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All these developments have taken place under pressure from Washington and Brussels. In hearings over the past few years, Congress has criticized the companiesnot always in consistent waysfor allowing harmful speech. In 2018, Congress amended the previously untouchable Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to subject the platforms to the same liability that nondigital outlets face for enabling illegal sex trafficking. Additional amendments to Section 230 are now in the offing, as are various other threats to regulate digital speech. In March 2019, Zuckerberg invited the government to regulate harmful content on his platform. In a speech seven months later defending Americas First Amendment values, he boasted about his team of thousands of people and [artificial-intelligence] systems that monitors for fake accounts. Even Zuckerbergs defiant ideal of free expression is an extensively policed space.

Against this background, the tech firms downgrading and outright censorship of speech related to COVID-19 are not large steps. Facebook is using computer algorithms more aggressively, mainly because concerns about the privacy of users prevent human censors from working on these issues from home during forced isolation. As it has done with Russian misinformation, Facebook will notify users when articles that they have liked are later deemed to have included health-related misinformation.

But the basic approach to identifying and redressing speech judged to be misinformation or to present an imminent risk of physical harm hasnt changed, according to Monika Bickert, Facebooks head of global policy management. As in other contexts, Facebook relies on fact-checking organizations and authorities (from the World Health Organization to the governments of U.S. states) to ascertain which content to downgrade or remove.

Read: How to misinform yourself about the coronavirus

What is different about speech regulation related to COVID-19 is the context: The problem is huge and the stakes are very high. But when the crisis is gone, there is no unregulated normal to return to. We liveand for several years, we have been livingin a world of serious and growing harms resulting from digital speech. Governments will not stop worrying about these harms. And private platforms will continue to expand their definition of offensive content, and will use algorithms to regulate it ever more closely. The general trend toward more speech control will not abate.

Over the past decade, network surveillance has grown in roughly the same proportion as speech control. Indeed, on many platforms, ubiquitous surveillance is a prerequisite to speech control.

The public has been told over and over that the hundreds of computers we interact with dailysmartphones, laptops, desktops, automobiles, cameras, audio recorders, payment mechanisms, and morecollect, emit, and analyze data about us that are, in turn, packaged and exploited in various ways to influence and control our lives. We have also learned a lotbut surely not the whole pictureabout the extent to which governments exploit this gargantuan pool of data.

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What COVID-19 Revealed About the Internet - The Atlantic