A practice solution to maintain free speech on social media — Part 1
For a long time, I have been thinking about how we could maintain freedom of speech on social media, but retain the ability to punish people with hate speech.
In my view, social media companies would need to regulate the user’s content. As a matter of fact, they already need to do it by law in a few countries¹. However, it would create very high bars for new social media startups, which will harm competitions. In consequences, social media bosses may able to have too much power over our life.
On the other hand, allowing governments to regulate everyone’s single post would be bad, and it would not scale as well. So, what can we do? How could we solve the issue?.
In real life, if someone falsely reports to the police that you use hateful languages toward them. And you expect the police would do a good job with the case. If it is more serious, I guess everyone would end up in a court, where judges and juries will hear and decide the outcome according to the law and regulations.
In current social media networks, the organizations have to act as the police and the judge, which would not bring a favourable outcome for anyone who got a different perspective. People often raise the idea of a decentralised social media network to solve the issue. However, it would risk making the place become a lawless area full of hate speeches.
For me, it is quite clear that social media companies should not be the police and the judge at the same time. There should be a new kind of independent companies/services who act as judges/juries where governments will decide people or AI systems' requirements to become the judges/juries. I will describe how it would look like in the next post.
