Social Media
Seeking to Quell ‘Evil Contagion’ of ‘White Supremacy,’ President Trump May Ignite New Battle Over Online Hate Speech

WASHINGTON, August 5, 2019 — President Donald Trump on Monday morning attempted to strike a tone of unity by denouncing the white, anti-Hispanic man who “shot and murdered 20 people, and injured 26 others, including precious little children.”
In speaking about the two significant mass shootings over the weekend in Texas and Ohio, Trump delivered prepared remarks in which he specifically denounced “racism, bigotry, and white supremacy,” and linked it to the “warp[ed] mind” of the racially-motivated El Paso killer.
That shooter – now in custody – posted a manifesto online before the shooting in which he said he was responding to the “Hispanic invasion of Texas.” The shooter cited the March 15, massacre of two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, as an inspiration for his action.
In White House remarks with Vice President Mike Pence standing at his side, Trump proposed solutions to “stop this evil contagion.” Trump denounced “hate” or “racist hate” four times.
Trump’s first proposed solution: “I am directing the Department of Justice to work in partnership with local, state, and federal agencies, as well as social media companies, to develop tools that can detect mass shooters before they strike.”
That proposal appeared to be an initiative that was either targeted at – or potentially an opportunity for collaboration with – social media giants like Twitter, Facebook and Google.
Indeed, Trump and others on the political right have repeatedly criticized these social media giants for bias against Trump and Republicans.
Sometimes, this right-wing criticism of Twitter emerges after a user is banned for violating the social media company’s terms of service against “hate speech.”
In Trump’s remarks, he also warned that “we must shine light on the dark recesses of the internet.” Indeed, Trump said that “the perils of the internet and social media cannot be ignored, and they will not be ignored.”
But it must be equally clear to the White House that the El Paso killer – in his online manifesto – used anti-Hispanic and anti-immigrant rhetoric very similar to Trump’s own repeated words about an “invasion” of Mexican and other Latin Americans at the United States border.
Hence this mass murder contains elements of political peril for both Donald Trump and for his frequent rivals at social media companies like Twitter, Facebook and Google.
8chan gets taken down by its network provider
Minutes before the El Paso attack at a Wal-Mart, a manifesto titled “The Inconvenient Truth” was posted to the online platform 8chan, claiming that the shooting was in response to the “Hispanic invasion.” The killer specifically cited the Christchurch shooter’s white supremacist manifesto as an inspiration.
As previously utilized by Islamic terrorists, social media platforms are increasingly being utilized by white supremacist terrorists. In addition to posting his manifesto online, the Christchurch shooter livestreamed his attack on Facebook.
In April, a man posted an anti-Semitic and white nationalist letter to the same online forum, 8chan, before opening fire at a synagogue near San Diego, California.
And on July 28, the gunman who killed three people at a garlic festival in Gilroy, California, allegedly promoted a misogynist white supremacist book on Instagram just prior to his attack.
But Saturday’s El Paso shooting motivated some companies to act. Cloudflare, 8chan’s network provider early on Monday morning pulled its support for 8chan, calling the platform a “cesspool of hate.”
“While removing 8chan from our network takes heat off of us, it does nothing to address why hateful sites fester online,” wrote Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince.
“It does nothing to address why mass shootings occur,” said Prince. It does nothing to address why portions of the population feel so disenchanted they turn to hate. In taking this action we’ve solved our own problem, but we haven’t solved the internet’s.”
Prince continued to voice his discomfort about the company taking the role of content arbitrator, and pointed to Europe’s attempts to have more government involvement.
The Christchurch massacre opened a dialogue between big tech and European critics of ‘hate speech’
Following the Christchurch attack, 18 governments in May signed the Christchurch Call pledge (PDF) seeking to stop the internet from being used as a tool by violent extremists. The U.S. did not sign on, and the White House voiced concerns that the document would violate the First Amendment.
Dubbed “The Christchurch Call to Action to Eliminate Terrorist and Violent Extremist Content Online,” the May document included commitments by both online service providers, and by governments.
Among other measures, the online providers were to “[t]ake transparent, specific measures seeking to prevent the upload of terrorist and violent extremist content and to prevent its dissemination on social media.”
Governments were to “[e]nsure effective enforcement of applicable laws that prohibit the production or dissemination of terrorist and violent extremist content.”
Although Silicon Valley has had a reputation for supporting a libertarian view of free speech, the increasingly unruly world of social media over the past decade has put that First Amendment absolutism to the test.
Indeed, five big tech giants – Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft – voiced their support from the Christchurch Call on the day of its release.
In particular, they took responsibility for the apparent restrictions on freedom of speech that the Christchurch Call would impose, saying that the massacre was “a horrifying tragedy” that made it “right that we come together, resolute in our commitment to ensure we are doing all we can to fight the hatred and extremism that lead to terrorist violence.”
In particular, they noted that the Christchurch Call expands on the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism set up by Facebook, Google’s YouTube, Microsoft and Twitter in the summer of 2017.
The objective of this organization is focused on disrupting terrorists’ ability to promote terrorism, disseminate violent propaganda, and exploit or glorify real-world acts of violence.
The tech giants said (PDF) that they were sharing more information about how they could “detect and remove this content from our services, updates to our individual terms of use, and more transparency for content policies and removals.”
Will Trump politicize the concept of ‘hate speech’ that tech companies are uniting with Europe to take down?
In his Monday statement commenting on an ostensible partnership between the Justice Department and the social media companies, Trump referred to the need to the need to “detect mass shooters before they strike.”
And he had this specific example: “As an example, the monster in the Parkland high school in Florida had many red flags against him, and yet nobody took decisive action. Nobody did anything. Why not?”
Part of the challenge now faced by social media companies is frankly political. Although Twitter has taken aggressive steps to eradicate ISIS content from its platform, it has not applied the same tools and algorithms to take down white supremacist content.
Society accepts the risk of inconveniencing potentially related accounts, such as those of Arabic language broadcasters for the benefit of banning ISIS content, Motherboard summarized earlier this year based its interview with Twitter employees.
But if these same aggressive tactics were deployed against white nationalist terrorism, the algorithms would likely flag content from prominent Republican politicians, far-right commentators – and Donald Trump himself, these employees said.
Indeed, right after declining to sign the Christchurch call, the White House escalated its war against American social media by announcing a campaign asking internet users to share stories of when they felt censored by Facebook, Twitter and Google’s YouTube.
And in June, Twitter made it clear that they were speaking directly about Tweets that violated their terms of service by prominent public officials, including the president.
“In the past, we’ve allowed certain Tweets that violated our rules to remain on Twitter because they were in the public’s interest, but it wasn’t clear when and how we made those determinations,” a Twitter official said. “To fix that, we’re introducing a new notice that will provide additional clarity in these situations, and sharing more on when and why we’ll use it.”
White House officials did not immediately respond to whether the Trump administration was reconsidering its opposition to the Christchurch Call.
Will Trump’s speech put others in the spotlight, or keep it on him and his rhetoric?
In additional to highlighting the anticipated effort with social media, Trump had four additional suggested “bipartisan solutions” to the “evil contagion” caused by the Texas and Ohio mass shootings.
They including “stop[ing] the glorification of violence in our society” in video games, addressing mental health laws “to better identify mentally disturbed individuals,” keeping firearms from those “judged to pose a grave risk to public safety,” and seeking the death penalty against those who commit hate crimes and mass murders.
Trump’s advisers said that they hoped the speech would stem the tide of media attention being given to the links between his frequent use of dehumanizing language to describe Latin American immigrants.
As he delivered his prepared remarks from a TelePrompTer in a halting cadence, Trump appeared to be reading the speech for the first time. This led to an awkward moment when he suggested that the second shooting of the weekend – which had taken place outside a Dayton, Ohio bar – had been in Toledo, Ohio.
But despite displaying the visible discomfiture that is evident when he reads prepared remarks to the White House press pool cameras, Trump made an attempt to silence critics like former El Paso Congressman Beto O’Rourke – who just hours before had explicitly called the President a white nationalist – by calling for defeat of “sinister ideologies” of hate.
“In one voice, our nation must condemn racism, bigotry, and white supremacy,” Trump said. “Hate has no place in America. Hatred warps the mind, ravages the heart, and devours the soul.”
Trump did not elaborate on the hate-based motivations of the El Paso shooter. Rather than reflect on where the El Paso shooter may have gotten the idea that Hispanics were “invading” the United States, Trump cast blame on one of the targets often invoked by conservatives after such mass shootings, including video games.
Although Trump has previously delivered remarks in the aftermath of violent acts committed by white supremacists and white nationalists during his presidency, Monday’s speech marked the first time that the President had chosen to specifically condemn “white supremacy,” rather than deliver a more general condemnation of “hate.”
In his rhetoric, both on his Twitter account and on the campaign trail, Trump uses non-whites as a foil, beginning with his 2015 campaign announcement speech, in which he described Mexican immigrants as “rapists” who bring crime and drugs to America.
That rhetoric reappeared in the 2018 Congressional elections as Trump spoke about an “invasion” from South and Central America taking up a significant portion of his rally stump speech.
As the 2020 election draws nearer, Trump’s strategy this campaign seems to similarly demonize racial minorities and prominent Democrats of color, most recently Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., the chairman of the House Oversight Committee.
Trump critics not appeased by his Monday speech
As a result, commentators said Monday’s condemnation of white supremacy marked a 180-degree turn for the President. But his performance did not leave many observers convinced of his sincerity.
House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., called the President’s speech “meaningless.”
“We know tragedy after tragedy his words have not led to solid action or any change in rhetoric. We know his vile and racist words have incited violence and attacks on Americans,” he said in a statement. “Now dozens are dead and white supremacist terrorism is on the rise and is now our top domestic terrorism threat.”
Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., tweeted that Trump had “addressed the blaze today with the equivalent of a water balloon” after “fanning the flames of white supremacy for two-and-a-half years in the White House.”
Ohio Democratic Party Chairman David Pepper said Trump’s condemnation of white supremacy in Monday’s remarks could not make up for his years of racist campaign rhetoric.
“Through years of campaigning and hate rallies, to now say ‘I’m against hateful people and racism,’ is just hard to listen to,” Pepper said during a phone interview.
“Unless he’s willing to say ‘I know I’ve been a part of it’ with a full apology and some self recognition, it felt like he was just checking the boxes.”
Pepper suggested that Trump “was saying what someone told him to say,” and predicted that Trump would soon walk back his remarks, much as he did after the 2017 “Unite the Right” white supremacist rally in Virginia.
Charlie Sykes, a former conservative talk radio host and editor of “The Bulwark,” echoed Pepper’s sentiments in a separate phone interview, but also called out Trump for failing to speak of the El Paso shooter’s motivations.
“It was so perfunctory and inadequate because he condemned the words ‘bigotry and racism,’ but he didn’t describe what he was talking about,” Sykes said.
Sykes criticized Trump for failing to take responsibility for his routine use of racist rhetoric, including descriptions of immigrants as “invaders” who “infest” the United States.
“Unless you’re willing to discuss the dehumanization behind the crimes, the invocation of certain words doesn’t change anything.”
Another longtime GOP figure who Trump failed to impress was veteran strategist Rick Wilson, who cited it as yet the latest example of “the delta between Trump on the TelePrompTer and Trump at a rally,” a difference he described as “enormous.”
“Nothing about that speech had a ring of authenticity to it,” said Rick Wilson, a legendary GOP ad maker and the author of “Everything Trump Touches Dies.”
“The contrast between the speechwriter’s handiwork and the real Donald Trump…is rather marked,” he said.
Where does online free speech – and allegations of ‘hate crimes’ – go from here?
Although the social media companies are making more efforts to harness and expunge online hate, they are unlikely to be able to get very far without someone – perhaps even President Trump – crying foul.
Putting the politics of online hate speech aside, the U.S. does take a fundamentally different approach to freedom of expression than does Europe.
According to the Human Rights Watch, hundreds of French citizens are convicted for “apologies for terrorism” each year, which includes any positive comment about a terrorist or terrorist organization. Online offenses are treated especially harshly.
By contrast, the U.S. has a fundamental commitment to the freedom of speech—including speech that is indecent, offensive, and hateful.
The Supreme Court has ruled that speech is unprotected when it is “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action” and is “likely to incite or produce such action.”
But this exception is extremely narrow—in Brandenburg v. Ohio, the Court reversed the conviction of a KKK group that advocated for violence as a means of political reform, arguing that their statements did not express an immediate intent to do violence.
The limitations on government leave the responsibility of combating online extremism to the digital platforms themselves, said Open Technology Institute Director Sarah Morris at a panel last month.
“In general, private companies have a lot more flexibility in how they respond to terrorist propaganda than Congress does,” said Emma Llansó, Director of the Free Expression Project at the Center for Democracy & Technology. “They need to be clear about what their policies are and enforce them transparently.”
But companies also need to carefully consider how they will respond to pressure from governments and individuals around the world, said Llansó, adding that “no content policy or community guideline is ever applied just in the circumstances it was designed for.”
“As the experience of social media companies has shown us, content moderation is extremely difficult to do well,” Llansó concluded. “It requires an understanding of the context that the speaker and the audience are operating in, which a technical infrastructure provider is not likely to have.”
(Managing Editor Andrew Feinberg and Reporter Emily McPhie contributed reporting to this article. Photo of Vice President Pence beside Trump speaking on August 5, 2019, from the White House.)
Social Media
Senate Commerce Committee Passes Two Bills To Protect Children Online
The bills failed to make headway in a previous Congress.

WASHINGTON, July 27, 2023 – The Senate Commerce committee on Thursday swiftly passed two pieces of legislation aimed to protect the safety and privacy of children online, exactly one year after the same bills passed the committee but failed to advance further.
The first bill to clear the committee was the Kids Online Safety Act, which requires social media sites to put in place safeguards protecting users under the age of 17 from content that promotes harmful behaviors, such as suicide and eating disorders. KOSA was first introduced in 2022 by Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., and Sen. Marsha Blackburn, D-Tenn. It previously won bipartisan support but ultimately failed to become law.
The current version of the bill was reintroduced in May, gaining traction in several hearings, and picked up more than 30 co-sponsors. Several changes were made to the text, including a specific list of online harms and certain exemptions for support services, such as substance abuse groups that might unintentionally suffer from the bill’s requirements.
The bill was also amended Thursday to include a provision proposed by Sen. John Thune, R-S.D. that would require companies to disclose the use of algorithms for content filtering and give users the choice to opt out.
Critics of the bill, however, said the revised version largely resembled the original one and failed to address issues raised before. These concerns included sections that would require tech companies to collect more data to filter content and verify user age, as well as an infringement on children’s free speech.
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, supported the bill but agreed that more work needs to be done before it moves to the floor. Since the last committee’s markup of KOSA, several states have approved measures concerning children’s online safety that might be inconsistent with the existing provisions, he noted, proposing a preemptive provision to ensure the bill would be enforced regardless of state laws.
The Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA 2.0, introduced by Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., and Bill Cassidy, R-LA, was the second bill passed out of the committee. It expands on existing legislation that has been in effect since 2000 to protect children from harmful marketing. The bill would make it illegal for websites to collect data on children under the age of 16, outlaw marketing specifically aimed at kids, and allow parents to erase their kids’ information on the websites.
“It is time for Congress to meet this moment and to act with the urgency that these issues demand,” said Sen. Markey.
This pair of legislation is among many others that seek to protect children from online harms, none of which have made any headway in Congress so far.
Free Speech
UK’s Online Safety Bill Likely to Impact American User Experience
The bill will affect the tone and content of discussion on U.S.-owned platforms that wish to continue offering UK services.

WASHINGTON, July 21, 2023 – The United Kingdom’s Online Safety Bill will impact the American-based user’s experience on various platforms, said panelist at a Broadband Breakfast Live Online event Wednesday.
The Online Safety Bill is the UK’s response to concerns about the negative impact of various internet platforms and applications. The core of the bill addresses illegal content and content that is harmful to children. It places a duty of care on internet sites, including social media platforms, search engines, and online shopping centers, to provide risk assessments for their content, prevent access to illegal content, protect privacy, and prevent children from accessing harmful content.
The legislation would apply to any business that has a substantial user base in the UK, having unforeseen impacts on the end user experience, said Amy Peikoff, Chief Policy Officer of UK-based video-streaming platform, BitChute.
Even though the legislation is not U.S. legislation, it will affect the tone and content of discussion on U.S.-owned platforms that wish to continue offering their services in the jurisdictions where this legislation will be enacted, said Peikoff. Already, the European Union’s Digital Services Act, is affecting Twitter, which is “throttling its speech” to turn out statistics that say a certain percentage of their content is “healthy,” she claimed.
Large social media companies as we know them are finished, Peikoff said.
Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator, will be responsible to provide guidelines and best practices as well as conduct investigations and auditing. It will be authorized to apprehend revenue if a company fails to adhere to laws and may enact rules that require companies to provide user data to the agency and/or screen user messages for harmful content.
Peikoff claimed that the legislation could set off a chain of events, “namely, that platforms like BitChute would be required to affirmatively, proactively scan every single piece of content – comments, videos, whatever posted to the platform – and keep a record of any flags.” She added that U.S-based communication would not be exempt.
Meta-owned WhatsApp, a popular messaging app, has warned that it will exit the UK market if the legislation requires it to release data about its users or screen their messages, claiming that doing so would “compromise” the privacy of all users and threaten the encryption on its platform.
Matthew Lesh, director of public policy and communications at the UK think tank Institute of Economic Affairs, said that the bill is a “recipe for censorship on an industrial, mechanical scale.” He warned that many companies will choose to simply block UK-based users from using their services, harming UK competitiveness globally and discouraging investors.
In addition, Lesh highlighted privacy concerns introduced by the legislation. By levying fines on platforms that host harmful content accessible by children, companies may have to screen for children by requiring users to present government-issued IDs, presenting a major privacy concern for users.
The primary issue with the bill and similar policies, said Lesh, is that it enacts the same moderation policies to all online platforms, which can limit certain speech and stop healthy discussion and interaction cross political lines.
The bill is currently in the final stages of the committee stage in the House of Lords, the UK’s second chamber of parliament. Following its passage, the bill will go to the House of Commons in which it will either be amended or be accepted and become law. General support in the UK’s parliament for the bill suggests that the bill will be implemented sometime next year.
This follows considerable debate in the United States regarding content moderation, many of which discussions are centered around possible reform of Section 230. Section 230 protects platforms from being treated as a publisher or speaker of information originating from a third party, thus shielding it from liability for the posts of the latter.
Our Broadband Breakfast Live Online events take place on Wednesday at 12 Noon ET. Watch the event on Broadband Breakfast, or REGISTER HERE to join the conversation.
Wednesday, July 19, 2023 – The UK’s Online Safety Bill
The UK’s Online Safety Bill seeks to make the country “the safest place in the world to be online” has seen as much upheaval as the nation itself in the last four years. Four prime ministers, one Brexit and one pandemic later, it’s just a matter of time until the bill finally passes the House of Lords and eventually becomes law. Several tech companies including WhatsApp, Signal, and Wikipedia have argued against its age limitation and breach of end-to-end encryption. Will this legislation serve as a model for governments worldwide to regulate online harms? What does it mean for the future of U.S. social media platforms?
Panelists
- Amy Peikoff, Chief Policy Officer, BitChute
- Matthew Lesh, Director of Public Policy and Communications at the Institute of Economic Affairs.
- Drew Clark (moderator), Editor and Publisher, Broadband Breakfast
Panelist resources
- An Unsafe Bill: How the Online Safety Bill threatens free speech, innovation and privacy, Institute of Economic Affairs
- Big Tech Behind Bars? The UK’s Online Safety Bill Explained, CNET, January 19, 2023
- The hidden harms in the Online Safety Bill, The Spectator, August 20, 2022
Amy Peikoff is Chief Policy Officer for BitChute. She holds a BS in Math/Applied Science and a JD from UCLA, as well as a PhD in Philosophy from University of Southern California, and has focused in her academic work and legal activism on issues related to the proper legal protection of privacy. In 2020, she became Chief Policy Officer for the free speech social media platform, Parler, where she served until Parler was purchased in April 2023.
Matthew Lesh is the Director of Public Policy and Communications at the Institute of Economic Affairs. Matthew often appears on television and radio, is a columnist for London’s CityAM newspaper, and a regular writer for publications such as The Times, The Telegraph and The Spectator. He is also a Fellow of the Adam Smith Institute and Institute of Public Affairs.
Drew Clark is CEO of Breakfast Media LLC. He has led the Broadband Breakfast community since 2008. An early proponent of better broadband, better lives, he initially founded the Broadband Census crowdsourcing campaign for broadband data. As Editor and Publisher, Clark presides over the leading media company advocating for higher-capacity internet everywhere through topical, timely and intelligent coverage. Clark also served as head of the Partnership for a Connected Illinois, a state broadband initiative.

Illustration from the Spectator
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Free Speech
New Tool Measures Economic Impact of Internet Shutdowns
The calculator is being called a ‘major step forward’ for those pushing back against such shutdowns.

July 10, 2023 – New measuring tool NetLoss launched by the Internet Society shows the impacts of internet shutdowns on economies including Iraq, Sudan and Pakistan, where government-mandated outages have cost millions of dollars in a matter of hours or days.
NetLoss, launched on June 28, calculated a four-hour shutdown in July in Iraq, implemented by the government to prevent cheating during high school exam season, resulted in an estimated loss of $1.6 million. In May, a shutdown in Pakistan cost more than $13 million over the span of four days, while a five-day internet outage in Sudan in April cost the economy more than $4 million and resulted in the loss of 560 jobs.
NetLoss is unique among other internet assessment tools as it also includes subsequent economic impacts on the unemployment rate, foreign direct investments, and the risk of future shutdowns, claimed the advocacy group Internet Society. It provides data on both ongoing and anticipated shutdowns, drawing from historical dataset of over 90 countries dating back to 2019.
“The calculator is a major step forward for the community of journalists, policymakers, technologists and other stakeholders who are pushing back against the damaging practice of Internet shutdowns,” said Andrew Sullivan, CEO of the Internet Society. “Its groundbreaking and fully transparent methodology will help show governments around the world that shutting down the Internet is never a solution.”
The tool relies on open-access databases, including the Internet Society Pulse’s Shutdown data, the World Bank’s economic indicators, the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project’s civil unrest data, Yale University’s election data, and other relevant socioeconomic factors. To stay up to date with real-time changes, the data will be updated quarterly.
According to the press release, internet shutdowns worldwide peaked in 2022 with governments increasingly blocking internet services due to concerns over civil unrest or cybersecurity threats. These disruptions are extremely damaging to the economy, read the document, as they impede online commercial activities and expose companies and the economy to financial and reputational risks.
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