One Person’s Terrorist, Another Person’s Freedom Fighter: Ronan Farrow, #twitterpurge, and The Moral Responsibility of Corporations

Do social media companies have a moral obligation to protect their users from harm? This debate has resurfaced in the wake of political commentator Ronan Farrow’s controversial Washington Post opinion piece “Why aren’t YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter doing more to stop terrorists from inciting violence?” and late July’s #twitterpurge debacle. Both cases called into question whether corporate oversight, as opposed to crowdsourced approaches to reporting unlawful content, could engender a chilling climate of corporate-led censorship.

In his piece, Farrow – to the ire of thinkers such as Jillian York and Glenn Greenwald – argued in favor of social media corporations taking a more active, explicit role in curbing access to “terrorist” content. Vaguely, he classified terrorist content as "material that drives ethnic conflict." Stating that this content deserved the same clampdowns as child porn, Farrow wondered why corporations haven’t employed every resource they possess to remove these incitements to violence.

Farrow acknowledged in passing the free speech abuses that could result from corporate content filtering, the pragmatic impossibility of monitoring voluminous content, and the notion that top-down restrictions will only inspire further resistance from offending parties. Still, he maintained that every Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube holds a moral obligation to its users that usurps these concerns. To bolster his argument, he looked to the example of radio media’s complicity in fueling ethnic conflict in Rwanda.

Can one person’s terrorist be another person’s freedom fighter? It’s a question that has enlivened counterrorism debates in the wake of 9/11. Corporate representatives responded to Farrow’s calls with this precise claim, justifying the calls for limited corporate interference in the name of protecting the fundamental principle of free speech.

Days later, York authored a scathing takedown of Farrow's piece. After pointing out that shutting down social media accounts is likely to bring more, rather than less, attention to offending causes, York critiqued Farrow’s call for an automatic algorithm to detect and remove calls for violence, noting that child pornography-detecting algorithms—on