it from a strange angle and it looks like a normal teddy bear that you would actually send to your loved one, but then they get it, and it is a monstrosity. Right . It is stuff like that that abounds on these marketplaces. That is what you get when you get that ebays and amazons of the world. We have a hard time wrapping ourselves around what is going on in social media, patrolling, the vast scope of terribleness. We are just getting scammed, in a different way. This is the canal street of ideas. It is just not working out, and theres a number of reasons why. Sanford katie, you brought a case against the president , not against twitter, right . Katie yes. At the knight First Amendment institute, we filed a case against President Trump and the white house director of socialmedia, who was his former golf caddy. We sued them both on behalf of seven individuals who were blocked by President Trump, because they replied directly to one of his tweets as Donald Trumps twitter account. A lot of people in their heard about our case, they figure the person who was blocked most of said something really terrible or vulgar, but all of our plaintiffs said things related to policies first of all, the president sometimes engages in vulgar commentary, but our plaintiffs were saying things like dust from the man who brought you covfefe, here is his latest terrible policy. Or at one point of the president tweeted something about winning the election, and one of the plaintiffs said to be fair, russia won it for you. We believe this is directly in the center of Public Discourse, which is at the heart of First Amendment. We filed the lawsuit, and our primary argument which now prevailed, is that when a public official, such as the president or any public official uses his social media account as part of their official role as a governing person, a person elected to office, and encourages the general public to speak in that forum in the context of the account, then it is a public forum subject to the First Amendment, and it has drawn on decades of sentiment from the Supreme Court that basically says, if the city council has an open meeting and allows everybody to come in and make a comment, you cant keep them out of the auditorium because you dont like what they say. Sanford and are you convinced that this argument is going to prevail at the Supreme Court . I hear the president is appealing. Katie right now, the president sanford actually, he is asking for the full Second Circuit katie threejudge panel from the Second Circuit held that the president violated the First Amendment when he blocked our plaintiffs from his twitter account, which, by the way, they have been unblocked, as did a number of other people who were also blocked. The government currently is asking for the full court in the Second Circuit to review and reverse the panels decision, then, depending on what happens with that, they could petition for cert to the Supreme Court. Sanford or you could. Katie yes, we could. I cant make a prediction about how the Supreme Court will come out on this. I do think that in this case and the Second Circuit that just rolled in our favor, if you look at the case, it is undisputed that the president blocked these people because of their viewpoints. That is almost of the central Cardinal Rule of First Amendment law, that the government may not censor speech because of someones viewpoint. So that is a really strong fact for us. So, what the government what trump has spent most of his time is arguing that because he is using his previously personal account, the realdonaldtrump account as an individual, it is not subject to his First Amendment. But he is governing by it . Katie that is our argument. In the First Circuit looked about and looked at how he uses it to make policy announcements, like the ban on transgender individuals serving in the military, appointment of new cabinet members or the director of the fbis, the fact that the National Archives considers the president ial tweets to be president ial records, and a number of facts you are aware of, and the way that he has used it over the past couple of years . Guest lori, you are the only bona fide member of the socialmedia brave lori. Sanford i have to come back and ask, how is socialmedia functioning as a marketplace of ideas, and when you hear all this . What youve heard is not unusual, these things are said by a lot of people everyday. How do you react . Lori you are exactly right, these things are said by people everyday. But the opposite is also said by people everyday. We have people on the panel here this evening that feel like facebook and other social Media Companies are a world of smut, who are scamming people, but there are also people in this audience and maybe on this panel who think they are doing too much to censor users. The way we think about it is that we dont want to cast ourselves as the official Public Square, right . When you invite government regulation into that space, you only entrench the powers of that already exist in socialMedia Companies like ours. There doesnt mean there is for regulation, we have been open about privacy regulation and Election Integrity regulation, but here in the united states, we are big fans of the First Amendment. We have talked and sent about selfgovernance mechanisms that the industry could put on itself. At facebook, we talked about an Industry Standard board, we have an Oversight Board we are putting together. To go back to karas analogy of socialmedia, i would fight back and say that we are trying hard to have institutions that we think of as keeping communities space. At facebook, Free Expression is paramount, but you can only express yourself in a place where you feel safe. It is why we have Community Standards, why we have 30,000 content reviewers that we are bringing are those fulltime employees or contractors . Lori a lot of them were contractors. Sanford how do you organize 30,000 people to review i mean, where do they sit . [laughter] lori we have them around the world. It is really important to us but content is reviewed in a market where they can have the local context to know what a piece of content might mean. While our Community Standards are global, we make an effort to also have regional specialties like having the right language, the context, that is important to our reviewers. The content the review surfaces in a number of ways, whether it is Machine Learning, viewer reports, and the review. And there is difficulty, there are paths that they can escalate it upward, and that does take place with facebook employees. But going back to her metaphor, i would consider it like the police and the town. When there is a fivealarm fire escalation, the russian involvement in the 2016 election, viral misinformation, we are hiring people in trying to build systems that perfect our algorithms and Machine Learning so we can have a community where people feel safe to express themselves. For us, it is a marketplace of ideas. Sanford you are a company with 2 billion subscribers. Lori 2. 7 billion monthly active subscribers. Sanford 2. 7 billion. I will push back on that one. To push back on the push back, you are the dominant way most people get news, communicate, Everything Else. Contents moderators were just recently hired after a long time. Most of them are contractors. There were treated very different pieces by a journalist at the verge. Many of them, this piece she wrote, please look at it, they operate under companies that are not well monitored, i think they will be better monitored now that the piece was written. They operate in substandard conditions. Sanford and working conditions. They get paid not very much. They start at nine minutes a day for Mental Health, when these people are doing with pedophiles, child abuse, pet abuse, conspiracy theories. A lot of them have now started to believe conspiracy appears because they have been reading them for so long. It is a very fair piece that was written. What i came away with from it with was that there arent enough people it would change facebook judge economics drastically if they had to pay for the amount as jeff was talking about, if they had to actually police it, to me, it would be in the trillions. Let me not just pick on facebook, youtube is worse. So, they all employ contractors all around the world, whether it is the philippines or in tempe, arizona, it is always in someplace like about, or in florida, it is interesting where they place these people. And it is fascinating, what i thought when i read the piece, is that none of them are employees. Very few of them are employees. What i would like to see is all of them sitting in the middle of the facebook campus right there with mark zuckerberg. Sanford 30,000 . That is more people than in my hometown. Its like putting the toxic waste dump cleaners somewhere else and not giving them good seats. I think they are trying, it is just this task Machine Learning is not up to doing it yet, a. I. Will not solve all your problems and it will create a set of the problems. Secondly, to do this, given the massive virality of facebook it creates a situation that it is not too little too late, it just feels like almost too late to fix it. That it is fixable. That it is architected and correctly. A lot of the internet is architected for virality and speed and when you get that, you get hate speech, conspiracy. But without looking at the consequences of what you have made. Lori i would push back on the push back, first, when it comes to contractors, the allegations in the verge are things we take incredibly seriously. Working totantly improve our communication with the companies to work with. We are trying desperately hard to catch up with Machine Learning. That is why we are able to take isis content down as soon as it gets on the platform. We are trying to do with the problem in a way that doesnt necessarily have humans on the frontline line of the worst of the worst of the worst, but it doesnt change the fact that a lot of this stuff is contextual, particularly with issues like hate speech. However, yes, facebook is a gargantuan company, but there are others in the marketplace as well. There is reddit, where the tools are different, there is twitter, where the tools are different, so to say that anyone of these companies is a Public Square, i dont think is a fair comparison. Jeff building on that, when we talk about platforms and what theyre doing, i worry that we focus on facebook, twitter and youtube, because they are dominant in the marketplace, but to see different approaches i would look at some of the newer entrants like pinterest, twitch, who are doing innovative things because it have smaller staffs. We are a lot of innovative, not necessarily the costs associated with them. Even reddit, they have cleaned it up substantially. Jeff yes, they have like 10 people working on that. So there is a lot of hope for that. Sanford so there is hope for Smaller Companies, and the real problems we get to other big companies, is what you are suggesting . Jeff i think the Bigger Companies could learn a bit from what some of the Smaller Companies are doing. Sanford they usually just buy them. Jeff they do . No more. Sanford no more of that . No. Sanford why not . Because theyre in the middle of antitrust investigations. They are not going to be able to buy a sandwich soon. [laughter] they have nice sandwiches at facebook. Twitters are better. [laughter] sarah i actually disagree. The Smaller Companies, certainly may be the pinterests of the world, they have designed their products to be more limited in scope. The reason why facebook gets so much flack, is because facebook is big, and because facebook is so big, it has the resources to investigate internally. When you launch an investigation, you will find something. When you find something, someone leaks it, and eventually, it ends up on the front page of the new york times. Those Small Companies who are supposed to be doing so great, they probably have something similar going on inside, we dont know because they dont know, because they dont have the resources to look into it. May be pinterest doesnt, because it is not usable in the same way, but reddit, for instance, is a terrible example, because it relies very much on unpaid labor. All of the subreddits have their own moderators, but that is unpaid work. Is it much more ethical, unpaid labor, then someone making 40,000 a year in arizona who has nine minutes of Mental Health breaks every day . I am actually not sure. I think has anyone look at reddit in the lead up to the 2016 election, it was not a good place, it hasnt been a good place for many, many years. It was ground zero for the leaking of celebrity nudes, it has been a place that has encouraged Cyber Bullying on a scale that is quite terrible. I think that this problem extends everywhere. But i think facebook gets the most flack because it is the bigge

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