Tech Companies Want Out of the Censorship Business
They shouldn’t be expected to police tightly anyway. Better to have the extremists in the public square than banning them to fester in a corner.
Err on the side of keeping distasteful speech on a platform where it can be shouted down.
Photographer: Tomohiro Ohsumi/Bloomberg
Data can be a liability as well as an asset. It’s great for ad targeting or fraud detection; it’s problematic when the possessor is expected to police it. Duties range from reporting the blatantly illegal to blocking the undesirable to plumbing the murky depths of content moderation.
Most tech companies are ill-equipped to deal with matters outside of technology and engineering issues. On Monday, security company Cloudflare terminated services for 8chan after the forum was implicated in inspiring recent mass shootings. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince expressed discomfort over being an arbiter of content, while explaining that 8chan’s removal “takes the heat off of us.”