Twittering #Extremist Propaganda: how to legitimately silence the voices of hate

Twitter and Facebook, the major social networks services (SNS), are usually utilized for the so-called “Life streaming”. In fact, SNS users are primarily committed to post status updates, photos, and videos – and/or share these contents with online friends – with the purpose of having an appealing version of their persona online. Furthermore, in the last years, SNS have acquired also a crucial role in the development of the public discourse. In fact, by virtue of SNS, the ‘average citizen’ is now able to raise their voices, and thus mobilize social movements, alike the Occupy Movement. On the other hand, political personalities have discovered SNS as a wonderful tool to spread their ideas among new possible voters.

However, SNS do not always work as free speech engines.

Twitter constitutes the favorite (and most successful) instrument of propaganda used by the Arabic terrorist organization Daesh to recruit new affiliates while in the “Western World” leaders of political parties contiguous with fascist ideologies use SNS as megaphones of incitement to religious hatred. This leads to a vicious circle that has as the ultimate effect the “weaponization” of SNS.

From a legal standpoint, the arising question is therefore which content moderation policy gives adequate legal remedies to tackle the hateful propaganda that grows up in the SNS context.