Tech giants such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google are facing all-time highs in hate speech and misinformation, with such content increasing twentyfold between 2017 to 2021 on Facebook, indicating that the company’s approach to censorship doesn’t work, according to a new study administered by Daryl Davis, a race relations expert, and Bill Ottman, a free speech activist and CEO of crypto social network Minds.
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The study, which was reviewed by Dr. Nafees Hamid, a senior research fellow on radicalization at King’s College London, among other academics, studied the effects of restricting extremist content from large-scale social media platforms by looking at the behavior of extremist groups, among them White supremacists, neo-Nazis, and Islamic extremists.
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“When you deny people the ability to express opinions and engage in culture, the data shows you send them to nefarious platforms where much worse behavior occurs,” Ottman told the Washington Examiner.
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“People who get canceled or de-platformed just move to somewhere with an echo chamber that reinforces their beliefs, and [that] leads to shootings at synagogues and mosques and what happened in Charlottesville,” he added.
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He added that rampant censorship and the blocking of people on social media have caused more people to become “lone wolves,” which has directly resulted in a rise in radicalization. The study also showed that censorship does not reduce hate speech or violence-inducing misinformation but merely moves it to other corners of the internet.
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“When platforms like Facebook or Twitter limit hateful conversations and censor controversial content, this only moves it elsewhere. Big Tech says censorship is working, but really, it’s just hiding the problem,” said Davis.
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Large tech platforms such as Spotify, Airbnb, and GoFundMe have also intensified bans and censorship due to public criticism.
Facebook and other social media platforms have periodically explained stricter content moderation and censorship by telling internal surveys that show that users do not like certain controversial content, including divisive political speech.
Davis and Ottoman said that they sympathize with the problematic role that social media platforms play. Large amounts of content keep a diverse community of users satisfied, and they desire more clarity from the companies.
“We’re not trying to take down the Big Tech platforms — we just want them to back up their content moderation policies with research and data,” said Ottman.
Ottman concluded that “we feel that our research justifies more of a First Amendment-based content moderation policy with more free speech that in the long run, over years, would lead to less radicalization and violence.”
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