Mueller on Challenging the Social Media Moral Panic: Preserving Free Expression Under Hypertransparency @miltonmueller

Milton Mueller, Georgia Institute of Technology, is publishing Challenging the Social Media Moral Panic: Preserving Free Expression Under Hypertransparency in Cato Institute Policy Analysis (no. 876) (2019). Here is the abstract. Cato Institute Policy Analysis, No. 876, 2019

Social media are now widely criticized after enjoying a long period of public approbation. The kinds of human activities that are coordinated through social media, good as well as bad, have always existed. However, these activities were not visible or accessible to the whole of society. As conversation, socialization, and commerce are aggregated into large-scale, public commercial platforms, they become highly visible to the public and generate storable, searchable records. Social media make human interactions hypertransparent and displace the responsibility for societal acts from the perpetrators to the platform that makes them visible. This hypertransparency is fostering a moral panic around social media. Internet platforms, like earlier new media technologies such as TV and radio, now stand accused of a stunning array of evils: addiction, fostering terrorism and extremism, facilitating ethnic cleansing, and even the destruction of democracy. The social-psychological dynamics of hypertransparency lend themselves to the conclusion that social media cause the problems they reveal and that society would be improved by regulating the intermediaries that facilitate unwanted activities. This moral panic should give way to calmer reflection. There needs to be a clear articulation of the tremendous value of social media platforms based on their ability to match seekers and providers of information in huge quantities. We should also recognize that calls for government-induced content moderation will make these platforms battlegrounds for a perpetual intensifying conflict over who gets to silence whom. Finally, we need a renewed affirmation of Section 230 of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which shields internet intermediaries from liability for users’ speech. Contrary to Facebook’s call for government-supervised content regulation, we need to keep platforms, not the state, responsible for finding the optimal balance between content moderation, freedom of expression, and economic value. The alternative of greater government regulation would absolve social media companies of market responsibility for their decisions and would probably lead them to exclude and suppress even more legal speech than they do now. It is the moral panic and proposals for regulation that threaten freedom and democracy.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.