Jillian York > Quotes

“For example, Twitter and Facebook—both of which happily hosted Kim Kardashian’s nude bottom—removed the word “vagina” from an advertisement marketing a book about female anatomy, written by prominent gynecologist Dr. Jen Gunter.21 Similarly, journalist Sarah Lacy found that she was unable to advertise her book, entitled A Uterus Is a Feature, on Facebook.22 Plus-sized women have had their Instagram accounts removed for posting selfies in bikinis—something that skinny women do all the time without reprisal.23 Both platforms have also blocked advertisements for information about teen pregnancy, proper bra fitting, and gynecologist visits.24”
― Jillian York, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism

“So it’s not American values, per se, that are being exported to billions of users around the world, but the values of a very particular demographic—perhaps not incidentally the same demographic that made up Facebook’s first set of users.”
― Jillian York, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism

“many around the world were beginning to find their voices online. The world before social media was different, as only certain voices were able to rise to the top, creating a skewed perception of what is globally tolerable. But when nearly everyone has equal access to the same platforms, the simple fact that not everyone thinks alike—and certainly not everyone shares the same values as those in the United States—becomes strikingly clear.”
― Jillian York, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism

“Facebook’s executives speak often of the platform being a global community, but those whose names do not fit within an Anglocentric idea of what is a name are subject to punitive measures that are not experienced by other users.”
― Jillian York, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism

“Somewhat notably, one of the first twenty members of Facebook’s new External Oversight Board is Emi Palmor, under whose direction the Israeli Ministry of Justice petitioned Facebook to censor legitimate speech of human rights defenders, according to 7amleh.”
― Jillian York, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism

“When pages that promote female pleasure are hidden, we understand that our pleasure is invalid,”
― Jillian York, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism

“Facebook and its counterparts don’t operate like courts; there is no case law, no checks and balances, and—until recently—no due process. The judges (content moderators) are not appointed or elected by voters, unlike in well-functioning democracies. There are simply no systems of accountability to the process and, as such, the same image that might be banned for one user can be allowed for another.”
― Jillian York, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism

“Second, we need true and meaningful representation and inclusion. Far too much of the external debate over the past decade has been dominated by white Americans, falsely framed as a First Amendment issue, and focused on political speech above all else, to the detriment of other key issues of free expression. And within companies—different as each may be—the focus is all too often on whatever pet issue the US media or lawmakers have adopted in a given week. Rarely is there sustained focus, inside or out, toward the threats faced by the world’s most marginalized people. And when attention is paid—as was the case with Myanmar and Facebook as well as GamerGate and Twitter—it is almost always too little, too late.”
― Jillian York, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism

“The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated the failures of American (and of course many other) institutions. But it has also shown us something interesting: although Silicon Valley companies have for years only wrung their hands as calls for genocide, death threats, and misinformation have proliferated globally on their platforms, now, in the face of widespread disease and death in the United States, they suddenly found the will to moderate certain expression.”
― Jillian York, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism

“their hatred for and opposition to the Iranian government so great as to throw all moral conviction out the window.”
― Jillian York, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism

“The third conclusion I’ve made is: if governments are collaborating, so must we. When it comes to expression, one thing remains certain: no one will moderate the speech of governments or their officials. Sure, Twitter will fact-check Trump, and Facebook will boot members of foreign governments (and maybe someday even the president of the United States), but in the grand scheme of things, we might be watching the watchers, but no citizen has the power to silence them.”
― Jillian York, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism

“Policymakers have demonstrated a predilection for giving the greatest amount of deference to state and other elite actors, rather than to their users. Increased complexity has led to a greater propensity for inconsistency and error, as the following chapters illustrate. This, combined with ever-increasing scale, has created a crisis of legitimacy and, for many individuals for whom these platforms constitute a vital tool, an untenable situation.”
― Jillian York, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism

“With all of these platforms having their headquarters in the West and their reliance on those lists to inform their policies related to extremist and dangerous groups, applying a universal view of terrorism to local complex contexts such as Lebanon’s allows for the weaponization of these policies in the interest of one side of the political equation,” she says. “The [de-platforming] of the group presents Hezbollah within a Western lens—as a terrorist group—and erases the political history of this group and its current participation in local and regional politics. This doesn’t just mean in its dealing with Iran, but also in the context of representation at a governmental, parliamentary, and municipal level as well as in unions and syndicates.”
― Jillian York, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism

“As a member of the Global Network Initiative, Microsoft had committed to “protect and advance user rights to freedom of expression and privacy, including when faced with government demands for censorship.” Specifically, member companies were supposed to work to “avoid or minimize the impact of government restrictions on freedom of expression.”
― Jillian York, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism

“One particular Facebook policy, which the company has dubbed the “newsworthiness exemption,” has come under fire from activists, who believe it privileges politicians’ speech above their own. The policy allows posts that otherwise violate community standards to remain on the platform if the company believes the public’s interest in seeing it outweighs the risk of harm.”
― Jillian York, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism

“The problem, of course, lies in companies viewing governments and citizens as equals, while in fact governments are, by and large, using their power to implement policies where passing laws is impossible without also changing the national constitution. By remaining neutral, corporations are acting as conduits of the state. They are today’s censors, not unlike the religious institutions and governments that came before them.”
― Jillian York, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism

“Whereas once upon a time, YouTube defended the free speech rights of al-Qaeda, today the company’s policy is to remove any content produced by government-listed terrorism organizations—even if the public might have an interest in seeing that material.”
― Jillian York, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism

“The specific line here is that you must never question Morocco’s sovereignty over the Western Sahara, the land claimed in 1975 when 350,000 Moroccans marched into the then-Spanish territory, kicking off a war that lasted sixteen years and only strengthened the Moroccan government’s resolve.”
― Jillian York, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism

“Twitter and Facebook, had begun to crack down (albeit somewhat reluctantly) on the American far right the summer prior, their attempts to do so pale in comparison to the resources they put into policing extremist groups elsewhere in the world—or, to put it bluntly, extremist groups that happen to be Muslim and invoke the ire of Western politicians.”
― Jillian York, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism

“Facebook, on the other hand, meets regularly with NGOs and other stakeholders, but remains mum about which ones. The company’s policy team is also deeply susceptible to government pressure, and, according to more than a half-dozen individuals that I spoke to, it will often speak openly about it to NGOs when meeting about specific policies.”
― Jillian York, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism

“First, it is imperative that we understand and view content moderation as existing outside of and apart from extant systems of governance. At worst, content moderation is inherently broken and, at best, is an imperfect system retrofitted to societal structures that are already deeply flawed. The processes of content moderation were not built to scale, nor were the rules created by companies; rather, they were built over time like an onion being peeled in reverse, layers stacked upon layers, always reactive to external forces. To mitigate its harms, this system must be subject to a comprehensive, external audit of both rules and processes, policies and procedures.”
― Jillian York, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism

“Other countries, such as the United Kingdom and the European Union—as well as Twitter—make the distinction between Hezbollah’s military wing and its political arm—putting only the former on their blacklists—while still others do not list Hezbollah at all.”
― Jillian York, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism

“Whether these politicians lack understanding of the law or simply seek to circumvent it by using corporate regulations instead is unclear. But in the case of both Hamas and Hezbollah, we need to ask: What is the impact in Palestine and Lebanon, where these groups are powerful players in local politics—local politics that have no shortage of violent actors? Azza El Masri is a media researcher from Lebanon who, for the past several years, has studied content moderation. “Is Hezbollah’s involvement in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and its participation in the Iran-KSA proxy war tantamount to terrorist activities? Yes,” she told me in a text message. “However, this doesn’t absolve the fact that Hezbollah today is the most powerful political actor in Lebanon.” Lebanon’s political scene is, to the outsider, messy and difficult to parse. After the fifteen-year civil war that killed hundreds of thousands, the country’s parliament instituted a law that pardoned all political crimes prior to its enactment, allowing the groups that were formerly militias to form political parties. Only Hezbollah—an Iran-sponsored creation to unify the country’s Shia population during the war—was allowed by the postwar Syrian occupation to retain its militia. The United States designated Hezbollah (which translates to “Party of God”) a foreign terrorist organization in 1995, more than a decade after the group bombed US military barracks in Beirut.”
― Jillian York, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism

“Another former staffer told me under the condition of anonymity that it was a “constant discussion,” and that the company was under pressure from the Israeli government. As Maria tried to point out to her superiors, Zionism is an ideology or a political doctrine, akin to “communism” or “liberalism”—not an immutable characteristic. Treating it as such is not merely a mockery of actual characteristics that make a person or group vulnerable, but elevating it—and not Palestinians—to such a level also fails to take into account the power imbalance that exists between occupied and occupier. But, Maria told me, “Palestine and Israel has always been the toughest topic at Facebook. In the beginning, it was a bit discreet,” with the Arabic-language team mainly in charge of tough calls, but after the 2014 conflict between Israel and Gaza, the company moved closer to the Israeli government. Somewhat notably, one of the first twenty members of Facebook’s new External Oversight Board is Emi Palmor, under whose direction the Israeli Ministry of Justice petitioned Facebook to censor legitimate speech of human rights defenders, according to 7amleh.”
― Jillian York, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism

“YouTube, which perhaps bore the brunt of the media’s ire, at first tried to make things right. Nicole Wong later called it “a moment where we needed the [help of the] human rights community [in order to] understand what we needed to see so that we wouldn’t make mistakes,” but YouTube later closed ranks, according to many activists who tried to reach the company as the situation in Syria escalated. The incidents from that period should have served as a lesson for company policymakers a few years later when the right-wing onslaught began, had their myopia, profit-mindedness, and deep-rooted US-centricity not blinded them to the glaring similarities between white supremacists and ISIS.”
― Jillian York, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism

“Silicon Valley’s response to the pandemic—swift, reasonable, measured—is a precise example of this idea, evidencing that all along, tech companies could have taken steps to mitigate harms … but chose not to, instead focusing their attention on the things that governments and other powerful entities wanted them to censor. The fact is that when the potential harm to Americans is big enough, these companies will act. When the harm to foreigners is big enough, they will act only in the face of extraordinary pressure. And sometimes not even then. *”
― Jillian York, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism

“As I arrived to work one day early that summer, I received a frantic call from a Palestinian friend in the United States. At that point, the kidnapped Israeli boys had not yet been killed, and my friend had discovered a Facebook page threatening the murder, every hour, of a “terrorist” until the boys were found. The page, in Hebrew, was quite clearly using “terrorist” as a stand-in for “Palestinian” and included comments such as “Kill them while they are still in their mother’s [womb],” but when my friend reported it, she received a message that the page was not in violation of the community standards—despite existing prohibitions on both hate speech and credible threats.25 I emailed a contact on Facebook’s policy team, who responded: “Seems like a violation of our terms. I’ll run it by people here.” As I awaited my contact’s reply, the page began calling for the deaths of specific individuals. I wrote back to share that new information, and my contact replied to say that although they were still chasing down an answer, “if it’s threatening people’s lives, it seems to qualify, right?” But later that day, my contact informed me over the phone that the page was not, in fact, in violation of the rules. The threat wasn’t deemed to be credible, and on top of that, “terrorist” wasn’t a protected category under the prohibition on hate speech. In a statement, Face-book’s head of global policy management, Monika Bickert, explained: “We clearly list the characteristics that we consider to be hate speech, and if it doesn’t come under one of those categories, we don’t consider it hate speech under our policies.”26 The page remained up.”
― Jillian York, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism

“By the end of the decade, governments had grown savvy to the fact that companies readily responded to their takedown demands. In 2009, when Google issued its first transparency report documenting government requests for takedowns and user data, the company had received more than one thousand content removal requests in just a six-month period, a number that has only increased over time.”
― Jillian York, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism

“For better or worse, Hezbollah remains a major player in contemporary Lebanese politics, as El Masri points out, and the willingness of tech companies to cave to US pressure has an immeasurable impact on the country’s political scene.”
― Jillian York, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism

“Although I am certain, for example, that the US government should not dictate to companies who is a terrorist, and that widespread bans on women’s partial nudity are discriminatory and harmful to the feminist cause, I still struggle to find the right answer to what we should do about suspected bots, or brigading, or how we should handle hateful speech that doesn’t quite reach the level of incitement.”
― Jillian York, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism