Pipeline Leaks and Stakeholder Theory
Filed under: accountability, corporate citizenship, corporations, CSR, management, pollution, shareholders, stakeholders |
Comments (2) When oil spills in a forest, does everybody matter? That’s the question posed by the events recounted in this recent CBC story: Wrigley residents voice pipeline spill concerns.
The story is about an Enbridge pipeline that sprung a leak in a tiny, remote town in Canada’s Northwest Territories. Not surprisingly, residents of tiny Wrigley are unhappy about the spill, and so Enbridge has to figure out not just what to do about the spill (i.e., how to clean it up) but what to do about the people of Wrigley. More generally, managers at Enbridge have got to figure out, on an ongoing basis, what their obligations are, and to whom those obligations are owed.
There’s an older school of thought (or more likely a caricature of an older school of thought) according to which shareholders are the only ones whose interests really need to be taken seriously. According to this view, an oil company’s managers’ only real obligations are owed to shareholders. After all, says this view, shareholders own the company, and they’re the ones who (indirectly) hired these managers to make money on their behalf. If anyone else matters, they matter in a strictly instrumental way. Don’t treat your customers badly, for example, because they’re the key to making a profit. Or, in the present case, don’t irritate the people of Wrigley, because if you do they might do something inconvenient, like protesting.
A leading modern alternative to the only-shareholders-matter view is sometimes called the “stakeholder” view (or sometimes, in academic circles, “stakeholder theory.”) The core of the stakeholder view is the idea that the real ethical task of corporate managers is to balance the interests of various stakeholders — various individuals and groups whose interests intersect with those of the corporation. After all, many people contribute to the success of a firm, from customers to suppliers to members of local communities. And if they all contribute, they all have the right to ask for something in return. (You can read a summary of my review of a recent book on the topic, here: Managing for Stakeholders.)
The pipeline story is an excellent example of both the strengths and the limits of the stakeholder perspective. It’s surely useful for executives at Enbridge (or any other company, in the midst of an environmental crisis) to survey the situation and ask, “Who do we need to talk to? Who has a stake in this?” So, are the people of Wrigley stakeholders in Enbridge? Pretty clearly, yes. But after that, things get complicated. Does the environment itself automatically count as a stakeholder of some sort, or does it only count if the well-being of the people of Wrigley is jeopardized? What about the residents of Zama, Alberta? That’s the little town, 850 km away from Wrigley, to which Enbridge is planning to ship the contaminated soil. What about me? Like most people, I’m a consumer of oil. I clearly have a stake, here, don’t I? Pretty clearly, there are stakeholders and then there are stakeholders.
But anyway, once you’ve figured out who the stakeholders are, then what? Let’s take the easy one, a group that’s directly affected, namely the people of Wrigley. What are they owed? Are they owed the cleanup? Are they owed a speedy one? At what cost? Do they have a right to participate in the decision-making, or just to be kept informed? Or are they owed, as one resident of Enbridge suggested, a “swimming pool or a hockey arena or something for the kids”?
As you can see, one problem with the stakeholder view is that the word “stakeholder”, itself, doesn’t actually clarify much. Yet some people tend to sprinkle it on like fairy dust, as if simply anointing someone a Stakeholder™ clarifies what is owed to them, ethically. Life in the little town of Wrigley should be so simple.
Managing for Stakeholders (Book Review)
A couple of years ago, the editors of Business Ethics Quarterly asked me to write a feature-length review of Managing for Stakeholders: Survival, Reputation, Success (2007), by R. Edward Freeman, Jeffrey S. Harrison, and Andrew C. Wicks. It was a daunting task. The book was a highly anticipated one — the lead author of the book, Ed Freeman, is the man who imported the term “stakeholder” into the world of business ethics back in 1984, in his much-cited (and recently re-issued) book Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach. Further, Managing for Stakeholders is a book aimed specifically at a non-academic audience, and yet I was being hasked to review it for a scholarly journal. The 4500-word result appeared in the October, 2009 issue of BEQ (Vol. 19, No. 4).
For anyone unfamiliar with the term, a stakeholder in a company is roughly any person or group that can affect, or be affected by, that company’s operations. It’s a useful concept, though its real contribution to business ethics is up for debate. Freeman’s key insight, nearly 30 years ago, was that business managers have obligations to a range of stakeholders (rather than just to shareholders), and that hence the manager’s job is to balance the interests of various stakeholders. But identifying someone as a stakeholder just means, ethically, that they matter — somehow. That still leaves unanswered a whole range of harder questions about how to balance the interests of various stakeholder groups when those interests conflict.
So, here’s a brief summary of my review of Managing for Stakeholders:
On the plus side:
1) The book’s authors express their intention to tell “a new narrative” about business, one according to which a manager’s legitimate social role goes beyond short-term profit-making. They’re right. We desperately need such a narrative.
2) The authors of Managing for Stakeholders aim their message directly at managers, rather than at other scholars, and they try hard to make it a narrative that managers, themselves, can take up and consider their own. In other words, their book isn’t just about managers, it is for managers.
3) The book wisely encourages managers to seek out what might colloquially be referred to as “win-win” solutions. Creating value for all, when possible, is both wise and ethically good.
On the minus side:
1) The authors of Managing for Stakeholders portray, as the “standard” view to which their view is intended to be an alternative, a view of managerial capitalism that I doubt anyone actually holds. According to them, the “standard” view (held by managers and scholars) is that the goal of capitalism is only to generate value for shareholders, and that other stakeholders need not even be considered. This is of course false.
2) The authors of Managing for Stakeholders try very hard to deny that there is any real conflict between the interests of different stakeholders. They’re right to point out that commerce is a cooperative game from which all voluntary participants ought to benefit; what’s in the interest of one stakeholder needn’t automatically be against the interests of another. But that’s not to say that there’s never any conflict at all.
3) Managing for Stakeholders also seems to assume that the mindset of managers is all that matters — it contains no discussion of corporate culture, and no discussion of the requirements of good corporate governance or the dictates of corporate law.
4) The authors slide from the very reasonable claim that managers ought to manage stakeholder relationships to the the much-less-plausible claim that managers ought to manage the corporation for stakeholders. The latter claim is one that many others believe, but it needs support, and it certainly shouldn’t be confused with the former claim.
5) The book also make a faulty leap of logic in jumping from the very sane claim that business is in some sense about creating value for all to the much-less reasonable claim that it is the role of individual managers to ensure value for all concerned. The latter claim puts a lot of pressure on the very managers these authors seek to help, as well as implying what is likely a violation of employment contracts and committing the fallacy of division.
But the biggest problem with Managing for Stakeholders, I argue in my review, was that it was unlikely to serve well its intended audience, namely managers. For example, the authors of the book steadfastly refuse to cite any social science (including economic) literature to back up their many empirical claims. This is surely a result of their well-intentioned populist approach, but the result is that many claims go unsupported, and managers who want to learn more are left with nowhere to turn. And by telling managers that a “simple” change of mind-set is all that is needed, the book fails to make good on the now decades-old promise to turn the term “stakeholder” from a mere category word into a useful tool for ethical decision-making.
Highest Standards Aren’t Always Best in Ethics
Filed under: accountability, character, conflict of interest, decision-making, ethics, government, regulations, standards, trust, values |
Leave a Comment No one wants low ethical standards, but it’s also a mistake to aim at the highest possible standards — at least it can be, depending on what you mean by “highest.”
See, for example, this useful piece on defence contractors, by Noah Shachtman for Wired: Pentagon Probe Will Review Every Darpa Contract
Since Regina Dugan became the director of Darpa [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency], the Pentagon’s top research division has signed millions of dollars’ worth of contracts with her family firm, which in turn owes her at least a quarter-million dollars. It’s an arrangement that has raised eyebrows in the research community, and has now drawn the attention of the Defense Department’s internal auditors and investigators…
The story usefully points out that aiming for the highest possible standards of integrity can also cause trouble:
[A former director’s] bright ethical guidelines had unintended consequences. If a company allowed an employee to take a sabbatical to join Darpa, the firm was essentially blocking itself from millions of dollars in agency research projects.
The result, of course, is that under the old rules the agency risked cutting off useful sources of expertise. That’s not to say that the old rules were worse. It’s just to point out that there’s a legitimate trade-off here.
There’s a very general lesson to be drawn from this. When thinking about ethics, the goal isn’t always to be squeaky-clean. The goal is to find standards that are high enough to merit the trust of relevant stakeholders, and to do so without sacrificing other, possibly-equally important, values.
Consider this graphic, which illustrates the challenge of choosing experts to make decisions. On one hand, we want people with real expertise. On the other hand, we want to avoid conflict of interest. That is, we want maximum expertise and minimal risk of bias. So the upper-left quadrant of this graphic is the sweet spot:
Note that what we’re looking for here is not the “highest possible” standard of integrity (i.e., the standard that implies the lowest possible risk of bias among decision-makers), but a system that makes the optimal tradeoff between risk of bias, on one hand, and relevant expertise, on the other. The point here is not that we’re trading off ethics and expediency. The point is that we’re trading off competing, ethically-significant values.
The point in thinking about ethics is not to aim at the highest standards, but at the best standards. We do enormous damage both to the functioning of organizations and to people’s willingness to talk openly about ethics when we talk about “high standards” in a way that comes off as unthinkingly pious.
Academic Business Ethics and the Corporation as Political Actor
Filed under: corporate citizenship, corporations, CSR, ethics, governance, government, law, personhood, politics, regulations, rights |
Comments (1) I’m returning home today after spending the weekend at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Business Ethics, the world’s foremost association for academics engaged in the study and teaching of issues related to business ethics, corporate social responsibility, and so on. (It was a fantastic meeting and anyone with a professional interest in these issues should consider joining SBE.)
One of the dominant themes of this year’s meeting was the role of the corporation in the political realm. It’s an old topic, one revitalized by the US Supreme Court’s decision last year in the Citizens United case. Corporate involvement in the political sphere takes many forms (from lobbying to campaign donations to participation in collaborative approaches to regulation). Such involvement is probably inevitable, but definitely controversial, and so there’s lots to sort out regarding how we should understand corporations in the political realm, and what rights and responsibilities they should have in that world. Among several dozen scholars presenting their research at the SBE meeting, a striking proportion of them presented work related to this set of topics.
David Ronnegard and Craig Smith, for example, presented work that elucidated the connection between competing theories of business ethics, on one hand, and competing theories from political philosophy, on the other.
Anselm Schneider and Andreas Scherer presented their work on the changes in corporate governance necessitated by (what I would call) the quasi-governmental responsibilities that corporations sometimes take on in the international sphere.
Pierre-Yves Néron presented work arguing that the way we think of corporations in the public sphere ought to be strongly influenced by thinking about the kinds of corporate behaviours (including regulatory lobbying, for example) that can either improve or frustrate market efficiency.
Waheed Hussain presented his work on what it might look like to “civilize” the corporation to make its participation in the political realm less worrisome — essentially, by fostering among corporations a “public interest” ethos, and insisting that lobbying etc be framed in terms of the public good.
Wayne Norman encouraged his fellow business ethicists to pay more attention to regulation, rather than focusing (as the typically do) on the corporate ethical obligations that go “beyond mere compliance”.
I myself presented some of my current thinking on the various ways we might think of corporations in their interactions with government. In particular, I argued that while, in some cases, it makes sense to conceptualize the corporation as an agent in its own right, there are other cases (perhaps many more cases) in which it makes sense to think of the corporation as a tool or technology used by citizens to advance their goals. (This is something I’ve touched on before, informally, in a blog entry.)
Although I don’t want to speak for my colleagues, it seems safe to say that the scholars whose work is noted above share an interest in better understanding what it means, and what it should mean, for corporations to be political agents. They are part of a trend — I don’t yet want to say movement — that sees scholars attempting to take seriously the complexity of the practical and philosophical problems raised by having limited-liability, joint-stock corporations participate in a realm that is generally thought of as being rightfully the place of flesh-and-blood citizens.
Deaf Nudists, Rights, and the Responsibilities of Business
Filed under: corporate citizenship, discrimination, law, rights, values |
Leave a Comment Here’s another “tempest in a teapot” story with much larger implications.
By Daniel Wiessner, for Reuters: Deaf man complains nudists would not provide interpreter
A deaf man has accused a nudist park in upstate New York of violating federal law by refusing to provide him with a sign-language interpreter at an annual festival.
Tom Willard, 53, of Rochester, filed a complaint with the U.S. Justice Department claiming Empire Haven Nudist Park violated the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) by refusing his requests for an interpreter.
“I am fed up with being turned away every time I try to do something, by idiots who somehow feel the ADA does not apply to them,” Willard wrote in the complaint….
Now it’s true that the ADA‘s “Public Accommodations” does require businesses and nonprofits to take reasonable steps to reduce barriers for the disabled. But according to this page explaining the application of the ADA, Willard is probably out of luck, legally speaking:
Q. Will a bookstore be required to maintain a sign language interpreter on its staff in order to communicate with deaf customers?
A. No, not if employees communicate by pen and notepad when necessary.
In other words, a business doesn’t have to provide a customer’s chosen accommodation, as long as they do something to achieve a fair outcome. (If someone reading this understands the application of the ADA better, please comment!) At a bookstore, you don’t need a translator as long as you’ve got a pen and paper. The same would pretty clearly apply at a nudist park.
Now all that is about the law, not about ethics per se. Ethics and the law are two different things, and that goes for the legal and ethical responsibilities of business, too. But that doesn’t mean that legal issues are “merely” legal issues. The legislation with regard to how businesses need to accomodate disabilities is right there, in black and white. But such legislation is must be interpreted, and interpretation inevitably involves the application of ethical principles, and the relevant ethical principles here include not just the principle that we ought to do more to lower barriers, but also a principle of reasonableness that says that the needs of the disabled have to be balanced against the legitimate interests of businesses and other organizations (and of their other stakeholders). Judges and juries end up having to apply such principles, among others, when discrimination cases reach court. In the 99.999% of cases that never end up near a courtroom, it’s up to businesses — and the people who work for them — to do their best to apply those principles too.
Topless in Not-Quite-“Public”
According to a CBC story, a Toronto woman was chastised by security guards after taking her shirt off (leaving only her rather modest black bra) at Toronto’s Festival of Beer.
Here’s the story: Toronto woman told to put her top on
…Jeanette Martin was at the annual Toronto beer gathering on Sunday when she took up a dare from one of her friends and took off her shirt. She was wearing a bra but apparently that wasn’t enough for organizers.
“Within 10 seconds flat I had a security guard telling me to put my top back on or else I’d be escorted out of the grounds,” Martin told CBC News….
The CBC story rightly points out that, 20 years ago, a young Canadian woman named Gwen Jacobs fought and won a legal battle for the right to go topless — entirely topless — in public.
What the CBC story misses, however, is that the Festival of Beer is not a public place. It’s a business venue. As we all know, there are plenty of business establishments with a policy: “No shirt, no shoes …no service!” The basic ethical principle here is that private establishments get to make their own rules about the tone they want to set.
In fact, the Beer Festival’s rules aren’t limited to proper attire. According to the Festival’s FAQ, there are plenty of rules, including for example:
What can’t I bring with me?
No pets
No children
No opened water
No food
No chairs
No coolers
No large video cameras
No cameras other than for personal use
Of course, these rules aren’t all about attire, but you see the point. A private business gets to set rules, including ones that set the tone for their events, and attire is a significant part of that. Bars and nightclubs in particular very often have dress codes — many forbid ripped jeans, for example, or require that men wear shirts with collars. (For interesting reading, see the rules for attire for customers of Harrod’s department store.) Now pointing out that companies generally have the right to make their own rules for decorum doesn’t mean that there are not ethical limits on such rules. It’s not hard to imagine truly morally obnoxious rules they could impose. For example, if a company imposed Victorian standards on women but put no limits at all on what men could wear, that would be unfairly discriminatory. But requiring shirts is far from that.
Unfortunately, while the Beer Festival’s organizers may have been within their rights to establish rules of decorum for their event, the reasons offered by the event’s organizers were weak ones. According to the CBC,
Martin was told that she would attract unwanted attention from men and her safety was at risk.
As Martin herself suggested (along with many who posted comments on the story), if men are behaving badly, then security should deal with them, rather than blaming Martin.
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Update (Aug. 12): I’ve learned through other news outlets that Martin says there were women wearing bikini tops at the Beer Fest on the day in question. That makes Security’s objections harder to understand. A business is still within its rights, but the distinction between a bra and a bikini top is, well, skimpy.
The “BlackBerry Riots” — What Should RIM Do?
Filed under: activism, corporate citizenship, CSR, privacy, protest, technology |
Comments (3) The intersection of social media with social unrest is a massive topic these days. Twitter has been credited with playing an important role in coordinating the pro-democracy protests in Egypt, and Facebook played a role in helping police track down culprits after the Vancouver hockey riots.
But the mostly-unstated truth behind these “technologies of the people” is that they are corporate technologies, ones developed, fostered, and controlled by companies. That means power for those companies. And, as the saying goes, with great power comes great responsibility.
Fast-forward to early August 2011. London is burning, and the riots have spread to a couple other major UK cities. The British government has called in a few thousand extra cops. And again, social media is playing a role. But this time the focus is specifically on Research in Motion’s (RIM’s) BlackBerry, and its use as a social networking tool. There have been all kinds of reports that the BlackBerry’s “BBM” messaging has been the tool of choice for coordination among London’s rioters. RIM is probably asking itself right now whether it’s really true that ‘there’s no such thing as bad publicity.’
Distancing itself from its role in the “BlackBerry Riots,” RIM issued (via Twitter) the following:
We feel for those impacted by the riots in London. We have engaged with the authorities to assist in any way we can.
The “in any way we can” part is intriguing. So, what can, and what should, RIM do? One thing they can do is to help authorities identify those inciting violence by breaking through the security of the BBM messages. But as reported here, “RIM refused to say exactly how much information it would be sharing with police.” The other, much more dramatic, thing that RIM could do would be to temporarily shut down all or part of its network. Whether that would be at all useful is open to question. It would certainly make a lot of people angry, including millions of people who are not involved in the riots, or who are relying on their BlackBerries to keep in touch with loved ones during this crisis. But I point out this option just to illustrate the breadth of options open to RIM.
The question is complicated by questions of precedence. Tech companies have come under fire for assisting governments in, for example, China, to crack down on dissidents. Of course, the UK government isn’t anything like China’s repressive regime. But at least some people are pointing to underlying social unrest, unemployment etc., in the UK as part of the reason — if not justification — for the riots. And besides, even if it’s clear that the UK riots are unjustifiable and that the UK government is a decent one, companies like RIM are global companies, engaged in a whole spectrum of social and political settings, ones that will stubbornly refuse to be categorized. Should a tech company help a repressive regime stifle peaceful protest? No. Should a tech company help a good and just government fight crime? Yes. But with regard to governments, as with regard to social unrest, there’s much more grey in the world than black and white.
Two Problems With CSR
There’s plenty of confusion about what CSR is. Indeed most of the definitions you’ll find online don’t even read like definitions. They’ll tell you what CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) is “about,” or what it “relates to,” but they won’t tell you what it is. Any definition worth its salt ought to take the words in the term seriously, and note that the term “CSR” refers to some kind of responsibility, and then explain just what kind of responsibility it is. But good luck finding such a definition. And this failure of definition isn’t just a matter of semantics. It’s critically important, because a sloppy understanding of the term gives the appearance of unifying under a single banner people who actually hold vastly different views of what a corporation’s responsibilities are.
Various definitions out there seem to coalesce around the idea that business should be “giving back” to the community — and typically not via antiquated methods like corporate philanthropy. The goal, generally, is to make sure that a company’s net impact on society is positive. Let’s take that as our point of departure.
The following two problems form the Scylla and Charybdis of CSR. If you avoid one, you run right into the other. Both spell doom.
Problem #1: CSR is too easy, if taken literally. If all that’s at stake is making sure your net impact is positive, wow, that’s pretty easy: just sell a decent product that people want, and don’t hurt any bystanders. It’s a fundamental principle of commerce. Start with individual transactions. Those, if voluntary and well-informed, always have a positive impact. A customer gives you $1.00, and you give them a pound of bananas. They’re happy, and you’re happy. Don’t step on any bystanders’ toes, and there you go: positive net impact. In fact, as long as your customers are happy enough, you can afford to hurt people along the way (e.g., by mistreating employee) and your net impact will still be positive. (And of course, claiming to adhere to CSR is even easier if you use a mushier definition, one that only asks that you “manage” your social impact, rather than aiming at any particular objective.)
Problem #2: On the other hand, CSR is unfairly burdensome, if really taken to heart — that is, if you really think that the pursuit of social contribution ought to take over a manager’s entire way of thinking. It means that a company that makes a good product, treats employees well, deals fairly with suppliers, etc., still has to ask itself, “yes, but how are we giving back to the community?” Look in the mirror. What’s your net impact on society? What good are you — other than the fact that you put in an honest day’s work, take care of your kids, and given a few bucks to charity now and then? (Hint: that’s a rhetorical question.) The joint-stock corporation, on the other hand, is arguably one of the most welfare-enhancing inventions of all time. For such organizations, failure to have a positive impact is the exception, rather than the rule. Asking one to risk its productivity by obsessing over something it’s already doing is silly.
Now, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the idea that companies are responsible for their behaviour (and that the individuals who work for companies are responsible for their behaviour, too). And for some people, that’s all that CSR means. That’s just fine. In fact, such responsibility is absolutely morally fundamental. Companies should try to make an honest living, just like individuals like you do. They should avoid hurting people, just like you do. They should clean up their messes, just like you do. That’s basic ethics. And if they’re doing those things, calling it something as mushy as “CSR” adds absolutely nothing to the equation.
Are they Competing, or Just Trying to Sell You Something?
Filed under: competition, complexity, corporate citizenship, CSR, definitions, sustainability, values |
Comments (2) Peaceful coexistence isn’t always a good thing. In the marketplace, competition is what drives different producers of a good to improve their wares, and having one producer explain the superiority of his or her product is — embellishment and puffery aside — how consumers learn to differentiate among products. When different suppliers fail to engage in competition, the consumer is left in the dark. Let me give you two examples.
Here’s the first example. One of the problems — or rather, one of the warning signs — about so-called “alternative” medicine is that there are dozens of different kinds of alt-med, all making different and presumably conflicting assumptions about how the human body works, and yet they all get along cozily together. Nowhere do you find homeopaths, for example, explaining why their methods are superior to those of acupuncturists. Nor do you find Reiki therapists dissing Ayurveda. Crystal therapy gurus are unlikely to tell you about the problems with Traditional Chinese Medicine. And so on. As Robert Park wrote with reference to alt-med, in his book, Voodoo Science (p. 65), “there is no internal dissent in a community that feels itself besieged from the outside.” Of course, the existence of different alt-med treatments isn’t in itself surprising or problematic. Mainstream medicine too uses different treatments for different illnesses. But the different treatments offered by mainstream medicine are all, without exception, underpinned by a single coherent body of theory: the heart circulates blood, germs cause infection, physiological effect varies according to drug dosage, and so on.
So the fact that various systems of alternative therapy, underpinned by very different understandings of the human body (and indeed of metaphysics), can get along so chummily is a huge red flag. It suggests that purveyors of alt-med either a) aren’t thinking critically, or b) are more interested in sales than in healing.
Roughly the same concern arises with regard to different perspectives on how businesses should behave. Some will tell you that the obligations of business are all rooted in the notion of sustainability, with its indelible environmental overtones. Others will say no, it’s a matter of CSR — Corporate Social Responsibility. Still others say it’s all about values. Or leadership. Or citizenship. Or the (ug!) Triple Bottom Line. And each of those seems, at least, to be underpinned by a different understanding of the nature of the firm, its role in society, and what it is that makes an action right or wrong. And yet all kinds of folks seem to want to cleave to all of the above, or to glom onto one of them seemingly at random, as if it doesn’t matter which one you choose.
Again, this should be a big red flag.
I’m sure I’m going to be told that these different schools of thought don’t need to compete with each other — what’s really important, they’ll say, is that, you know, we focus on fixing the way business is done. But again, as with the case of alternative medicines, if someone tries to sell you some and isn’t willing to even try to explain why theirs is better than the other stuff, you should at least wonder whether they aren’t thinking critically, or are merely trying to sell you something.
Should Twitter Censor?
Filed under: accountability, corporate citizenship, CSR, internet, protest, standards, technology, values |
Comments (2) Last weekend, a despicable “hashtag” trended* on Twitter, one promoting the idea that violence against women is OK. By Sunday morning, tweets using that hashtag were mostly critical ones, expressing outrage at any non-critical use of the hashtag. One prominent twitterer, Peter Daou, (@peterdaou) asked why Twitter wasn’t preventing that hashtag from trending. He tweeted:
“Unbelievable: Is Twitter REALLY allowing #reasonstobeatyourgirlfriend to be a trending topic??!”
The outrage expressed by Daou and others is entirely appropriate. The hashtag in question is utterly contemptible. But the question of whether Twitter should censor it and prevent it from trending is another question altogether.
The central argument in favour of censorship is that the idea being broadcast is an evil one, and decision-makers at Twitter are in a clear position to stifle the spread of that evil idea, or instead to allow its proliferation. With great power comes great responsibility.
The most obvious reason against censorship is freedom of speech, combined with the slippery slope argument: if Twitter is going to start censoring ideas, where will it end? Freedom of speech is an important right, and that right includes the right to speak immoral ideas. Limits should only be imposed with great caution.
Now, it’s worth noting that the hashtag trending isn’t actually anyone’s speech: it’s the aggregate result of thousands of individual decisions to tweet using that hashtag. So if Twitter were, hypothetically, to censor the results of their trending-detection algorithm, they wouldn’t actually be censoring anyone, just preventing the automated publicizing of a statistic. But perhaps that’s a philosophical nicety, one obscuring the basic point that there is danger anytime the powerful act to prevent a message from being heard.
More importantly, perhaps, Twitter isn’t a government, it’s a company, and it doesn’t owe anyone the use of its technology to broadcast stupid ideas (or any other ideas, for that matter). We insist that governments carefully avoid censorship because governments are powerful and because for all intents and purposes we cannot opt out of their services as a whole. If a company doesn’t want to broadcast your idea, it’s not morally required to. Your local paper, for instance, isn’t obligated to publish your Letter to the Editor. The right to free speech isn’t the right to be handed a megaphone.
But then the challenging question arises: is Twitter a tool or a social institution? Just how much like a government is Twitter, in the relevant sense? It is, after all, in control of what many of us regard as a kind of critical infrastructure. This is a challenge faced by many ubiquitous info-tech companies, including Twitter, Facebook and Google. While their services are, in principle, strictly optional — no one is forced to use them — for many of us going without them is very nearly unthinkable. We are not just users of Twitter, but citizens. That perspective doesn’t tell us whether it’s OK for Twitter to engage in censorship, but it does put a different spin on the question.
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*The fact that it was “trending” on Twitter means that Twitter’s algorithm had identified it as, roughly, a “novel and popular” topic in recent tweets. Trending topics are featured prominently on Twitter’s main page.
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