Business and Government

There are growing calls from both sides of the political aisle for government regulation of speech on social media platforms, but letting government dictate what is acceptable speech is the very definition of censorship. It’s true that some right-of-center users have been suspended or banned from Twitter, put in “Facebook jail,” or had their videos or channels pulled from YouTube. However, in fairness, it’s also true that liberal Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., has had some of her content pulled from Facebook and that the company inadvertently labeled every ad with LGBT in it as political, whether it was or not. That both sides of the ideological spectrum have been dinged suggests that not every act of content moderation enforcement is politically motivated. Sometimes users have simply run afoul of the stated community standard rules. Facebook admitted in a 2018 letter that it likely has a 10 percent error rate in content moderation. Is government regulation the answer?