Stop outsourcing the regulation of hate speech to social media

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Regulating hate speech on the internet should not be left to private corporations. Shutterstock

Natasha Tusikov, York University, Canada and Blayne Haggart, Brock University

When it comes to dealing with online hate speech, we’ve ended up in the worst of all possible worlds.


This very much includes Facebook’s decision this week to ban white nationalist content, a move that critics have demanded for years and that Facebook could have introduced at any time.


Whether it’s pressure on companies to withdraw web-hosting and payments services from Wikileaks following the leak of U.S. diplomatic cables in 2010, or the documented influence of the American government to pressure companies like Google into supposedly “industry-driven” trademark enforcement efforts, government regulation of speech is happening, but without any real accountability.


Debating the regulation of online speech




Beyond such a straightforward example, different societies will draw different lines between acceptable and unacceptable content — think Germany’s ban on public Holocaust denialism — but every society does have a line.

Ignoring the problem



We have to ensure that decisions about what speech gets regulated are made by the people affected by these rules. That’s the whole point of democracy.

What this means is that in the absence of a global government, we need to think nationally, because that’s where the accountability mechanisms are.


Germany’s law may be controversial. However, it’s important to recognize that all efforts to regulate speech involve trade-offs, but that these efforts are designed to respond to a legitimate societal need. Plus, given the explosion of murderous real-world consequences associated with Facebook, for example, it’s not clear that the American way is better.

Global connections

In an ideal world, connections would be global and through social media platforms, and they would operate in countries in which domestic law is the first and last word. For a model, consider Canada’s banking system, embedded in a global financial system but subject to strict rules that spared the country the brunt of the 2008 global financial crisis.

Decisions about what speech would be regulated would be made out in the open, perhaps by an arm’s length agency like the Bank of Canada.



Read more: Unliked: How Facebook is playing a part in the Rohingya genocide


Natasha Tusikov, Assistant Professor, Criminology, Department of Social Science, York University, Canada and Blayne Haggart, Associate Professor of Political Science, Brock University
