by Elon Musk buy twitter in a $44 billion settlement has opened a new front in the culture wars, specifically over what constitutes freedom of expression in the 21st century. While there was considerable pearl-clutching after Musk’s offer over the prospect of a billionaire controlling a major social media platform, a more substantive debate emerges from the language used by more moderate observers.
At issue are freedom of expression on the one hand and “content moderation” on the other. Advocates of social media content moderation, whether directly or implicitly, place higher value on some forms and content of discourse than others. What is often lost in the fog of the battle for speech is that freedom of expression and moderation of authentic content are not necessarily at odds. Rather, it is those who inadvertently or intentionally conflate disparate concepts and hide speech suppression through “content curation” more appropriate for professional media who compound the problem.
Elementally, there is a significant distinction between statements in the public square, of which Twitter and other social media platforms now form a prominent part, and the traditionally developed journalistic and other “content” delivered by the professional media. The Internet flattened and democratized access to information, giving rise to independent citizen journalism, and simultaneously expanded the public square. This technological shift blurred (but did not eliminate) the lines between substantive “content,” the product of investigative journalism, subject matter expertise, relevant personal and professional experience, and the like, and more broadly defined “expression.” wide.
The ideological flaws revealed by mishaps about Musk’s offer for Twitter highlights this confusion. Content moderation may be applied to expression or content to the extent necessary to remove truly inappropriate or offensive material. Unlike “direct” content moderation, content curation (the process of determining coverage, story selection, editing, fact-checking, and the like, and including some measure of content moderation) is applied better to the professional media production of an editor. do not post on a social platform.
Expression, in contrast to the standards expected of published media, need not be reported or even defensible; at best, the expression can serve as a catalyst for published content, informing professional media hypotheses, which are subsequently confirmed or refuted through investigation and investigation. Suppressing expression not only inhibits speech; suffocate the “fourth state” by denying it the necessary oxygen to produce results intrinsic to public discourse.
That trust in the media is currently in historical lows it is a fact; Several reasons are offered for the decline in trust in the media. Many believe that journalism has strayed from a “facts only” approach marked by relatively unbiased investigation and morphed into something more akin to advocacy. This colors not only the lens through which news is reported (see the rise of so-called “news analysis” features in major newspapers), but also what is considered newsworthy. This inverts the practice of journalism into an inductive discipline, in which reporting results fit a narrative, rather than how media consumers understand (and prefer) it to work: as a result of deductive empirical research based on acts. When media content is seen as predetermined, faith in the profession and its gimmicks are compromised. As this same approach has been applied to expression on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter in recent years, user satisfaction and engagement have suffered. As of December 2021 Washington Post poll reported that 72 percent of those surveyed distrusted Facebook; a like Newsweek poll in October 2020 revealed that registered American voters distrusted Twitter even more than Facebook.
Restoring trust in the media requires drawing a clear and bona fide distinction between the standards that should apply to expression and media content. The expression is the easier of the two: it must be free, full stop. That’s why we have a First Amendment, and why it’s listed first among our listed amendments. Bill of Rights. This means ending bans, shadow bans, and other forms of speech suppression (shaping content in a way more appropriate for an editor) by Twitter and other social media companies. Moderation of genuinely objectionable content should not be controversial; forbidding the new york post Y The bee of Babylon because the material that is not in favor with progressives certainly is, or should be. These platforms maintain that they are not publishers as described in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act; they can prove it by resisting calls for “content moderation” that seek to suppress expression by combining curation with actual content moderation.
Resurrecting the traditional respect accorded professional media, and reversing declining standards in content curation, is the biggest challenge. There are no happy days of properly and expertly produced content that we can return to; In the absence of the aforementioned checks and balances of technology-enabled distributed journalism, the ability to challenge narratives was historically limited. The biases of the past may not have been so apparent, and a less concentrated media landscape may still have conveyed “every print-ready news” altogether, albeit across multiple mediums, but they were certainly present.
Still, even today one would hope that there is a journalistic ethos and level of professional integrity capable of delivering the curated content necessary to enable the mainstream media to regain lost respect. A start with defensible standards might include rejecting obvious ideological bias in reporting and story selection; give up the defense outside the pages of opinion pieces; avoiding errors of both commission and omission in coverage (the latter most recently witnessed with Hunter Biden laptop suppression fiasco); return to deductive and empirical investigative journalism; and define the experience objectively, rather than whether a given point of view fits perfectly into a preconceived narrative.
Importing appropriate concepts for curation from traditional media to social media content moderation restricts discourse and harms civil discourse. Furthermore, the application of now degraded journalistic standards to expression exports a failed oversight regime, however it is rightly applied to the creation of professional media products in a medium where it is not only inappropriate, but risks amplifying the same degraded standards that are now ubiquitous in traditional media.
A healthy representative democracy requires an easily accessible public square for the expression of opinions from across the ideological spectrum. Likewise, it requires a media complex capable of providing the quality of information critical to maintaining a well-informed citizenry. Understanding the distinction between expression and content, and the standards that should apply to each, can enable both traditional and social media to regain their potential as instruments of a freer and less distorted marketplace of ideas.
Richard J. Shinder is the founder of Theatine Partners, a financial consultant and frequent lecturer, speaker, and panelist on business and financial topics. She has written extensively on economic, financial, geopolitical, cultural, and corporate governance topics.. Follow him on Twitter @RichardJShinder.
Reference-thehill.com