Snap and TikTok have been preparing for Inauguration Day.
Snap, where President-elect Joseph Biden's team has launched an augmented reality lens to take users to the ceremony, has devoted an internal task force to conduct "regular proactive sweeps" of its platform to ensure that its content is factual ahead of the inauguration, a company spokesperson said. TikTok, meanwhile, has updated its community guidelines around the event.
<p>"TikTok stands firmly against hateful behavior and violence, both online and off," a spokesperson for the company said in a statement. "Content or accounts that seek to incite, glorify, or promote violence or violent groups violate our Community Guidelines and will be removed."</p><p>After the invasion on the Capitol by Trump supporters, local and federal authorities have been on high alert and taken unprecedented security measures. Social media sites where the Capitol attackers organized have also beefed up their moderation efforts in an attempt to stem violence and slow the spread of misinformation. </p><p>Parler, a popular site among right-wing extremists, took a hit when Apple, Google and Amazon forced it off their platforms. Some experts, however, say it may be too late. </p><p>All content on Snap's Discover and Spotlight — the only two Snap features that can be seen by all users — is moderated before it can appear on feeds, a Snap representative said. </p><p>Snap is also working with its media partners including Reuters, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, to provide users coverage of the Inauguration. </p><p>TikTok is now redirecting hashtags like #stormthecapitol, #patriotparty and #threepercenters to its community guidelines page. #Stopthesteal and #QAnon have been redirected to the guidelines since last year. </p><p>TikTok also works with third-party organizations like PolitiFact and Lead Stories to fact-check content on its platform. The company said that sponsored content supporting or opposing a political leader or issue — including Inauguration Day — is in violation of its advertising policies. </p>
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Calls are mounting among lawmakers to ramp up regulation of social media following the violent takeover of the U.S. Capitol last week.
Facebook, Amazon and a slew of other tech companies have locked President Trump's account and given the boot to right-wing site Parler.
But Bay Area Congresswoman Anna Eshoo, a Democrat on the Energy and Commerce committee, calls the move by tech giants too little, too late and says "Congress and the administration must take swift and bold action."
"These companies have demonstrated they will not do the right thing on their own," she said.
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The problems that social media can create or exacerbate, including spreading misinformation and breeding terrorism, are well known. But it's tricky regulatory territory, cutting across issues of free speech, data privacy, market competition and the responsibility that companies should have over the content on their platforms.
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Eshoo sat on the powerful Communications & Technology subcommittee in the last Congressional session, during which she and fellow Democratic Congressman Tom Malinowksi of New Jersey introduced legislation to amend Section 230. The law governs the liability of internet intermediaries including social media companies for the content users publish on their platforms. The amendment would increase sites' liability for how their algorithms spread harmful or radicalizing content that leads to offline violence.
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Facebook and Twitter's move to suspend Trump's account, she said, was "a few hours too late to thwart the failed coup attempt...and years too late to avoid the harm done to our democracy."
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Eshoo said in a statement she will revive the bill in this legislative session and update it.
</p><h2>The Possible Changes to Section 230
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Enacted in 1996 as part of the Communications Decency Act, Section 230 says interactive computer services like social media websites are not to be considered publishers of, and therefore should not be held liable for, the content that appears on their platforms. It also provides cover for "good faith" moderation of content that the provider or users deem objectionable.
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Both sides of the political aisle have increasingly taken issue with the legislation, for different reasons.
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Democrats tend to criticize 230 for absolving tech companies of the responsibility for policing their platforms. President-elect Biden has called for 230 to be revoked, saying social media companies are "propagating falsehoods they know to be false."
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That could backfire, said Ángel Díaz of the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan law and policy think tank.
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"The reality is Section 230 is precisely the law that gives the platforms flexibility to remove posts that may not necessarily be illegal but are objectionable in some way," he said.
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President Trump began pushing for a Section 230 repeal after Twitter began fact-checking his tweets. His concerns echoed the objections other Republicans have made to the law, claiming it enables platforms to disproportionately censor conservative voices.
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Such concerns speak to one of the thorny issues surrounding content moderation – balancing it with free speech. Although Section 230 aims to provide a legal framework for doing so, it does not specify what should and should not be censored, leaving room for debate of the sort that has unfolded across party lines.
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Nor does Section 230 cover all the issues pertinent to potential social media regulation. Since the time the legislation was written, internet companies like Facebook, Amazon and Google have gobbled up huge markets, causing concerns among legislators and observers regarding fair market competition. And concern is growing about these companies' use of consumer data.
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"The conversation needs to go beyond 230 to capture these other avenues that are really important for understanding the future of the internet," Díaz said.
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Emma Llansó, director of the <a href="https://cdt.org/area-of-focus/free-expression/" target="_blank">Center for Democracy & Technology's Free Expression Project</a>, said "the attention Congress (and the Biden administration) will be paying will be as strong if not more intense in the wake of what happened at the Capitol."
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Congress "needs to identify the specific problems and harms it's trying to address or prevent and come up with tailored legislative proposals."
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But, she added, amending 230 alone won't resolve many of these issues and could create bigger problems.
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Requiring platforms to moderate content with a fine-tooth comb, for instance, could give more established and better-funded social media sites such as Facebook a leg up on upstarts and make it impossible for new companies to get started.
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"If you do regulation like 230 the wrong way you could just entrench the biggest players," Llansó said.
</p><h2>Other Content Moderation Laws in Development</h2><p>
One helpful way forward, said Díaz, could be to mandate more transparency from social media companies about their moderation policies and the outcomes of that moderation. Clearer public data, for example, "would help us get a better understanding of how much of a conservative bias there is or how much hate speech is targeting communities of color and being allowed to stay on the platform," he said.</p><p>
In California, State Assemblymember Ed Chau of Monterey Park introduced a bill in December to address transparency from social media companies. <a href="https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202120220AB35" target="_blank">Assembly Bill 35 </a>would force social media platforms to disclose to users, in an easily accessible way, whether they have a policy or mechanism in place to address the spread of misinformation.
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"The rioting upon our nation's Capital...was exacerbated by the spread of falsehoods and misinformation, some of which was disseminated via social media platforms," Chau said in a statement released last week.
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"It is vital to ensure that information on these platforms, which many have come to rely upon, is accurate and factual," he said.
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The bill would authorize levying $1,000 fines on social media platforms for each day they violate the disclosure requirement. That provision, however, could disproportionately burden smaller companies, Llansó said.
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"You could imagine a site that doesn't know about this requirement finding out 90 days after they launch that they owe $90,000 in fines, which would be problematic for a small service," Llansó said, noting that even a blog with a comments section could be subject to the bill in its current form.
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Another piece of legislation that may resurface in the new congressional session would establish a bipartisan <a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/4782" target="_blank">National Commission on Online Platforms and Homeland Security</a> to explore how social media platforms can spread violence. The bill was introduced by Mississippi Congressman Bennie Thompson in 2019, and received co-sponsorship from nearly twenty legislators on both sides of the aisle.
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The images of a mob of Trump supporters invading the U.S. Capitol Wednesday afternoon played out on live television and in Twitter feeds, but the moment had been building for years.
"Trump's most loyal base, which includes those affiliated with the QAnon conspiracy theory and white supremacists, have long been successful at translating online chatter to real-life action," said Daniel J. Jones, president of the Advance Democracy, a non-partisan nonprofit conducting public-interest research and investigations.
The group released a report on Wednesday that found over half of all QAnon-related Twitter accounts wrote about Jan. 6 leading up to the siege. And that ahead of storming the building, supporters called for violence on Twitter, Parler, TikTok and TheDonald, an online forum frequented by the far right.
<p>"I think we will continue to see this on Parler and Gab and user-generated forms like theDonald.win," Jones said. "I suspect we will also see more coded language for violence to avoid the censors." </p><p>In reaction, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snap and Twitch have all <a href="https://dot.la/trump-snapchat-2649782203.html" target="_self">banned Trump in some form</a>. But, as mainstream social media companies have cracked down on Trump's false rhetoric, a slew of others have popped up that accommodate the speech, places like Parler, a libertarian-leaning social site <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/parler-backed-by-mercer-family-makes-play-for-conservatives-mad-at-facebook-twitter-11605382430" target="_blank">created in 2018, run by John Matze</a> and backed by conservative donor Rebekah Mercer. </p><p>Several recent Parler posts leading up to the storming of the capitol referenced war, some stating, "the war begins today." On the internet forum TheDonald.win, more than 80% of the top posts on January 6 featured "unmoderated calls for violence in the top five responses," according to the report. </p><p>Even on TikTok, the video-sharing platform that too has become a home for political discourse, four widely-shared posts called for violence or rebellion during the protests.</p><p>There's been a shift away from mainstream sites like Twitter and Facebook to alt-right platforms as stronger moderation policies have been implemented, said Zachary Steinert-Threlkeld, an assistant professor of public policy at UCLA who studies how social networks affect an individual's decision to protest.</p><p>Over the last two years especially, supporters have turned to far-right online platforms for "tactical coordination," he said. </p><p>"We have real-time communication about how to protest," he said. "In what I've researched on the Arab Spring, this is quite common behavior. This occurred in Iran, in 2009, for example."</p><p>Steinert-Threlkeld said many supporters are also probably having private conversations in closed and private groups on Facebook, for instance, or through encrypted messaging platforms. </p><p>Ángel Díaz, who focuses on liberty and national security at the Brennan Center for Justice, said it can be hard now to draw the line between conversations about violence online and actual violence. "We're not in that territory anymore," he said. </p><p>The move by some social media companies to block Trump came too late. </p><p>"For months the president has been using social media to incite real-world harms," Díaz said. "He encouraged violence towards Black Lives Matter protesters over the summer. He encourages supporters to defy lockdown orders. He encourages supporters to harass election officials." </p><p>"I think a lot of how the platforms will react going forward is going to continue to be shaped by a combination of what the public outcry is and what the political pressure is," he said. </p>
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