By Demola Adeniran
Virtual reality is all fun and games, until your avatar gets strip-searched at the border- Quetin Hardy in New York Times of June 1, 2016.
As a creative, it would be tantamount to a career Hara-Kiri to oppose freedom of expression because freedom of expression is the foundation upon which the creative career thrives. Therefore any form of physical embargo on freedom of expression in the society becomes like a mental imprisonment because the freedom of internal expression and inspiration automatically gets caged.
There is no doubt that in the 21st century, “Freedom of Expression,” brings new knowledge, encourages international knowledge exchange and it gives the “voiceless,” voice, within the complex cornucopia of human existence, especially in a democracy. And with the advent of social media platforms, freedom of expression is enjoying a global expansion like never before. It is to this end that the big tech companies like Facebook, Twitter, Google, WhatsApp, Instagram and Yahoo who invent or create the social media platforms have become such a powerful force in the 21st century.
Fundamentally however, there is a question we must ask. Is freedom of expression a universal practicality or is it a phenomenon that should be regulated from nation to nation? For example in Nigeria, freedom of expression seems to have empowered some people to be able to call the Fulanis “cows,” in a derogatory manner, based on the point of view of the Fulanis historical affiliation to cattle herding. But no one can openly do same in India on a similar premise because, the cow is considered sacred over there. Between the Nigerian and the Indian, there is an opposing perception of cows within the context of freedom of expression which changes in time and space. So therefore we can conclusively say that, though there is a universal recognition of freedom of expression, content and context equally matters over time and space. Openly hurling invectives on heads of states is a common occurrence of most democracies except in Britain, where the Queen enjoy certain levels of protection from public scrutiny and attacks on her person. So clearly, there is no blank cheque to freedom of expression anywhere; but rather open cheque books, where individual nations write the amount of freedom of expression they can allow in their sovereignty at a given time. This is what social media/big tech companies must try to understand going forward.
In the wake of the EndSARS protests in Nigeria last October, I posted a series of advisory tweets to the official Twitter handle on Twitter, one of the behemoth social tech companies. Therein, I highlighted that Twitter must endeavour to understand the domicile laws of nations, rather than confront them headlong because there are many avenues upon which nations could clampdown on “meddlesome,” US-based tech corporations who seems to be in the habit of interpreting and imposing their will on nation states on the basis of freedom of expression.
Prior to this in the same 2020, Google, another of the big tech companies, clashed with the Australian government, declaring that it would stop its common search service if the government approved a recent legislation that would force it to pay media companies for linking to their news. Facebook also followed by declaring that it would stop Australian users of its service from sharing or posting links to news items if this bill were passed. The Australian government sternly responded, with Prime Minister Scott Morrison saying, “We don’t respond to threats. Australia makes our rules for things you can do in Australia. That’s done in our parliament. It’s done by our government. And that’s how things work here.”
From exploiting the ambiguities of an elusive universal freedom of expression, to refusing to pay taxes and levies as required by nation states laws, to data protection issues, definitely, a clash between the big tech companies and nation states was imminent. Add to this the incidents of damaging contents of racism, online bullying, paedophilia, cancel culture, warmongering, scaremongering and fake news which are perpetuated daily online; you could just about tell where the cause of the next war would come from.
All of a sudden, social media platforms that promote free social interaction of people have inadvertently become an anti-social entity, where millions now dread to tread to retain their sanity. The two worlds of social media companies and governments are interfacing through a high octane grating of policy interactions which touches raw nerves. While one is operating on an amorphous philosophy of freedom of expression, the other hinges on a boundless national security position, which puts victims in gags according to the whims of government. It then becomes a thing of delicate balance: freedom of expression or national security? To what extent should we allow one to encroach on the other? Can social media companies be the platform and arbitrator at the same time? Or the responsibility should be that of the domicile governments of nation states; who breaths censorship as oxygen? Who should also be responsible for regulating the hordes of faceless scums who perpetuate mischief from remote locations in the name of freedom of expression? These are the fundamentals of the issue.
In one line of argument, governments are finding the handling of national emergencies more difficult because of exploitative fake news which are masquerading under freedom of expression. And when governments want to clamp down on what they consider to be fake news, perpetrators hide under repression of freedom to blackmail governments. On the other line of argument, governments are also using this encroachment excuse to stifle the genuine cries of the people by either banning or through stringent laws. Either way, fake news is a clear and present day menace to both nation states and social media companies.
Baptista and Gradim (2020), in their journal titled; Understanding Fake News Consumption: A Review, sourced from sought to understand why fake news seems to have a wide reaching appeal on many people. They summarised their findings, thus; “The proliferation and success of fake news are associated with its characteristics (more surreal, exaggerated, impressive, emotional, persuasive, click-bait, shocking images), which seem to be strategically thought out and exploited by the creators of fake news.
It is apparent that the purveyors of fake news understand the lacuna created by the ambiguity of freedom of expression and they are manipulating it judiciously.
With billions of users, social media companies now see themselves as some powerful “democracy,” akin to nation states. They now operate outposts all over the world like nation states, which they probably think to be, “embassies and diplomatic missions,” of the information age. Their greatest undoing however will be to underestimate nation states of physical boundaries backed by the legitimacy of national laws and the will to enforce.
- Adeniran, author of the Ifeajuna Manuscript, wrote from Abuja.
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