Open Platforms, Fair Rules: The Ethics of Content Curation
This paper addresses a critical question in the ethics of content-curation on social media: how can the broad curatorial freedom of platforms be reconciled with the claims of users to fair treatment? It starts by showing the promise and pitfalls of two common approaches. The public forum model treats platforms like state-owned public squares and fails to respect the curatorial rights of platforms; the private entity model upholds broad curatorial rights but fails to respect the rights of users to fair treatment from platforms that claim to be open to the public. The paper introduces the procedural rights model which holds that platforms open to the public have two obligations. They must consistently apply their stated curation-procedures to similar cases for similar reasons so that any differential treatment that may occur is morally justifiable to users. Alternatively, they must publicly declare that they are not open to the public, which sheds them of the prior obligation but not without serious reputational and financial costs. In short, the model proposed aims to preserve meaningful curatorial freedom for platforms while enabling users to know whether platforms are open to them.
