Gilad Edelman for Wired:
For that matter, why should YouTube police election fraud claims at all, long after the election is over?
Social media companies are private entities that aren’t bound by the First Amendment. But their power over communication is so significant that their policies are nearly as important as law itself. In a new book, Cheap Speech, the election law expert Rick Hasen argues that platforms should ban political speech “only upon a clear showing that the speech actually threatens to undermine, rather than support, democratic governance.” One clear example of that kind of speech is encouraging violence against political opponents. A second is spreading false information about when, where, or how to vote in order to deprive people, through trickery, of their constitutional right to vote.
YouTube, Twitter, and Meta all have policies forbidding that kind of content. But YouTube goes a step further by disallowing claims that any past presidential election was rigged—without explicitly saying why it has that policy.
Perhaps YouTube takes Hasen’s position that rigged-election talk undermines public confidence in elections.
“An election requires not only that you hold a fair election but that people believe in that election that it was done fairly,” he tells WIRED. “When you undermine that, you risk undermining our entire democracy. If you believe that the last election was stolen, you’re going to be more likely to be willing to take steps to steal the next one.”
The tricky thing is that it’s hard to find the limits of that logic. In 2020, quite a few people were alarmed over the prospect that Louis DeJoy, Trump’s postmaster general, would use mail delivery slowdowns to prevent Democratic ballots from being counted. And to this day, millions of Democrats believe that the 2000 election was wrongly awarded to George W. Bush based on an inaccurate vote total in Florida. Should they not be allowed to make that argument? (Technically, YouTube’s election integrity policy forbids this claim, too.) Blocking people from questioning election results seems likely to backfire, if the goal is to increase public confidence.
Another reason to ban Trump’s big lie might be that it has been linked to violence. Certainly, this rationale applied during the period around the election and January 6. The January assault on the Capitol was the direct consequence of Trump egging on his supporters to “stop the steal” and prevent Congress from certifying the election results. In that context, it made perfect sense to treat Trump’s claims of election fraud as too dangerous to tolerate.
More than a year on, however—and with claims of electoral fraud continuing to saturate Republican politics, notwithstanding social media platform policies—the calculus has changed. That appears to be the view that Twitter has taken. In January, CNN’s Daniel Dale reported that Twitter had, in March 2021, quietly stopped enforcing its policy against claiming the election was rigged. “When enforcing our civic integrity policy, we prioritize content that can cause direct, immediate, real-world harm,” Twitter spokesperson Elizabeth Busby said in an email to WIRED. “With the US 2020 presidential election certified and implemented, and President Biden seated in office, these harms and risks look different than they did more than a year ago.”
Even though nobody had noticed the policy shift for nine months, Dale’s article was met with quite a bit of outrage. In a recent op-ed, Hasen called it “a step in the wrong direction.” The prominent press critic Jay Rosen tweeted that Twitter’s decision “makes no sense,” because Trump’s “lies still have political valence.”