Uncivil Speech in the Social Media: Democracy, Political Liberalism, and the Virtue of Public Reason

Initial hopes of the democratizing potential of the internet are increasingly replaced by fear that a fragmented and unedited public sphere unleashes the destructive forces of populism, hate speech, and demagoguery (Tucker et al. 2017). In social media, these forces are amplified by algorithms used to feed designed to create “audience engagement.” Thus, toxic communication in social media is no accident as postings that provoke and elicit emotional responses are consistent with the business model (Saurwein and Spencer-Smith 2021; Maréchal 2021). At the same time, operators of social media supervise and regulate postings on their platforms. Content violating “community standards” risk being demoted, flagged, or deleted, while users that do not comply with these standards are potentially excluded or “deplatformed” in the new vocabulary. As emphasized by Gillespie (2018), content moderation is an unavoidable feature of social media. Standards for content moderation frequently target hate speech, disinformation, and violent threats. Few deny that measures taken to reduce such content are or can be justified. Less obvious is if platforms should regulate and moderate uncivil speech; words or utterances that communicate rudeness, impoliteness, insult, or hostility.1 Uncivil speech is here defined as denigrating but not hateful speech: uncivil speech and hate speech are thus mutually exclusive categories (Waldron 2013). Hence, the question is whether social media providers should delete, demote, or flag uncivil postings and comments. Are they justified in ultimately excluding from their platforms users that engage in what Meta (2017) calls “language that seems designed to provoke strong feelings”? The value of freedom of speech is a reason to worry about regulating uncivil speech in social media. Just as there is reason to object to governments that suppress free speech in the public sphere, we should arguably oppose acts of censorship by social media platforms in the “digital public sphere” (Schäfer et al. 2015). Accordingly, critics argue that the regulatory activities of social media platforms are contrary to basic democratic values and principles. The suppression of speech in social media is a species of “cancel culture” that stifles freedom of expression and undermines the value of democratic participation (e.g., McGarvey 2022). Against these critics, it is worth keeping in mind that content moderation has for a long time been institutionalized in traditional media (Ward 2014). Publishing and broadcasting is unthinkable without editors enforcing professional standards, codes of responsible journalism and self-regulatory nongovernmental institutions. Hence, the normative issues at stake in the digital public sphere are not altogether new. What is new is who the relevant players are. Standards of content moderation in social media are not defined by members of the journalistic profession but by corporations that apply them against ordinary citizens creating online content. The cumulative effects on the public sphere are also different. The sense is that social media are responsible for an unprecedented “crisis of civility, a veritable war of words that distorts our public discourse” that ultimately threatens to undermine our democracy (Bejan 2017, 1). As the public sphere grows more uncivil, its democratic value quickly recedes. In a democratic society, the public sphere should be an arena for free opinion formation and “mass deliberation” among citizens. Ideally, the public sphere should contribute to keeping the democratic citizen informed, encourage critical perspectives that hold officials into account, and constitute a public arena that includes and represents the diversity of opinions and perspectives among citizens (Chambers 2012). But uncivil language is not informative, not instrumental to the accountability of public officials, and it does not represent the opinions and perspectives of citizens. To the contrary, the more nasty and “toxic” the public debate is, the less the public is likely to listen and participate in public discussions at all.2 According to Stephen Macedo (2022), we should welcome private initiatives to supervise and regulate uncivil speech that correct the dysfunctionalities of the digital public sphere. There is consequently disagreement on how democracies should respond to uncivil speech in social media. Some argue that freedom of speech is at peril if social media platforms regulate uncivil speech. Others take the opposite view and contend that democracy is at risk if social media do not regulate uncivil speech on their platforms. This paper asks what the democratic state should do; should it protect freedom of speech against the regulatory activities of social media corporations? Or, should the democratic state embrace and even encourage attempts by social media corporations to civilize speech on their platforms? The consequent framing of the normative problem is taking for granted the predominant framework of economic liberalism in which social media corporations operate. Whereas others argue for more radical solutions, this framing of the problem allows us to examine the viability of political liberalism for urgent normative issues “here and now.” The conundrum is answered from the standpoint of political liberalism, which offers an account of the “moral basis for a democratic society” (Cohen 2003, 86). 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