Regulating Harmful Speech on Social Media: The Current Legal Landscape and Policy Proposals

Abstract

Extract Social media platforms have transformed how we communicate with one another. They allow us to talk easily and directly to countless others at lightning speed, with no filter and essentially no barriers to transmission. With their enormous user bases and proprietary algorithms that are designed both to promote popular content and to display information based on user preferences, they far surpass any historical antecedents in their scope and power to spread information and ideas. The benefits of social media platforms are obvious and enormous. They foster political and public discourse and civic engagement in the United States and around the world.1Close Social media platforms give voice to marginalized individuals and groups, allowing them to organize, offer support, and hold powerful people accountable.2Close And they allow individuals to communicate with and form communities with others who share their interests but might otherwise have remained disconnected from one another. At the same time, social media platforms, with their directness, immediacy, and lack of a filter, enable harmful speech to flourish—including wild conspiracy theories, deliberately false information, foreign propaganda, and hateful rhetoric. The platforms’ algorithms and massive user bases allow such “harmful speech” to be disseminated to millions of users at once and then shared by those users at an exponential rate. This widespread and frictionless transmission of harmful speech has real-world consequences. Conspiracy theories and false information spread on social media have helped sow widespread rejection of COVID-19 public-health measures3Close and fueled the lies about the 2020 US presidential election and its result.4Close Violent, racist, and anti-Semitic content on social media has played a role in multiple mass shootings.5Close Social media have also facilitated speech targeted at specific individuals, including doxing (the dissemination of private information, such as home addresses, for malevolent purposes) and other forms of harassment, including revenge porn and cyberbullying.