American politics has been going through a particularly tumultuous phase lately, but sitting in India it’s easy to feel that it doesn’t affect you. The reality, however, is that what affects “American” companies like Google, Facebook and other global giants may also have implications for people in India – and elsewhere. And it’s not just laws and policies that matter anymore, as recent events should make you realize. The United States has seen marches, demonstrations and counter-protests over the past few months, and in the past two weeks things appear to have only gotten worse. As tech giants have attempted to position themselves as platform neutral, it’s becoming increasingly clear that this is not a tenable position.
Recently, Google fired an employee for writing an anti-diversity manifesto. Soon after, following a rally in Charlottesville where people marched with Nazi imagery, tech companies cracked down on supremacist speech, abandoning the posture of neutrality.
The Verge reported that Google, GoDaddy and WordPress have all banned neo-Nazi groups from using their platforms. Airbnb has also banned supremacists, and a white supremacist whose viral video has circulated on the internet has been blocked on dating site Ok Cupid.
On the one hand, it seems pretty good to hear that in an age where fake news, hate speech, trolling and online abuse have become painful realities of life, big business is starting actually take the necessary steps to actually make things better. On the other hand, it is also a potential slippery slope.
Cloudflare, which also provided services to a neo-Nazi site, the Daily Stormer, started the site from its platform. The company discussed this in a blog post, and in there it raises some very interesting points.
As Cloudflare CEO and co-founder Matthew Prince pointed out, its terms of service give it the right to terminate users at its sole discretion. Thus, removal of the site does not constitute a breach of the service agreement. And further, even though Cloudflare didn’t agree with the Daily Stormer’s ideology, it had no plans to take the site down — until the latter claimed Cloudflare was a secret supporter, Prince writes.
It’s reasonable enough, but as Prince himself points out, it’s also potentially dangerous. As he explains, a whole chain of services – from content creators to hosts, transit providers, registrars, ISPs and browsers, not to mention search engines – is needed for users to access content, and any of them could restrict access. But the question is whether any of them should regulate access.
In the case of Cloudfare’s action, no due process was followed, nor was there any public discussion – rather, the removal of the Daily Stormer was carried out as an almost knee-jerk reaction. It was arbitrary and took place behind closed doors.
It’s a problem, and it’s a problem not just for people in the United States, but for people around the world. For companies like Cloudflare to take such actions without any scrutiny is worrying. Here is what Prince wrote about it:
Someone on our team asked after I announced we were ending the Daily Stormer, “Is this the day the internet dies?” He was half joking, but only half. He is not a fan of the Daily Stormer or similar sites. But he realizes the risks of a company like Cloudflare getting into content policing.
Consider this – in India, we’ve had 63 internet shutdowns in six years, according to the Software Freedom Law Center. Site blocking has become commonplace, for such petty reasons as trying to prevent pirated movies from being downloaded. This affects not just a few torrent sites, but large swaths of the internet for reasons that are hard to justify.
Right now, companies are blocking things they deem inadmissible, and that’s a move a lot of people are cheering for. Tomorrow, what a global company wants to shut down may well be different – and remember, these are decisions that aren’t made in public and don’t follow any due process. These are arbitrary decisions made behind closed doors.
What if a global company feels its bottom line is best served by bowing to government pressure and shutting down parts of the internet? It’s not hard to imagine this scenario, and the same methods we promote today may well be the problem in the future. Removing hate speech is a big goal – but what is needed now is a framework to do so publicly and openly, with proper accountability for such removals.
Tech
