from the unfiltered-speech-can-be-good dept
In
the early hours of December 31st,
2019 weeks before the coronavirus was recognized as a budding
pandemic, Taiwanese Centers for Disease Control Deputy Director Luo
Yijun was awake, browsing
the PTT Bulletin Board.
A relic of 90s-era hacker culture, PTT
is an open source internet forum
originally created by Taiwanese university students. On the site's
gossip board, hidden behind a warning of adult content, Yijun found a
discussion about the pneumonia outbreak in Wuhan.
However, the screenshots from WeChat posted to PTT described a
SARS-like coronavirus, not the flu or pneumonia. The thread
identified a wet market as the likely source of the outbreak,
indicating that the disease could be passed from one species to
another. Alarmed, Luo Yijun warned his colleagues and forwarded his
findings to China and the World Health Organization (WHO). That
evening, Taiwan began screening travelers from Wuhan, acting on the
information posted to PTT.
A
niche Internet forum, not the WHO or Chinese Communist Party (CCP),
notified Taiwan, and the world more broadly, of the seriousness of
COVID-19 – the disease caused by the new coronavirus. The same
day, Wuhan’s
Municipal Health Commission described
the disease as pneumonia
and cautioned against assumptions of human-to-human transmission.
While Chinese health authorities downplayed the seriousness of the
outbreak, a lightly governed website
helped information about the disease to escape China’s Great
Firewall. As viral misinformation inspires skepticism of free speech
in the west and conservative
legal scholars express admiration for China’s system of
information control,
this episode illustrates the value of unfiltered speech.
PTT’s
gossip board is not fact checked by experts, and while the board has
some rules, it is a place for gossip rather than verified information
or news. The forum is governed far more liberally than contemporary
social media platforms with extensive community standards and tens of
thousands of paid moderators. While bulletin boards have largely
fallen out of favor with western Internet users, PTT probably is most
comparable to 4chan, the Something Awful forums, or Hackernews. In
the past, it has hosted
leaked government surveillance proposals,
and Chinese officials have recently complained
about the site
as a source of abusive speech about the WHO.
There
is a real difference between lightly governed or unmoderated spaces,
essentially ruled by the First Amendment (which inevitably play host
to the good, the bad, and the ugly) and platforms that are
specifically curated to highlight vulgar or illiberal content. 4chan
contains image boards dedicated to fashion, travel, umpteen forms of
Japanese animation, and /pol, a board for politically incorrect
conversation that receives an outsized amount of attention in
mainstream media. The Daily Stormer is a blog for white nationalists.
We must resist the urge to condemn ungoverned fora alongside badly
governed forums simply because both provide platforms for noxious
speech.
Because the Daily Stormer is specifically curated
to highlight neo-Nazi speech, we can safely assume that it won’t
host valuable information. Its gatekeepers explicitly select
fascistic speech for publication before the content goes live and are
unlikely to grant a platform to anything else. It certainly isn’t
a hangout for anonymous epidemiologists. 4chan, on the other hand,
contains its fair share of extremist speech but the platform is not
moderated by fascists, nor, for the most part, anyone at all. 4chan
hosts almost any sort of speech; despite being unverified, useful
information may still be posted there. Due to its lack of formal
gatekeeping, users’ comments are not screened for either
accuracy or good taste. As a result of 4chan’s norm of
anonymous participation, prominence, and popularity with particularly
active internet trolling communities in the mid-aughts, the site
gained a reputation as an informational free-for-all, rendering it a
useful dumping ground for both leaks of authentic nonpublic
information
and unhinged conspiracy.
Even
as its prominence has diminished, 4chan’s reputation ensures
that it remains a popular space to share privileged information,
often in concert with other essentially unmoderated publication
services such as Pastebin. Last year, News
of Jeffrey Epstein’s death
was first leaked on the site. While it can be difficult to prove the
veracity of any one claim, the existence of such a place--an
ungoverned information clearinghouse--has undeniable value.
Ungoverned fora allow arguments, assertions, and media to be freely
shared and considered without giving undue authority to unproven
assertions.
Because
users participate anonymously or pseudonymously, they cannot rely
upon, and subsequently do not risk, their permanent personal
reputations and credentials. Likewise, it is the very popularity of
these message boards as information clearinghouses that makes them
attractive to bad actors. If you want to publish a sensitive message,
for good or for ill, lightly moderated platforms are good tools for
the job.
Although
these platforms may spread disinformation, if read with a healthy
dose of skepticism the content they carry is not per-se dangerous.
Crucially, they fail differently than, in this case, Chinese state
health authorities, which had political reasons to downplay the
seriousness of the outbreak. Rather than providing filtered,
authoritative information that can cause widespread harm if
incorrect, such as the WHO
recommendations against mask use published throughout March,
open fora host many unfiltered claims that, without supporting
evidence, carry little authority whatsoever. A healthy information
ecosystem will contain both trustworthy authorities, and bottom up
information distribution networks that can correct institutional
failures. In a world in which seemingly authoritative sources are not
trustworthy, unfiltered platforms will gain credence, for good and
ill.
However,
as Luo Yijun’s late night discovery on PTT demonstrates,
unverified information can inform and illuminate, especially in the
absence of trustworthy authoritative information. Furthermore, if
used effectively, open-source information hosted on ungoverned
platforms can enhance the capability and legitimacy of traditional
institutions, such as the Taiwanese CDC. Liberally governed platforms
are often blamed for their role in transmitting falsity and hate but
seldom lauded when they facilitate the spread of life-saving
information.
Will
Duffield is a Policy Analyst at the Cato Institute
Filed Under: free speech, information sharing, taiwan, unfiltered information, unmoderated information
Companies: ptt