A little while back Facebook got a lot of slack for refusing to ban some particularly reprehensible hate speech groups. While Facebook’s representative employed the cause of free speech in their defense, many commentators have pointed out that, as a private company, Facebook has complete control of the speech on their site. (I wrote most of this series when this event was still playing out, but chose to take some time before completing it and posting.)  I believe, it is important to take a historical perspective when dealing with issues like this. Luckily, the Supreme Court has something to say on this issue. At least they do if you consider Facebook to share legal characteristics with a shopping mall.

Shopping mall owners have a tendency to go overboard in banning speech they personally disagree with. For example, t-shirts with such slogans as “Give Peace a Chance” have often been considered unacceptable by mall owners.

While a mall is used in roughly the same way as main street used to be, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that as private property the First Amendment doesn’t apply. Facebook too remains private property, which can be easily forgotten as, like a mall atrium, it is increasingly used as a public space. Given this precedent, it stands to reason that Facebook has no legal obligation to allow hate speech.

However, is it desirable that Facebook take it upon themselves to censor hateful viewpoints such as those in question? As the central online community space for a whole generation at least 2.5 generations, one could argue that it would be more desirable for Facebook to install their own First Amendment.

Why? This makes Facebook less likely to abuse their power to ban whatever they feel like. A lot of legitimate activism takes part on and through Facebook, including a lot of political activity. If Facebook is to remain a platform for such activity, a freedom of speech policy is critical.

For example, Facebook technically could have banned all speech favorable of the Obama campaign leading up to the recent election. Cries of censorship wouldn’t matter from a legal perspective. However, given Obama’s popularity on Facebook, such an action could have skewed the results in favor of McCain

It could be argued that, like for public spaces, the best safeguard against abuse of power in a public-like space like Facebook is an absolutist policy on freedom of speech.

Specifically because there are no legal First Amendment protections inside Facebook, this question becomes more urgent. This is not a question the courts can answer for us.   It is a question we need to answer for ourselves.  Whatever paths Facebook and the other big social networks choose now will set the precedents for later.

In this series of posts, I will argue that online communities share more in common with universities, libraries, and newspapers than they do with shopping malls.

• Do We Need a Scientific Literature? – Deep Thoughts and Silliness – Bob O'Hara's blog on Nature Network
  Insightful post on scientific literature. "This got me wondering – why do we consider peer reviewed research to be important? I’d actually suggest that peer review is of secondary importance, so I’ll discuss that later (if I remember). So, why do we need a scientific literature?"
  (tags: publishing stm journals peerreview science scholarlypublishing scholarlycommunication)
• Technology Review: Blogs: TR Editors' blog: Genetic Tests on the Horizon
  "The latest in genetic testing from the Consumer Genetics Conference."
  (tags: genetics)
• Home :: The Naked Truth :: Medical Textbooks Revealed
  Promising new medical textbook review site put out by HS. "Medical Textbooks Revealed: The Naked Truth, from the people who brought you Flesh and Bones is a website essentially written by medical students for medical students and aims to take the 'irk' out of the sometimes irksome task of choosing the right medical textbooks for you…who better to guide you through this maze than your peers and ensure you spend your precious cash in the very best way?"
  (tags: bookreviews medicalschool medicalstudent stm reviews elsevier textbooks)

• Michael Nielsen » Is scientific publishing about to be disrupted?
  An interesting essay on disruption and some lessons to be learned from newspapers. I don’t entirely agree with the prescription Michael offers though.
  (tags: science science2.0 scholarlypublishing scholarlycommunication stm journalism publishing evolution disruption newspapers michaelnielsen)

• All 2.0
  feed portal
  (tags: science20)

• arXiv.org help – Author Identifiers
  (tags: identity)
• Science Online London 2009
  Less than 50 spots left…. “The Web is rapidly changing the communication, practice and culture of science. Science online London 2009 will explore the latest trends in science online. How is the Web affecting the work of researchers, science communicators, journalists, librarians, educators, students? What can you do to make the best use of the growing number of online tools?”
  (tags: ScienceOnlineLondon2009 ScienceOnline ScienceBlogging conference)

• A Wandering Mind Heads Toward Insight – WSJ.com
  (tags: creativity science)

• Academic Productivity » Soft peer review? Social software and distributed scientific evaluation
  (tags: socialbookmarking peerreview)
• Quantifying success of science stimulus spend is challenging – Ars Technica
  “The US economic stimulus package contained substantial funds designated for scientific work and, eventually, we’re going to want to know whether that was money well spent. But providing anything more than the simplest of measures will be a real challenge.” – I am all for increased spending on basic science, but am not sure calling it stimulus money is entirely accurate.
  (tags: stimuluspackage science)

• Neenan Challenge – Success
  25,000 donors over 1 year matched by $500,000 in anonymous donations now that the goal is met! Encouraged “nano-gifts” of $8.63 in honor of BC’s founding in 1863. Most all of it goes to financial aid. A successful micro-payment fundraising campaign by a university!
  (tags: fundraising micropayments bc bostoncollege neenanchallenge)

• Scribd Store a Welcome Addition to Ebook Market (and 650 O’Reilly …
  Scribd is making a major move here. They are now direct competitors with Lulu and the POD establishment.
  (tags: ebooks POD)

• Galaxy Zoo: Citizen science on Rails
  Awesome presentation on distributed citizen science.
  (tags: science2.0 citizenscience)
• PLoS ONE: The e-Index, Complementing the h-Index for Excess Citations
  An alternative metric. It get’s pretty complicated pretty fast, making it tough to add a coherant snippet.
  (tags: alternativemetrics h-index bibliometrics)
• The Mouse Trap: Science 2.0 : what is and what needs to be
  Sandeep Guatam’s thoughts on the Patil and Siegel article: “However, while they believe that all the tools for online collaboration are already in place, I on the other hand think we need a more formalized one-stop system for scientists, where all their sharing, networking and collaborating needs are met…”
  (tags: science2.0 science scholarlycommunication)
• This revolution will be digitized: online tools for radical collaboration — DMM
  Inspiring article fantasizing about the potential of more collaborative science – “What if everyone in the world were in your lab – a ‘hive mind’ of sorts, but composed of countless creative intellects rather than mindless worker ants, and one in which resources, reagents and effort could be shared, along with ideas, in a manner not dictated by institutional and geographical constraints? by Chris Patil and Vivian Siegel* via Chris’ FF
  (tags: 2collab collaboration science science2.0 scholarlycommunication)