In a recent interview on PoliticKING with Larry King, our own social media attorney, Ethan Wall, spoke with Sue Fennessy and guest host Matthew Cooke about social media censorship and how it affects all of us.
This all stems from allegations from the President that conservatives are being censored on social media. Whether that’s true or not depends on who you ask. There is, however, a bigger issue, and it is that Facebook is deciding on its own what should be censored and what should not.
Let’s take a deeper look at how Facebook’s censorship can affect us as individuals and as a society. Facebook is entirely responsible for monitoring posts for social media compliance, and its policies change frequently, so how is the average person to know what you can and can’t post.
According to Facebook, its Community Standards are “designed to be comprehensive” and will “continue to develop over time.” That sounds great, but in reality, it leaves all of its users in a gray area. Let’s say I create a post sharing a news article from a reliable source, but someone flags it as false news because they disagree with the content. We all know fake news is a real issue, but can Facebook remove my post because someone didn’t like my opinion on the subject? Some people say that this is a First Amendment issue, but Facebook isn’t a government-run entity, and it’s legally within its rights to remove any of my content from the platform as I’ve agreed to its website terms and conditions when I joined. The question then becomes, are we willing to continue to use a platform that openly censors our content? Only time will tell.
