Artículo 4: «Gender identity in informal care: Impact on health in Spanish

Chapter 5 explores the content governance practices of arguably the most popular digital intermediary: Facebook. Facebook’s ubiquity in the global system of networked communication makes its content governance practices worthy of study; as of this

54 “Rights,” of course, are in quotes here because neither speakers nor audiences have a “right” regarding speech against a digital intermediary.

55 Essentially, the heckler’s veto doctrine straddles so-called negative First Amendment theories (such as the marketplace of ideas theory) that conceive of freedom of expression as a right against the government and so-called affirmative First Amendment theories (such as self-governance theory) that conceive of freedom of expression as a right that government can protect through proactive policies. See generally MEIKLEJOHN, supra note 26.

56 See ROBERT POST,CONSTITUTIONAL DOMAINS 144 (1995) (contending that the main goal of the First Amendment is to promote “critical interaction” among groups with conflicting opinions and values, and that the way it does so is by preventing the government from invoking community norms to silence extreme speech).

writing, the social network claims to have more than 1.35 billion active monthly users,⁵⁷ making it the second most popular site on the World Wide Web.⁵⁸ Facebook is unique among digital intermediaries because it allows users to publish a broader array of content (including video, text and photos) with greater latitude as to the volume of that content (i.e. unlike Twitter, posts are not limited to 140 characters) compared to other mainstream intermediaries (namely Twitter and YouTube).⁵⁹ Facebook is a general social network, appealing not to one niche population but rather to users from many different

nationalities, language groups, races, ages, religions and ideological backgrounds. This diversity both in types of UGC and among Facebook’s users presents the company with a major challenge: to create a set of community standards that accounts for the nuances of diverse UGC and the dozens of norms of speech that its users from around the world bring to the network.

This chapter tackles the following research questions:

RQ1: How have Facebook’s community standards changed from the origins of the social network until the standards’ most recent update in March 2015?

RQ2: What instances have there been of Facebook controversially removing or not removing extreme UGC that seemed to contravene Facebook’s community standards?

To answer these questions, this chapter will utilize the following methodological approaches. To answer the first research question, this chapter will analyze Facebook’s

57 Dewey, supra note 17.

58 The Top 500 Sites on the Web, ALEXA (Mar. 20, 2015), available at http://www.alexa.com/topsites (Google.com is the Web’s most popular site, according to Alexa).

59 See Kate Crawford and Tarleton Gillespie, What is a flag for? Social media reporting tools and the vocabulary of complaint, NEW MEDIA &SOC’Y 1, 7 (2014) (discussing the policies of various digital intermediaries of allowing users to “flag” undesirable content, as well as the reasons why individuals flag content).

community standards or terms of service pages⁶⁰ as cached snapshots from the Internet Archive’s “Wayback Machine.”⁶¹ These snapshots offer the ability to observe how the social network’s speech guidelines have changed over its 11-year existence. The

Wayback Machine generally caches webpages at a frequency of once every few weeks to once every few months, depending on how well linked-to the page is.⁶² This chapter will examine every update of Facebook’s terms of use from 2004 until March 2015, and four examples of Facebook’s community standards from January 2011 to March 2015.⁶³ Two criteria will guide the analysis of these pages. First, the analysis will look for changes in policies over the course of 11 years. This analysis will require tracking which items get added to newer versions of the standards and subtracted from older versions, as well as noting if/how definitions of certain key terms (such as “hate speech”) change over time.

Second, several benchmarks will be used to assess how Facebook’s community standards balance protection of individuals’ speech with prevention of harm. These benchmarks include legal tests for distinguishing protected from unprotected speech (discussed in chapters 3 and 4), as well as Facebook’s interests within the networked economy

60 According to the Internet Archive, Facebook did not create a separate page outlining community

standards until 2011. Before then, all stipulations for what constituted allowable versus unallowable content was contained in Facebook’s “Terms of Service” page.

61 Wayback Machine, INTERNET ARCHIVE, available at http://archive.org/web/.

62 According to the Internet Archive’s website, the Wayback Machine’s “automated systems crawl the web every few months or so.” Also, “Much of our archived web data comes from our own crawls or from Alexa Internet’s crawls. Neither organization has a ‘crawl my site now!’ submission process. Internet Archive's crawls tend to find sites that are well linked from other sites. The best way to ensure that we find your web site is to make sure it is included in online directories and that similar/related sites link to you.” Frequently Asked Questions, INTERNET ARCHIVE (Mar. 20, 2015), available at

http://archive.org/about/faqs.php#The_Wayback_Machine.

63 The terms of service are clearly marked with the date on which they are updated, allowing for an analysis of each update. The community standards are not marked with such a date, and therefore the pages that are analyzed are the first edition, the most recent update (March 15, 2015), and two randomly selected pages in between.

(discussed in chapter 2). Obviously, Facebook’s community standards need not be as protective of speech as First Amendment jurisprudence, and the purpose of the analysis is not to make such an obvious argument. Rather, the goal of assessing Facebook’s

standards vis-à-vis legal standards is to understand which areas of speech Facebook protects or restricts more than others. The objective is to understand what criteria Facebook uses to find the balance between promoting speech and preventing harm.

To answer the second research question, I will compile news reports on Facebook’s actions toward extreme content that appears to contravene its community standards. I will analyze these reports inductively, coding the key themes that emerge from reading them.⁶⁴ The theoretical framework guiding this analysis is Gillespie’s politics of technology theory.⁶⁵ Together, the evolution of Facebook’s community standards and the way in which news media have covered incidents of removals or non-removals of extreme UGC are part of an ongoing dialogue about how the norms of freedom of expression should be defined in a networked communication environment. In other words, Facebook is the technology, and the debate being analyzed in this study is

64 The literature on qualitative textual analysis is fragmented and piecemeal (Elfriede Fürsich, In Defense of Textual Analysis, 10 JOURNALISM STUDIES 238 (2009). However, the method continues to be an important tool in mass communication research. It has been used to uncover polyvalent media messages, due especially to its essential focus on the context(s) in which media messages are both made and interpreted (NORMAN

FAIRCLOUGH,DISCOURSE AND SOCIAL CHANGE (1992); Fürisch (2009); GIOVANNA DELL’ORTO,THE

HIDDEN POWER OF THE AMERICAN DREAM:WHY EUROPE’S SHAKEN CONFIDENCE IN THE UNITED STATES

THREATENS THE FUTURE OF U.S.INFLUENCE (2008)). The methodology of qualitative textual analysis commonly categorizes findings of media texts into key themes (DELL’ORTO (2008); THOMAS R.LINDLOF AND

BRYAN C.TAYLOR,QUALITATIVE COMMUNICATION RESEARCH METHODS 246 (2011)). Often these themes are built from frames, which, in the qualitative literature, regularly take the form of “interpretative packages”:

“central organizing idea[s]” that give meaning to an issue and “make sense of relevant events” (William A.

Gamson and Andre Modigliani, Media Discourse and Public Opinion on Nuclear Power: A Constructionist Approach, 95 AM.J. OF SOCIOLOGY, 1, 3 (1989)).

65 GILLESPIE,supra note25.

how that technology is being defined (by Facebook, itself, and by news media) in terms of that technology’s role in facilitating individuals’ expressive agency.

This analysis has several broader implications. First, although this analysis (by definition) cannot be generalized to describe all forms of content governance, it can serve as an illustrative example of how norms of freedom of expression are being defined for networked communication via digital intermediaries. Second, this analysis can shed light on the potential extent to which tolerance for extreme speech is changing in a networked communication environment. The findings of this study can lead to two potential

hypotheses that can be tested using social scientific methods:⁶⁶ 1) Facebook is its own communicative arena that has its own norms of communication; 2) the norms of freedom of expression on Facebook diffuse into greater society, affecting individuals’ tolerance for extreme speech outside of Facebook. Third, on a related note to the second broader implication just discussed, the examples from this case can serve as a proxy for assessing another of DeNardis’ concerns regarding Internet governance and freedom of expression:

the public’s perception of what their civil liberties are in a networked communication environment where digital intermediaries have become the arbiters of expression.⁶⁷