{"id":54607,"date":"2020-08-09T06:58:04","date_gmt":"2020-08-09T11:58:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=54607"},"modified":"2020-08-09T06:59:45","modified_gmt":"2020-08-09T11:59:45","slug":"social-media-imposing-modern-day-hays-code-on-political-speech","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=54607","title":{"rendered":"Social Media Imposing Modern-Day Hays Code on Political Speech"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.realclearpolitics.com\/articles\/2020\/08\/07\/social_media_imposing_modern-day_hays_code_on_political_speech_143911.html\">Social Media Imposing Modern-Day Hays Code on Political Speech<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Social media companies continued to assert their power over the political sphere this week, with Twitter temporarily&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2020\/08\/05\/tech\/twitter-trump-restrict\/index.html\">suspending<\/a>&nbsp;the Trump campaign\u2019s ability to post until it removed a clip of a Fox News interview with the president regarding COVID-19. When the Democratic National Committee reposted the video to debunk it, Twitter similarly&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2020\/08\/06\/politics\/twitter-democratic-national-committee-trump\/index.html\">banned<\/a>&nbsp;the DNC from tweeting until it too deleted the footage. With Twitter seemingly unbothered by the implications of suspending a presidential campaign\u2019s account just 12 weeks before the election, what might the future hold as control of our public squares is increasingly centralized?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Twitch became the first social media platform to formally&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2020\/06\/29\/technology\/twitch-trump.html\">suspend<\/a>&nbsp;a presidential candidate\u2019s account this past June when it deleted two of President Trump\u2019s campaign rally videos for violations of its \u201chateful conduct\u201d rules. In doing so, it emphasized the divide between physical and virtual campaigning. At an in-person rally a candidate can present the policy proposals he or she believes supporters want. Virtual rallies, however, are policed by an army of moderators enforcing ever-changing acceptable speech policies, forcing politicians to self-censor or risk deletion from the online world that increasingly shapes elections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In the case of this week\u2019s ban, the story is all the more remarkable because the video in question was actually a cable TV interview with the nation\u2019s leader, meaning that social platforms were in effect banning a major news organization\u2019s reporting. As news is increasingly consumed through social media, the upshot is that the online platform\u2019s acceptable speech rules are being applied to traditional news outlets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Additionally, rather than link the video to an outside fact check, Facebook simply&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.com\/news\/election-us-2020-53673797\">deleted<\/a>&nbsp;it as \u201ca violation of our policies around harmful COVID misinformation\u201d while Twitter&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.com\/news\/election-us-2020-53673797\">forced<\/a>&nbsp;the campaign to delete the post as a \u201cviolation of the Twitter Rules on COVID-19 misinformation.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Social Media Imposing Modern-Day Hays Code on Political Speech Social media companies continued to assert their power over the political sphere this week, with Twitter temporarily&nbsp;suspending&nbsp;the Trump campaign\u2019s ability to post until it removed a clip of a Fox News interview with the president regarding COVID-19. When the Democratic National Committee reposted the video to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[1493,30158,30157,30159,11998,1169,819,3931],"class_list":["post-54607","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-facebook","tag-hays-code","tag-kalev-leetaru","tag-political-speech","tag-real-clear-politics","tag-social-media","tag-twitter","tag-youtube"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54607","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=54607"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54607\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54608,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54607\/revisions\/54608"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}