The tragic murder of Charlie Kirk has exposed the dark underbelly of left-wing discourse on the Internet as users on BlueSky, Reddit, and Discord celebrate the vicious assassination of a young husband and father because of his politics and faith. Moreover, FBI Director Kash Patel has confirmed evidence that some media users may have previewed Kirk’s killing days beforehand (the FBI is investigating at least twenty Discord users for their communications with the killer).
This entire episode highlights the dangerous radicalization that has happened over years as extreme rhetoric online pushes young people toward desperate and awful acts. Social media companies need to take responsibility for their role in radicalization, and their failure to address irresponsible liberal discourse after their aggressive censorship of conservative viewpoints exposes a dangerous double standard.
A template for how private actors can self-police was on display Tuesday when local television affiliates, Nexstar and Sinclair, forced Disney/ABC’s hand to cancel indefinitely Jimmy Kimmel Live! They recognized that the callousness and blatant misinformation on that show did not serve the public interest. By contrast, social media titans have enabled irresponsible leftist rhetoric to proliferate and pollute civil discourse.
For the last decade, the Left has sought to drive conservatives from the public square through tools like deplatforming and debanking. Working hand-in-glove with the Biden administration, for instance, the Big Tech companies canceled thousands of conservative voices who dared to challenge the then-conventional wisdom during the Covid-19 pandemic. And they did so again after the 2020 election, targeting “election deniers” and “J-6ers” for cancellation, even going so far as to ban President Trump. Not only everyday citizens, but a half-dozen senators and congressmen (all Republicans) had their accounts suspended for violating these “community standards.” Even Stripe stopped processing campaign contributions to Donald Trump because the financial services company believed he violated their arbitrary standards.
When the Big Tech companies defended those decisions in the media and the courts, they turned again and again to their “terms and conditions,” the contracts users sign that permitted the companies to remove content that violated their “community standards.” The popular conversation site Reddit, for instance, has a set of “Reddit Rules” that include principles like “[e]veryone has a right to use Reddit free of harassment, bullying, and threats of violence. Communities and users that incite violence or that promote hate based on identity or vulnerability will be banned.”
On January 8, 2021, two days after the protests taking over the Capitol, the news magazine Variety reported that “Reddit on Friday said it banned r/donaldtrump — one of the biggest pro-Trump subreddits on the platform — after ‘repeated’ violations of the site’s policy against inciting violence.”
Many of these decisions occur down the Internet stacks and not just at the platform level, such as a cloud services company that manages the site’s traffic or even the app store. This was on full demonstration in 2018 when Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince unilaterally decided to stop servicing the alt-right website Daily Stormer after they were instrumental in planning the infamous neo-Nazi demonstration in Charlottesville, Virginia. As Prince explained in a Wall Street Journal column, he decided it was no longer in Cloudflare’s interests to service this client, so he pulled the plug. Prince simply found that the Daily Stormer was in breach of his company’s Terms of Service and decided to act accordingly.
Apple similarly decided to boot Parler from its App Store by claiming communications by members of the social media community violated Apple’s terms and services in the aftermath of the 2020 election.
But left-wing voices have not faced the same level of prompt and thorough censorship from these platforms, especially in the wake of Kirk’s murder. This fact looks like a failure to fairly apply their terms and contracts, which could be a basis for federal investigation. The Trump administration’s Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission, for instance, both have focused on Big Tech’s content moderation policies in recent months. The FTC recently opened an inquiry into social media censorship; this disparate treatment of certain views over others could figure into that existing inquiry.
Moreover, these platforms may not have protection from Section 230, the federal law that grants a lawsuit liability safe harbor for web companies. That controversial statute ties its protections to “good faith” on the part of the companies. Prominent law professors Adam Candeub and Eugene Volokh have written that applying these rules in a viewpoint-discriminatory way fails to fall within the scope of “good faith.” Even a cursory look at the communications on these social media platforms do not appear to be in line with the community standards established by the platforms or the cloud services, and app stores. No progressive influencers who celebrated the death of Charlie Kirk have been suspended on Stripe or had their YouTube channel cut.
Americans have always cherished our nation’s unique heritage of free speech, and so they are understandably wary of any attempt to censor speech online. But a core component of free speech is the equal treatment of speech and speakers regardless of the viewpoint expressed. It just as much violates our free speech tradition to censor only one side of the aisle as it does to censor everybody.
If social media companies are not even-handed in their internal application of their content moderation standards, the government has an appropriate role to ensure fair treatment of all consumers.