By Shane Tews

The debate around online content moderation is not slowing
down. People remain bitterly divided over whether social media platforms should
take down more content, or not moderate at all. Meanwhile, outside the US,
authoritarian regimes are censoring online dissenters and retaliating against
citizens who share certain content. How are content moderation experts working
to solve these ever-complex issues?

On this episode, I sat down with Julie Owono to discuss why we need clear principles
around online speech — centered on free expression — and how these principles
can be applied across different countries. Julie is the executive director of
Stanford University’s Content Policy & Society Lab, executive director
of Internet
Without Borders, and a member of the Facebook Oversight Board.

Below is an edited and abridged transcript of our talk. You
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platform. You can also read the full transcript of our discussion here. If you enjoyed this episode, leave us a review, and
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Shane Tews: Julie, to
get started, tell us about your background at Internet Sans Frontières (or
Internet Without Borders).

Julie Owono: It’s a digital rights organization, with digital
rights meaning human rights that people enjoy offline. Our assumption is that digital
rights should have the same protections as offline ones, which means defending freedom
of expression, freedom to speak, and also freedom to access online mediums. Not
everyone can afford accessible internet or freely speak because their
government either shuts down the internet or limits access to social media
through taxes and censorship.

We also focus a lot on issues around privacy and anonymity,
because we think both are very interlinked to digital rights. Some people are
really keen on having their privacy strongly protected because they are
involved in the criticizing their authorities or governments. That can be a
very dangerous, risky business.

Are there times when
it is appropriate to limit online speech?

There are three important principles to follow when imposing
limits on speech.

The first is that your limitation has to be legal. You need
a rule that is both clear and accessible. The second is that your limitation
should be proportionate. If you wanted to limit the reach of a publication, is
taking it down the only way to go about it? Alternatively, could we add
interstitials or algorithmically limit the reach?

Third, whatever you’re doing should be necessary. In other
words, what is the imperative that justifies the censorship? The imperative
could be safety, security, or preventing harm. But the problem with many of the
laws is that they create this illusion that moderating the internet is easy. It
is not. Especially when you’re a massive platform that deals with a gargantuan amount
of content every day, it becomes very complicated.

Being relatively new
to the First Amendment as a non-US-native, is there anything that has surprised
you as you’ve had to integrate it into your thought process?

In Europe, we have this assumption that there’s simply no
limit to free speech in the US. The First Amendment means absolutely no limits.
But after coming to the United States two years ago, I started reading academic
material about First Amendment issues. What I was surprised to realize is that
there is a strong debate about the limits of speech; are you really allowed to
say anything and everything?

I also discovered that there is more proximity between
international human rights standards with regards to speech and expression and
the First Amendment. This is an exercise that we’ve had to do as Facebook
Oversight Board members when we were deliberating on a case — the most famous of
which involved the former president of the United States.

From your work at the
Facebook Oversight Board, what have you taken away from the global presence of
Big Tech? What problems have you encountered?

We’ve received lots of cases from North America and Western
Europe, but also some from Latin America, Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the
Middle East. I’ve come to realize this: We need to do a better job of reaching
out to users who do not speak English. Facebook (now Meta) has a hard time
making sure all its users who speak a wide array of languages can understand
the rules. I’m very curious on how someone wants to enforce a rule that nobody
understands in a country. For example, Arabic is a group of related languages,
but the US treats Arabic as a monolith, and certain nuances are lost in
translation. In other cases, there is not even a translation of the guidelines
available. With Punjabi, which is a language widely spoken in Southern Asia,
community standards of Facebook were not available for a language spoken by
over 100 million people.

When you want to be a global platform, there are some
inequities that shouldn’t exist. Removing lingual barriers is of the upmost
importance if you want to make sure that people use your platform to its
fullest extent possible.

Tell us about
Stanford’s Content Policy & Society Lab.

The lab stems from this idea that we don’t talk to each
other as different stakeholders. We don’t really listen to each other and to
the challenges that we’re facing. One challenge, for instance, as a civil
society organization is that we don’t fully understand Silicon Valley
companies.

We’ve also organized a set of workshops to create the safest
place possible to have the most candid conversations on different subjects. The
first subject that we dealt with was the moderation of dangerous organizations
and violent extremism. We’ve also had speakers from the Nigerian government, and
we also heard from an activist from Pakistan focusing specifically on issues
around human rights — women’s rights in particular — and the moderation of
dangerous organizations such as the Taliban.

The second theme of the workshops was about moderation
beyond social media. Regarding this, everyone thinks of the big companies like
Facebook and Twitter, but there are other companies that are facing moderation
challenges and have been quite creative in solving those problems. We wanted to
make sure that there are high-level employees within tech companies from
different teams attending the workshops to create the most productive
environment.

The post The complexities of online content moderation: Highlights from my conversation with Julie Owono appeared first on American Enterprise Institute – AEI.