Should Twitter (and other media outlets) delete user content?
In light of the recent debate over the topic, I thought I’d offer my (hopefully) concise take.
To start by answering the question directly, I believe that the answer is No, unless the content relates to a crime being committed or any threatening language (which includes hate speech). There’s simply no place for that type of content in a society, and it is a media company’s duty to filter this out. Acknowledging that the definition of “threatening language” can be subjective, let’s assume we use society’s legal rules to make that determination — if it would be illegal to say to someone in person, it should be banned online as well.
Should media companies, then, have the right to place any influence or filter on user content as appropriate? I believe the answer to this is Yes, and I believe that one proper way of doing that is to put a “fact-check” filter (banner) on a piece of content, as Twitter has recently done on several occasions. Disclaimer — I did not investigate any of said occasions myself, I am merely saying this is the proper way to handle WHEN COMPARED WITH straight deletion of the content.
The point that should be considered here is that if you are a person of great influence or elected power in a society, you have the power to influence people’s lives, positively or negatively. You have a responsibility to protect your fellow human.
To be clear, I am not talking about if someone says, “DQ is better than Baskin Robbins, and that’s a FACT!” Who cares, that doesn’t hurt anyone, and maybe they’re on DQ’s payroll — more power to ’em. I am talking about content / speech that can be potentially hurtful to the society AND the content is objectively wrong by any simple fact-checking of the situation.
(I must acknowledge, too, that there will always be some subjectively in determining what is “potentially hurtful”, but I would argue that common sense should guide this determination and the push/pull of human reaction to the content filter should prevail. If the media company is comfortable with their decision to filter after gauging a reaction, then so the filter remains—if not, then it gets removed.)
The internet is simply too important the time that we live in and to choose to ignore its consequences would be naive. I may have felt differently about all of this pre-internet, but the internet is the red blood cells of our society, carrying packets of information to billions of humans (frankly I have no idea off the top of my head what the heck red blood cells do, but it sounded like a great analogy. I may be thinking about neurons in the brain. Can someone fact-check me?). The internet is too powerful in influencing people’s lives to ignore the consequences of what happens within its walls.
Outisde of crime-related content and threatening language, why shouldn’t media companies delete content? I believe the rational answer to this is that there is simply too much subjectively — it is largely dependant on the employee (or person) assigned to audit the content. The precedent would just be too much of a slippery slope. I strongly feel that to delete content in this fashion would be a fundamental violation of the uniqueness, breadth, and freedom of the natural human voice and experiences we have as humans.
