ninafaith

On a daily basis, as we speak, Internet companies are making speech-related decisions more important than those made by any government. YouTube, for instance, has to constantly decide what to censor. Generally, it blocks copyright infringements on request and pornography without request, and it listens to some but not all of the demands of governments. Facebook, for its part, has been tested less, but it has been willing to delete user-generated content at the request of governments, like Pakistan and Bangladesh.

This is what speech management looks like in 2010. No one elected Facebook or YouTube, and neither one is beholden to the First Amendment. Nonetheless, it is their decisions that dictate, effectively, who gets heard. What’s the answer? There is no easy answer. Monopolies like Google, Facebook, and Hollywood have certain advantages: That’s why they tend to come into existence. That means the American public needs to be aware of the dangers that private censors can pose to free speech. The American Constitution was written to control abuses of power, but it didn’t account for the heavy concentration of private power that we see today. And in the end, power is power, whether in private or public hands.