Nadine Strossen, a law professor and former president of the American Civil Liberties Union.
“Even if we have content moderation that is enforced with the noblest principles and people are striving to be fair and impartial, it is impossible,” she said, testifying at the June 26 House hearing. “These so-called standard are irreducibly subjective. What is one person’s hate speech … is somebody else’s cherished loving speech.”
“I did read every single word of Facebook’s [content policing] standards and the more you read them, the more complicated it is. And no two Facebook enforcers agree with each other and none of us would either. So that means that we are entrusting to some other authority the power to make decisions that should reside in each of us as individuals, as to what we choose to see and what we choose not to see and what we choose to use our own free speech rights to respond to.”
Though private companies, even the ones as large and influential as Google and Facebook, are not bound to protect free speech for the individual, “it is incredibly important that they be encouraged to do so,” she said.
Nailed it.