Freedom of Speech and the Control of Volume

Last night I listened to Yuval Harari and Ari Meiber speak about Nexus, the new book and related topics and the concept that I found really stood out is about freedom of speech and volume. Yuval Harari believes that we should be able to share information and lies, but that social networks are responsible for how it is promoted and amplified, how loud the volume of certain ideas is.

“Freedom of speech is very different to control of volume” source because freedom of speech is the ability to discuss without fearing imprionsment but control of volume is how visible, or amplified a post becomes, and whether by encouraging engagement a post is spreading hate or negative messages. They spoke about how Facebook, “by turning up the volume of hate speech encouraged violent attacks”.

Yuval Harari speaks about how algorithms work as editors and that they select what we see and how prominent it is, and that as a result of this it is not individuals that should be held to account but rather that algorithms and that the people that wrote them should be held accountable and made responsible. To paraphrase “They should not be liable for what people post but they should be made liable for the decisions made by their own algorithms”.

According to Google Gemini “Europe has a complex relationship with freedom of speech, balancing it with the responsibility to combat disinformation. While freedom of expression is a fundamental right enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights, there are limitations, particularly when speech incites hatred, violence, or poses a direct threat to public safety.” In the US that responsibility does not exist. That’s why Facebook, Twitter and other social networks get in trouble in Europe for how they treat lies and disinformation. That’s why the nuance with volume, and algorithmic promotion become so important.

In Europe if you lie, you’re accountable for the lie you told, and it isn’t classed as free speech. In the US a lie is seen as free speech so is not forbidden. In such a cultural environment it becomes important to fact check, but also to control “volume”.Algorithms and AI can do sentiment analysis and can detect whether something is kind, hostile, positive or negative. In light of this algorithms, the editors of social network, make decisions and as such should be accountable for the ideas they spread and the resulting emotions that emerge.

And Finally

Last night, instead of watching television series or films I spent two hours listening to Yuval Harari speak with journalists about the ideas in his books and it was interesting. I think these ideas need to be discussed further. I have his book Nexus, but have not started reading it yet.