National Religious Broadcasters Slam Hate-Speech ‘Censorship’
Seven major ISP and Web companies engage in de facto “censorship” because of policies against hate speech, and some have banned certain Christian content, a group representing religious broadcasters said. The National Religious Broadcasters said the companies decide what’s so shocking as to not be allowed on their websites. Its 41-page paper said Twitter was the only major Internet player whose policies it reviewed that didn’t censor speech on those private companies’ sites. Apple, AT&T, Comcast, Facebook, Google, MySpace and Verizon all have policies that could let them engage in such discrimination, NRB said. Those companies had no comment.
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The problem is that hate speech can be defined differently, and some definitions have been used as a reason to block religious content, said speakers at an NRB event Thursday at the National Press Club. It can be “used as a censorious club,” with a “descriptive but vague” standard, NRB General Counsel Craig Parshall said: Apple and Comcast “promise to ban content that they find to be misleading in their opinion, making them kind of an arbiter of truth.” Apple twice in the past year removed applications from its iTunes App Store that espoused orthodox Christian views, NRB said. Facebook has removed content the company deems anti-gay, and bans most all political speech on controversial issues, the group noted. Google has said it will block ads calling abortion murder, while AT&T and Comcast bar content they consider “hateful,” the report said, while Verizon forbids using its service to promote “hatred."
NRB relied on publicly accessible policies from the companies, and didn’t speak to their executives before releasing the report Thursday, Parshall told us. Such efforts would have been fruitless and the companies wouldn’t have changed their policies, so the association went public and now will seek to talk to the companies, he said. “There’s a strategic problem in trying a piecemeal approach to Fortune 500 companies,” Parshall said, citing his past work as a civil-liberties lawyer in private practice. “It is an insurmountable problem to really have an intelligent dialog” before releasing such a report, he added.
An ex-FCC commissioner said the trends are “deeply troubling” because they show major companies operating in an environment faced by many industries that can stifle speech. It’s “not a systematic effort by those companies to block content based on religion,” said Director Harold Furchtgott-Roth of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Economics of the Internet on a panel sponsored by NRB. “These are some of the most open companies in the world and the least likely to engage in discrimination,” he said. “This is not isolated to these companies. This reflects a broader failure of our society” where “morality is turned on its head,” he continued. “That is not limited to specific companies.” Furchgott-Roth is an economist who often opposes regulation.
Panelists said the best route to changing anti-hate speech policies is to work with the companies. “I want to call out your better angels,” said communications lawyer Colby May, who has worked for religious broadcasters like Trinity Broadcasting Network. He’s director of the Washington office of the American Center for Law and Justice, which advocates religious freedom. There’s no proposed legislation or regulation to fix the problem on the table, and that would take a long time to put into place and could also lead to the type of government oversight that could be avoided, speakers said. “Government intervention is not always the best solution” to a problem, said Associate Dean Suzanne Caruso of Liberty University’s law school.
Lawsuits may not succeed, because the companies aren’t government entities subject to First Amendment rules, some panelists said. “The problem” to any suit “is the Internet is not the same as a public park owned by a city,” Parshall said. And “this is not just a Christian theology problem,” he said. “On a broader scale, it’s a free-speech problem” of Internet companies “with a near monopoly.”