Former President Donald Trump plans on launching his social-media platform TRUTH Social with AI that will automatically censor posts. The platform is being touted “family-friendly” according to CEO Devin Nunes.
Something that has me questioning this new platform, it’s supposed to be ‘free speech’ yet they’re going to use AI to automatically censor posts?
Nunes and Trump have both told Fox Business that the “free speech” platform is expected to be available by the first quarter of 2022.
TMTG , Trump Media & Technology Group, is partnering with Hive for the AI that the start-up provides to check posts, eliminating the whole free speech aspect of the social media platform.
The excuse to use Hive and their AI is that they anticipate the site will be targeted and attempts to flood the platform with illegal content after their launch.
“We want to be very family-friendly, we want this to be a very safe place, and we are focused on making sure any illegal content is not on the site,” Nunes said in an exclusive interview with Fox Business.
“Hive has a great track record in this, and they have been good to work with,” Nunes continued. “They are very helpful for our team and because of their experience, I think they’re helping to craft the right spot for us.”
He added: “We want to be the most family-friendly site.”
While it’s great that they want the site to be family-friendly, can they continue saying that the platform is free speech? The site will have restrictions on what you can post. This censorship will be enforced by artificial intelligence.
Hive CEO Kevin Guo, has said that Hive will police the site for sexually-explicit content, and posts that include violence, bullying, hate speech, and spam.
So it’s being left up to a company to determine what you say as hate speech. Or bullying. Or violence. We’ve seen how some of these companies lean when it comes to those very things. Anything that goes against what they think is hate speech. You say something mean and you’re banned for bullying. You share links and you’re spamming.
Guo argued that his company’s moderation would not encroach on politics. Is he sure though? Is he sure? Can he promise that his AI won’t mark our political posts as hate speech like Facebook, Twitter, and now Gettr?
“This is not political,” Guo said. “These are not things that are left or right or have any political baggage. When you think about these bigger companies, what they have put in place around things like misinformation, what they deem that to be, for instance, that’s their prerogative.”
“We’re not going to censor anybody because they have a different opinion about, for example, a COVID vaccine,” Nunes said.
“That is what the open internet is all about — it should be for the free flow of debate and ideas all over the globe, so that people can learn from one another and debate with one another.”
It’s hard not to be skeptical of a social media platform claiming free speech while saying they’re using AI to censor posts in the same paragraph.
Free speech is just that free speech. Unless you are making a call to violence you should not have your first amendment rights censored.
