Silicon Values Quotes

“For example, Twitter and Facebook—both of which happily hosted Kim Kardashian’s nude bottom—removed the word “vagina” from an advertisement marketing a book about female anatomy, written by prominent gynecologist Dr. Jen Gunter.21 Similarly, journalist Sarah Lacy found that she was unable to advertise her book, entitled A Uterus Is a Feature, on Facebook.22 Plus-sized women have had their Instagram accounts removed for posting selfies in bikinis—something that skinny women do all the time without reprisal.23 Both platforms have also blocked advertisements for information about teen pregnancy, proper bra fitting, and gynecologist visits.24”
― Jillian York, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism

“Twitter and Facebook, had begun to crack down (albeit somewhat reluctantly) on the American far right the summer prior, their attempts to do so pale in comparison to the resources they put into policing extremist groups elsewhere in the world—or, to put it bluntly, extremist groups that happen to be Muslim and invoke the ire of Western politicians.”
― Jillian York, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism

“Although I am certain, for example, that the US government should not dictate to companies who is a terrorist, and that widespread bans on women’s partial nudity are discriminatory and harmful to the feminist cause, I still struggle to find the right answer to what we should do about suspected bots, or brigading, or how we should handle hateful speech that doesn’t quite reach the level of incitement.”
― Jillian York, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism

“Censorship is, as I hope this book makes clear, inherently political, and the more complex the rules, the more difficult they are to apply at scale. On top of that, as the past few months have demonstrated, the individual right to free expression is inherently in tension with public health and freedom from harm. These are not easy problems, and we must be wary of anyone who claims to have easy solutions.”
― Jillian York, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism

“They should be transparent about what they censor, provide users with ample notification, and ensure that every user has the right to appeal removals.”
― Jillian York, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism

“The final conclusion I’ve made is that we, the people, must decide what comes next. The events of the past decade have brought to the public fore a fairly widespread recognition that certain speech is beyond the pale, but in nearly every instance I have seen, regulatory and legislative proposals to restrict such speech take the wrong aim, punishing companies (and their workers) for errors, or for not moving fast enough, while failing to do anything to address the problems at the root.”
― Jillian York, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism

“The third conclusion I’ve made is: if governments are collaborating, so must we. When it comes to expression, one thing remains certain: no one will moderate the speech of governments or their officials. Sure, Twitter will fact-check Trump, and Facebook will boot members of foreign governments (and maybe someday even the president of the United States), but in the grand scheme of things, we might be watching the watchers, but no citizen has the power to silence them.”
― Jillian York, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism

“Second, we need true and meaningful representation and inclusion. Far too much of the external debate over the past decade has been dominated by white Americans, falsely framed as a First Amendment issue, and focused on political speech above all else, to the detriment of other key issues of free expression. And within companies—different as each may be—the focus is all too often on whatever pet issue the US media or lawmakers have adopted in a given week. Rarely is there sustained focus, inside or out, toward the threats faced by the world’s most marginalized people. And when attention is paid—as was the case with Myanmar and Facebook as well as GamerGate and Twitter—it is almost always too little, too late.”
― Jillian York, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism

“First, it is imperative that we understand and view content moderation as existing outside of and apart from extant systems of governance. At worst, content moderation is inherently broken and, at best, is an imperfect system retrofitted to societal structures that are already deeply flawed. The processes of content moderation were not built to scale, nor were the rules created by companies; rather, they were built over time like an onion being peeled in reverse, layers stacked upon layers, always reactive to external forces. To mitigate its harms, this system must be subject to a comprehensive, external audit of both rules and processes, policies and procedures.”
― Jillian York, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism

“In the early years of my work in this field, I observed as an elite crew of law professors and media experts, State Department officials, and corporate executives sought solutions that centered free expression issues that aligned, almost perfectly, with the goals of the US government.”
― Jillian York, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism

“Silicon Valley’s response to the pandemic—swift, reasonable, measured—is a precise example of this idea, evidencing that all along, tech companies could have taken steps to mitigate harms … but chose not to, instead focusing their attention on the things that governments and other powerful entities wanted them to censor. The fact is that when the potential harm to Americans is big enough, these companies will act. When the harm to foreigners is big enough, they will act only in the face of extraordinary pressure. And sometimes not even then. *”
― Jillian York, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism

“YouTube, which perhaps bore the brunt of the media’s ire, at first tried to make things right. Nicole Wong later called it “a moment where we needed the [help of the] human rights community [in order to] understand what we needed to see so that we wouldn’t make mistakes,” but YouTube later closed ranks, according to many activists who tried to reach the company as the situation in Syria escalated. The incidents from that period should have served as a lesson for company policymakers a few years later when the right-wing onslaught began, had their myopia, profit-mindedness, and deep-rooted US-centricity not blinded them to the glaring similarities between white supremacists and ISIS.”
― Jillian York, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism

“The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated the failures of American (and of course many other) institutions. But it has also shown us something interesting: although Silicon Valley companies have for years only wrung their hands as calls for genocide, death threats, and misinformation have proliferated globally on their platforms, now, in the face of widespread disease and death in the United States, they suddenly found the will to moderate certain expression.”
― Jillian York, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism

“Facebook is perhaps the most powerful and the least responsive to criticism. In 2020 alone, stories have emerged of Facebook’s highest-ranking policy staffer in India intervening to keep incitement by the country’s ruling BJP party online; of board member Peter Thiel dining with white nationalists; and of the prior role played by Facebook’s External Oversight Board Member Emi Palmor in censoring Palestinians’ speech. In each of these cases, the response from Facebook executives has been weak at best. The line where the state ends and Facebook’s rule begins is increasingly murky.”
― Jillian York, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism

“While accusations that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is a Nazi are surely exaggerations, it is not a stretch to say that white supremacy is alive and well in certain segments of Silicon Valley. From Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, a Trump donor who reportedly ran a “shitposting” account on Reddit, to Facebook board member Peter Thiel, known for attending white nationalist–friendly events and undermining free expression, to Clearview AI CEO Hoan Ton-That, perhaps Silicon Valley’s most notable alt-right supporter, the field is rife with white supremacist sympathizers.30”
― Jillian York, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism

“What stands out for me in this story is the seeming fact that Mark Zuckerberg and co. only pay attention to internal resistance when it reaches critical mass, which it only seems to do when the cause is American. I am aware of a number of attempts Facebook employees have made over the years to raise concerns about the handling of, for example, wrongful takedowns of Palestinian content or inattention to the growing problem of harassment … all of which were dismissed.”
― Jillian York, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism

“many around the world were beginning to find their voices online. The world before social media was different, as only certain voices were able to rise to the top, creating a skewed perception of what is globally tolerable. But when nearly everyone has equal access to the same platforms, the simple fact that not everyone thinks alike—and certainly not everyone shares the same values as those in the United States—becomes strikingly clear.”
― Jillian York, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism

“At least one journalist, Ehsan Ahrari of the Asia Times, pointed out the double standards of European countries in defending the freedom of expression to publish something so offensive to Muslims while enforcing censorship (such as Holocaust denial) in other instances. “To Muslims, the West appears stubbornly against compromising on the freedom of expression, and they see hypocrisy in this because this freedom is not as absolute as it is pretended to be in some quarters,” he wrote in a syndicated column.8 Ahrari additionally noted the impact of Western imperialism on Muslim countries and how it has quashed citizens’ hopes for true democracy and freedom: “The rot of authoritarianism, nepotism and corruption has been so entrenched that people cannot realistically aspire to be free, prosperous or see prospects of technological advance.”
― Jillian York, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism

“Algorithms are simply incapable of encapsulating human experience, regardless of what Silicon Valley would have us believe. And once companies have taken humans out of the loop and relinquished the reins to machines, there is no telling the sort of cultural norms they will eventually propagate in the future.”
― Jillian York, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism

“Facebook’s executives speak often of the platform being a global community, but those whose names do not fit within an Anglocentric idea of what is a name are subject to punitive measures that are not experienced by other users.”
― Jillian York, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism

“Algorithms of Oppression”
― Jillian York, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism

“Sudhra’s point gets at the subjectivity of defining what is “harmful”—and, viewed in light of most Silicon Valley platforms’ actual policies, it becomes clearer that their version of “harm” lines up almost precisely with historical American definitions of the same. That is why Facebook allows gun shops to advertise on their platform, but a book about vaginas is barred from doing so. It is why Donald Trump can call for the violent invasion of another country on Twitter with no consequence, but breasts are hidden behind an interstitial.”
― Jillian York, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism

“When drawings of vaginas are removed, we learn that we should be ashamed of our bodies. When female nipples are censored but male nipples are not, we know that we must police our own bodies to ensure we do not arouse men … The bodies, sexualities and desires that are allowed online, translates itself into the bodies, sexualities and desires that are accepted in society.”
― Jillian York, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism

“When pages that promote female pleasure are hidden, we understand that our pleasure is invalid,”
― Jillian York, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism

“In 2009, Facebook was employing just around 150 content moderators, who worked primarily from Palo Alto, making around $50,000 per year (consider that salary in light of the already-skyrocketing Bay Area rents at the time). Although the moderators’ focus was broad, covering an array of topics, a Newsweek article from that year failed to appreciate the workers’ broad responsibilities, calling them “porn cops,” but also conceded that they were key to the company’s growth.6 Simon Axten, a twenty-six-year-old Facebook employee profiled in the article, was quoted in the New York Times just four months later as saying that Facebook had tried outsourcing content moderation, but “had not done so widely.”7”
― Jillian York, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism

“in the middle of the decade, three revolutionary technological developments created the conditions for anyone to create and share videos: the smartphone, video-sharing platforms, and fast internet speeds enabled millions of people to capture, distribute, and consume video”
― Jillian York, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism

“Facebook and its counterparts operate more like churches than courts; they are subject to influence by states and the wealthy, and all too content with disregarding the needs of their subjects in favor of those with power.”
― Jillian York, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism

“the global default” of permissible speech, defined by a narrow set of actors and replicated by less powerful ones, that has become the status quo online.”
― Jillian York, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism

“So it’s not American values, per se, that are being exported to billions of users around the world, but the values of a very particular demographic—perhaps not incidentally the same demographic that made up Facebook’s first set of users.”
― Jillian York, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism

“Facebook and its counterparts don’t operate like courts; there is no case law, no checks and balances, and—until recently—no due process. The judges (content moderators) are not appointed or elected by voters, unlike in well-functioning democracies. There are simply no systems of accountability to the process and, as such, the same image that might be banned for one user can be allowed for another.”
― Jillian York, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism