I'm Valerie Aurora I'm here to talk about the paradox of tolerance
and how it applies to tech companies today. In particular I want to
address the issue of how to support free speech without also supporting
white supremacy - tough question a lot of people are struggling with. Just a quick
disclaimer before we get into this. I'm representing only myself and Frame Shift
Consulting, no other organization or person. Many of the
companies I talk about in this talk are my clients but any information in this
talk about them is totally from public sources. I'm not using any private
information for that. Finally I'm not a lawyer and this is not legal advice so
talk to your lawyer if you have questions about legal
problems. Just to point out to some online resources I've put up the slides
and some various related research resources at this bitly link bitly slash
intolerable speech and you can see some more stuff on Twitter at frameshift LLC
If you're live tweeting this talk thank you very much please tag frameshift LLC
instead of my personal account thanks. All right so I just I'm going to set the
scene with reviewing the common u.s. approach to free speech and I'm talking
about the the general common knowledge or how people think about it and it can
be summarized in this way with these words: I disapprove of what you say but I
will defend to the death your right to say it and that's author Beatrice Hall
describing Voltaire's beliefs. Right so there's an interesting problem here: what
if the people whose right to speech you are defending actually want you to be
dead. That this is their goal they want to kill you and that makes them happy
that you're dying defending their speech. Well back in 2003 the onion took on this
kind of problem with this approach to free speech at a joke satirical
newspaper article entitled ACLU American Civil Liberties Union defends Nazis
rights to burn down ACLU headquarters. Right the Nazis would like for the ACLU
to not exist,
all right excellent. Somehow appropriate now we fast forward
to 2017 and it's looking more and more like actual reality the ACLU did defend
the rights of people with actual Nazi flags to march in Charlottesville and
they carried torches, they threatened to light people on fire, they beat people
and they injured dozens and they actually murdered a person as we all
know so this is an actual real problem. Something that was a joke in 2003 we are
concerned about being in reality even worse than that our president responded by
saying that there were fine people on both sides of this violence and various
other comments which seem to be supporting white supremacist and
as a result about 37% of the people polled thought that his response was
either somewhat appropriate or very appropriate. So this is a new world we
are finding ourselves in it's so new and different that the ACLU did actually
change its policy after a Charlottesville. This is what Anthony
Romero the executive director of the ACLU has to say: if a protest group
insists no we want to be able to carry loaded firearms well we don't have to
represent them they can find someone else. Keep in mind the ACLU has been
defending Nazis since 1934. This is an enormous change to make for this
organization (audience question) I'm sorry I can't explain why the ACLU is supporting Nazis
they but there's lots of articles about why they do it. They have a theory. So
what I want to talk about is what this means for tech companies and tech
workers in particular, everyone here. The outline of this talk is I'll first talk
about what the paradox of Tolerance is then I'm going to go over my proposed
Intolerable speech rule. It's proposed because I'm hoping you'll improve it. I'm
going to talk about examples of tech companies taking action based on the
paradox of tolerance just to show nobody is alone in this. A
lot of people are doing it now, and I'll talk about how to implement the paradox
of tolerance at your company. So David told you a little bit about
this but I'll repeat for the people who won't get the introduction. I was a
software engineer specializing in the Linux kernel and file systems for over
ten years at which point I got tired of being
treated in a sexist way and I co-founded and was executive director of the Ada
initiative which supported women in open source software, Wikipedia, and things
like that. I founded Frame Shift Consulting which is a diversity and
inclusion and technology consulting company here in San Francisco. As part of
that I teach the Ally Skills Workshop which teaches people with more privilege
and power how to support people with less privilege and power. I've taught it
to over 1,900 people in eight countries at this point. More relevant to this
topic - it was interesting digging up things I
was proud of - Breitbart news wrote about me in 2015 back when most people had
never heard of it. They said that I was trying to frame Linus Torvalds for
sexual assault. No I wasn't. So I'm just proud they wrote a scurrilous hateful
wrong article about me back then. Starting around 2016 I started
doing a number of other things around politics. One of the things I started
doing is tweeting using my company account about politics in mid-2016.
After the election I co-organized the never again tech
pledge where over 2,800 tech workers took a pledge not to support human
rights abuses with their work. I wrote a post explaining how to change people's
hearts and minds and your families and friends who might have bigoted or
intolerant opinions. I went on marches and made protest signs. I called my
representatives. I donated thousands of dollars. I did all of the thing. One of
the things I did is I studied fascism. I read these books and many others and
many other sources of information on both the rise of fascism and the
situations in which fascism was thwarted before it could come to full flower and
that's where I learned about the paradox of tolerance. So the paradox of tolerance
is actually just a rule with one exception but paradox makes it sound
cooler. So the paradox is: a tolerant society should be tolerant by default
with one exception it should not tolerate intolerance itself. So there's a
great Wikipedia page you can send to people or look for more details on
it but I'll talk a little bit more about it. This is a graph of deaths
by country in World War two both in absolute numbers of millions and the
percentage of the total population. The paradox of tolerance was formulated in
1945 at the end of World War two by Karl Popper. This is absolutely no coincidence
because we just went through a situation in which being too tolerant put us in a
situation of having a gigantic World War. When we tolerated Mussolini in
invading Ethiopia and said hey you know what they're intolerant, they're terrible,
but if we just give them this they'll stop and be satisfied, we made a big
mistake. Same thing happened with Hitler annexing various places around Germany.
We said ok he'll be happy once he has this and he'll stop. This was known as
appeasement. You can also call it being tolerant of intolerance. Another way to
look at it is that a tolerant society has a right to self-defense.
If the tolerant societies had not fought back against intolerance
they would have been wiped from the face of the earth. There would be no tolerant society. So if you want there to be tolerance it must defend
itself and sometimes that means being intolerant. All right so hopefully that's
enough on what can be a tricky issue but that's the paradox of tolerance. So
let's look at what it looks like in practice and I'll start here
with the European Convention on Human Rights which says everyone has the right to
freedom of expression. The exercise of these freedoms may be subject to such
formalities conditions restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and
are necessary in a Democratic Society for the protection of the reputation or
rights of others and in particular the protection of the rights of others is
important here. So an example of this is laws against denying the Holocaust. The
idea here is that the Holocaust was such a terrible
event that we can't risk debating the facts of how it happened because if - or
whether it was important - because if we lose that information, if we lose that
knowledge, we could repeat it. There are laws against denying the
Holocaust in around seventeen countries. Most of them are located in Europe or
were heavily affected by World War two - that would be Russia - with the exception
of the country that was created in part by the Holocaust which is Israel.
There's some sort of experience with this with the Holocaust that led people
to say we need to restrict speech in this particular way. So here's a more
down-to-earth everyday example and also it's not a Valerie Aurora
talk unless I have a tweet from Jenn Schiffer in it. So Jenn Schiffer is a
software engineer artist and humorist and she tweets: a very easy and fun
activity is not letting people use your software for
racist garbage. This is a very important thing to bring up when talking to future
current employers: what's your stance on Nazis using your product. Right so just
as an individual software developer you can say, hey you know I'm not going to
support people who are white supremacists. That's just my choice. So
let's talk about tech companies and freedom of speech and sort of this -
what was the norm maybe a few years ago and which is becoming less and less the
norm. So historically a lot of people would approach the the topic of what
content to host as just: support all speech as long as it's not actually
literally illegal, if it's not spam, or if it's not directly harming the service. A
bunch of companies will say that they have rules against harassment and abuse on
their platforms but that's pretty indifferently implemented so I won't put
that - I won't include it as totally common. One of the issues we suffer from
when we talk about free speech and tech companies and how that affects our
decision what to host is something called legal talisman syndrome. This is
coined by the lawyer Kendra Albert and a legal talisman is a legal
term of art that's out of place. It's invoked to make or justify substantive
decisions that don't involve formal legal process.
So you're taking - often times when you use the phrase free speech you're bringing
all of these connotations of a vast powerful government which
could greatly harm things if it censors and this huge body of First Amendment
law and very serious people arguing in suits in front of courts and
you're applying it to a private company making decisions about which clients to
support. These are two totally different situations but through the
magic of legal talisman you can then introduce a great deal of uncertainty
and doubt. It's so common that there is a meme that's been created with the
concept that free speech is so meaningless if you say it over and over
again free speech free speech you end up saying freeze peach which is
approximately as meaningful as free speech in the context it's being used. so
this is a great comic from Naoise Dolan. Let's see: Now 100 percent nuance free
right like okay I can't get complicated, just free speech the end. So I recommend
looking that up it's great. So here's a freeze peach example. This is Twitter in
2012. Tony Wang says: generally we remain neutral as to the content because our
general counsel and CEO like to say that we are the free speech wing of the free
speech party. To which I say what you're not only the government, Twitter is the
government like, we are like the government but you also have parties and
you're the good party and what is he - what is even happening here. Like free
speech doesn't have meaning in this context.It's a great example of free
speech or legal talismans. So there are totally legitimate concerns about free
speech that do apply to individual private companies making decisions about
what which content to host. Governments do pressure companies to censor their
their work in ways that harm society. It's a thing to worry about a lot of
people express a concern like, how do I know I'm banning something because it's
bad or if I'm banning it because I just personally am prejudiced against them
because of the way I was I was raised. Are you going to have to reverse your
decision and look foolish? Will users leave the service because we
made a bad decision about what to host? Are we are we actually harming society
is a big question that people ask. So there's plenty of legitimate
concerns there but taking away this sort of blanket freeze peach approach is
really helpful. So here's what Karl Popper has to say and Karl Popper
again is the the philosopher who formulated the paradox of tolerance. He
says I do not imply for instance that we should always suppress the utterance of
intolerant philosophies. As long as we can counter them by rational argument
and keep them in check by public opinion suppression would certainly be unwise. So
he's saying there's a lot of cases in which censorship or banning or
suppressing speech is not the right answer but here's what he goes on to say.
But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force
for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of
rational argument but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid
their followers to listen to rational argument because it is deceptive and
teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. This is
precisely what's happening today. What do you think fake news is, right? This is a form of intolerance and hate which is impervious to
argument, to speech, to the usual methods of fighting bad ideas, and instead
they're coming out and saying you know what we'll just load up our guns and
we'll light our torches and we'll get our way by violence. So this is the
situation that we're talking about here, when we're talking about the paradox of
tolerance. So even the US Bill of Rights has something to say and I
love this quote from Waldo Jaquith who is the former ACLU Virginia Board
member who resigned as a result of the ACLU's decision to defend the
white supremacists marching in Charlottesville. He says the First
Amendment guarantees the right of the people peaceably to assemble. Peaceably.
When it became clear that the organizers' goal was violence that left me with no
qualms about their lack of First Amendment rights in this matter.
One more point I want to make here is that the level of tolerance
changes with context. So there's a great thing from Susan Benesch
the director of the dangerous speech project she says even in the US where we
have the most speech protective law some acts of speech are illegal.
Nobody has suggested that to fulfill freedom of expression every act of
speech has to be allowed. It doesn't mean you can post absolutely anything.
Everyone is figuring out how to draw the lines. And I like this this idea that
like we are - it is an ongoing process, there's no hard and fast rules, and it
changes depending on what's going on. So I would like to talk about tech
companies that are actually using the paradox of tolerance.
I made a spreadsheet because that's what you do. If you go to bitly slash
intolerable speech you'll find the link for that. I've currently got 37 entries
for 34 different companies including heavyweights like Apple Google Twitter
Uber even and of course Airbnb, you all. So let's go into a few of these. So I'm
gonna start with people who took action before Charlottesville. I think that's
only fair. October 27th 2016 Airbnb created the
community commitment for all hosts and guests so it goes like this: I agree to
treat everyone in the Airbnb community regardless of their race religion
national origin ethnicity disability sex gender identity sexual orientation or
age with respect and without judgment or bias. Which came in handy on August 8th -
still before Charlottesville - when Airbnb revoked the bookings and accounts for
dozens of people attending the unite the right rally in Charlottesville. Here's
the company's statement: when through our background check processes or from input
of our community we identify and determine that there are those who
would be pursuing behavior on the platform that would be antithetical to
the Airbnb community commitment we seek to take appropriate action including as
in this case removing them from the platform. So this is a great you know set
up and then spike. Spotify took action before Charlottesville as well they have
for many many years used a database of objectionable material maintained by the
German government to proactively ban white supremacist
material and bands and things like that. They do other bands on a case-by-case
basis and of as of November 2014 they'd already banned 22 of the 54 white
supremacist bands listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center and they were
deleting more after Charlottesville. They responded to
additional requests to delete more obscure comp white-supremacist content
and they said: we are glad to have been alerted to this content and have already
removed many of the bands identified today whilst urgently reviewing the
remainder. Facebook took action before and after Charlottesville. On
August 11th they removed the organizing page for the unite the right rally which
was the day before it and on the fourteenth afterwards they deleted many
more white nationalist groups' pages and profiles things like that. But I can't
give them a ton of credit because they had several warnings before that. In 2016
the Southern Poverty Law Center let them know about over 200 items, Facebook
deleted fewer than 10. May 10th Fast Company told them about 17 items
Facebook deleted two. July 31st The Guardian told them about 175 items they
deleted nine. Right it took Charlottesville it took frankly a white
woman being murdered before they were willing to take this action. I just want
to point out the moral of the story here: if the Southern Poverty Law Center reaches
out to you and says there's a problem with the content on your site you should
listen to them because they're the experts. An example from a company that's
proactively doing this: Bumble is in online dating websites or dating service
similar to Tinder but with a pro-woman slant. It was co-founded by
Whitney Wolfe who experienced being sexually harassed and discriminated against
as a co-founder of Tinder. So as an explicitly pro-woman service they
experienced a lot of attacks motivated by misogyny, so they were aware bad
people are out there and they need to do something about it and they extended
that into hate symbols - being very proactive about finding and removing
profiles with hate symbols, especially white supremacist hate symbols.
So after Charlottesville they formally partnered with the Anti-Defamation
League which maintains an up-to-date database of the latest symbols so they
could stay ahead of the curve. After Charlottesville, here's -
Wordpress which is run by the company Automattic. Before Charlottesville they
were asked by Fast Company why are you hosting a lot of these white supremacist
sites and their answer is we censor nothing, if it's legal we put it up.
August 15th they deleted American Vanguard without
further explanation. American Vanguard is the group that James Fields claimed
membership, in the alleged murderer in Charlottesville. So not exactly covering
themselves in glory but they did it. I just want to say something about Terms
of Service versus enforcement. So as I went through and collected this database
I noticed that most companies didn't change their terms of service, they just
changed the way that they enforce them and this is totally fine it's normal to
have a public-facing document and then a much more detailed much more quickly
changing set of internal guidelines. It's important is to keep those up to
date and actually put in the effort to enforce them. So you can check out the
various forms that terms of services used to ban this kind of hate speech and
hateful content and I just want to note that while Amazon has an extremely
explicit ban that covers white supremacist content, they are taking no
action before or after Charlottesville to remove white supremacist content. So I
want to talk about a few examples that weren't based on the paradox of
tolerance. CloudFlare on August 16th. It's a company that provides protection
against denial of service attacks. The daily stormer which was a white
supremacist website had an account with them. They terminated it on
August 16th and the leaked internal email said literally, I woke up in a bad
mood and decided someone shouldn't be allowed on the internet. No one
should have that power. And I do sympathize with this and agree you
shouldn't be making decisions about who is allowed to be on the Internet based
on being in a bad mood and I have a proposal for making that decision based
on other things. Here's another non paradox of tolerance
example Dreamhost. Dreamhost's official policy is we will host any website as
long as its content is legal in the United States of America. On August 24th
after the Daily Stormer had lost its denial of service protection, Dreamhost
terminated Daily Stormer's account for basically being the target of a
denial of service attack. I don't think that's a great way to make this kind of
decision is: it's unpopular and people are doing denial of services because
plenty of positive things get denial of
service attacks. All right so I just wanted to give you another freeze
peach reminder. I actually was given a little freeze peach model and I'll pass
it around the audience. My friend Gretchen Koch made it and if you
look in the slides you can find out more about it.
Freeze Peach, think of it next time somebody just says that with no context.
All right so here's my proposed rule and I'm calling it the
intolerable speech rule. It's probably going to undergo some more revisions but
here's the basics and I'll go over each element. I suggest that you ban people
from using your products if they are advocating for the removal of human
rights from people based on an aspect of their identity in the context of
systemic oppression primarily harming that group in a way that overall
increases the danger to that group. So we'll go over each one and then we'll do
a few examples. so the advocating for the removal of
human rights this covers a lot of things it includes like the right to not just
live but vote travel get medical care. This includes speech. There's a bunch of
things in this in this realm. I count dehumanizing or treating a group
as inferior categorically as meeting this criteria because humans don't need
human rights right you have to be human first many tech companies Terms of Service
already forbid - and they usually use the words promoting advocating or
encouraging violence or hate of this form so that's relatively
uncontroversial - from people based on an aspect of their
identity so it has to be based or rooted in a judgment on a person based on a
part of their identity that's something that's difficult to change so it's
something like race or gender or sexuality or disability religion is
interesting because parts of it you do not need to respect the intolerant parts
this is part of the paradox of tolerance just to be super clear it's not part of
your identity - your intolerant or bigoted opinions are not
part of your identity and it's okay to treat people differently based on that
in general it's it's according to this rule it's fine to advocate removing
rights from people based on things they actually did or they freely chose so we
feel as a society it's reasonable that someone convicted of murder may lose
their ability to travel as they are in prison that sort of thing there's limits
there's details I don't take that too far but that's just explaining that so
three in the context of systemic oppression primarily harming that group
this is really like not somebody says so on the internet but
there - people have done studies and they've run tests and they have
concluded there is a systemic oppression so as an example systemic sexism hurts
everyone it's true but it hurts women and non-binary people more than it hurts
men so you can't get away with like patriarchy hurts men too so don't
say anything mean about men and I'll give some more examples later on there's
plenty of reliable research out there people are often saying like well who is
systemically oppressed I'm like it's not actually rocket science the
difficulty comes if you believe that you have to convince the person you're
banning that they aren't part of an oppressed group you don't you only have
to convince yourself so do that all right that overall increases the danger
to that group so as Karl Popper said a lot of speech is better off if you let
it go out there and then you just treat it the normal way with like other people
responding to that speech right criticism and all that and there's some
some hate speech that makes the target group safer and here's some examples
quoting hate speech in order to denounce it providing material on hate speech
for those studying hate groups publishing private communications of
hate groups in order to embarrass them or ruin their or their organization
right so there's there's a way to say like hey we can allow this content
because it's making the world better so I'm just gonna give you a few examples
so say a famous black person tweeted maybe white people shouldn't vote for 10
years just take a break I argue according to this rule that you should
allow that kind of speech first it doesn't meet number three there's no
context there's - white people's votes are safe that's not going to change there's
no danger of that and in reality this is a joke meant to raise the awareness of
how normalized it is that there are people sitting in rooms right now trying
to figure out how to suppress the vote of people of color powerful people who
are succeeding and doing it right sothis is the kind of speech you
would allow on your platform here's another example that doesn't meet
this rule Wall Street Journal op-ed suggesting that Democrats should not be
allowed to vote so being a Democrat is not part of your identity so it doesn't
meet number two you because you can choose your political opinions but you
would might want to suppress the speech for other reasons like believing that
universal suffrage is really important or wanting to protect your newspapers'
reputation right so this isn't the only rule it's just one of many rules here's
another case that doesn't meet the test the Fast Company reporter in an
interview with the CloudFlare CEO said if I were to write on my blog I think
CloudFlare is homophobic and that's good because I hate gays that puts you in the
same position that you were with the Daily Stormer right so equating like
this little tiny random blog with a powerful hate site for white
supremacy I would say it doesn't meet number four this is the kind of thing
that you can have a normal response of other people criticizing
your little tiny blog maybe maybe not but I would say not all right and here's
one more example people posting the Daily Stormer article attacking
Heather Heyer on facebook with comments denouncing it I would say number four it
doesn't increase the overall danger to the group and actually it helps because
a whole bunch of people were expressing disgust Facebook also made this
exception so this is not the only test it's one of many you should keep using
all your other tests but it covers a really bad loophole that a lot of
companies have alright just another free speech this one by my friend Stephanie Szvan
I have on the little subtitle saying not sure what it is but it's mine you know
this vague idea like vague I have something that makes whatever I'm doing
okay so I like that all right so we're close to the end here implementing the
paradox of tolerance here's some here's the basics of it update your Terms of
Service if necessary you'd be surprised how often that isn't necessary there's a
lot of language out there already continuously update your enforcement
guidelines including proactively seeking out evolving threats so not just
waiting until you notice or somebody else points it out to you a really
important part of this is having a diverse and empowered team that's not
only implementing the terms of service but also creating the guidelines the
enforcement guidelines and the Terms of Service so there needs to be power and
feedback going on there and you should listen to and partner with experts there
are people who founded whole nonprofits to study these kinds of things they're
experts they want to help you they're often willing to do it for free
so do that so I just want to go into a few details around this legal issues
people sometimes are worried about as always ask your lawyer if you have a
real legal concern I just want to point out that in many cases the law is
actually supportive of implementing the paradox of Tolerance. Examples
there's anti-discrimination laws for how you provide lodging in the United
States sure helps if you don't have a bunch of white supremacist hate speech
in your users' profiles right I'm sure that will help that anti harassment or
anti-stalking laws if you're not helping people do those things and non-US laws
tend far more towards restricting speech in fact Twitter has like a special
Holocaust denial mode that in countries where that law is active it just won't
show certain Twitter accounts why can't you do that for all the countries oh I
don't know okay so structural issues there's a good question here this is a
question the CloudFlare CEO is asking why are tech companies making
these decisions? it's a good question it's not a great situation that we're in
that tech companies have this kind of power he was saying and many others
would rather that there were clear legal limits and they could just implement
those and they would be fine many countries do have better laws including
most of the EU but the laws will always lag or be out of step and we'll have to
be willing to take action ourselves so we need to stay ahead of that and still
do what we can what where we can all right so advice on advocating for change
at your company so Liz Fong-Jones has a really great summary of how she led
several campaigns to change company policy at Google the gigantic very
important company you can find that on my blog you can also hire me or I would
suggest why Y-Vonne Hutchinson at ReadySet to help you with implementing these
sort of things here's some arguments you can use
depending on what works for the person you're talking to I don't necessarily
agree with all of these or think they are good arguments they're just
arguments that sometimes work so hosting hate groups is bad for the brand
that was one of the things that the CloudFlare CEO talked about. He was like we
don't want to be the denial of service protection company for white supremacists
like that's not it no that won't help us hate groups are just bad clients. They are
unethical they are cheap they are mean they're just jerks
nobody likes working with them it's just miserable fascism overall is bad for
business as it mobilizes the entire economic output of a nation for the
purpose of going to war so I suggest that you help prevent it it's harder to
recruit and retain employees if you host a bunch of hateful groups on your
service people just don't want to do that they don't want to work for a
company that does it and that's not how they want to spend their days it reduces
your legal exposure because frankly hate groups do illegal things they want to
kill people and do many other bad things so it's helpful personal arguments you
can stop feeling bad about your job and sleep better at night
you like living in a free society you care about fairness and justice your
friends might start avoiding you if you work for a company that supports hate
groups and this is totally a real concern yeah random arguments I don't
these are terrible but if they work use it everyone else is doing it and now you
can give them a spreadsheet at least 34 other tech companies with big names Karl
Popper and a bunch of other old white male philosophers say that this is the
right thing to do if you think they think that's a good argument go for it and
World War II is what happens when people are tolerant of intolerance we could
skip that this time that would be great all right so here's the call to action
please tell other people about the paradox of tolerance the wiki page is
great there's other options I keep thinking about making business cards
with the paradox of tolerance just printed it on them organize other tech workers
at your company to adopt the Intolerable speech rule at your company ask your
legislators to pass laws that take the paradox of tolerance into account let me
tell you though the US anti-discrimination laws are on terrible
footing it would be really nice to improve this and finally donate to the
Southern Poverty Law Center that's something you can do right now they're
doing great work they're amazing and you should support it all right
that's it thanks I appreciate it