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FREE SPEECH ON SOCIAL MEDIA: HOW TO PROTECT OUR FREEDOMS FROM SOCIAL MEDIA THAT ARE FUNDED BY TRADE IN OUR PERSONAL DATA

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 May 2021

Richard Sorabji
Richard Sorabji*
Affiliation:
Philosophy, King’s College London, UK
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Abstract

I have argued elsewhere that in past history, freedom of speech, whether granted to few or many, was granted as bestowing some important benefit. John Stuart Mill, for example, in On Liberty, saw it as enabling us to learn from each other through discussion. By the test of benefit, I here argue that social media that are funded through trade in our personal data with advertisers, including propagandists, cannot claim to be supporting free speech. We lose our freedoms, if the personal data we entrust to online social media are used to target us with information, or disinformation, tailored as persuasive to different personalities, in order to maximize revenue from advertisers or propagandists. Among the serious consequences described, particularly dangerous because of its effect on democracy, is the use of such targeted advertisements to swing voting campaigns. Control is needed both of the social media and of any political parties that pay social media for differential targeting of voters based on personality. Using UK government documents, I recommend legislation for reform and enforcement.

Keywords

freedom of speechpersonal datatrade in personal datasocial mediatargeted advertisementsvoting campaigns
Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 37 , Issue 2 , Winter 2020 , pp. 209 - 236
Copyright
© Social Philosophy & Policy Foundation 2021

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Footnotes

I am very grateful for queries and suggested reading supplied to me by an expert anonymous referee.

References

1 This essay is a preview of Chapter 3 of my forthcoming book: Freedom of Speech and Expression: Its History, Its Value, Its Good Use and Its Misuse (The Rutgers Lectures in Philosophy) (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021).

2 As described in Disinformation and ‘Fake News’, Final Report of the House of Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, paragraphs 64–76.

3 Information Commissioner’s Office, UK, Report, July 11, 2019, Democracy Disrupted? 38–39.

4 Michael Kosinski in the New York Times, December 12, 2018, in his “Congress May Have Fallen for Facebook’s Trap, But You Don’t Have To.”

5 Martin, Moore, Democracy Hacked (London: Oneworld, 2018), 121.Google Scholar

6 Athanasios Andreou, Marcio Silva, Fabricio Benevenuto, Oana Goga, Patrick Loiseau et al., “Measuring the Facebook Advertising Ecosystem,” HAL, submitted December 18, 2018, https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01959145.

7 Disinformation and “Fake News,” paragraphs 64–76.

8 Even more of the emails had been cited in the committee’s Interim Report in July 2018, and a number of these emails were summarized in The Guardian, by Alex Hern, December 6, 2018.

9 Such as access to the data of the app users, or permission to use the app company’s trademark names.

10 In 2011, the Commission was said to have complained that Facebook had been violating privacy since 2007 by sharing profiles on this basis. The Commission offered to make a settlement with Facebook. But in 2012, it complained that, despite the settlement, a Facebook user’s profile could also be accessed by platform applications that were used by the user’s “friends.”

11 See e.g, Zuboff, Shoshana, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (London: Profile Books, 2019), 86.Google Scholar

12 Tim Sparapani on Frontline, The Facebook Dilemma, program one of two PBS television programs, October 29 and 30, 2018, directed by James Jacoby; recorded also by Halpern, Sue, “Apologize Later,” New York Review of Books 66, no. 1, January 17–February 6, 2019, reviewing Frontline’s, The Facebook Dilemma. The data brokers are unregulated despite a full Federal Trade Commission report.Google Scholar

13 See Information Commissioner’s Office, Investigation into the Use of Data Analytics in Political Campaigns, July 11, 2018, 4.6 and “What Are ‘Data Brokers’ and Why Are They Scooping Up Information about You?” https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bjpx3w/what-are-data-brokers-and-how-to-stop-my-private-data-collection.

14 Tim Berners Lee, The Guardian, Sunday March 12, 2017. Available at https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/11/tim-berners-lee-web-inventor-save-internet.

15 Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 103, with note 20.

16 Jennifer Rankin, The Guardian, May 18, 2017.

17 Jacob Weisberg, “The Autocracy App,” New York Review of Books 65, no. 16, October 25–November 7, 2018, 22.

18 Jacob Weisberg, “The Autocracy App,” 20.

19 Compare the view that data processing is always a worthy good, criticized in Woodrow Hartzog and Neil Richards, “Privacy’s Constitutional Moment and the Limits of Data Protection,” preprint abstract available at time of writing; https://papers.ssm.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=344150.

Full version later published in Boston College Law Review 61, no. 5, article 3 (2020): 1689–1761, https://papers.ssm.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3441502.

20 Data Policy, https://www.facebook.com/about/privacy/your-info.

21 Final Report of the House of Commons Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport Committee, February 18, 2019, paragraphs 41–42; Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 483–84.

22 Final Report, Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport Committee, paragraphs 19, 49, 150, 315; Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 186–87; 484–85.

23 I draw here again on Athanasios Andreou et al., “Measuring the Facebook Advertising Ecosystem” and on Athanasios Andreou, Giridhari Ventkatadri, Oana Goga, Krishna P. Gummadi, Patrick Loiseau, Alan Mislove, “Investigating Ad Transparency Mechanisms in Social Media: A Case Study of Facebook’s Explanations,” Network and Distributed Systems Security Symposium, February 18–21, 2018, San Diego, California

http://dx.doi.org/10.14722/ndss.2018.23191.

24 Andreou et al., “Measuring the Facebook Advertising Ecosystem”; Mislove, “Investigating,” 11.

25 Mislove, “Investigating,” 9, 10.

26 Ibid., 12.

27 Ibid., 3 and 5.

28 Ibid., 11.

29 Ibid., 11.

30 Andreou et al., “Measuring the Facebook Advertising Ecosystem,” 3.

31 This goes far beyond an earlier report in The Guardian by Jim Waterson, April 4–5, 2019, on CTF Partners’ propaganda.

32 Private Eye, October 18, 2019.

33 Martin Moore, Democracy Hacked, 114.

34 As stated in an interview by Kara Swisher of Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, on Frontline’s, The Facebook Dilemma.

35 Sue Halpern, “Apologise Later,” reviewing Frontline’s, The Facebook Dilemma.

36 Zeynep Tufekci, “Facebook’s ad scandal isn’t a ‘fail’, it’s a feature,” New York Times, September 23, 2017.

37 BBC News, January 1, 2018, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-42510868.

38 Sam Thielman, The Guardian, http://www.google.co.uk/Guardian, August 26, 2016; Sam Levin, Julia Carrie Wong, Luke Harding, “Facebook Backs Down from ‘Napalm Girl’ Censorship and Reinstates Photo,” The Guardian, September 9, 2016.

39 Frontline’s The Facebook Dilemma.

40 The Washington Post, March 17, 2019.

41 Sacha Baron Cohen, The Guardian, November 25, 2019.

42 Frontline’s The Facebook Dilemma. Cf. Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 110–12.

43 Jeffrey Gottfried and Elisa Shearer, “News Use Across Social Media Platforms,” Pew Research Center (2016).

44 Martin Moore, Democracy Hacked, 129; cf. 177–78.

45 The Guardian, June 28, 2017.

46 YouTube, July 30, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-2qxLuWK6g.

47 Jennifer Rankin, The Guardian, May 18, 2017.

48 The Telegraph , December 28, 2018.

49 James Ball, The New Statesman, August 23, 2018; The Guardian, Editorial 23, August 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/23/the-guardian-view-on-labours-media-policy-important-contribution-but-more-please.

50 Illustrated in Tamsin Shaw, New York Review of Books, April 5, 2015, 34.

51 Tamsin Shaw, New York Review of Books, 34.

52 Baldwin, Tom, Ctrl Alt Delete (London: Hurst, 2018), 191.Google Scholar

53 Jon Swaine, The Guardian, December 18, 2018.

54 Carol Cadwalladr and Mark Townsend, The Guardian, March 24, 2018.

55 The Guardian, March 24, 2018.

56 A.J. Vicens, Daisuke Wakabayashi and Scott Shane, as above, and The Guardian, November 16 and 17, 2017.

57 E.g., The Guardian, November 4, 2019.

58 E.g., The Guardian, November 14, 2019.

59 This was already exposed in The Guardian by Harry Davies on December 11, 2015, in connection with the earlier campaign by Ted Cruz in the United States to be nominated as the Republican Party’s Presidential candidate in the 2016 election, a campaign later won by Donald Trump.

60 I take the following information from Sue Halpern, “The Known Known,” New York Review of Books 65, no. 14, September 27–October 10, 2018, 36 and 38.

61 Martin Moore, Democracy Hacked, 160.

62 Julia Carrie Wong, Sabrina Siddiqui, The Guardian, March 27, 2018.

63 David Smith, The Guardian, April 11, 2018.

64 Alex Hern, The Guardian, April 13, 2018.

65 The Washington Post, December 17, 2018; Jon Swain, The Guardian, December 18, 2018; Leader article, December 19, 2018.

66 Graham Smith and Judith Rauhofer, “Mandatory Data Retention Legislation Lives on in the UK–Or Does It?” https://uk.practicallaw.thomsonreuters.com/8-577-6488?transitionType=Default&contextData=(sc.Default)&firstPage=true&bhcp=1; Alan Travis, “Repeal Call on Day One of ‘Snooper’s’ Law,” The Guardian, November 30, 2016. I have benefited from a clearer explanation of the European Court of Justice’s call for amendments in an unpublished paper kindly shown to me by Lord Mance.

67 Hartzog and Richards, “Privacy’s Constitutional Moment,” preprint abstract, p. 16.

68 A preliminary judgment of the European Court of Justice endorsed the decision of Google to respond to requests for data-erasure only within the European Union. Owen Bowcott, The Guardian, January 11, 2019.

69 http://www.eugdpr.org/key-changes.html.

70 https://www.westlawnextcanada.com/blog/insider/proposed-changes-to-pipeda-gdpr-ready-for-the-change-969/.

71 Hartzog and Richards, “Privacy’s Constitutional Moment,” preprint abstract, p. 12., https://papers.ssm.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3441502.

72 Alan Rushbridger, Breaking News (2018), 305, 325.

73 Ibid.

74 https://webfoundation.org/2017/03/web-turns-28-letter/.

75 Olivia Solon, The Guardian, “Tim Berners-Lee: We Must Regulate Tech Firms To Prevent ‘Weaponised’ Web,” March 12, 2018.

76 Hartzog and Richards, “Privacy’s Constitutional Moment,” preprint abstract, pp. 1 and 21.

77 https://www.dataprotectionreport.com/2018/06/california-passes-major-privacy-legislation-expanding-consumer-privacy-rights/.

78 Hartzog and Richards, “Privacy’s Constitutional Moment,” preprint abstract, p. 28.

79 Ibid., 46.

80 Ibid., 24–25.

81 Ibid., 15–16.

82 Baldwin, Ctrl,Alt,Delete, 282–83.

83 Ibid., 254.

84 Nic Newman, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism Digital News Report 2018, Overview and Key Findings, “Why Are Consumers Relying Less on Facebook for News?” 11; http://www.digitalnewsreport.org/survey/2018/overview-key-findings-2018/.

Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism Digital News Report 2018 2.6, Antonis Kalogeropoulos, “The Rise of Messaging Apps for News,” http://media.digitalnewsreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/digital-news-report-2018.pdf?x8947-.

85 Nic Newman, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism Digital News Report 2018, Overview and Key Findings, 1. http://www.digitalnewsreport.org/survey/2018/overview-key-findings-2018/.

86 Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism Digital News Report 2018, 2.6, Antonis Kalogeropoulos, “The Rise of Messaging Apps for News,” http://media.digitalnewsreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/digital-news-report-2018.pdf?x8947-.

87 Aamna Mohdin, The Guardian, November 15, 2019.

88 Reference to John Gramlich, “10 Facts About Americans and Facebook,” Pew Research Center, February 1, 2019, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/01/facts-about-americans-and-facebook/ is provided by Hartzog and Richards, “Privacy’s Constitutional Moment,” preprint abstract p. 26.

89 New York Review of Books, 66.1, January 17, 2019.

90 David Vladak looked into this, The Facebook Dilemma, Part I.

91 Rand Walzman, The Facebook Dilemma, Part I.

92 However, so far as I can identify the example from India quoted from the program by Sue Halpern, it was the murder of only one single person over a dispute on his using an unflattering form of address on a post to a Facebook friend.

93 A further account of Maria Ressa’s case is given in Pomerantsev, Peter, This Is Not Propaganda (London: Faber and Faber, 2019), 20–33.Google Scholar

94 Congress grilled him much more sharply on October 24, 2019.

95 trimmtravels.com/facebook-headquarters-tour/.

96 Alex Hern, The Guardian, November 7, 2019.

97 Emma Graham-Harrison, Jim Watson, The Guardian, November 27, 2018.

98 In 6.9, the White Paper further recommended that in the case of companies without a legal presence in the UK, where international collaboration failed to secure conformity to law, a last resort would be blocking platforms from being accessible in the UK.

99 Karin Matussek and Christoph Rauwald in Bloomberg, September 24, 2019, and Jasper Jolly et al. in The Guardian, Monday Sept. 30, 2019, a case brought to my attention by Reinholdt Munzberg.

100 BBC News, October 9, 2019, a case brought to my attention by Orde Levinson.

101 Hartzog and Richards, “Privacy’s Constitutional Moment,” preprint abstract, p. 32.

102 Julia Carrie Wong, The Guardian, October 30, 2019.

103 Julia Carrie Wong, The Guardian, November 22, 2019.

104 Aamna Mohdin, The Guardian, November 15, 2019.

105 Madhumita Murgia and Alex Barker, “Google plan to lock down user data draws fire from advertisers,” The Financial Times, November 15, 2019.

106 Jemima Kelly and Sebastian Payne, The Financial Times, November 21, 2019.

107 Rowena Mason, The Guardian, October 30, 2019.