AMBIGUOUS THREATS

Journal of Ethics & Social Philosophy (available here)

In July 2022, a Facebook user in Iran posted the phrase “death to Khamenei” (“marg bar Khamenei” in the original Farsi). The content was posted in a public group that described itself as supporting freedom for Iran. Another Facebook user complained about this post to Meta’s content moderation teams, which govern users’ speech on Facebook and Instagram. In response, the post was removed, having been deemed to violate Facebook’s Violence and Incitement Community Standard.Did Meta make the right decision by removing the post? This single question, it turns out, illuminates a litany of deeper philosophical issues concerning what sort of speech is properly targeted by platforms’ content moderation systems. Upon review, both Meta and its Oversight Board concluded that the platform had erred in removing the post. But the arguments that brought them to this conclusion were fundamentally in conflict, and involved crucial confusions about the criteria for removing speech. This article pinpoints an important source of instability in how speech is currently governed online—namely, a failure to distinguish the illocutionary and perlocutionary dimensions of speech acts (very roughly, their communicative force vs. their downstream effects). By offering a solution, our goal is to provide broader normative guidance for the proper design and enforcement of platform rules.

Written by Sarah A. Fisher and Jeffrey W. Howard