It's not easy to write a comprehensive review of a subject as complicated, multi-national and controversial as free speech on the internet. Throw in the on-going issue of hate speech on Twitter and the accusations levelled at Facebook that they have influenced elections and referendums on behalf of foreign powers then it becomes a Herculean task.

Kaye has approached this potential minefield and produced a book that examines these issues, and others, while suggesting ways of approaching regulation that might be acceptable.

If nothing else this book deserves praise for taking a global view on these issues rather than a narrow parochial one.

Recommended if you want to understand these issues from a global perspective.

The author's painstaking research and attention to detail is obvious in the writing of this book. There were many facts that I only discovered after reading this!

David Kaye is the United Nations special rapporteur for freedom of expression. He gets complaints from all over the world for the annoyances we all live with. Speech Police is his quick summary of the state of censorship, lack of effective self-regulation, and inconsistent and ineffective national regulation on internet postings.

Internet companies never tell you why your post was deleted, your account suspended or closed, what do about it, who to appeal to – or anything at all, usually. You never know if you were terminated by person or by software, or whether the software flagged you and a person clicked OK. (This is hardly restricted to speech. Apple terminates app sellers in its store without reason or recourse, and the same goes Amazon for any sort of vendor on its platform. Silicon Valley is justifiably renowned for its arrogance.)

Facebook deleted a section of the Declaration of Independence without a pre-removal warning or any information to the newspaper that posted it. It took an uproar in Congress for it to be restored. One person’s offensive language can be another’s founding documents.

Each internet firm has its own rules, its own definitions and its own vocabularies. Kaye gives the example of Twitter, which does not have a rule regarding hate speech, but instead has a paragraph on rules of conduct. In court cases, this can keep arguments going forever. At You Tube, it’s Community Guidelines. At Facebook, it’s Community Standards. Good luck understanding what you can and cannot do on each one. And then remembering the differences as you post to them, and where you are posting from.

There are no global laws, treaties, obligations or rules for these platforms to self-regulate by. So it’s all about the flavor of the month at each company. It was finally in 2018 that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged he wasn’t on top of it and that Facebook actually needed an overhaul, despite years of controversy and bad press.

The obvious question remains – why are we leaving it up to the companies to figure this out? Kaye quotes Marietje Shaake, a Dutch parliamentarian: “No one wants a Ministry of Truth, but I am also not reassured that Silicon Valley or Mark Zuckerberg are the de facto designers of our realities or our truths.”

But it’s not even that simple. Getting countries to agree is never easy. Some authoritarian leaders want no speech rights at all. Some religion-based nations have issues with any mentions of human bodies. And the degrees of freedom of speech vary widely. But as Kaye points out, just transparency in the rules would be a big step forward.

The book is an easy read, a superficial skim of the issue. It doesn’t go deep, and there is nothing new in it.

David Wineberg

That's a great read for anyone who's interested in internet and free speech.
I appreciated the style of writing and how things were explained.
Highly recommended!
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.

Last summer, I listened to an episode of the podcast Radiolab called “Post No Evil.” In it, Jad and Robert discuss the rules of what is and isn’t allowed on popular platforms, focusing on Facebook. Reading through the Facebook posting policy, it seems straightforward - just don’t post hateful and inappropriate stuff. But putting that into practice is a whole other beast, one with a gray area so large you can’t even see the black and white. As the hosts say, “How do you define hate speech? Where’s the line between a joke and an attack? How much butt is too much butt?” These are questions that Facebook’s highest experts have to grapple with, especially now that Facebook is a global platform serving as an online public forum - as David Kaye calls them, “stewards of public space.” Although Mark Zuckerberg probably never imagined that his website would one day serve as a breeding ground for fake news, hate speech, trolls, spam, pornography, and more - it’s certainly become that now.

Since then, content moderation on social media has become a hot-button issue, with John Oliver and Hasan Minhaj covering it on their shows, and various real-life content moderators (“the janitors of the internet”) writing exposés on the horrors of what they have to see in their day-to-day jobs.

As the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression for the United Nations, David Kaye is in a unique position to discuss this issue. He’s been invited to policy meetings and hearings with the big tech giants, he has worked on task forces concerning online hate speech, and his work stems from a global mandate to control hate speech while promoting freedom of expression. SPEECH POLICE is an interesting, thought-provoking read on these intersections, serving as both a primer for readers who are new to this topic, and an in-depth look at conversations that are typically private to seasoned readers.

Kaye covers a variety of issues, from the more popular topics of how Facebook contributed to ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya in Myanmar to the less known topic of undemocratic Internet Referral Units in Europe. He discusses how governments have and have not intertwined themselves with social media, what the legal and business obligations of platforms are to moderate content, how difficult it is to stamp out fake news, and how free speech plays into all of this.

If anything, Kaye makes you realize what a tough, tough job platforms have. “They have to make fine distinctions between the disturbing content that they all allow and the treats that they prohibit; between the insult that is kosher and the hate speech that is not; between legitimate journalism depicting horrors of the world and groups seeking to incite those horrors.” The lines in the sand are constantly moving, and it’s really hard to make policy that is consistent with these case-by-case decisions while still trying to make everyone happy.

In the end, Kaye puts forth two recommendations, one public and one private. But, in my opinion, this book is more informative than solutions-oriented. It really seeks to convey the complexity of the issue and how hard it is going to be to craft policy (both corporate and public policy) to adequately address online speech. He gives examples of laws like NetzDG in Germany that have tried to put sanctions on platforms for not addressing hate speech soon enough - and that’s in a country where hate speech (especially Nazi speech) is strictly illegal. I shook my head thinking about how ill-equipped our free-speech lauding and technologically-illiterate Congress is to work on a nuanced topic like this. But the threat of hate speech and fake news is as rampant as ever in the U.S., and we’re going to need some serious thought and action to prevent it from further infecting our society.

I can see this book likely being read as part of college courses on free speech and the Internet, but it’s a great read for anyone interested in the topic - which should be all of us.