The Guardian view on Facebook: power without responsibility | Editorial
Are social media companies responsible for the lies their users tell? Both the obvious answers, "yes" and "no", are clearly wrong. Complete responsibility is a bad idea, and impossible in practice: even in China, the home of the largest and most sophisticated censorship apparatus on the web, the internet is expected to slow down markedly in the coming weeks under the burden of combing through it to ensure that no references to the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre are published. And, as the Chinese example shows, there are also considerable difficulties that arise when any one organisation can decide what counts as truth or falsehood. Yet it can't be right, either, to say that social media companies have no responsibility to exercise the powers they have to remove obnoxious material from their servers. Videos of murder, child abuse and other horrors are routinely and rightly removed. It will be objected that these are horrible precisely because they are not lies - they record things that really happened. But that doesn't stand up. It is no defence, either in British law, or in any moral sense, to say that a video of atrocity is faked. If it works as propaganda for jihadis, or for child abusers, it will be censored and its originators punished if that's possible.
The platforms have been much more reluctant to act against lies which promote causes which are not in themselves criminal, however despicable. Google and Facebook are both advertising businesses, the biggest that the world has ever seen, and they depend on their ability to attract and to retain viewers. So the conspiracy theories of Alex Jones were tolerated for many years. So were the 9/11 truthers, the anti-vaxxers, and, on Twitter, Donald Trump's campaign to suggest that Obama had been born abroad.
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