Threatening to shut down private companies -- not for limiting speech, not for refusing to distribute speech -- but for exercising their own right to free speech alongside the free speech of others (in this case the president).
There is no right to unchallenged or un-responded-to speech, regardless of how you interpret the right to free speech.
There are forms of government where certain forms of speech cannot be challenged. Well, not safely anyway.
I should know, I lived for 20 years in that sort of place (Eastern Bloc kid).
I tried to make the question more precise, but I’m not quite sure what I’m asking. I guess I was hoping to hear more from you because normally I’ve only heard it from books, not from an actual person who lived under it.
pg’s trick for getting interesting answers is to ask “What surprised you the most?” That may be relevant here — if you had to pick some surprising differences, what specifically would they be?
I guess what would shock you is how normal it felt for us, back then. I mean, when that's all you know, that's just how it is.
You had to be careful with the general frame of the ideas that you expressed in public - but that was normal. You could not freely leave the country - but that was normal. Anything that had to do with the government was a bunch of lies - but that was normal.
Yet life went on. People grew up, got married, got a job, etc.
We used to tell a lot of jokes about the government - I guess as a way to cope. I miss those jokes.
As always with him, the proof is in the projection: he's accusing others of interfering in the election (states expanding mail in voting, Twitter, etc.) while he's actively doing it himself.
There is simply nothing that indicates voting by mail is less secure than our wonky voting machines, but there is plenty of evidence that ballots by mail help more people vote.
The only reason to oppose mail in voting, much like supporting rejiggering districts (gerrymandering), is to rig the vote. Your feelings of insecurity simply don’t matter, as they are entirely unfounded as well as flat out wrong.
Frankly, there are dozens of such cases in Oregon alone.
Your "assertion" does not "fit the facts"
Here’s an excerpt from your article about the devious voter fraudsters: “At the time of the election, (Robbins) was suffering from kidney infections which impacted his cognition,” said Oregon Department of Justice spokeswoman Kristina Edmunson. “He does not remember voting two ballots, but acknowledges that he did and is extremely remorseful.”
But that's the objection. Mail in voting is problematic because the fraud is so hard to detect.
Suppose someone obtains and submits a bunch of mail in ballots. Ballots of people who don't normally vote etc. How would they even get caught? "We haven't caught very many of them" is the problem.
> The only reason to oppose mail in voting, much like supporting rejiggering districts (gerrymandering), is to rig the vote.
You could say it's to prevent someone else from rigging the vote.
Also, this:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/there-is-no-evidence-th...
So if it doesn't really affect the balance of legitimate ballots and only makes fraud more difficult, why would somebody be against it unless they're legitimately concerned about fraud?
It's a thing that actually happens:
https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/cudahy-officials-co...
https://www.dothaneagle.com/news/crime_court/woman-convicted...
https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/cahokia-village-tr...
There are also even more small time cases like this:
https://gvwire.com/2019/08/23/mexican-man-who-supports-trump...
Where it's only one person voting when they're not eligible. Those cases often aren't even prosecuted, but at scale it adds up.
Edit: clarity while trying to maintain brevity.
For a start in California mail in ballots have to be signed and the signature has to match the registered voter's signature on file.
So you're assuming someone can steal a bunch of registered voters' ballots and fake their signatures.
Grave ballots would require new/additional votes. That would sure the expected ballot returns.
There are a ton of ways to verify elections statistically that you could read into
That is some evidence that mail-in votes can be abused. And you should consider how hard it is to detect such abuse. I’d love to see some evidence on why the benefits of mail-in voting outweighs the risks.
Also some evidence on your claims that mail-in voting favors one particular party would be enlightening.
And I certainly did not claim that mail-in voting favors one particular party, simply that it enables more people to vote and is at least as secure as any other system of voting that we have in the US. That said, I think it is worth asking - why is one party, with truly zero supporting facts, so vehemently opposed to voting by mail? And why is it the same party that so unabashedly gerrymanders voting districts: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/how-the-...
I know political rants are semi-frowned upon these days on HN, but it is deeply important that we as a society figure this stuff out.
I think your distinction is valid and correct, but somewhat pedantic.
You said the only reason to oppose mail in voting is to rig the vote. That’s a pretty strong implication. But I would say an open mind would ask the other direction: why is anyone opposed to increasing voter integrity? You can’t simply ignore that. Voter integrity appeals to me as a normal-ass American with 1 vote.
You may have noticed I haven’t been political, and stay on principle. We as a society should be able to talk openly about principle without corrosive contempt for those with differing viewpoints.
Personally, I'd like to vote by mail because there's a bit of a global pandemic going on. Preventing me from voting in a safe way (with a simple, well-tested solution, I might add) is an outright assault on my right to vote. So the integrity of your vote is really harmed far more by the willful incompetence of those in power.
With ordinary mail fraud, the victim tends to notice. You have a bill for something but the something never arrives.
With mail in ballots, if someone registers people who didn't register themselves and then takes their ballots, the real constituents weren't expecting to get a ballot and then don't notice when none shows up.
There are also a lot of problems that have really nothing to do with mail fraud. When people fill out their ballots outside the context of a polling place with election monitors, anybody could be intimidating them or paying them to vote in a particular way and then verifying that they do.
I suppose the pandemic is a valid point for wanting to vote by mail, but concerns for voting integrity are still there. I think there should be an easy-to-implement contactless yet in-person way to vote (maybe similar to how you get a coronavirus test), which would avoid the rather drastic action of allowing universal mail-in voting. Know that there are many states who ban / regulate it for good reason.
163 cases of "fraudulent use of absentee ballots" over 1988-2017. Probably a lot more useful to worry about the scantron machine accuracy.
As has been demonstrated at DEFCON for years now, voting machines used in dozens of states are laughably insecure and easily tampered with. Mail-in ballots would be much more difficult to pull off large scale voting fraud with due to their distributed nature.
And the distributed nature is the problem. At the polls you have representatives of both major parties there to make sure nothing untoward is happening. How are you supposed to secure something that happens literally anywhere?
Voter intimidation is a lot easier, for example, if you know where and when to turn up.
You would probably find it easier to tamper with a voting machine if you know where they're going to be, and if more people have access to them, too.
But for the same reason it's a lot easier to prevent. If you show up at the polls to intimidate voters you get arrested. If you do it to other members of your household, or your employees or union members, nobody there is independent. Anybody who reports it still has to live or work with those people the next day, so people don't report it.
> You would probably find it easier to tamper with a voting machine if you know where they're going to be, and if more people have access to them, too.
Not when there are election monitors there watching you. With paper ballots you fill out your ballot behind a screen, but you drop it into the machine in front of everybody.
Also, many of the voting machine vulnerabilities are as a result of submitting specially crafted ballots. Which is another reason you want to give people their ballot and have them fill it out by hand and submit it immediately, instead of giving them an unlimited amount of time and access to a computer and a printer while "filling out" their ballot.
Of course the better solution in either case is to use voting machines without security vulnerabilities, but there aren't always enough ponies for everybody.
Yes, if this is consistently and fairly enforced, I agree - only doubting that it is because I honestly don't know, and hopefully never have to find out firsthand.
> many of the voting machine vulnerabilities are as a result of submitting specially crafted ballots
Yeah, fair enough. I don't know enough about the vulnerabilities, but if this is the case, I agree.
That's more than five cases a year, of those that have been caught. Five stolen elections a year seems like a lot.
> Probably a lot more useful to worry about the scantron machine accuracy.
The scantron machine isn't purposely trying to alter the election results so the errors it makes aren't all in the same direction.
As with most of Trump's dumber scandals, he has already literally confessed to his impure motives.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/nation-world/ct-nw-nyt-mail-v...
The single largest case of voter fraud in this countries history happened in North Carolina in 2018. That was committed by a Republican.
If you investigate the voter fraud instances in Trumps own listing you will find that the majority of them are committed by Republicans.
Combine this information with the efforts by Republicans to suppress the vote and you can see the problem. In North Dakota, the Republican-controlled legislature passed a law that required all citizens to have a physical mailing address to be able to vote. Sounds resonible right? Well, this was after a Democrat won a Senate election in that state thanks in large part to the Native American population. Most Native Americans live on reservations in that state and part of living on the reservations is a lack of physical mailing addresses.
Nothing about having a physical address is going to make voter fraud less likely. It's plain as day that Republicans are just interested in suppressing the votes of people who vote against them.
The Chicago “Democratic Machine” laughs and says “hold my beer.”
I don’t care who commits the fraud. I want my vote to count as it should. So that’s a why I believe we should be vigilant about mail in voter fraud.
Your Native American example is an example of a corner case that should be addressed properly. Indeed it is unfair if there were no other ways for Native Americans to vote (surely they could vote in person? If not, I’d classify that as a violation of rights). But this doesn’t extend generally, not does it nullify general mail vote fraud concerns.
And I would add more evidence under the claim ‘majority of fraud committed by Republicans’ in order to be more convincing.
There is nothing about a reservation that prevents it from having a mailing address. People on reservations receive mail all the time. Even someone who doesn't currently know what it is can find out. And it seems like a pretty crappy voter suppression method if it at best only works until people figure out what their mailing address is.
> Nothing about having a physical address is going to make voter fraud less likely.
Having a physical address proves you live in the district. It prevents people from making a mistake and voting in the wrong elections, or voting in the wrong elections on purpose. It gives the government something to investigate if they suspect fraud. The perpetrator will either have to give their real address (leading investigators right to them) or a fake address (allowing investigators to prove that person doesn't live there).
> It's plain as day that Republicans are just interested in suppressing the votes of people who vote against them.
The Democrats do the same thing. They regularly e.g. schedule school board elections off-cycle (a separate election day than the major elections for statewide offices) so that most people don't show up, which allows the election to be dominated by teachers unions. And there isn't even a pretext for doing that -- it has no other purpose, and wastes a ton of money to hold a separate election.
The effect may be large or it may be small, but there will be an effect. If you truly cared about voter integrity you would care about this too.
Every current and past Secretary of State from each state will tell you election fraud happens, and that it's rare enough it doesn't have an effect on the outcome.
Trump is lying when he said there is a 100% certainty of a rigged election if there's widespread mail-in ballots. Be clear about what he means by rigged. A system-wide fraud that influences the outcome of an election.
It's the same kind of lie about 3 million voters being "illegals" in 2016 and why he lost the popular vote. It's the same kind of lie he told about buses being shipped up from Massachusetts to New Hampshire to explain why he lost New Hampshire. The same lies about "you will not believe what my people are finding in Hawaii" about Obama's birth certificate. And the thousands of people cheering on 9/11. And the hundreds of people he knew who died on 9/11 yet went to no funerals, zero zip.
And it's the same tactic he used in 2016 to set the stage for his loss. When asked if he would accept election results if he lost he refused to say yes, he only said he'd accept the election results if he won.
He excels at creating doubt and confusion. That's his entire life history way before he was in politics.
He's an asshole. He's a complete waste of space. He's a whiny little bitch. He's always been this way. It's not new. He was this way when he was a Democrat too. As president. As candidate. Before he was even in politics. He has always been a piece of shit asshole. He will always be a piece of shit asshole. And hilariously this is a completely unremarkable observation. The absurd claim would be that he's a compassionate person of strong ethical and moral character, a role model you want your kids to look up to, mimic, and be like when they grow up.
Who they would have voted for isn't actually relevant. The fact that they didn't (in our hypothetical) vote as a result of the FUD is evidence of interference.
If someone was making robocalls telling voters that voting machines in their district weren't to be trusted and some number of people didn't vote, would you consider that to be interference?
> And you can’t ignore the main point, which is voter integrity, which I as a normal American agree with.
What is a "normal American" and why would you say that in this context?
By definition, I'm a "normal American" and I also care about "voter integrity". However, I just have absolutely no reason to believe that mail-in voting, which has been used widely for decades by the select states (blue and red) which allow everyone to do it and by _every_ state which allows for absentee voting, is any less secure than any other method.
If you've seen any of the presentations/POCs from Defcon's Voting Machine Hacking Village, read anything about how easily Diebold machines can be manipulated, etc. I just can't believe you'd make the argument that mail-in voting is less secure in good faith.
To be specific, here you can only use mail-in ballots as an exception if you live outside the border of Sweden, and you can only make a request to use the mail-in ballot if you visit an embassy first or use the digital identity system through one of the Swedish banks, which then operate similar to the embassy in its role in identification processing.
Naturally using less security does not mean fraud has happened in the past, but it should be relevant to the question if fraud may happen in the future. If we have factually evidence it won't happen then Sweden should change it rules to make it easier for people to vote and reduce costs to embassies. If we are uncertain, well, then the question is a fair game to ask what is good enough security and what isn't.
We don't know that the mail-in ballot system here in California is absolutely, with 100% certainty, immune to abuse. We do have reasonably good circumstantial evidence at this point that it does not appear to increase the chance for voter fraud, and furthermore, we have reasonably good evidence, based on multiple studies conducted over many years that anyone can easily find if they care to, that there are very, very few fraudulent ballots cast in American elections. There is, however, also reasonably good evidence that American elections have a history of efforts to prevent eligible voters from casting votes at all, and that this is far and away the kind of "voter fraud" that we need to be concerned about.
As a general axiom, therefore, in American elections, campaigns that have as their goal making it more difficult for eligible voters to vote in the name of "reducing fraud" should be viewed with, well, a high degree of suspicion.
If we are going by evidence then finding the cause of the lower voting participation in the US should be the goal, for which there exist plenty of research studies conducted over many decades. A lot of people have wondered why there is such a large difference between EU and US. The general conclusions is not the lack of more easy to use internet based solutions, but rather to concepts like minimum wages, trust in government, belief in the efficacy of voting, combining the system of taxation to voter registration, access to voting centers, and voter fatigue when people have to vote in multiple elections in close proximity.
The resistance and general suspicion to internet based solutions with weak security should not be taken as a campaign to make it more difficult for eligible voters to vote. A government website where an anonymous user can put in a a registered person postal address in order to trigger part of the voting process should be viewed with legit suspicion.
- minimum wages - trust in government - belief in the efficacy of voting - combining the system of taxation to voter registration - access to voting centers - and voter fatigue when people have to vote in multiple elections in close proximity
(Let me add disenfranchisement after a prison sentence etc, too.)
And he should not make a stink about mail votes and any number of random accussations. Look at the big picture. He has us debating the finer nuances about one tiny individual bomb in his ground covering barrage of crap. Mission accomplished. How's the Corona effort going, by the way?
Pretty good if you don't live in Stockholm. The worst hit areas is the retirement homes around the Stockholm region, which account for most deaths. The other areas of Sweden are operating mostly like normal except for industries that been effected by closed borders. Economically we are currently a bit ahead compared to our neighbors because of difference in tactics in handling the pandemic, but it is expected to go down as the Swedish economy is comparable more depended on exports. Most news focus on the economic depression as a result of the pandemic rather than on the health sector. Latest news is that a few airports are closing down, and that the partially state owned airline is having economical problems.
The fact that there's a new conservative talking point about the dangers of voting by mail (and no other aspects of voting security) shows that this message is bullshit.
The reality is that the conservative party actively works to curtail voting because they are in the minority and it's the only way for them to stay in power.
Well, that's the tactical reason.
Bigger picture, conservativism is about narrowing and liberalism about broadening and equalizing access to the levers of power; conservatives for narrowing the franchise both because of immediate tactical advantage and because of fundamental ideological reasons.
I've had little love for every Republican administration, but this is the first time I'm actually afraid of them. What is happening now is not conservatism, it's fascism with a dash of Christian Dominionism.
> Bigger picture, conservativism is about narrowing and liberalism about broadening and equalizing access to the levers of power; conservatives for narrowing the franchise both because of immediate tactical advantage and because of fundamental ideological reasons.
Are you in marketing? Because you sound like it, and I'm not buying what your selling.
Let's try Wikipedia for grins:
"Traditionalist conservatism, also referred to as classical conservatism, traditional conservatism or traditionalism, is a political and social philosophy emphasizing the need for the principles of a transcendent moral order, manifested through certain natural laws to which society ought to conform in a prudent manner."
Now that's a bit better. Using that definition tell me how that applies to Trump's GOP.
Disclaimer: I have no love for the DNC either, but at least with them it's a more genteel corruption and their ostensible goals are not entirely unpalatable.
p.s. @dang, I'm in dangerous territory here being political on HN, but it was meant to be germane to the OP.
You're ascribing to conservativism what should belong to a particular political party at a particular time. Yes, the current Republican party does intend to limit franchise by minorities, and this has literally been stated ala Hofeller.
That is not a conservative position and many things the Republican party does are not actually conservative.
Just as Democrats at their worse can be about finding equality by restricting rights and treating people like zoo animals, the Republicans at their worse are about winning the power grab ethics be damned. And at those extremes, neither party represents the values of liberalism or conservativism.
No, I'm ascribing to conservativism what has defined it since the classic liberal/conservative divide emerged in the Enlightenment (well, except that at the very beginning the conservative position was merely to retain the existing narrow distribution of access to the levers of power, resting on appeals to religious and other traditional bases; it's only after the liberal side had some success in broadening access that the conservative position became actively reversing that progress, but it has remained so since.)
The Reactionary Mind - Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Reactionary_Mind
I hope not. Their treatment and forced castration of autistic people carried on for most of the last century was horrid.
Free speech means you have the right to express yourself. It does not mean a private company is at all required to give you a platform... They can moderate content as they choose.
As far as tagging an individual user account in this way, I'm sure there are provisions for that in the TOS that Trump agreed to in order to use the site.
On a legal level, I can't imagine anything has been done wrong. On an ethical level, the only problem I see so far might be that Twitter is taking it upon themselves to be fact checkers, and personally I don't mind so far, I think the public benefit probably far outweighs any negatives.
The below is just a snapshot. Just a teensy-weensy bit of research will give you hundreds of articles like the below.
Report from Government Accountability Institute: http://www.g-a-i.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Voter-Fraud-...
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/2018/07/11/voter-fraud-inves...
https://eu.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/oakland-county/2...
https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-skid-row-voter-...
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/central-figur...
https://www.dothaneagle.com/news/crime_court/fourth-person-c...
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/2018/07/11/voter-fraud-inves...
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-08-09/duplicat...
wait, 938 convictions over what looks like is over two decades? Just in the presidential election years that's something like 625 million votes. That's very little fraud.
(and there's some nonsense in there if it's trying to present itself as voter fraud...like the California cases of candidates misrepresenting their home address. What does that have to do with any voters?)
http://www.g-a-i.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Voter-Fraud-...
I'm also not sure about the methodology there, so perhaps someone could explain it to me.
From what it looks like, GAI started with 60,000 matches from the state data. Then they... added additional identifiers and confirmed c.7000 of them? How do you get from uncertain data to more certain data in this way?
There seem to be c.15,000 instances of prohibited addresses being registered, which I don't believe alone indicates voter fraud.
GAI was unable to conduct a comprehensive review since a complete data set of state voter rolls is currently unobtainable. (it was denied)
I think the other major concern I have, other than the methodology, are the definitions - I still don't know whether 8500 represents 8500 people who voted twice (17000 total votes cast), or 4250 people who voted twice, or something in between, or some thing completely different. Perhaps I missed this.
And of course even if the sheer number of votes is not on the same order of magnitude as all votes cast, we should still worry because a relatively small number of votes can have an outsized effect when placed appropriately.
Edit: as the first page states, this is not a comprehensive list, but a ‘sampling’.
great, but what does that have to do with providing evidence that
> There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent."
is not substantial nonsense based on zero evidence, but more importantly (given that this thread is about "lying"), that
> The Governor of California is sending Ballots to millions of people, anyone living in the state, no matter who they are or how they got there, will get one.
isn't at all true?
You must love philosophy. Is this really the first you have heard someone use a hypothetical in an ethical argument?
Let’s see fact checks on diet claims, exercise, claims about social solutions, claims about the economy, etc., etc. Let’s see fact checks on their own advertisers.
They don't have to be perfect. They don't have to save the world. They don't have to cure cancer. Any improvement is an improvement.
Life is not binary.
If twitter created some arbitrary rule like "We're going to fact-check all state/government personnel.", then the state/government personnel would just change platforms.
it's a real issue -- it's potentially more dangerous to push politicians to lie on platforms that fact-checkers can't respond and provide feedback towards, and if twitter starts playing hardball against politicians that's exactly what will happen.
A ton of small echo-chamber communities that splinter off as a result of perceived hostility or discrimination from twitter (but really any social media group) and the general public may be more hostile/dangerous than having these groups of people being vetted by the public at large constantly on twitter or other popular platforms.
Meanwhile, I make the claim that the echo chambers will stagnate rapidly outside a big platform. The echo chambers need constant exposure to gain new ideological members. If left to a private-club-platform, they will not showcase themselves.
Note that there is a strong adherence to the YCombinator’s code of conduct on the current platform - but we come back to discuss ideas here, not to a not-vetted forum. By making the level of adherence to fact checks, discussions will improve.
Yes it is, it just involves adding an html element below it
> Will they get into the business of fact checking everyone over certain number of followers
Their choice, because of the first amendment they can do it to anyone or noone at their leisure or based on whatever criteria they like and as arbitrarily as they like.
> Will they do it impartially world-wide
Their choice, because of the first amendment they can choose to be as impartial or as partial as they like as locally or globally as they like.
> How can they even be impartial world wide given the different contradictory points of view, valid from both sides
The simplest solution is to not be impartial, but that's a decision that is wholly up to them and whatever they decide is protected by the first amendment
See how simple it is? They do whatever they feel like and the government is obligated to not interfere. The end.
(Other governments might object to some of these decisions, the US government most certainly has no legal power to)
An evolved, but still incorrect view is that a private entity is legally or constitutionally obligated to apply their policy about hosting speech consistently across all users.
There are tons of edge cases with free speech, but we almost certainly want the free market to experiment with potential solutions. It would be great if there were attempts at a free speech Twitter, a free of hate Twitter, free of disinformation Twitter, etc. and let the chips fall where they may.
As long as their terms of service is applied equally and consistently it should be legal as far as I know. Maybe you could make the argument that their rules are discriminatory and aren't being (or can't be) enforced equally, but that's different from telling a company that they have to accept any type of content without restriction.
FB, YT, Reddit, Twitter, etc. have been removing posts and banning users for years. So, the act isn't new, but the fact that it's being applied to the President is new.
So you've just privatised policing of free speech, and it's now subject to arbitrary rules and whims of management and wall-street. Twitter can ban you if they don't like what you are saying, and they are not obligated to enforce rules equally or to even explain what you breached. The terms and conditions are very fuzzy on to what is actually offensive.
If I host my own website, my cloud provider can ban me. If I self host at home on my own server, my internet service provider could cut me off - my ISP contract has a specific clause in their contract, stating that they could cut me off if they deem my content offensive, they are judge, jury and executioner and they owe me no explanation.
All of this creates great potential for foul play, where a hypothetical rich or powerful person or party could silence embarrassing news with a few phone-calls, and there is sod all you could do about it.
And it seems the market have already chosen that a slightly moderated but not too heavily model seems to retain and attract the most users.
Twitter I don't think is putting in place these moderation mechanism for fun or through their own personal CEO's own moral and ethics. They do what they think will be best for business.
From a free speech perspective, it's straightforward, private parties can choose to relay (or not) whatever viewpoints they want, and can choose to relay those viewpoints with or without commentary.
From a “what’s an ideal policy” perspective, maybe it's not, but “your policy is not ideal” isn't an exception to free speech justifying government intervention.
> How can they even be impartial
Private actors aren't required to be impartial. In fact, the whole premise of the marketplace of ideas is that private parties will be partial in choosing which ideas to present and how to present them.
The issue is that a few giant corporations have got a cartel going. It's really an antitrust problem which is only a speech problem because the market is the marketplace of ideas.
What would NOT be lawful would be Trump to close them down because they did what they did. That is full stop illegal if he did it. Not sure how legal it even is to threaten it this way.
At this point, Twitter might as well even close Trump's account. Still legal, still within their rights.
now if they want to use limited public goods, well then there's a role for the FCC or something like it...
Could that be a 'limited public good'? Due to the network effects, it seems like only one website at a time would hold this status.
Now that it's here, and they're all on it.. "the coffee shop can throw you out" seems a little trite. I don't like Trump either, set him aside, what if we were on the wrong side of Twitter's politics?
I'd be fine with retaining Twitter's right to add commentary, as they did to Trump, as long as it's clear who's saying what.
Even without explicit abuse, this is effectively the government saying "you must transmit this information, no matter what", which is an unwelcome intrusion of governmental power, in my opinion.
Check this out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier
What would be novel in twitter's case, is that rather than recognizing that the phone company is a natural physical monopoly and hence must not refuse service to the politically unpopular, twitter is more of a natural social monopoly because of network effects. It would be an expansion of the doctrine, but it's arguably justified to the extent that you can't just go 'start your own twitter'.
Child porn is unprotected speech that does not enjoy first amendment protections. What you are advocating for is giving the government control over forms of protected speech, which is a whole different ball of wax. Creating precedent that the government should regulate acknowledged protected speech is not a good idea at all.
> What would be novel in twitter's case, is that rather than recognizing that the phone company is a natural physical monopoly and hence must not refuse service to the politically unpopular, twitter is more of a natural social monopoly because of network effects
Twitter is not a monopoly.
If that's the case, the common carrier concept is helpfully already fleshed out for us in the law.
Good night.
You're not intending to, but by giving the government the ability to regulate political speech you are.
And yes; telling Twitter what they can do with political speech is governmental regulation of protected speech. You're giving the government to decide what forms of protected speech get extra special protection, which is a form of regulation.
> I am suggesting that Twitter might be a monopoly, and subject to the common carrier doctrine, on "being the watering whole for the entire media/political class".
So, I can declare any company a monopoly if they have cornered a specific user base, no matter how vague? Is Slack now a monopoly because they're popular in tech offices? Can I regulate declare Reddit a monopoly for sports fans and regulate it as such?
What is the general principle that will decide whether or not a company should be regulated as a monopoly? And how in the world do you define the "media" class in order to regulate companies like Twitter?
Only 22% of Americans use Twitter daily. That is not a monopoly, period.
> but I think we can all agree that you can't just start your own Twitter and have the same unique position of political influence.
Sure, but that's no argument for an expansion of government power.
Good night.
The basic problem you're going to run into is that common carrier status was designed to ensure equal public access to limited resources. In most cases this will either be a physically limited resource (railways, pipelines, power lines, long haul fiber) or access to resources that were actually created by the government (radio frequencies, highways, licensed taxicabs). Common carrier status is frequently also applied where eminent domain was used to create the infrastructure in the first place.
Basically, common carrier was designed to solve the problem of limited infrastructure, and their application to telecommunications has been spotty. I would remind you that ISPs are not common carriers under US law. Ma Bell might've gotten broken up, but the power of the FCC to do that was actually repealed in 1996.
The problem is that social media networks aren't a limited resource, at all. The damn things keep popping up, closing, and buying each other. I've had well over a dozen social media website accounts so far at least, and that's probably under counting.
So any attempt to declare Twitter specifically a common carrier is going to have to center around this idea that they have a monopoly on media and political figures. Of course this is an extremely vague concept; how do you decide who is a "media" or "political" figure? And what percentage of them must be on a site before that site should become a common carrier? What if they’re on multiple social sites at once? And how exactly do you define what is and is not censorable wherever media figures are present? And how in the world would you codify this into law in a way that wouldn't be overturned as unconstitutional?
Honestly, the contortions required to make Twitter a common carrier are so strained, they strike me as something started with the end goal in mind.
Would that make political parties illegal?
IANAL but an example could be:
Someone posts a pirate ebook on their facebook profile. They can hide behind the "yeah but it was the user" harbor.
vs.
Someone posts a pirate ebook on a facebook profile, facebook staff thinks it's cool and puts it on a special themed section called "Pirate picks from today". They will be in trouble.
they didn't edit anything; it was very clear what he posted and it was his exact words as written. there weren't even any dark ui patterns to make it look like the fact check was part of what he said.
2. Twitter already automatically adds posts to special themed sections called "What's happening", so even if you were right there is no added liability.
3. Adding fact checking is not adding things to special themed sections, so this is off topic.
Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which immunized from tort liability "interactive computer service[s]", was passed in response to a 1995 NY state court case that found Prodigy liable for statements posted on a forum by one of its users. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratton_Oakmont,_Inc._v._Prod.... The test the judge employed in that case was the degree to which Prodigy exercised editorial control over user-posted content, and in that case the judge found Prodigy exercised such sufficient editorial control that the discretion it effectively exercised in failing to remove the statement made Prodigy liable.
If Section 230 was revoked then that test of editorial control would presumably become the law in many if not most U.S. states as, AFAIU, the test wasn't created out of whole cloth, but rooted in well-established precedent. Some states might go another way but I doubt it; categorical, bright line limitations on liability are an unusual feature of judge-made law (which emphasizes fairness in the context of the particular parties, with less weight given to hypotheticals about society-wide impacts) and are typically created by statute. Other jurisdictions seem to have ended up applying very similar rules as the NY court, and even supposed Section 230 analogs (e.g. EU Directive 2000/31/EC) seem more like the NY rule in practical effect than Section 230's strong, categorical protections. Manifest editorial control seems like a sensible test for deciding when a failure to remove constitutes negligence; sensible, at least, if you're going to depart from strong Section 230-like protections. But I would expect significant variance in the degree of control required to be exhibited absent a national rule. In any event, massive sites like Twitter and Facebook might be faced with some stark choices--go all-in on censorship, or take a completely hands-off approach a la Usenet.
But whether or not you like the feature, the idea that the president of the United States would threaten “shutting down” Twitter because he doesn’t like a feature is beyond the pale, full stop.
> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider" (47 U.S.C. § 230)
To sum up: If the platform becomes the "information content provider", defined as "any person or entity that is responsible, in whole or in part, for the creation or development of information", then they loose the protection. The statute also excepts federal criminal liability and intellectual property claims.
Creation or development of information can exclusively be moderation, as has been shown in copyright cases. Cutting (deciding what to show and what not to show), re-arrange or changing the context can create new original work, which would make the creator an information content provider for that. At the same time, doing either of those does not automatically cause the moderator to become a creator of original work.
As lawyers like to say, it all depends on the details of the specific case. To take a extreme example outside of this twitter discussion, taking an video interview and cutting it to create a new narrative would make the editor responsible for that whole new version.
But not for the purposes of section 230. And there's significant precedent to this effect that you'd need a supreme Court ruling to change it.
To take an fictional twitter example, blocking a user from a website is unlikely to create a derivative work. Removing a post in the middle of a twitter chain that makes up a story could change the narrative and content of that story, and if done intentionally would create a derivative work. The user could then sue twitter for copyright infringement, and if the new story is defamatory, under liability laws. We could for example imagine a rape story where the post that includeded the word "Stop" was removed, where the author would then have a legit legal claim against the moderation.
It all depend on context, intent, and the details of a specific case. The tools of moderation does not define what is legal and what is not.
Be a bit more tolerant of other people's point of view.
Anyway, I think you are misinterpreting the intention of that sentence. It basically means that, in principle, the behavior of being a "provider or user of an interactive computer service" does not imply that it is "the publisher or speaker of any information provided [...]". But that does not exempt them from potentially being the actual publisher, and all the rights/obligations that go with it.
Trivial example: Someone publishing its work on the web (hence becoming a "user of an interactive computer service") does not imply that they lose copyright; even though they "shall [not] be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided [...]".
Again, IANAL, but I read a lot of copyright, safe harbor law, DCMAs, etc... and it goes like that.
They're not wrong. Every single time Section 230 comes up, there's somebody here arguing that Section 230 doesn't actually mean that companies can choose who they want to censor without becoming a publisher.
But it does. That was the explicit point of Section 230, and that's how Section 230 has played out in legal courts ever since it was established.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...
----
But of course, that entire debate about Section 230 is irrelevant here because Twitter hasn't censored anybody, and I haven't seen anyone give a clear reason why neutrality requirements on commentary wouldn't be outright unconstitutional, regardless of what Section 230 says.
From your own quoted source:
"A defendant must satisfy each of the three prongs to gain the benefit of the immunity:
1. [...]
2. [...]
3. The information must be "provided by another information content provider," i.e., the defendant must not be the "information content provider" of the harmful information at issue."
The moment you create your own content (even if you are a content provider yourself) you lose the protection of Section 230 over that. Editing/policing content is, in most cases, akin to creating content. You cannot make a list of "staff picks" and then claim that the content comes from other sources. Putting that list together (even if you're just quoting somebody else) is equivalent to an action of creation, you are the creator of that list. You chose what to put in it and what to exclude. You ARE the original creator of this and Section 230 does not apply for you.
No. Practically every social network and publisher creates their own content occasionally, yet there's plenty of precedent for companies like Google, Ebay, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook being protected under Section 230.
A better, more accurate way of phrasing your objection would be to say, "Section 230 does not protect you from lawsuits over the specific content you created." So if Twitter's company-written annotation was found to be libel, they could of course be sued over that.
But adding your own content to a forum/platform has no bearing on whether Section 230 applies more broadly to other content that you host. Take a deeper look at your example:
> You cannot make a list of "staff picks" and then claim that the content comes from other sources
This is exactly what Amazon, Apple, and Google Play do every day. And all of those platforms have been ruled to be protected by Section 230 in multiple lawsuits -- covering everything from trademark violations to defective products. The fact that Amazon has a "recommended brand" section does not mean that they are liable for everything that shows up on their store. And that's a principle that's held up in real courts over, and over, and over again.
> Editing/policing content
I don't want to keep beating the same horse, but that's not what Twitter did. They didn't edit Trump's tweet or restrict it, they added their own speech next to Trump's tweet. That has nothing to do with Section 230, it's just a generic, common case of 1st Ammendment protected counterspeech.
I was talking in a broad sense. I never accused or defended twitter of doing anything. Please stop making such weak strawmans.
Regarding the rest of your arguments, you're basically agreeing with me with a different set of words. I am glad you got the point :).
Why would I tolerate a blatant falsehood?
> that does not exempt them from being the actual publisher, and all the rights/obligations that go with it.
With respect, you're totally misinformed. Social media websites do not fall under any kind of "publisher" obligation, this is a totally made up meme that people spread online.
Now, if you want to argue that we should change the laws so that these websites would fall under some kind of publisher obligations, I would disagree, but that would at least allow room for "tolerance of other people's point of view". However, in terms of the actual law you and the parent are unequivocally incorrect.
If a Twitter user posts child porn (which is an example of an illegal act in the US), and Twitter knows that it is on the platform and does not remove the content, do you know if Twitter would therefore become liable for the content?
(Again, this is more exploring Section 230, not about the specific controversy du jour.)
Section 230 also wouldn't have necessarily protected them before SESTA/FOSTA either, federal criminal liability was always exempted. It's just that SESTA/FOSTA made that a lot more explicit and generally widened that liability.
Section 230 isn't a blanket protection against literally anything (it also has a number of holes surrounding copyright). It's just a much broader protection than many people online think, and the areas where it doesn't protect platforms typically don't line up well with where Internet commenters think it shouldn't protect companies.
IANAL, don't go out and do something stupid and then claim that I said it was legally OK. But in general a good heuristic for talking about Section 230 online is that it's, "not unlimited, but probably broader than you're thinking." But if you're trying to launch your own service or something and you want legal advice about where exactly the line is drawn, you should talk to an actual lawyer.
Section 230 isn't absolute, there are several specific exceptions. One example is the FOSTA law from 2017 which explicitly overrides Section 230.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/1865
> The bill amends the Communications Act of 1934 to declare that section 230 does not limit: (1) a federal civil claim for conduct that constitutes sex trafficking, (2) a federal criminal charge for conduct that constitutes sex trafficking, or (3) a state criminal charge for conduct that promotes or facilitates prostitution in violation of this bill.
There are some other examples I'm not thinking of off the top of my head, but on a note directed more towards the general discussion, I'd point out that creating laws to limit the scope of Section 230 is illustrative of the kind of freedoms it affords site operators in the general case.
No one said they did. But also Section 230 does not imply that they're exempt of that, in the case they become such a thing. And remember that those rights/obligations are acquired the moment they are exercised.
Consider the following:
Twitter (the platform), on its official twitter account (on their own platform) decides to publish something which has legal repercussions. Are they exempt of them because of that statement on Section 230? No, not at all.
Section 230 does NOT give the NYT immunity for anything in the articles themselves, where they operate as a publisher. However, absent S. 230 protection, those articles and their publisher still enjoy regular First Amendment protection, which is quite strong. In particular, there are nearly insurmountable obstacles for a public figure to win a defamation lawsuit in the US.
You're aware that comments on NYT articles are also human-moderated, yes?
(2) Civil liability
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of— (A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected [...]
No, not at all, because Section 230 has nothing to say about the scenario you are describing.
> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information _provided by another information content provider_
In your scenario Twitter is the provider of the information, so naturally they are liable for the legal repercussions of posting that information. Everyone already understands how this works intuitively, obviously when something illegal or otherwise legally significant is posted to the internet there isn't even a question of whether or not the posting platform is legally responsible for it as long as they are perceived to be taking reasonable steps to remove the offending content. If the site operators are posting the questionable content directly then obviously they are liable.
That's not what we're talking about though, we're discussing twitter having labled Trump's tweet as misinformation. I guess you're suggesting that twitter is the "publisher" of that warning and thus they are legally responsible for it, which is true, but there is nothing illegal about what they published so the hypothetical is moot.
Meaning that the statement by eanzenberg:
>"As they move into a “publisher” role, they will be liable in count (sic)."
Is not wrong. At least not over what concerns Section 230.
To paraphrase and summarize the whole discussion:
"As they move into a “publisher” role, Section 230 will not exempt them from what they do."
I'm glad we came to an understanding but this is a strawman. You might as well be saying "Section 230 does not exempt twitter from the law". This is very obviously not something anyone is arguing.
I would like to see it greatly narrowed.
Even if we ignore this particular instance as a special case where the act was justified, large companies having unfettered control over most political discourse in the country, and wielding that power in an arbitrary, unaccountable way is still a problem.
Yes, if Twitter publishes something defamatory in their own name, they're liable. No, they are not the publisher of any content they choose to moderate.
I doubt he would shut Twitter down (if only because he needs it more than it needs him), but I don't doubt for a second that he would use the executive branch to retaliate against them.
I mean, I could have told you that when the already part-time CEO announced he'd move to Africa for a year :)
Dorsey is being incredibly smart by trying to figure out how to break into the African market. He probably wants to do payments there. Get in early, win the market. It's genius.
Just look at what's happening with Belt and Road.
Africa is going to be huge.
If I had his money and influence, I would be doing the same.
It’s definitely a threat. But I don’t see any people backing down, and using “chilling” to me is just pathos to try and make one side seem right. It’s a disagreement on what to do and how to run our big platforms.
He made threats to retaliate, clearly to chill speech he disagrees with.
They are not the same thing. Not even close. And businesses will have to take his behavior into account, especially if some people give him a pass for this.
Trump keeps moving the bar, or trying to, in terms of pushing back against any organizational or legal limits on himself.
It has been both amazing and depressing to see how quickly people start making excuses for him, and declaring his behavior acceptable when it is clearly corruption.
— Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
Of course no social media company will be shut down over this- Trump has absolutely zero power in this regard (I think half of Trump's frustration is in realizing how little power a president truly has).
Anyway, he doesn't think he is a king. He thinks he is an emperor.
.. and ultimately, it was Twitter who said he has no clothes.
Weird times.
Twitter frequently selectively enforces its own terms of service. They punish some users and then intentionally let other users get away with atrocious behavior with no consequences. I've witnessed this across hundreds of various Twitter accounts over the last several years, so the number of times this happens must be rather epic. Numerous agencies of the US Government can choose to pursue Twitter for that. Twitter will find it impossible to correct their chaotic, selective, biased approach to how they treat their users so very differently. Angency N from the government slaps Twitter with an increasing fine each time they fail to properly, equitably enforce their terms of service. Start at $100 million and double it with every violation. Twitter will be bankrupt before a month is out.
Twitter would get on their knees and beg for mercy almost instantly. The US Government can break any corporation it wants to, anytime it wants to.
If the Trump Admin wants to be really devious, Nixonian, they'll target the executives operating the companies. Sending the IRS & Co. to make their lives a living hell. These companies will capitulate instantly.
Just ask the PRISM companies how this works in reality: you have no choice but to bow. It all depends on how nasty the Feds are prepared to get.
And on top of that would force the government to pay for Twitter's legal fees. And probably also for economic damages.
Then the US Gov't would be back at square one. Only worse.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-28/trump-fur...
I am not a free speech extremist, and recognise you need to balance the competing demands as these platforms are defacto digital town squares. There are several problems that currently exist. They are:
1) Who decides what is and isn't on the platform Now that the web has effectively been centralised into a handful of organisations, being locked out of a platform can be seriously harmful. There are no appeals, or arbitration on decisions made. No courts to provide an independent check.
2) Asymmetry of rule application The biggest issue is rules are not applied fairly. Certain types of people seem free to repeatedly break the rules on platforms without recourse.
(If you want to argue that a platform is treating people differently because of political affiliation, then yes, I'd agree that the argument about Masterpiece Cakeshop would apply - but it's far from obvious that any platform is in fact treating people differently because of political affiliation.)
My point was not on the merits of the case, but rather that many people on one side demand that this be made illegal, and yet on the other demand that twitter shut trump up. They demand free speech for themselves while silencing critics.
If Trump posted that America was being invaded by little green men from outer space would it be unreasonable to annotate that too?
I also don't know that I would want Trump to be silenced, since he's often his own worst critic.
I don't think Twitter is stopping him from saying bad things, either; in fact, they're pretty explicitly letting him say things, and they just happen to have something to say about what he's said, too.
On the other hand, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube et al are undoubtedly massively influential on the public opinion and their corporate position on political topics - Yoel Roth's recent tweets serve as a decent example, showing clearly that this person cannot be an objective "fact checker" - essentially create a public forum where I am not able to exercise my first amendment rights (and, legally speaking, rightfully so). I cannot help but to find this very concerning.
YouTube (despite numerous issues with their interpretation of free speech), for instance, starting linking Wiki articles under videos that cover certain topics or are uploaded by certain channels. Videos by the BBC show a notice that the BBC is a British public broadcast service, simply informing the viewer about the fact that any bias they might encounter can be easily identified (feel free to switch "BBC" with "RT"). I've found that to be a decent middle ground between outright suppressing views by a corporation pretending to be the authority on certain topics and broadcasting everything without any context.
[1] - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p035w97h/episodes/downloads
For me, free speech is fundamentally about trying to rectify the injustice of an imbalance of power between those in authority and the ordinary citizen. During the Enlightenment, the authorities were monarchs, but even before that, the origins of free speech can be seen in the Reformation, the authorities being the established Church and the battles being eg the right to a Bible in your own language or the right to worship without priests.
In modern times, authorities can be just straightforward, well, authoritarian. Global leaders & business people who tweet or post on FB carry an authority ex officio that make their proclamations much more acceptable to the neutral reader. That in itself is a dangerous situation and Twitter or FB absolutely need to take control. If these companies want us to take them seriously as champions of free speech, they have to play their role to help restore that balance of power, by being far more stringent about fact-checking the tweets of those global leaders than they would be for ordinary posters.
Those right-wingers who love to proclaim themselves champions of free speech are really objecting to the Tyranny of the Majority. That is not an authority that requires a rebalance of power. It is just an established opinion.
What about the executive and majority stockowners of these companies, and how they might abuse their power?
I would rather prefer a federated structure like email. Anybody can choose their own clients to generate their own biased/unbiased feeds, and with plugins for fact checking.
Elizabeth Warren had a position on making the big tech companies open platforms. That was along the same lines, and would provide a far better solution than handing off the power to control people off to FB and Twitter execs
A tyranny of the majority—which you appear not to understand is a bad thing[0]—is a disaster and precisely what modern democratic institutions seek to avoid. It always leads to the repression of minorities, whether that's ethnic minorities, religious minorities, or political minorities. I doubt you would be much in favor of tyranny by a majority of a different political persuasion.
There has never been “unbiased” media in the USA. Even PBS, NPR, and in other countries the CBC and BBC have been (often quite rightly) accused of bias.
I’m not sure what the ultimate answer to “fair public discourse” is, but “government regulated media” surely isn’t the answer we want.
I don't object to a good-faith defense of Twitter etc. as arbiters of truth, because it's entirely possible they'll do a good job and become a responsible authority. I do object to the idea that only the political right would have a problem with them, and that the only problem anyone could have is tyranny of the majority. I'm more worried about tyranny of Jack Dorsey than tyranny of the majority.
This is one of my biggest pet peeves with the current political climate. Everyone forgets the Y axis on the political compass! This is why people who understand that both parties are authoritarian could see past the Russiagate and other bullshits but most of the country couldn't.
If one is still falling for the left/right paradigm one won't be able to understand the bigger picture at play. It's much more about authoritarianism vs libertarianism.
The BBC is the last place I'd look to understand free speech. There is a reason why orwell based the ministry of truth on the bbc.
(1) Private forum, displayed in the public. (2) Those rights protect your speech from being suppressed BY THE GOVERNMENT. (3) Correct if you meant legally as a private company running a private forum, they can manage the content as they see fit, including fact checking the POTUS. Or incorrect if you meant you have a legal right to exercise your speech on their platform free of their rules.
There are a tiiiiny number of companies that are controlling global communications, and that should make us all uncomfortable.
Being banned from one restaurant in town, should not mean you're banned from all restaurants in the world.
Swastikas have a rich cultural history from long before NSDAP.
EDIT: to all the down-voters, I am not sure why the down-votes, but I suspect doing a Web search for "japan swastika" or similar may enlighten you.
EDIT2: FTR, I did not think of my post as some supposed big revelation, rather I mostly wanted to share my appreciation for the various Swastika forms (as old graphical art); and also thought banning Swastikas in general might be insensitive to Asians.
Probably because the point you're trying to make here is 1) nitpicking a detail of a hypothetical example which wasn't particularly relevant to the discussion, and 2) the "but it's not always a symbol of hate" argument is a rather common neo-Nazi talking point.
I don't think that quite describes the situation. Those with no money often have no recourse against Google, Facebook or CNN. But those with money whether individuals or corporation (even outside the media world), have many ways of shaping opinion, whether that shaping is public relations, SEO, media-creation or legal action.
Just during the time that Facebook has attempted to spread the standard, cautiously wide mainstream view of covid and the shutdown through their information center, I've received an ocean of polarizing false-claims about Covid and the shutdown through sponsored ads. Those ads cost money and they certainly show how today, money, any money, has a voice.
> Being banned from one restaurant in town, should not mean you're banned from all restaurants in the world.
So is the suggestion that I should be forced to serve people I don't want to serve?
The problem with social media is that the big platforms, like the post office or your ISP often ends up as an natural monopoly that can be just as dangerous to your political freedoms as any out of control government department by virtue of being just as powerful in the real world.
To be clear, current US law protects things that one can not change about themselves eg: race --and even this is a bit of an oversimplification (see being gay or a woman)-- but it in no way prevents a restaurant from serving someone because of the attire they are wearing or the speech they are speaking.
A classic example being that it is permissible to refuse to rent an apartment to a lawyer. (And in fact this is common in some places.)
the US first amendment protects against GOVERNMENTAL infringement.
in terms of this Twitter tempest-in-a-teapot, they ALSO have a right to free speech and Trumps demonstrably FALSE claims can absolutely be addressed, labeled as false, and that is an absolute right to free speech that Trump has already threatened with specious "governmental action" which PRECISELY violates both the letter and the spirit of the first amendment!
Trump is violating it!
I was referring to non-protected classes of people.
For example, I have the right to refuse to serve someone who has written bad checks at my establishment, for example.
Or I have the right to refuse service to someone who has caused harm to my clients.
Which leads back to my question: Should I be forced to serve these people?
> So is the suggestion that I should be forced to serve people I don't want to serve?
Well, yes. Like a utility company.
It doesn't matter who is hooked up to the water/sewer/internet/etc., they get service. I think the platform/publisher debate needs to actually be had.
Right now Twitter/FB/etc. are acting like publishers (silencing some, ignoring others) rather than platforms. If they are going to take responsibility for what is on their platform, they need to take full responsibility (a publisher). Or, they need to take no responsibility, as far as that goes under the law (a platform, which I here conflate with utility).
As it stands, all of the major social media companies are biased to the US left, and they cater largely to the left [0][1]. When they silence, they silence the US political right. Or comments that are critical of the CCCP[2]. Or legitimate medical opinions about Covid-19[3].
[0] https://dailycaller.com/2017/08/11/conservative-and-independ...
[1] https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/03/social-media-companie...
[2] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/05/youtube-auto-del...
[3] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/youtube-facebook-spli...
It's not as crazy an idea as it sounds. You may already be forced to. You cannot not serve people based on a protected characteristic.
For example, I have the right to refuse to serve someone who has written bad checks at my establishment, for example.
Or I have the right to refuse service to someone who has caused harm to my clients.
Well, a few other crowds did move to it but were quickly banned under the argument that their speech did not count as speech and thus wasn't protected. I remember it being quite a humorous (ironic?) twist for a company claiming to champion free speech.
You could have said the same thing about the press fifty or sixty years ago.
I just ctrl+f'd for "public forum" and yours was the first hit. One thing in particular I would like to comment on is that post-Trump's election I started listening to some of my SO's legal field podcasts because I wanted less sensational analysis. I very distinctly remember a series on the Opening Arguments one where they went into some depth about why Twitter should be legally considered a limited public-forum (this was in response to some other Trump-Twitter hubbub at the time).
So, just granting that, how does potentially being a "limited public forum" change it's rights and responsibilities to it's users? What about the heavy US government involvement in these companies, how could that change the analysis? What about the fact that dominate platforms are able to control the narrative due to that domination? Doesn't that completely fuck up the free speech concept? "Everyone uses X, but you can't because we don't like you, so you can have your free speech over there in that corner where nobody is." What kind of dangers in the long run does this present? Why do these companies so easily fall into models of censorship, and what kind of future would that mean for the public? (not looking to actually get into the convo necessarily, I'm commenting on the meta of the discussion and wish these kinds of questions were being asked more)
I personally hate youtubes banner for controversial shit. It always links to some shitty ass Wikipedia thats been heavily controlled/edited. Wikipedia is just not a good source of info on controversial topics, (though looking through revision history certainly can add context of what is "missing").
Considering they could log out (or open a private tab) and view the content, obviously it wasn't access to the information that was fundamental but the act of the President taking a step to reduce someone's access.
With that in mind, the underlying host taking a similar action is either a) Okay because it's their system? or b) Bad because they're blocking or altering the message?
We're in this really weird spot of free speech vs private property vs public forum vs free access vs..
Imagine a future president picks a Catholic forum to make the same sort of announcements that Trump currently does, specifically a catholic forum that bans any advocacy of pro-choice discussion. It is relatively easy to find a similar forum on any side of a modern hot button political issue.
Twitter's upcoming option to limit replies is being touted as a politician's dream, but in the US it's likely going to be unuseable for the same reason
If you're going to make legal nitpicks, you should probably have a thorough understanding of the jurisprudence.
And I wish you were right. That was how I always read it too but we've found out repeatedly - and recently - that state & local governments (and state universities) can ban numerous things, contrary to the 1st Amendment.
Those laws are called common carrier laws.
It is already illegal for many communication platforms, that a subject to certain classifications, to discriminate on the basis of the content of the speech that they distribute.
Common carrier laws are not controversial. Few people would argue that we should get rid of common carrier laws.
Example:
- CC laws guarantee that if you are able to host your speech on your own server that ISPs have to route information requests to it.
- CC laws do not guarantee you can force Reddit to host your speech on their own private servers or force Reddit to give you broadcast access to their audience.
I am arguing that common carrier laws already exist, and are not controversial.
And that it really isn't much of a stretch to change and expand our existing, uncontroversial, common carrier laws, so as to apply to other things that really aren't much different than our phone system.
Even if those laws have yet to be slightly updated to apply to the modern era yet.
Phones systems are are not platforms to host speech - i.e. CC laws can't force me to play your phone recording in my private home when someone calls me.
You talk about how established Common Carrier laws are, but that's precisely what they're established for - transportation. Hence the word carrier. CC laws were originally for unbiased trucking and rail transportation, and do not guarantee that you can force a private warehouse to store your goods.
> Phones systems are are not platforms to host speech - i.e. CC laws can't force me to play your phone recording in my private home when someone calls me.
> You talk about how established Common Carrier laws are, but that's precisely what they're established for - transportation. Hence the word carrier. CC laws were originally for unbiased trucking and rail transportation, and do not guarantee that you can force a private warehouse to store your goods.
But here we have an example of Twitter modifying communications in transit (by attaching additional information that is not metadata and not part of the original message). This would be like the post office marking letters from you as "do not open" in bold red letters before they reached the receiver.
2) Twitter isn't a post office, it's a privately owned website. They do not handle transportation requests for information on the internet, just their own private servers meaning they are not a common carrier.
3) Even if you conflate twitter with being a privately own post office, CC laws do not prevent them from putting "Toxic" stickers on any toxic waste being handled by them.
Your point of "toxic" labelling is interesting. I think there is a difference in the non-physical realm though as "toxic" as it applies to ideas is subjective.
It's weird how the administration that is responsible for de-regulating ISPs also wants to regulate platform-holders because they're concerned about how they treat their message.
I am saying that these laws are uncontroversial, and it would only require a slight expansion and change to them, to order for them to cover very similar things, that aren't that much different than what CC laws currently cover.
Yes, I understand that CC laws don't technically apply to what I am talking about. I am instead saying that it would only be a slight change, to make them apply, and therefore not as big of a deal as people are making it seem.
> but that's precisely what they're established for - transportation
I don't see how telephone companies transporting your phone calls is much different than twitter transporting your tweets. Yes, it is not exactly the same. It is slightly different. But only slightly.
> CC laws can't force me to play your phone recording
> do not guarantee that you can force a private warehouse to store your goods.
The private warehouse, or end phone user, in the twitter example, would be the end user. Twitter, is arguably, transporting your messages. And then the end user is not forced to keep it.
So even if CC laws were changed to apply to twitter, the end user would not be forced to keep their tweet. They could delete it, or not follow you, or whatever.
Just like how if I make a phone call to someone, they still receive the phone call, but you don't have to pick of the phone. The same argument could be applied to tweets.
> Phones systems are are not platforms to host speech
They have to transport speech. In the same way that twitter transports speech.
All that said, the concept of where and how to apply common carrier is of course controversial, hence the entire net neutrality debate. If an ISP isn't required to carry content the idea of an information service (ie Twitter) being required to is borderline absurd.
I have stated multiple times that I am aware that CC laws do not currently apply to these situations.
I am instead saying that these laws could be slightly changes, because, philosophical, there isn't much of a difference between a phone calls, and tweets or FB messages.
> is borderline absurd.
Apparently people don't think it is absurd to force phone companies to carry most phone calls.
And IMO, there isn't much difference, philosophically between a phone call and tweets or a FB message, even if our laws haven't been changed slightly to apply to them yet.
Twitter is not transporting your tweets, they are storing them and distributing them to anyone who asks to see them (given a very loose definition of ask).
Regardless, the actual storage of phone calls, or tweets, is not the reason that most people would say it is important for these things to not to be discriminated against or for.
Or another example, it is arguable that the water company stores water. And the storage of the water is a part of the transportation of it.
To use the example of phone calls, most people would not be OK with the phone company choosing to read your voice mail, and determining if you are allowed to store it based on the contents of it.
Regardless, the storage part is not the actual interesting part of the question here.
Regardless, I was responding to the 1st amendment claim by the GP.
Sure. But now imagine if we applied the same provisions to twitter or facebook. We could say that if they don't follow common carrier status, then we can hold them responsible for any crime done on their platform.
This is would almost effectively the same thing as forcing them to follow common carrier laws. And it would have the same effect as requiring them to follow the 1st amendment, but doing it in a round about way.
It is not exactly the same as using the 1st amendment. But it is close enough.
Because, TBH, we already use these laws for commication platforms, such as phone companies.
So are you arguing that the president has a greater right to free speech than Twitter?
This isn't how common carrier laws work.
The way that common carriers laws work, is that companies that are subject to them do not have the right to pick and choose who they sell to, if they want the protections that theses laws provide.
Twitter isn't currently subject to these rules. But these laws already exist, and are uncontroversial, and could be extended to other platforms.
For example, if Twitter lost it's current content immunity, by being deemed a publisher, then it would be subject to significant liability, and may have to change up how it runs itself
I mean I can say whatever I want on this platform as well, but if I cross a line my posts will be hidden and eventually my account blocked. And that is fair, it's what I agreed to, and not only that but it's morally just.
The free speech extremists confuse freedom of speech with protection from consequences.
Interestingly, Trump and some other celebrities on Twitter have had special protection from said consequences.
Tech CEOs can now influence the public as much or more so than any politicians. So this is fundamentally about power to influence.
Trump is mad because he thinks he is and should be the most powerful person on the planet. This action stands in contrast to that.
Blackwater is a private enterprise and arguably is able to legally kill (and is in a sense a form of private military). Beyond that obvious example, private police agencies have existed in the US for some time.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_police_in_the_United...
Specifically, the consequence of other people exercising the same freedom of speech, including by deciding not to relay certain speech of the self-styled “free speech” advocates.
Bad, ignorant, hateful ideas are bad because they are wrong; if they were true, you would not call facts "bad". That being the case, the correct response is to defeat them with truth-- not censorship, whether state or privately enacted. Censorship is just admitting that you dislike the ideas but cannot argue them down with reason and are resorting to the cudgel.
But we do. Any facts that cast certain religions (but not others!), or certain lifestyle choices (but not others!) in a bad light are considered _____-ophobic. Bad.
Facts are routinely politicized and made out to be evil.
> Censorship is just admitting that you dislike the ideas but cannot argue them down with reason
This is true. And this is why it is so hard to have an honest debate. Many people in the United States (perhaps elsewhere?) think with their feelings, and not facts or reason. The videos of people screaming over the top of presenters on college campuses are case-in-point.
The world as a whole is marching towards the cudgel. Hate speech laws are a manifestation of this. What remains is the removal of an individual's right to defend their life. After that we have tyranny.
In my view, the most powerful person in the world unilaterally shutting down companies he disagrees with is much closer to tyranny.
If he succeeds, it is definitely a step in that direction.
How many media outlets are thinking twice before possibly attracting his ire?
So true! People should consider why we call politically correctness that. We don't call them facts or truth, but that they can be said and not hurt "feelings".
the Supreme Court certainly has not upheld compelled speech. And internet theories about private services as de facto public forums continue to be defeated in court (PragerU v Google being the most recent example).
"Despite YouTube's ubiquity and its role as a public-facing platform, it remains a private forum, not a public forum subject to judicial scrutiny under the First Amendment," the court said."
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/youtu...
The whole POINT of 'free speech' is that there are no consequences.
(And no you shouldn't be allowed to shout 'fire' in a theatre).
That's not the consequence here.
The consequence is “other private parties might choose not to relay your speech or continue association with you, exercising their own rights to free speech and association.”
Me not allowing you to use my resources to magnify the reach of your message isn't analogous to the state subjecting you to capital punishment.
> The whole POINT of 'free speech' is that there are no consequences.
No, the whole point is that the state doesn't have their thumb on the scale, allowing ideas to succeed or fail by their ability, or not, to attract support from private actors. Legislation in which the state intervenes to prevent private consequences through the exercise of free speech are not only on their face contrary to free speech, but sabotage the operation of the marketplace of ideas.
But I also wont bend the definition either. That’s where the problems start.
https://www.factcheck.org/2016/09/trump-pence-acid-wash-fact...
> Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump falsely claimed Clinton “acid washed” 33,000 personal emails to delete them, calling it “an expensive process.” The FBI said Clinton’s tech team used BleachBit, which is a free software program. It does not use chemicals.
These sorts of "fact checks" are blatant horse shit that always go in one direction. Some "challenge", the very antithesis of any sort of good faith discussion on the facts.
The entire point of the "fact-check" - and what people object to - is the privileged position, that makes direct replies impossible.
If you have something to say in good faith, let me know.
States that allow no excuse mail in ballots are evenly split between red and blue.
Do you have a specific critique of statements Twitter made in this case?
Twitter does not fact-check Democrats. The end.
Until everyone can agree on a universal arbiter for what those things mean in a concrete way, there will always be demographics who strongly disagree.
The reason free speech exists as a concept is because of a historic understanding that there fundamentally cannot be an unbiased arbiter for 'good' or 'bad' speech.
On the other side of this, the internet is increasingly controlled by a particular demographic with a particular definition of what things like 'hate speech' mean. Which suppresses and censors a wide range of topics that the other demographics do want to discuss. When the entire internet makes it impossible to express certain views, we can't claim to have free speech anymore. It's not good enough to say 'well if you don't like it then you can go and shout your views out on the street instead'.
The weapon against 'incorrect information' is education, not censorship. Censorship has never worked to actually quash 'wrongthink', it only marginalises and energises demographics who are censored, and drives them to eventually revolt. See: trump winning presidency.
I thought it was to protect citizens' rights to hold their governments accountable.
>On the other side of this, the internet is increasingly controlled by a particular demographic with a particular definition of what things like 'hate speech' mean.
Hilariously, I agree with the wording but am willing to bet we disagree on who the controlling demographic is. Everyone remembers the stronger emotional reactions.
> bet we disagree on who the controlling demographic is
I don't have a horse in the race. All I'm saying is that there is a bias due to the existence of a controlling demographic, and this undermines free speech when that demographic is able to censor what's visible to the average internet user. As a proponent of free speech, I'll fight for it even if it means that it unleashes views that I disagree with - that's the exact purpose of it. The most terrifying part about accepting censorship because you happen to agree with the censors, is that the censors will change over time and you will eventually find yourself on the receiving end.
But it doesn't predate the concept of government or the idea of government’s accountability to it's citizens; it appears to have emerged directly attached to that concept in Athenian democracy.
> Free speech is about ensuring that there's a broad pool of ideas in society so that it doesn't stagnate into a degenerate vertical of narrow beliefs.
No, it's really about preserving the proper subject relation of the government to the citizenry, as opposed to the inverse.
It's not against coalescing around consensus ideas, it's against the state dictating where that consensus will fall. There's obviously situations where nominally private institutions are de facto arms of the state, so you can't simply ignore formally private institutions, but just because a private actor has a powerful voice doesn't mean they stop being a free participant in the marketplace of ideas and must be constrained in order to preserve an artificial absence of consensus.
I feel most people arguing for "free speech" applied universally to governments and private parties don't really understand the classical nature of it very well and how it functions as a pillar of democracy. If they did they would understand the paradox it would create when the restrictions placed on government are applied to private parties..
There doesn't exist an avenue to meaningfully exercise free speech on the internet. You can make your own blog, but it will never go viral. Because the only means for something to go viral is that 99.9% composed of privately censored platforms. We've gotten into a situation where censorship has changed shape from 'one is prevented from expressing a view' to 'a view is prevented from reaching an audience'. Which is far worse than old school Stalin era censorship.
This is not an easy question, but it is clearly a case of the law needing to be updated in light of how technology has evolved. We can't claim to have free speech if there's de-facto no way to exercise it on the primary communication channel of our time.
Concrete example: it has recently come out that youtube has been silently censoring a wide array of comments that express anti-china views. Like most users, I was completely unaware that this is going on. Youtube distorted my perception of reality by suppressing an entire class of opinions from being visible. They didn't tell anyone that they're doing it, there was no transparency, and when they were caught, they said 'whoops it was a bug sorry lol'. That's crazy. What else are they suppressing? I do want laws to stop that even if it exposes me to comments I don't like.
Or consider the degenerate case: Imagine Facebook takes over the entire internet. They buy Google, they buy Twitter, they buy pretty much everything than an average user will ever see. And Zucc comes along and says, from now on any mention of a certain political view on any of these platforms will be censored. This is ok by the rules you're proposing, but it's clearly not ok in terms of the spirit of free speech laws.
The issue is that if you express 'wrongthink', then the 99.9% of platforms will prevent your idea from spreading, even if it would have otherwise spread or become popular.
This is how censorship has changed form. It's no longer about stopping someone form saying something, it's about preventing certain views/ideas from ever being allowed to spread or become viral or reach a wide audience.
Twitter is notorious for soft-censoring posts, where only connections 1-2 hops away from the author can see them, and then they don't exist. Those posts, no matter how much they resonate with people, can never spread to a large audience.
If we backport it to the real world, it's a bit like saying, sure we still have freedom of speech. You are welcome to go and say anything you want inside this soundproof box with room for only 1 person.
Other industries have things like the FCC or the FDA where companies can say, "Look, we did our due diligence, the FDA approved our drug."
We've become quite protective of the data that's collected by digital products for fear of a concentration of power.
But then we all see the internet as a great 'leveller', and we don't want to disturb that balance.
The likes of the FDA (or your local equivalent) work at a certain scale... Perhaps civilly agreed constraints can be applied to companies who have managed to cultivate a userbase of a certain size.
Like a 'tax' of a kind on the amount of 'trash' you're allowed to ignore, before the police physically ensure you and your users can't abuse state infrastructure for whatever your nefarious purpose is.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/18/a-toxic-w...
One of the people making the argument is Nate Matias, the guy behind Civil servant, which is essentially the first open testing system to see the impact of content moderation rules on users -
https://www.fastcompany.com/3068556/reminder-you-can-manipul...
it's more concerning that people are taking it seriously enough to create so much chatter. it's not even a free speech issue, insofar as twitter is not a government entity. there's literally no 'there' there.
I initially thought that he could not gut the American administration _too_ much because of institutional inertia and the systems put in place that still had you country functioning pretty well once he took power. But now here we are, him having placed stoodges at the head most most institutions and gutted them of power.
If he could do that, he most obviously could lead to Twitter falling apart. Another poster outlined here how that could work:
the massive federal bureaucracies don't turn on a dime and are still running fine (we have food, power, water, commerce, justice, etc.), despite trump's paranoia around having anyone around him stealing his limelight, including competent cabinet members and heads of other federal agencies. hopefully these next few months are the final season of reality tv government here.
it’s a small squeak though, unlikely to last more than a news cycle. he just loves the twitter limelight too much, loves being a bully, and really needs the media distracted on him for the next 6 months. we’ll get a bunch of these tirades as he tries every outrage to see what sticks with the media and keeps that sweet camera lens on him.
Either the president does not know the constitutional limits on his power, or he knows them but still thinks it's a good idea to claim power that he does not have. I'm not sure which is worse.
Or he knows what he is allowed to do and is just saying stupid crap like he usually does. Trump doesn't have a filter and just says/tweets whatever pops into his head. This could be another example of that.
So I think it's more of a third choice - He doesn't care if he has the power, he's just creating chaos and conflict to excite his base, as he has been doing for years.
A not-insignificant portion of his base supports him because of exactly the sort of attitude you display in your post: arrogant, smug, baseless condescension. Did you learn nothing from the whole "basket of deplorables" incident?
https://wjla.com/news/nation-world/trump-won-the-majority-of...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basket_of_deplorables#Analysis
Supporting Trump because the mean lady made an insulting (but not untrue) comment about his base one time doesn't make them not morons - at best, it just makes them morons with a persecution complex who don't care that their movement has been brigaded by racists and xenophobes.
A large portion of his base supports him and squeals with delight because he antagonizes people that are intelligent, educated, and open-minded. Those people are morons. All of them. And if that sounds arrogant or smug or condescending then good.
So you THINK you're the smartest guy in the room...and yet you can't even conceptualize that, somewhere among the US population of 330 million people, with ~6.6 million geniuses, that there are intelligent, educated, open-minded voters who heavily-weighted policy issues such as border security, 2nd Amendment, and countering a rising China, looked at their Candidate options, and opted for Trump as a best-fit to pursue their prioritized issues.
If your brain can't fathom that possibility, then ARE you objectively better than ALL of them? That's far beyond statistically improbable. I would hope that you would cultivate a sense of introspection and contemplate the subject. All of us would benefit. Seriously. No one in America gains when portions of our population are completely unable to productively engage with their fellow citizens, which they've cast wholesale in a mold shaped by the most ridiculous, caricatured stereotype possible.
I am 100% better and smarter than every Trump supporter on earth. All of them. Border, 2nd ammendment, rising China...if you want to talk policy I am most certainly your Huckleberry.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: I just checked the account history and am glad to see that you haven't made a habit of this in HN comments in the past. Please don't start!
You sound like a raging extremist. It's ironic that you're so sure you are smarter than like 100 million people.
One thing that seems relevant in the discussion about speech restrictions on social media is the fact that most if not all of the major websites are deliberately set up to maximize user engagement. The site is designed, measured and iterated on in order to induce users to comment as much as possible.
That practice seems to be incompatible with unrestricted speech. Eventually people run out of nice things to say. Facebook's policy is very obviously "if you don't have anything nice to say, say something anyway, we want money". Free speech has been sustainable historically because it's natural for people to think before they say something controversial, but now we have websites that actively undermine that built-in filter.
20-30 years ago mass media was only accessible to people with large amounts of money to purchase advertising or run their own media platform such as a TV or radio station or a newspaper. It was closed to everyone else unless you could pull off some stunt to get five minutes of fame and somehow leverage that to deliver a message.
Now you have these vast platforms enabling anyone with a few bucks and cheap computer to potential address millions upon millions of people in near real time. It's completely unprecedented. In many cases these platforms are free as long as you comply with some minimal platform rules and regulations around what you can and cannot say. For most platforms the rules really are pretty minimal. Twitter is one of the least restrictive. You have to be a real obnoxious ass to get kicked off Twitter.
Somehow people have become so accustomed to this free and ubiquitous open access mass media that what was just a few decades ago impossible is now seen as an entitlement. Refuse to let your platform be used to deliver my message? You're censoring me!
Censorship refers to the use of force to prevent someone from speaking. The government has a legal monopoly on force, so generally this requires a law to be passed or perhaps an abuse of the civil court system to leverage the government to shut down someone's speech.
I can't speak for every country but in the USA that is extremely rare. We take the first amendment very seriously around here. You've got to go pretty far to get actually censored. You can buy books on how to make illegal drugs for example, or slander public figures on social media with baseless accusations, or publish software designed to directly facilitate illegal activity, and rarely will anything happen to you.
Being denied access to speak via someone else's privately owned and operated platform is not censorship. Nobody is preventing you from speaking. They're just refusing to assist you in delivering that speech.
Imagine someone walking into a newspaper office 40 years ago and demanding to have their op-ed printed (for free!) and then shouting "censorship!" when the newspaper refused? It's ridiculous.
I thought conservatives were skeptical of entitlements, especially when they involve other peoples' property.
You can host a webpage on a raspberri pi and reach millions of people.
Secondly, media platforms affect the reat of society amd its perfectly reasomable that some standards be set for how they operate. Thats usually some form of fair treatment, and you should not be denied a platfork for fictitious or discriminatory reasons
The companies would also presumably have to allow commercial spam.
You have the right to free speech. That's not disputed. You are entitled to it. However you don't have the right to distribute that free speech on a private companies platform, that's a privilege offered by the owners not a entitlement.
It's very simple. Like it or not, that's your constitution.
Lets just play this out.. The president of the US (a supposed conservative) closes down one of the largest private companies in the US.. Not for doing something illegal as with `SilkRoad` for example.. But for practicing their own business policies.
Does that sound right to anyone ?
The threat to force private entities to toe the line is the only speech issue here. If you think people want unedited speech then I believe Gab could use some of your money.
Arguing that Twitter users must prefer said curation / censorship because Gab exists doesn't hold up because Twitter has other obvious advantages, like a massive network effect.
Outright ban all user tracking and profiling transparently with annual code audits and watchdog groups that can punish those in charge for not adhering to this, no advertisements, no selling data, and put 18f on the job of designing/developing it based off sound human principles, no army of behavioral researchers and Psychologists A/B testing bait-and-click engagement dark pattern metrics that penetrate deeply into the reward system of our neuroplastic brains and yanks on that lever of addiction formation with ease. Cut the bullshit and I'm on board. I'll even work for free on this if you promise to make it a reality, hell consider it a public utility if you have to so it stays funded and maintained.
The Advertising industry needs to be lobotomized and severely scaled back to more traditional forms of reaching people where they are, not vacuuming up every ounce of data their movement, click, search, and vitals generate unbeknownst to them. Good riddance.
Trolling is free speech, being a jerk is free speech, hate speech is free speech, pornography is free speech. Any forum that sets the bar at "free speech" is going to be filled with the dregs with depressing speed. There's a reason why Gab never really gained serious traction.
Another concept is just following a set of moderators.
Either way there is already Secure Scuttlebutt.
Distributed social media might solve this problem, but to be honest I don’t know a single person in my life on one. And I’d never heard of Secure Scuttlebutt before.
Fundamentally you still have the choice of curating some content or not. On the extreme ends are things like hate speech and exploitive content. Then there are “false” or incorrect information. You either allow them unchecked or you don’t. This isn’t a technological problem.
The web is nearly entirely privately owned, which makes answering this question difficult.
On one hand, the web is where we do 90% of our communication these days and losing that right seems like losing most of the first amendment.
I’m convinceable either way. Did telephone companies have a right to censor land line speech? Should they? Should ISPs be able to censor? Should cloudflair? AWS? It seems like industries like ISPs should be regulated to be “dumb pipes”. But where social networks fall is less clear.
Social media is the opposite. Abusive users of those networks operate at the application layer, and can spoil the experience of other users at the application layer but (likely) not at the network layer. So they moderate user activity at the application layer.
In each case it's about trying to ensure bad actors don't ruin other customers'/users' experience. It's just done in different ways depending on what part of the network stack the bad actors do their work in.
We've already lost the right to privacy, we don't have the right to not self incriminate, we don't have the right to be free of arbitrary punishment, we aren't presumed Innocent until proven guilty, and we don't have unlimited free speech.
Do I think this as it should be? No. We exist, as humans, on the internet and therefore should have human rights.
They are however only protected from civil liability for good faith restriction of otherwise legal content on their platform. To the extent to which that moderation is done on content that is compliant with the TOS, or without prior notice and indication of what terms were violated, or only selectively with an agenda to influence the broader social discourse, they may not necessarily benefit from an assumption of good faith, and therefore may be subject to civil liability.
And honestly, who wouldn't want social media companies to have a more fair and transparent TOS and moderation policy?
Companies growing does not make them into utilities. Utilities are providers of very specific commodity services which are specifically defined by statutory law.
Monopolies (as in anti-trust law) are companies which abuse their power to hurt the consumer. Traditional anti-trust law doesn't work against social media companies because consumers pay no cash for the transactions. We could change anti-trust law, but since there is no analog, it's not clear what we would change it to.
> There certainly is precedent for governments compelling utility providers to not restrict their services arbitrarily.
There is also precedent for governments to uphold a concept of "decency" (the same government that defines it as "I know it when I see it") which communities can judge for themselves, without a written definition. I, personally, don't see the judgements that social media companies make as "arbitrary" (they do have written ToS and they attempt to give their content moderators guidelines/baselines for judging decisions).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_as_a_public_uti...
I don't disagree.
> the idea of Twitter and other social networks being utilities isn't something I invented
Fair enough. I don't blame you. I just don't think it's easy or reasonable to overload the word "utility" as applied to content, which is exactly why it's currently governed by Section 230 and not Common Carrier.
Just two examples: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/make-whites-great-again-ha...
and https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/police-minnesota-trump-ral...
There were others; blaming people and nations that had nothing to do with this brutal horrible act for aiding and abetting.
Twitter will do nothing about this very harmful behavior. I reported some of the most egregious fake information being tweeted or retweeted and nothing happens.
to be fair this has been going on for three years now, something insane is done, instead of focusing on the insanity, people pivot to the policy
this is not how democracy works
While we are doing this the most astonishing thing happening is actually the extent to which the POTUS is constantly lying and spreading miss/disinformation. Every day. For more than three years now as you point out.
I wouldn't be surprised if Trump is the single greatest source of lies and otherwise false and purposefully misleading information in most peoples lives. Perhaps even greater than all other sources combined! That and the amount of effort spent discussing this for years is incredible.
You don't see a problem here?
Firstly, stop qualifying it with "hate", "factually incorrect", etc. It's a cheap tactic by authoritarian types to justify censorship. The religious zealots, authoritarian governments, etc all use the same argument you do to censor. Free speech is free speech whether you like it or disagree with it or whether it is factually incorrect.
Secondly, the question is whether a private company has a monopoly position. For example, we wouldn't allow power, water, telephone, etc companies from denying service based on what these companies feel are hateful or not. A christian ceo of these companies can't deny service to lgbt homes/companies/etc just because he doesn't like them or their speech. You get the idea?
Thirdly, if a social media platform is a vehicle for communication by elected officials, should that platform be allowed to limit citizen's access to said politician. I believe the courts already ruled twitter cannot deny people access to trump's twitter. But I'm not sure.
> Surely, it's clear here that having the actual head of the US government threatening to shut down private companies for how they choose to manage their platforms is a far more disturbing and direct threat against free speech even in the narrowest sense.
Yes. It is a concern worthy of discussion. But so are the other aspects of this issue which you naively dismiss as "hate"/etc.
How does this square with the fact that Donald Trump regularly blocks people from viewing his Twitter account for disagreeing with him or refusing to acknowledge his (apparent) infallibility? Is that not a much more egregious violation, and by an actual government official to boot?
He can't block them. That's my point.
"Trump can't block users from his Twitter feed, federal judge rules Blocking users from viewing his Twitter account is unconstitutional and a violation of the First Amendment, according to the judge."
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/all/trump-can-t-block-users-his...
I don't think he should be allowed to block americans from posting legal content on his feed.
Somehow the right-wing rage machine never takes on that particular free speech battle. Strange isn't it?
[1]https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/trump-violates-federal-...
[2]https://www.politico.com/story/2019/08/23/trump-twitter-bloc...
And I'm against it as long as it is an american behind the account.
> Somehow the right-wing rage machine never takes on that particular free speech battle. Strange isn't it?
Nothing strange about it. People with agenda all want censorship when it suits them. This entire thread is chock full of left-wing rage machine defending censorship just because it suits their ideology.
Left-wing rage machine and right-wing rage machine are ultimatel the same thing. They want control and obedience.
I¨m hoping you are not suggesting the same? If so, we¨re not even operating in the same reality.
> Direct quote, you can easily find a full transcript and see for yourself. Yet you didn't even know this existed. You're being lied to every day and you don't even know it.
You are assuming I'm being misled because I¨m not up to date on the latest "controversy" to hit PragerU.
I watched the whole press briefing when it happened, I'm very aware of what Trump said. And your direct quote is as much a direct quote as that which you suggest was unfair. Both are low on context.
The problem (in full context) was his multiple use of "both sides" referring to both good people as well as bad.
Whether he explicitly referred to neo-nazis or not is trying to divert the focus away from the fact that only people on one side was killed, only people on one side the night before chanted "jews will not replace us" and "blood and soil", and only people on one side were sporting a flag that symbolizes slavery.
I'm not glossing over the fact that there were violence on the other side, as there always will be.
But what the narrative cast by "charlottesville hoax" is sidestepping is that one side wouldn't be there if there wasn't for the need to stand up to (some portion) literal nazis.
Repeatedly uttering the words "both/all sides" in any context at that press conference is indefensible.
> Same with "Steele dossier"
I have trouble taking seriously this amount of irony.
I guess the racist part could be arguable, but that’s more opinion than fact.
What facts (either real or hypothetical) do you believe are missing?
The bigger issue is these platforms only get those free speech protections because they're platforms. The moment they start editing content like this, they become editors to a publishing platform, and they should be held liable for all that they've published. You can't just have your cake and eat it too, today they make you happy to censor the evil orange man, tomorrow they may censor those you support.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
We're seeing with YouTube that they're deleting posts against Communist China:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23324695
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23221264
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23317570
Worse what happens when you cross Facebook imposing Chinese censorship on the whole world?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13018770
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12479990
What happens when Google is used to push liberal bias?
Vimeo deletes videos claiming such bias from Google despite clear evidence in video:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20302010
"If we break things up, we can't stop Trump" replace Trump with any political candidate you've ever supported by the way to understand why this sort of thing is dangerous:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20265502
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20697780
I am sure I will get into fire for this comment, considering my citations were flagged to death because people don't agree with others. But mark my words, if the tables were flipped and they were censoring all your favorite candidates, you'd be outraged and against anything that would hinder free speech.
If you take away anything from this post be sure to be this:
Twitter, Google, Facebook etc are considered "platforms" the moment they editorialize content, they become publishers. Platforms are protected for obvious reasons, they cannot reliably contain every single thing a user posts, but a publisher dictates what is published, and is definitely liable for what they publish. These platforms want to be hybrids, but that gives them dangerous power to push agendas as they claim they are trying to stop.
No, this is totally incorrect.
> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider" (47 U.S.C. § 230)
It appears that removing the liability shield for social media platforms[0] is a popular position for both Republicans and Democrats by a wide margin. Nothing has transpired, yet.
However, the §230 is nuanced. There's case law where the liability shield defense has been rejected. See the defamatory information issues [1] where the site merely editorialized the headlines and was deemed a publisher.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...
Twitter are not editing they are editorializing.
Especially if they determine its not in their financial interest.
In general, the last 50-60 years have seen private individuals and businesses stripped of their rights to turn away customers, in the US mostly under the guise of the CRA, FHA, etc. YouTube finds itself remarkably (and unsurprisingly) unrestrained by these kind of (progressive) laws.
Any "conservative" content that has been kicked off of platforms like YouTube has been specifically targeted not for political reasons but because they were spreading hate speech and/or dangerous disinformation. Things like racism, sexism, religious intolerance, specific accusations (ie Joe Scarborough is a murderer) or dangerous disinformation (ie 5G causes Coronavirus) are not intrinsic to any group of people. There's still plenty of content around mainstream conservatism that can be viewed freely.
I think any attempt to argue a slippery slope isn't valid. People aren't computers and just because you can't apply a mathematically rigorous distinction between these kinds of speech doesn't mean that a reasonable person can't easily distinguish them.
He offered to sell them a pre-made cake (in compliance with non-discrimination laws). The question was whether he could be compelled to perform an act of speech (custom-making a cake) that violated his sincerely-held religious beliefs.
Regardless of the context of this case, it's odd that the state can now seemingly force someone to engage their creativity and artistic sensibility for any reason. It is now federal judicial precedence that he must lawfully create a satisfyingly beautiful cake for anyone who= asks. What if it's not beautiful enough? Is that punishable by law? Who judges the beauty?
Probably the baker should have just made a half assed cake...
No, the state (because the citizens wanted it that way) can merely require you to treat people the same regardless of race, gender, religion, or sexual orientation if you are offering services to the public. If you offer services to the public you can't pick and choose based on that criteria. You're free to create whatever you like, for whomever you like, if you're not a public business. Plus you can still refuse services to lawyers, people without shirts or shoes, or people who indent with spaces if you're a public business.
I fail to see how the state not enabling bigotry in services offered to the public constitutes oppression.
If you really can't see it, there has to be some kind of observational defect in your model of the world. Forcing people to do work they don't want to do is bad because compulsory labor is bad. It blows my mind that this is not immediately obvious to people who live in a society that (reasonably) vocally opposes slavery.
Also, "not enabling bigotry" is an insanely stilted way of saying "forcing people to perform labor they don't want to".
This is the same tired argument that every bigoted person whines about when they're 'forced' to treat human beings like human beings.
You'll be extremely relieved to know that nobody forced them to open a business that sells products and services to the general public. They made that choice. The only thing they are 'forced' to do is follow the extremely reasonable "don't discriminate" requirement.
If you really can't see it, there has to be some kind of observational defect in your model of the world.
Thought experiment: Imagine an individual woman went into the store and said to him "My son is marrying his boyfriend this weekend. Can you make a custom cake for them?" The baker says no. Should that be illegal?
Thought experiment #2: Imagine an alt-right troll goes into a Jewish bakery and asks for a cake that says "Jesus is Lord". The baker says no. Should that be illegal?
So it's cool to discriminate if you offer something that's separate but equal?
Same goes for Twitter. By your logic, Twitter has no grounds to complain when Trump screws them over for censoring conservatives, because no one forced them to go into business.
Are you really thinking about this? I feel like you're just responding with bad-faith platitudes.
> we wouldn't be as conflicted it it was an interracial couple that he was denying services to
I don't believe you would be able to make a "sincere religious conviction" argument against it - I'm not aware of any mainstream religions that prohibit interracial marriage as part of their doctrine (as opposed to an epiphenomenon of the cultural practices of the people who make up the group).
People have used sincere religious arguments against interracial relationships for decades if not centuries. The reason it's not invoked now is because we've had a couple generations where the law of the land was obviously morally superior to the scriptures, to the point it's not seriously debated anymore.
There are absolutely sincere people whose religious beliefs are that interracial marriage is morally wrong[1].
> Reagan says many black athletic stars choose white wives in a willful attempt to make their offspring lighter, challenging God’s plan. “He don’t want them to be like him, so he’ll marry another. … It’s another defiance of God’s law, it’s a worldly way.” And the pastor condemns fellow ministers who perform interracial marriages. “Some of the men in pulpits should have a pantywaist instead of a preacher coat on!”
[1] https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2014/02/19/tennessee-pas...
What's actually in scripture has very little to do with the religious beliefs many profess.
So is it a "human right" to use a business's services even if they don't want you to, or not? Be consistent. If it is, it's a human right violation to politically deplatform people.
> has been specifically targeted not for political reasons
This is obvious bullshit to anyone who follows youtube/twitter/facebook censorship drama. Tons of people have been deplatformed without having e.g. harassed anyone.
> they were spreading hate speech
Is this supposed to impress us? That something someone said falls under this recently-made-up category that coincidentally includes a bunch of factual rightist talking points?
> There's still plenty of content around mainstream conservatism
I'm sure you feel that way, but conservatives certainly don't agree with you.
> I think any attempt to argue a slippery slope isn't valid
There's not a slippery slope argument here - YouTube, Twitter, and others have deleted content that many conservatives think is obviously fine and within the bounds of civil discourse.
Here are two related things that came up in my feed literally today:
https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2020/5/26/21270290/you...
This can be mostly likely summed up as self-selection bias. Discrimination laws are not being applied unequally to people of differing political opinions. It is much more common that people's political identities are self-chosen based on their own personal identity and experiences.
As far as politics today is concerned, I would sure hope that both conservatives and liberals both agree that is it wrong to deny service based on someone's membership in a protected class.
Of course, as a progressive (I'm guessing), you would hope the overton window stays firmly within the progressive comfort zone. This has little to do with the fact that progressive laws do, in fact, generally work in opposition to conservative (rightist and/or libertarian) politics, even if we can retroactively come up with some clean-sounding justification like "it's about human rights". It's not self-selection bias.
Only you get to make the decisions that define your character. Others observe your choices and choose to associate with you, or not to.
> And by what metrics are so perfect they won't be abused or change in 5 years?
There are no metrics. The free, global, unfiltered publishing platform is free to decide that they just don't like you. Nobody is entitled to free unfiltered publishing of their content.
I should note that if you're willing to pay, there's basically nothing that you can't get published on the internet. For some reason people get the 'free' in free speech confused with zero-cost. You can publish whatever repugnant material you like, you just don't necessarily get the eyeballs that some believe they're entitled to.
Btw, political discrimination is illegal.
The Levering Act disagrees with you. The government itself has been forcing people to swear they're not members of the communist party for decades.
Surely, it's clear here that having the actual head of the US government threatening to shut down private companies
The United States President has neither the authority nor power to start censoring Twitter on his own. Right now, Jack Dorsey has far more power over allowed public speech in America than Donald Trump.
Exactly! This is American Civics 101. When you become President, you lose things because you have power. You and I have more legal authority to restrict speech than the President.
It's not really clear why other people enable the President, which is the underlying reason why you can't reassure people that he's ineffectual.
One thing that I hope people remain aware of is that there are a number of different arguments in play and while sometimes they have similar outcomes in specific situations, they often wildly differ.
For example, there is the argument that Twitter is not to be considered just a private company, as decided by a court when Trump was not allowed to block other accounts. The argument would be that twitter blocking a user entirely would be restricting their right to interact with their government officials through an official channel. Now, if Twitter blocked such a user from interacting with everyone except government officials, then that would be acceptable because the person is still allowed to interact with government officials through official channels. Also Twitter would be able to stop acting as an official government channel by ending any accounts that count as such and free to fully block a user thereafter.
This is not the same argument that you are talking about, but I do commonly see people treating it as the same.
Here's the problem. Who is doing the fact checking? Who fact checks the fact checkers?
The world isn't black and white. State press releases are not facts. There is no authority that is the arbitrator of truth.
By giving your own.
In other words, we just need more speech, not more restrictions on speech.
-- reply to below because I'm restricted and at comment limit (ironic, eh?)
> Isn't that exactly what Twitter did? They left the speech up, and added a note below it expressing their opinion that a particular link demonstrates that the tweet was not factual.
Anybody can reply to a comment on twitter and cite the facts, and people can reply to those comments and contest or argue them. The specific difference is Twitter's "fact checking box" cannot be replied to - which makes them the ministry of truth.
All Twitter had to do was create a @twitterfactchecks handle and reply to the posts in question - perhaps promoting their reply to the top so that it is most visible, but then people could reply to @twitterfactchecks contesting their opinion (a fact check is always an opinion, if you didn't get what I was hinting at above.)
Surely you see the irony of your trying to regulate how Twitter formats their free speech on their own platform?
They left the speech up, and added a note below it expressing their opinion that a particular link demonstrates that the tweet was not factual.
>Trump falsely claimed that mail-in ballots would lead to "a Rigged Election.
We don't know if the claim is false; it hasn't happened yet. It could have said unlikely, improbable, whatever. Making this statement, however, is just as charged as the one it opposes.
> Clicking through the new prompt from Twitter brings users to a fact-checking page debunking the president’s false claims with the header “Trump makes unsubstantiated claim that mail-in ballots will lead to voter fraud.” The page also offers a summary of the issue with bullet points providing context for the misleading tweets and links to stories by CNN, the Hill, the Washington Post and other news sources. Still, the prompt itself stops short of calling the tweet’s claims incorrect or misleading, instead opting for neutral language.
If I own a store and someone injures themselves on the premises I am held liable for that. I did not force that person to enter the store but the benefits of having a store outweighed the risks. Why should internet companies receive special treatment? They should be 100% liable for what happens on their "premises" if they are going to take the risk of allowing user-generated content.
Apple does this with the App Store, where it is possible to get away with breaking app store rules if the app is not downloaded very often. It is not worth the time and energy for Apple to challenge apps that no one is downloading in the first place.
On twitter, with regard to illegal content it also has to matter the degree. How illegal / and reprehensible is it? How often is this tweet being requested?
Law enforcement must also work at scale, and focus on illegal behavior that is having the most impact.
When a court finds this power is used improperly, such as the arrest of Stormy Daniels in Columbus, Ohio, there are penalties.
For something like this to stand, I believe conservatives will have to prove major examples conservative bias. Unfortunately, the tweets in question so far will not be great evidence of that.
Whether they are paying people or writing automated systems to remove content they disagree with, these companies argued for this legal protection on the grounds of protecting free-speech, and now that they want to restrict it they don't deserve those same protections.
So if I run a chess forum and disallow posts that are not related to chess, your belief is that if one of my users posts a libelous statement about another user's alleged conduct during a chess game at a tournament in their city, I should be on the hook for the first user's post?
If I can afford to spend maybe 20 minutes a day reviewing all posts that keyword-based scanning suggest might not be about chess, I should have been able to fly to the city that tournament was in and conduct an investigation to determine if what the user said was true before allowing the post to stay up on my forum?
EDIT: Imagine if we allowed phone companies to listen to all calls and then censor the ones they didn't like. People would be outraged. This is what is happening on the Internet.
Don’t you think it’s more akin to standing in a privately owned square and yelling your protest?
There doesn't exist any platform right now where one can share an idea and have that idea go viral, unless the idea is first gated through private censorship.
Sure one could make their own blog or website to express their idea, but the chance of it spreading is then pretty much 0, because again any means for links or ideas to spread are all 'private squares' with their own censorship.
This is how the internet broke free speech. This is where the law needs to catch up with technology.
I am taking issue with the fact that we have allowed private companies to be the gate-keepers of what should be public spaces.
Go read the First Amendment, just the first five words. Here, I’ll spell them out for you:
“Congress shall make no law...”
Now here’s the thing about the Constitution: it means what it says. There’s no spirit in there that you need a law degree and 10 years on the Federal bar to really draw out and interpret at some courtroom seance. It’s words with the force of law, and we are a nation of laws.
Now if you read the rest of the Amendment, you’ll note that it says nothing about the President, it says nothing about the Courts, and it says nothing about any kind of exceptions, like if the speech is exceptionally hurtful. It also says nothing about the States, that came later post-14th Amendment, but not in the manner that the drafters of the 14th Amendment who had nothing on Madison intended. Rather than the Privileges or Immunities clause, not to be confused with the Privileges and Immunities clause, it came about by the due process clause through a process called incorporation, wherein individual rights in the Bill of Rights began to apply to the States.
Oh, and most importantly, it says nothing about the Internet! Now there is a way to get the result that you intended, and it is really rather simple. It turns out that if you want to make changes to the law, you pass a law. You build a consensus, and a coalition around that consensus, and you use the powers vested in lawmakers to get your result.
So what about the President? Well he doesn’t really have any power to regulate speech either, other than the powers that Congress gives him, which it can’t grant because it doesn’t have the lawful authority to make those laws. That happened once, at least once, with the Alien and Seditions Act not long after the ink on the Bill of Rights dried. This would later come to be understood as “unconstitutional”. My point is the President has no more power than that which is listed in Article II and which the Congress in its lawful capacity vested in him, that is to say statutory powers, some of which only exist in specific circumstances. It’s still a lot of power, more so than it should be in my opinion since Congress has abdicated much of its responsibility, but it isn’t enough to do anything more than his Article II powers plus whatever Congress has granted under its Article I authority plus amendments.
So where do private companies fall in here? Welp, they’re still private companies, not public. They’re not governed by the First Amendment. If they were nationalized, they would effectively fall under the First Amendment because Congress is the supreme branch of the government no matter how much they sell themselves short with that coequal horseshit. You don’t have to agree with the decisions that private companies engage in, just like I don’t agree with you, a private citizen, invoking the “spirit of the law” rather than deferring to the actual text. If the law can mean whatever you want it to mean, then it effectively means nothing and our entire conception of the Rule of Law falls apart. It’s not perfect, it is not always just, but it is the basis for the form and authority of the Federal Government. Lasting changes to the law come about by passing more laws and anything below that standard is ephemeral. As for Twitter? It can do whatever it wants. They have been undermining their credibility as a useful platform for communication for 10 years and I see no reason why they would stop now, but either way the First Amendment exists to protect Twitter from the Government, not for the Government to be protected from Twitter. The President has a level of speech that goes beyond free speech because his speech has the force of a government order to his subordinates no matter how stupid or asinine and regardless of the medium. I don’t like it, but that’s the world we live in.
I’m okay with Twitter and Facebook doing whatever they want to their crappy websites. They aren’t the web, they’re not even all the social media apps on the web. They’re just a couple of large fish in the Ocean.
The mistake you’re making is assuming the discourse on Twitter matters. Arguably the President’s tweets do matter as much as anything the President does, but outside that scope it isn’t as representative of society as the site’s core users believe it to be. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t punch above its weight in driving discourse, but it is just one more tool in a world that is not lacking in ways to send what is effectively a text message.
I mean arguably this forum post I’m writing is hardly distinguishable from a text message. I’m typing this on my phone, and there’s a decent chance you or someone else is reading this on their phone.
On any given day someone might be participating on Twitter, Facebook, an IRC channel, their email, Discord, Slack, Reddit, whatever. They might even write a blog or publish a podcast. At the end of the day it is all communications, as much as saying a toast at a wedding or a cheers at the bar. It’s not important to me that Twitter shoots itself in the foot so long as they’re not the only way for people to gather and communicate, and they are objectively not the only way for people to gather and communicate because that’s an enormous chunk of what people spend their lives doing.
EDIT: this occurred to me after my original post, that I didn’t really address your gather to protest point.
First, the kind of protesting that you’re talking about taking place on Twitter falls into two categories: coordinating a protest in meatspace, or collectively whining.
Second, actual protests still happen all the bloody time in meatspace. The March for Life, the Women’s March, there was a controversial protest in Virginia a few years back with a controversial counter protest which ended with someone driving an automobile into the crowd. There was a drive-thru protest in Michigan a few weeks ago, and people gathered to protest Newsom closing the beaches in Orange County not long after that. Protests, in the free to assemble sense, are still a largely meatspace event with some coordination taking place using whatever modern comms tech is convenient. Back when modern comms tech wasn’t convenient and available and safe to use, Hong Kong protesters turned to mesh networking applications last year.
You need to think about entities based on their properties, not the labels that are attached to them. That ought to be obvious to people who program for a living; think of a private company with a speech monopoly as the good old .txt.exe scam.
You're attaching the label "not government" to Google, but in terms of properties it is like the government. YouTube has openly admitted to manipulating video results despite it costing them money to do so. Their monopoly position is so strong that the YouTube leadership rules us like a dictatorship.
I would prefer it if these tech monopolies were simply broken up. But failing that, they need to obey the first amendment or be shut down in the US.
Europe is a different beast, but I think the UK at least should adopt the US first amendment.
When a company has a total monopoly over a sector, you are obliged to use the service they provide or you will simply go without that service entirely.
Twitter is not a clear example of this, because it doesn't really have a solid monopoly. But Google and Facebook certainly are - there really isn't a competitor to YouTube or Google Search, and there isn't a competing social network to Facebook.
> There are multiple levels of fines. It starts at hundreds of thousand of euros but it can reach up to 4% of the global annual revenue of the company with severe cases.
How can these euro countries claim to be free societies when they restrict the most basic element of personal freedom?
It's not just France. Several of the euro countries have laws like this.
[0]: https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/14/france-passes-law-forcing-...
> stop acting like what gets posted or removed from twitter is anything other than a bullshit triviality
Should we not care about something that gets removed from Twitter because the French or German or Chinese government didn't want it there?
The most Twitter can do is tell you to find somewhere else to publish your speech. The most the French / German / Chinese government can do is destroy your entire life and the lives of everyone who publishes or consumes your speech.
So when a government leader starts talking about suppressing critical speech, that's a lot more worrisome than Twitter deleting tweets. The abuse of power is hardly comparable. You might even say that in comparison, it's a bullshit triviality.
There's nothing to reconcile. A social media website is not at all like a government, I don't see what the laws in Europe have to do with that.
> stop acting like what gets posted or removed from twitter is anything other than a bullshit triviality
Should we not care about something that gets removed from Twitter because the French or German or Chinese government didn't want it there?
"Despite YouTube's ubiquity and its role as a public-facing platform, it remains a private forum, not a public forum subject to judicial scrutiny under the First Amendment," the court said."
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/youtu...
There's no hard criterion, but YouTube is a great example; it is so dominant in the video industry that either you use their service, or almost nobody will see your videos. Facebook is another one - it is now the only social network of its type, and also owns Instagram. If your content is banned from Facebook and Instagram and YouTube and deranked on Google Search, your audience reach will drop to almost nothing. Just two companies control the majority of speech on the western internet.
Twitter IMO doesn't fit into this pattern; it is quite good with free speech. Richard Spencer still has a Twitter account!
You can read about exceptions here:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_ex...
I agree that Twitter doesn't quite fit this pattern though.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/every...
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/every...
Utterly absurd hyperbole. There are a billions of people in the world who do not use Facebook, comparing the use of Facebook to drawing breath is about as ridiculous as it gets.
The reason that activists engage in deplatforming activity is that it's effective at destroying movements; brands like Milo Yianopolous and Generation Identity were totally destroyed by deplatforming by a few key social networks.
I can provide the evidence on those if you don't believe me.
A total falsehood that is easily disproven by the many millions of people who have friends that don't use social media and the many thousands of successful companies that don't advertise on social media.
* The PRC government right now
* Pretty much any government behind the iron curtain during the cold war
* The Catholic church over much of its history
...
I mean, come on. Pick any reasonably competent totalitarian regime and you'll find that one of core pillars of the support structure is precisely "control over public discourse".
So maybe in context putting a fact check link under a tweet doesn't sound so bad?
>If someone opens up the Facebook app for 5 minutes a month they are considered a MAU. Suggesting that browsing an app for a few minutes out of a day is comparable to authoritarian control over 1.4 billion people demonstrates a complete lack of perspective in reality.
Your strawman is what lacks perspective of reality. The average FB user spends 30-60 minutes on Facebook each day, depending on the source.
You'd first have to a establish a definition for the term "control".
> The average FB user spends 30-60 minutes on Facebook each day
Voluntarily interacting with an app for 45 minutes a day does not in any concevibile interpretation meet the definition of "control". The user is literally in complete control of the apps they interact with on their phone or computer.
Let me google that for you:
>control: the power to influence or direct people's behavior or the course of events.
There are people who advocate the idea that private companies should be compelled to distribute hate speech, dangerously factually incorrect information and harassment under the concept that free speech is should be applied universally rather than just to government. I don't agree, I think it's a vast over-reach and almost unachievable to have both perfect free speech on these platforms and actually run them as a viable business.
But let's lay that aside, those people who make the argument claim to be adhering to an even stronger dedication to free speech. Surely, it's clear here that having the actual head of the US government threatening to shut down private companies for how they choose to manage their platforms is a far more disturbing and direct threat against free speech even in the narrowest sense.