Jamal Greene: evaluation

Transcript context

…Facebook is a big player in the market. You don’t have to think it’s either collusion or that Facebook is a monopoly, but it’s just like, if one employer fires you, a lot of others will be reluctant to hire you. They’ll think, “Oh, something went wrong.” If Facebook takes down a content poster, then Twitter and YouTube must think, “Well, Facebook looked into this. Facebook even has this oversight board, a lot of smart people on it, a lot of diverse points of view.” Shouldn’t that make you much more reluctant to argue for something not being on Facebook? Well, I’m skeptical that that’s, in fact, how YouTube and Twitter behave, that they take things down because Facebook takes something down. I’d also say, look, it’s complicated. There are things that come down because there are good reasons to take them down. Yes, as I said, I think one should be concerned with market concentration and market power. One should be concerned if there is speech that should be proliferating but isn’t. One should be concerned that the decision-makers are private actors. One should also be concerned with the harms of certain kinds of speech and the ways in which those harms can be amplified in the social media context. One should be concerned about the particular rights of the platform. These are private companies, but also have their own views about what their speech environment should be. There are a number of other factors that count in addition to whether some particular piece of content should get spread. Now, you’ve argued in the past that there’s no constitutional right to privacy, and I think I agree with everything you have written on the topic. But if I introduce a new angle, I’m wondering if I agree with you. Right now, facial and gait surveillance are much more prominent than when you wrote your original articles. If someone said, “Well, I’m worried about facial and gait surveillance.” These are genuinely infringing upon a right to privacy, in the literal sense of that term, that’s much more literal than the other context where the right to privacy has been invoked. Would you still say there’s no right to privacy?…

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