Platforms Want Centralized Censorship. That Should Scare You.

In the aftermath of [recent horrific mass shootings], some of the responses from internet companies include ideas that point in a disturbing direction: toward increasingly centralized and opaque censorship of the global internet. Facebook, for example, describes plans for an expanded role for the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, or GIFCT. The GIFCT is an industry-led self-regulatory effort launched in 2017 by Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and YouTube. One of its flagship projects is a shared database of hashes of files identified by the participating companies to be “extreme and egregious” terrorist content. Self-regulatory initiatives like the GIFCT function not only to address a particular policy issue, but also to stave off more sweeping government regulation. Beyond that, though, there's a fundamental threat posed by solutions that rely on centralizing content control: The strength of the internet for fostering free expression lies in its decentralized nature, which can support a diversity of platforms. 

[Emma Llansó is Director of Free Expression at the Center for Democracy & Technology.]