Freedom of Expression/Limitations - Restrictions/Private curtailment
Is this right at times curtailed by private actors?
In many European countries (Germany, France, Austria, etc.), Holocaust denial is illegal and approximately 80 Facebook posts per year are blocked. Zuckerburg, in a 2018, interview stated that he found Holocaust denials to be deeply offensive, but does not believe that warrants censorship. Zuckerburg seems to follow the harm principle, stating that "unless individuals are trying to organize harm against someone, or attacking someone," content should not be censored (Rosenberg 2018) . Facebook's Community Standards (also includes Instagram) are intended to guide freedom of expression on the site through rules such as preventing offline harm related to Facebook content through "consider[ing] the language and context in order to distinguish casual statements from content that constitutes a credible threat to public or personal safety." The community standards prohibit the presence of terrorist groups on Facebook. The standards also "prohibit people from facilitating, organizing, promoting, or admitting to certain criminal or harmful activities targeted at people, businesses, property or animals." With hate speech, although the community standards are clear, their implementation is vague--"We define hate speech as a direct attack on people based on what we call protected characteristics — race, ethnicity, national origin, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, caste, sex, gender, gender identity, and serious disease or disability." The community standards do not account for politic speech. In a speech at Georgetown University, Zuckerburg articulated his position for political censorship: "I don’t think it’s right for a private company to censor politicians or news in a democracy" (Ghaffary 2020) . Although Twitter has extremely similar policies to Facebook, they have dramatically different applications. In early May, Twitter fact-checked President Trump's tweets regarding voting by mail by placing links to a fact-checking page that debunks the president's tweets. Twitter announced that it would place labels on tweets containing false or misleading information in response to misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic (Ghaffary 2020) . Previously, Twitter had resisted such a move because the president is a world leader and considered his tweets as "noteworthy" and, as such, exempted them from their standards policy (Ghaffary 2020) . Facebook has a similar conduct policy, but enacts it much differently. In response to the move, Zuckerburg stated that Facebook should not, nor is, an "arbiter of truth" (Ghaffary 2020) . Twitter again used its new policy on the president's tweet about protests, saying that his "when the looting starts, the shooting starts" violated Twitter's policy of glorifying violence (Ghaffary 2020) . Facebook, on the other hand, defended its position of not censoring the same statement by saying "didn’t violate Facebook’s policies about inciting violence. He said the company saw it 'as a warning about state action,' and that 'people need to know if the government is planning to deploy force” (Ghaffary 2020) .