Langue Verte

David Kaye is the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression. In that role, which he has held since 2014, Kaye has traveled across the globe to address issues related to free speech, human rights, disinformation, propaganda, and the internet. In Speech Police: The Global Struggle to Govern the Internet, Kaye compiles much of what he has learned in those travels to provide suggestions for governments, politicians, social media companies, and individuals on how to navigate free speech in the modern era. No group is blameless. Governments across Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia have responded too strongly to online disinformation campaigns, threatening free expression globally. Politicians have used disinformation to gain power and have attacked democratic institutions like the free press. Social media companies have responded more to market demands than the best interest of their consumers. Kaye's solution is simple, though he acknowledges that it leaves questions unanswered. For him, governance of expression, whether by governments or corporations, should be grounded in transparency, democracy, accountability, and human rights law.

Speech Police is valuable for Kaye's expertise and recommendations, but it is also valuable for other lessons that it teaches. First, free speech is not a solely American concern. Often, it seems that discourse around free speech in the United States completely ignores the global context of either human rights law or the experiences of other nations. Kaye's breadth of experience acts as a counterweight against such discussions. He incorporates discussion on the NetzDG law in Germany, the Singaporean Parliament's Select Committee on Deliberate Online Falsehoods, Kenya's Computer Misuse and Cybercrimes act, among others. Moreover, he shows how different nations learn from one another, for instance, how nations around the world began to adopt Internet Referral Units (IRU) modeled after those in the United Kingdom. In fact, it seems that America is on the fringes of the discussion on free speech globally. Whereas most countries, even free speech activists within those countries, seem to recognize the need to balance a right to free expression against other rights, American discourse often suggests free speech is not something to be balanced. Of course, in reality, few talking heads who discuss free speech in absolutist terms are truly free speech absolutists, but the discourse remains far more stringent in the United States than elsewhere. Nonetheless, as Kaye shows, American discussions over free speech and “fake news” do have global consequences. America has a unique point of view on free speech, but it is hardly the only one.

Another strength of Speech Police is its humanization of otherwise blank faces. Kaye meets with the content moderators who have to make split-second decisions, for hours at a time, about what content violates Facebook's rules. He introduces us to human rights activists in Singapore, Germany, Kenya, and elsewhere who are on the front lines of censorship globally. This emphasis on such people teaches another lesson. Globally speaking, American free speech concerns seem almost laughable. American right-wing media harps on temporary bans on pundits like Candice Owens, but pays no attention to the crack-down against opposition protests in Kenya. When Facebook banned Alex Jones and others from its platform, the New York Times wrote that the social media company's previous strategy of not banning controversial people was “insufficient, with new reports of lies and hate speech surfacing on Facebook almost daily.” It even approvingly quoted Paul Barrett, a human rights expert, who argued that “'The social media companies not only have the right, but an ethical responsibility to remove disinformation and hate speech and those who spread it from their platforms.'” Such blanket statements and calls for removal of content may seem fine to those angry at right-wing provocateurs, but globally they carry significant consequences. According to Kaye, authoritarian governments around the world use blanket bans on false or misleading information as a cover to punish political opposition and critical news outlets. On the flip side, the damage that Jones has done is minuscule compared to the genocide of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar which was partially facilitated by Facebook. American concerns seem to ignore the severe consequences of both too much and too little regulation of speech.

Kaye makes several, strong recommendations to balance free expression with personal safety and privacy, but other steps would seem warranted. He suggests that merely deleting Facebook or other social media accounts might make sense in the West but has limited value for people elsewhere. This is because, globally, Facebook, particularly through WhatsApp, is the only social media option available. Yet, I think it makes sense regardless, for those who can, to pursue alternatives. In particular, peer-to-peer networking or federated social media sites like Mastodon or Friendi.ca would seem to offer alternatives that are transparent, open source, and decentralized. Kaye argues implicitly that the size and private nature of Facebook, Twitter, and the like is a major part of the problem. Federated social media is inherently small and there are no proprietary algorithms that lead people down disinformation rabbit holes. This is not a perfect solution on its own, but perhaps a necessary step. Another important step is a change that must happen in American discourse. Americans can no longer rely on a neat distinction between speech in public spaces that is protected by the First Amendment and speech in private spaces like Facebook that is not protected. As more and more speech occurs on those platforms, as they became an essential part, sadly, of our democracy, the distinction between public and private forums becomes less and less tenable. Flippantly arguing that Twitter, for example, is a private company and therefore can regulate speech however it chooses, seems weak. If this argument is taken seriously as social media giants become even more widely used, we risk turning over complete control of our communications to opaque, unaccountable, private entities whose only goal is make profit.

As an historian, I tried to look at these contemporary events with an historical lens. The internet certainly presents new challenges regarding free expression than traditional mass media. It is much easier to control newspapers, television, and radio broadcasts that require companies to invest in a lot of equipment, buildings, and people in order to function. Social media has only become easy to control as people have flocked to fewer and fewer platforms. Yet, much of what Kaye discusses has precedents in the long history of free expression. Kaye denounces filters that remove content at the point of upload, for instance, which are simply the 21st century equivalent of prior restraint. He argues that artificial intelligence (AI) will not solve the problem for us because social prejudices and assumptions are necessarily embedded into the way it works. This may come as a shock to some of Kaye's readers, but it is a fundamental truth in the history of technology. Even the growth of social media giants evokes the history of the Gilded Age, a period in the late 19th century when large monopolies controlled many major industries. Just as the wealth of those companies masked huge inequalities of wealth and power in the United States, so too does the promise of free communication mask inequalities of wealth and power globally. The book encouraged me to learn more about information revolutions in the hopes of finding old answers to new questions.

Overall, Speech Police is a wonderful book and a quick read that gives the reader a new perspective on free speech and censorship globally.