Facebook, Twitter and Youtube: What Role do Social Media Companies Have in Stopping Speech? | UT News | The University of Texas at Austin

After the extremist group ISIS posted a YouTube video of American journalist James Foley's execution, Google-owned YouTube took the video down, and Twitter's CEO said in a tweet, "We have been and are actively suspending accounts as we discover them related to this graphic imagery."

Who would want to see the gruesome video or further the militants' propaganda goals? Count me out. However, it is wrong that Twitter and YouTube made that decision for us, without a clear explanation. Twitter, showing its inconsistency, declined to suspend the Twitter accounts run by the New York Post and New York Daily News, which also posted images from the beheading.