Aashish Mishra

Back in October of 2015, Facebook banned the phrase “everyone will know” from their platforms. For more than a day, people could not post the sentence on their timelines, look it up through Facebook’s search or send it to their contacts through Facebook Messenger. Many thought it was a prank. Reddit was alight with suspicions and conspiracy theories. Suddenly, the three words “everyone will know”, which were theretofore harmless, began sounding ominous and commenters started debating on its context and what might have motivated Facebook to prohibit its use.
The Huffington Post investigated the matter and the reason for the banning turned out to be more quotidian than anyone expected. It was not a prank nor did it warrant fear or suspicions. It was simply a mistake. Facebook had apparently updated their spam-fighting engine and somehow “everyone will know” got added to the list of spam words to watch out for. The error was later fixed.
But this mistake, while innocuous, started a conversation about censorship on the internet; a conversation that has only grown over the years. Facebook has been accused of censoring anti-Modi and anti-BJP opinions in India (while conversely, not blocking pro-BJP statements even if they violate the law and its own guidelines on hate speech). On October 14, 2020, it “reduced the distribution” of a news article published by the New York Post on the purported misdeeds of Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s son. Twitter, in recent years and especially since the Charlottesville neo-Nazi rally, has been ramping up fact checks and the enforcement of its community standards. It is open knowledge that Google complied with government censorship requests, to an extent, when it operated in China from 2006 to 2010. Most recently, Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat blocked US President Donald Trump and his content from their social networking sites after the events that unfolded on Capitol Hill on Wednesday.
While not all these are objectionable, it raises some very questions. Can these companies block people and ban content at their sole discretion? What policies are in place to ensure free speech on social media?
The answer to the first question is yes and the answer to the second question is none. Facebook. Twitter, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Google – all of them are private, for-profit, companies and hence, have the right to control what happens on their platforms. They do not need to consider free speech because their social networks are their companies’ “domain” subject to their rules and regulations.
Think of it this way. A bookstore can decide on its own whether or not to sell a particular book. It would be perfectly within its legal rights if it decided to not carry a specific writer or promote a genre. It is the bookstore’s choice. The same also applies to internet companies.
Now, thankfully, social networking sites have not exercised their “control” or treated their networks as “company domain”, at least not collectively or arbitrarily. But what if they decide to? Given the widespread penetration of social media, the ubiquity of search engines, and their transformation into spaces of and for public organisation and information sharing, it is worrying to think that they are beyond public reach and oversight. Our digital freedom of expression prevails as long as some supranational corporations want it to and to the extent they deem acceptable. This is the frightening reality.
So, as calls to curb misinformation and propaganda online grow, we must see that the corporate entities do not become too comfortable of erasing statements and revoking access to people. There should be a line somewhere and we must now draw it. We should beware of our internet giants becoming our internet overlords.