September 5, 2024 - 8:00pm
X is the bastion of free speech on the Internet. At least that’s what Elon Musk and his raucous supporters would like you to believe any time one dares to point out his hypocritical, arbitrary, and often self-serving content moderation actions after taking over the social media platform.
This week’s decision from Meta’s Oversight Board on moderation of the pro-Palestinian phrase “from the river to the sea” further undermines Musk’s self-styled image as a “free speech absolutist.” The Oversight Board — an independent panel of experts that oversees content moderation decisions for Meta-owned platforms like Facebook and Instagram — determined that the phrase should not be flagged as hate speech or removed unless “accompanied by statements or signals calling for exclusion or violence, or legitimizing hate.”
Contrast that with Musk, who, on 17 November of last year, posted, “‘decolonization,’ ‘from the river to the sea’ and similar euphemisms necessarily imply genocide. Clear calls for extreme violence are against our terms of service and will result in suspension.” X has also blocked or limited the visibility of posts that use the phrase “Israeli terrorists” and suspended hundreds of pro-Palestinian accounts.
The phrase “from the river to the sea”’ has been used by groups like Hamas to promote antisemitic hatred and violence. However, it has also been employed by peace activists and anti-Zionist Jewish groups critical of Israeli policies. Even if one interprets the phrase as antisemitic, it remains protected under the First Amendment — whose ideals Musk himself claims to champion. As the Oversight Board noted, international human rights law also protects such political speech, despite offering more limited protections than US law.
Interestingly, Meta’s decision may be at odds with bans on the phrase in European countries, most notably Germany. Last month, a German court convicted and fined a 22-year-old German-Iranian activist for leading a chant of the slogan at a rally in Berlin. A 41-year-old woman in Berlin had her house raided, her devices confiscated and was arrested by police for having written “from the river to the sea” four times on social media.
This leaves Meta in a thorny situation where it may have to comply with requests to remove the phrase in Germany and other countries with strict laws against hate speech. And that impact may affect all of Europe due to the Digital Services Act (DSA), Europe’s sweeping online safety rulebook. That’s because the DSA requires platforms to remove “illegal content,” which the act does not define and differs from country to country. If not removed fast enough, social media platforms face steep fines.
If Musk were truly committed to free speech, he would ensure that controversial phrases, such as those banned by the German government, remain protected and accessible on his platform for users in other countries, just as he has taken on Brazil’s increasingly authoritarian crackdown on disinformation. Whether the phrase is popular with Leftist activists or the “woke” segment — groups Musk is often at odds with — should be irrelevant. Upholding such principles would also signal a departure from his current selective and grievance-based approach, which tends to cater to the Very Online Right.
The moderation of “from the river to the sea” is just one of several instances where Musk’s content decisions appear driven by audience capture rather than principle. In June 2023, Musk posted that “the words ‘cis’ and ‘cisgender’” would be considered slurs on X. According to reports, users who posted these words received warnings stating that the language could be harmful and in violation of the platform’s rules.
These examples underscore the need for constant vigilance to protect free speech from both censorial governments and the billionaires who hold disproportionate control over speech on private platforms. What’s needed is a global coalition committed to “Old School Free Speech,” rooted in civil libertarian ideals and consistent principles. Unfortunately, such rigour is becoming increasingly rare.
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SubscribeCome on Unherd. You can do better than this nonsense.
What is the point in saying this? Give your reasoning.
For my part, I think there were useful details and the set up for an interesting debate.
Putrid.
Not readable..!
Author absolutely nails it. Free speech also includes speech we dislike. From the river to the sea is distasteful, but it’s not always hate speech.
And what happens to the Jews of Israel (now half the Jews on the world after Jewish people have been subject to genocide in Europe and hounded out of countries across the Middle East and North Africa) when “Palestine” is free from the river to the sea? There is a difference between distasteful speech and threatening speech. The difference usually relates to whether we are the target, or just a bystander.
“what happens to the Jews … when “Palestine” is free from the river to the sea?’
Do you really believe that some phrase repeated by mindless activists on American campuses can create this result? It’s not as if the rest of the world is joining in.
I am a very strong supporter of Israel. Street slogans won’t be the death of Israel. Waning support from Britain and America is a much bigger threat.
Why do you think the support is waning though? It’s because of the noisiness of the chanters for ethnic cleansing?
I think you’re suggesting that the governments have been pressured by the chanters to such affect that they’ve withdrawn support of Israel. But why have they given in to the chanters? They don’t with other chanters?
Because the chanters are also voters. Here in the UK anti-Israel sentiment caused the winning party to lose votes and in one or two cases, lose MPs. It gave them a fright. There’s now a small pro-Gaza coalition in the HoC. It’s probably why the new government has denied some arms imports to Israel. Symbolic, yes, but the decision reflects the pressure the government feels under.
I see they lost seats in predominantly Muslim areas. Are Muslims the actual chanters, or is it a general mood across the country that makes the government nervous?
Starmer just announced plans to cut military shipments. Biden and Harris have openly delayed shipping military equipment and funding.
Biden / Harris have the same noisy demographic causing trouble in the streets & on campuses. Starmer has only just become PM.
Certainly “from the river to the sea” is not only and always hate speech that should be censored on social media. But the idea that Mark Zuckerberg’s idiotic Oversight Board does a better job at making decisions like this than Elon Musk’s largely hands-off approach is a woke fantasy.
Something like heil Hitler as of oct 6. How about from the river to the sea on October 7th? That made it hate speech.
Meta still keeps censors dressed up as fact checkers. End of discussion.
From the same mindset that sees “hard work” as a racist dogwhistle comes “from the river to the sea” as not necessarily hate speech.
Demonic.
Sure it is ‘hate speech’ (whatever that means) but free speech laws should not stop people from saying who/what they hate rather only threatening actual imminent violence against people. It is (and should be) legal to hate.
I tend to agree, except that the mobs calling for Palestine to be ‘free from the river to the sea’ don’t know that they’re parroting a tidied up translation of ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be Arab’: a direct call to exterminate all the Jews. And that that’s exactly what many Arab terrorists are trying to put into practice. So it’s less ‘hate speech’ and more support for ethnic cleansing?
Other charming phrases being bandied about are ‘We don’t want no two state, we want all of it’ & ‘globalise the Intifada’.
That’s literally what they did everywhere they went, actually. From Morocco to Yemen, where there were Jews and Christians now there’s f*ck all
Meta only outshines Musk on hypocrisy and prejudice. Meta’s policy is to censor hate speech, which it defines as “direct attacks against people — rather than concepts or institutions— on the basis of what we call protected characteristics (PCs): race, ethnicity, national origin, disability, religious affiliation, caste, sexual orientation, sex, gender identity, and serious disease”. That hasn’t changed, and has been and is used to censor a wide variety of content disliked by the progressive establishment. They just make an exception for slogans supporting the elimination of the state in which half the Jews of the world live. Presumably on this basis permitting the singing of the Horst Wessel Song outside a synagogue would be a shining example of free speech in action also.
Content moderation is hard. All social media companies have a tough time doing it. Do it too leniently and spammers, trolls and fools will soon learn how to game the system and flood a platform with trash postings. Do it too strictly and too many legitimate posts get tossed, leaving posters frustrated and driving some of the best posters from the platform.
Look at UnHerd, with its reader comment platform. Even despite good faith on the part of the moderators here, my always anodyne comments occasionally disappear for hours until a human plucks them out of the temporary purgatory where an automated censor had sent them. Yet some posters post abuse that appears and stays.
So the nature of content moderation means that some decisions about what posts to leave and what posts to censor will be wrong. Even so, there’s no question that Elon Musk’s X does a much better job at content moderation than does Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook.
The Facebook independent moderation oversight board is not a serious body. Former British politician Nick Clegg still uses it just like a prosecutor here in the US uses a grand jury — to rubberstamp the decisions he wants made. The board’s rationale for kicking Donald Trump off the platform in 2021 was specious, almost a woke joke. Better to drop the pretense.
I’m a big free speech advocate. But I don’t think we can ever have a perfect system, and we do more harm than good when we try to. The US supreme court case in Murthy v. Missouri, though decided correctly, was a case in point.
In that case, the government put pressure on some social media platforms to block users who were posting what the government thought was misinformation during the Covid-19 pandemic. Misguided as that pressure by the government was, it was not illegal. Case law on the issue is clear: coercion is illegal but pressure is not. But there was and still is a lot of fervor on the right for that decision to be reversed.
So that case is still being pursued, and new cases like it are wending their way through the courts as well. That bothers me when people like Bobby Kennedy and Alex Berenson try to drum up support and beg for funds to clog the courts with their quixotic cases. Their focus on the government is misguided. Their focus should be on the social media platforms.
The social media platforms need to be more like Elon Musk and less like Mark Zuckerberg. We need to put social and legal pressure on the social media platforms, not the government, to change their content moderation policies. We need to go after flagrant offenses by the social media platforms, not rough play by the government that is still within the rules.
There is an argument to be made that, were Jay Bhattacharya and other “fringe epidemiologists” allowed to been heard on Twitter and FB, many lives could have been saved; the lockdowns that many argued against were terribly harmful, and it is not hard to find good ex post research into those effects. That these voices were muffled and in some cases silenced is 100% on the Biden administration. How is fighting against the government’s Ministry of Truth impulses “quixotic”? Maybe you meant heroic?
During the Covid-19 pandemic there was a lot of panic and passion. Plus it was hard to know what was true and what was false. It’s no wonder that some mistakes were made in muffling some voices on social media. There always will be. In hindsight we should try to learn from our mistakes but we should not expect to ever avoid them completely.
That’s why these lawsuits are such a waste of time and money best spent on other things. The injunction was lifted by the US Supreme Court in Murthy v. Missouri because there was no real evidence that the government had harmed the plaintiffs. The fringe epidemiologists were criticized but not muffled. Thus they had no case. Yet courts all the way up to the Supreme Court had to hear it.
What’s heroic about fighting a battle that is not worth the fight? Where you tilt at a giant who is really a windmill? That’s why Jay Bhattacharya and his ilk are like the man of la mancha. They need to be realistic instead of quixotic.
A realist would realize that the government is not making the social media companies moderate content the way they do. The companies set their own policies, as they are free to do under the law. Complaints should be made to them, not to the courts.
Plus it was hard to know what was true and what was false.
Actually, it was relatively simple. I turned off the television and radio news, trusted my eyes and ears, and my 56 years of exprerience, and got on with my life to the best of my ability. What I learned during that terrible time is that I had been naive to trust my fellow men. Not a mistake I will make again when, inevitably, the next “unprecedented crisis” hits.
“A realist would realize that the government is not making the social media companies moderate content the way they do.”
As it turns out that’s exactly what the Biden government did with Meta and put pressure on them to modify content about Covid,
It is Facebook that decided what its content moderation policies were to be. The US government does not make Facebook policy like Europe does, forcing social media platforms to delete certain types of content. Facebook makes its own rules.
The US government did identify certain accounts that it thought violated Facebook’s policies, and pressured Facebook to do something about it. But that pressure was not force or coercion, and Facebook made the final decision, not the government.
That’s the important distinction. Facebook cannot pretend that the government made it delete any accounts or otherwise censor content. As Mark Zuckerberg himself admitted, Facebook bears the responsibility for the decisions it made.
I agree with your point about Facebook making their own decision. But pressure by the most powerful government in the world to remove content is coercion. It’s like gangsters saying if you don’t pay-up we might have to pay you a visit and you wouldn’t like that,
I’m a lawyer and I’ve been following this line of cases for the last few years. The courts do make a distinction between pressure and coercion. Coercion adds threats or mandates to pressure. In these cases there were no threats or mandates.
The trial and appeals court said that “significant encouragement” should be treated like coercion, making arguments like you do of mafioso demanding protection money. But the supreme court was having none of that, pointing out that there was no evidence of that in the record.
I’m all for free speech, but I think these cases are misguided. The social media companies are not being forced to do content moderation on their platforms by the government. They do it for themselves, to make their platforms more attractive to their users.
Just like UnHerd. Imagine what this reader comment space would be like if they didn’t moderate content.
UPDATE: I thought of a good analogy to the difference between pressure and coercion. Let’s say a man is trying to get a woman to have sex with him. The man might apply pressure to overcome reluctance the woman might have, but that’s not a crime unless it escalates to coercion where force is used.
It’s the same kind of issue as the free speech cases, where some people will find it hard to draw a line between pressure and coercion but the case law has been pretty good at drawing the line.
You’re joking? The Princess Star cruise liner marooned off LA in early 2020 with Covid outbreak told us exactly who was at risk. Barely touched the 1500 crew members, all of them under 60. 13 fatalities in the 2500 elderly passengers, average age 80 plus and with multiple pre-existing conditions. Incontrovertible evidence as to who was at risk! The farce that ensued told a blatant lie everyone was at risk and deliberately fomented hysteria and panic by censoring anyone who didn’t participate in the biggest lie of the 21st century. Leading to the ghoulish coercion to vaccinate all with experimental medication, an actual attempted vaccine mandate (defeated in the Supreme Courth), a state of affairs that would have Mao or Stalin blush with shame.
“From the river to the sea” is supposedly being used by activists (not leaders-activists as the author likes to suggest), in a firm different from its original meaning. That may be true. But these people are so vague about where they stand that it’s hard to know what they know or mean. But this seems to be similar to the woman arrested for posting a comment about burning down buildings. She didn’t say go and burn down a building and activists may not mean go and wipe out out the Jews.
I don’t know where to draw the line about incitement and censorship, but I don’t know if I agree with any government, authority or mob deciding what the relationship between a private company and its customers should be. If people don’t like X then they choose. The same with Meta. If people don’t like the subscribers of X that’s something they have to accept. They can’t demand the company change its product because they don’t like it.
If Mr Mchangama is the future of free speech, we’re in deep doo-doo.
Unherd has gone downhill fast. The Left has hundreds of outlets that cheerfully spout the party line. I subscribe to Unherd to hear unheard voices, not whatever is already written in the NYT, WP, MSNBC, and such similar party mouthpieces.
I don’t pay a subscription fee to be lied to and fed badly written propaganda pieces. There are demonstrable, actual falsehoods in many of these recent pieces in Unherd, facts taken out of context and pure fabrications. The cancer is eating into Unherd from the inside, I’m afraid …..
Indeed. My subscription hangs in the balance. And that’s a terrible shame. Time to get your house in order, Mr Sayers.
In fact, articles calling out the hypocrasy of both left and right-wing censors is precisely what UnHerd exists for.
“What’s needed is a global coalition committed to “Old School Free Speech,” rooted in civil libertarian ideals and consistent principles.”
If you want only articles that support your beliefs, go to the DT.
I can stand well-written and closely-reasoned articles that sharply disagree with me. In fact, I deeply appreciate reading the opposite point of view, if it is based on truth, logic, and an appeal to righteous behavior.
What I can’t abide is pure falsehood and fabrication, facts taken out of context with deliberation, and mind-twisting propagandistic communication. Some of these recent authors on Unherd fit into the latter category and not the first.
I disagree with the author of this article, but I don’t see it as “pure falsehood and fabrication, facts taken out of context with deliberation, and mind-twisting propagandistic communication.” Seemed an article that is more pedestrian and anodyne than spectacularly bad.
“The DT”? What’s the DT?
The Daily Times
Seems to mean the Daily Telegraph.
To me free speech is overrated. The issues in the Israel-Palestine conflict are complex and difficult to solve. But there is not much talk can do to help. The problems need compromise to execute a solution, not verbal fencing.
Does it really matter whether Facebook posts or X tweets say “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”? How does that hurt anyone, other than their feelings?
Adages point this fundamental truth that words are abstractions that have no effect in the real world:
“Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.”
“Actions speak louder than words.”
“Talk is cheap.”
“Deeds, not words.”
“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”
What matters are the many horrific wars the Arabs have waged since Israel’s founding and the terrorism carried out by the Palestinians even today, most recently the bestial attacks last October. All designed to wipe Israel off the map.
What matters are the harsh and inhumane occupation by Israel of the West Bank and the flagrant war crime of Israeli settlements on Palestinian land, as well as the brutal invasion of, and death and devastation meted out in, Gaza. All designed to deny the Palestinians their basic rights, including self-government.
Both sides need to compromise and take the actions needed to live in two states in peace. Both sides refuse to do that, and fight over the right for one state to rule over all the land from the river to the sea. The Palestinians want it all. The Israelis do too. Neither will settle for less.
Fighting on Facebook and X gets us nowhere. Protecting people’s ability to speak freely won’t help solve this conflict at all. We need actions that neither side is willing to take. Instead we get meaningless virtue signaling by the woke posturers on the Facebook Oversight Board. Who needs that?
One of the things about the internet and our access to information instantly and at many levels is that we can observe a war from our little house in a suburb, where we live in our reasonably secure world with all our morals and opinions intact, virtually untouched or challenged, and observe and take part in a war from a distance without living any of the horrors. What effect could some platitude or moral position from a distance have on a war on the other side of the planet. How ridiculous might those platitudes look on a street where two sides try to destroy each other. The arguments online over hate speech, genocide, democracy, or what have you, are really an indulgence of those whose lives are virtually untouched by war itself. They can afford to take some moral high ground and never be tested. So, yes, you’re right about the meaningless virtue signalling and the fact that it’s there where we think we’re making a difference.
Brett and Carlos, good points both but,
1. Nothing happens in a vacuum. You could plan a military attack without actually speaking, but you’d have to write or type or sign what you want to “say”. Also getting other people in the room with you to have that discussion in the first place follows a lifetime of discourse between individuals in families, schools and political groups to get them there. Talk precedes action – action requires talk in order to be coordinated or planned.
2. No man is an island. The thoughts and opinions of your suburban keyboard warriors ricochet around the world at the speed of broadband. In large enough numbers they affect what jobs people will be willing to do (e.g. defense, nuclear), who they vote for and what they buy. In large enough numbers, these opinions can lead to real world consequences – including in the aforementioned suburbs.
Sure, if you think virtue signalling is meaningful enough once it’s left the mouth of its mindless thinker to carry any weight. If that thinker acts on their thoughts and words, then fine, but I don’t see any direction in their platitudes and I suspect they don’t know what action to take because they don’t really know what they’re talking about. Basically they’re not really committed.
Maybe free speech is not the same as a free-for-all. Before social media, influence had to be built up slowly, starting with small forums. Now we have unreflective and unknown people saying things with no thought of consequences, often coming to deeply regret it. People should be able to say what they think, but not everyone should have an audience.
“Wisdom is too high for fools; in the assembly at the gate they must not open their mouths.” Proverbs 24:7
Let’s not confuse liberty and anarchy!
The assertion that Meta is doing a better job is a good way to rub some people the wrong way. However, that does not mean that Musk – who bombastically proclaimed to be a “free speech absolutist” – should be exonerated so easily.
As Noam Chomsky famously said: free speech is precisely for views you despise. Otherwise every despot in history is for free speech.
But it remains complicated. Then again, nobody ever said an open society was going to be easy.
From the facts I have seen, this author grossly misrepresents the content moderation policies Elon Musk has put on X.
I’m not well-informed about the specifics and I rarely use these platforms. If the author makes wrong assertions regarding the moderation policies and practices on X (or Meta) I would hope someone writes a substantiated rebuttal.
When a supposed academic starts an article with – “his hypocritical, arbitrary and often self-serving” — I think we all know that this person does not bring objectivity to the article or to the subject.
About the most partial, biased, one sided and frankly disingenuous piece of drivel that UnHerd could publish.
Utter durchfall.
It’s an “independent panel of experts”, apparently, so that’s all right then. When the panel includes Alan Rusbridger and Helle Thorning-Schmidt we all know what to expect.
” Elon Musk and his … hypocritical, arbitrary, and often self-serving content moderation actions after taking over the social media platform.”
First paragraph. Thanks Jacob. Plainly won’t find any moderate or even halfway reasonable journalism here. Moving on.
Meta is also very chilled when it comes to CP. Not surprised they don’t give a damn about calls for etnic cleansing in the Middle East
I imagine Facebook are celebrating the phrase, rather than just allowing it.
Metta just censored a undercover video of a federal DOJ public affairs officer
https://rumble.com/v5dqrj1–doj-chief-admits-trump-indictments-a-politically-motivated-perversion-of-j.html?e9s=src_v1_cw&playlist_id=watch-history
So this author is obviously irrelavant
I am beginning to wonder about unherd.
Perhaps they’ve been leant on, got at.
Eager to appear ‘ Balanced’ , caving in to the tyrannical censorious Left
Bit like King Charles is discovering.
You have your supporters.
Without them…
Everyone either wants you gone or at best wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire.
There is nothing wrong with the phrase from the river to the sea. I take it to mean a one state solution to the Israel/Palestine problem, a policy I have supported for over fifty years.
ARE a slur. They are used in the context of ‘trans’ and ‘cis’ women.
AdultHumanFemales are NOT a subset of of sex category.