Do you see how quickly the cookie crumbles? What Twitter has done has a chilling effect. If it cannot justify on what policy it decided to attach a notice to a politicians tweet it won't stand a chance in convincing that it is just a platform and not a publisher/editorial. Especially if it targets a single politician and the rule was not used for any other politician.
That someone blatantly bullies people and lies on such a platform, would get anyone else banned or at least posts moderated. Lying/deception, defamation and "hate" speech is not protected speech. Some of it may even be punishable by Law.
Twitter still has the option to ban the president. This is not censorship either. Prudent moderation is being performed daily on many social platforms.
Maybe it is time to review the power of social media platforms (so I do see your point).
Though, I suspect a prudent review would end unfavourably for bullies, trolls and liars, at the very least for unprotected speech and especially speech violating established Law.
Exactly. So Twitter should have shown it has the balls and banned Trump "just like everyone else". It had the policy backing it up. It wouldn't have caused Twitter to be dragged into this controversy of becoming a biased publisher instead of a neutral platform.
> Lying/deception, defamation and "hate" speech is not protected speech. Some of it may even be punishable by Law.
Yes it is. But Twitter is not the Judge, Jury or Executioner. You have the courts for it.
> Twitter still has the option to ban the president. This is not censorship either. Prudent moderation is being performed daily on many social platforms.
Nope. That doesn't cut it. Your hatred for Trump cannot be a justification for misuse of power by Twitter. If Twitter tries to be an arbiter then it loses the ability to call itself a platform. It can either allow/disallow posts. It cannot decide to add to/edit/remove the post in question. This makes it an editorial/publisher and no longer a platform.
You may think both are the same thing. Both are "moderation". Nope. Imagine you are in a debate and you are the "moderator" of the debate. You have these rights: allow the speakers to speak when their turn comes, disallow speakers from speaking about certain topics. If the debate goes South you have every option to stop the debate. You can kick out a speaker if you feel the speaker is not adhering to the rules. All this is valid and is part of "moderation" as the speakers have come on your "platform".
But just because they are on your "platform" does not mean you have acquired rights over them. They are still individual entities. Now imagine if you are a "biased" moderator. You do not like a speakers point and you decide to add to/edit/change it. But you do not want the speaker to stop talking (lest you be accused of bias) so you instead take a sticky note, write down your counter opinion and attach it to the speakers forehead. Would the speaker be okay with that? Now that is invading that speaker's personal space. Just because you are a moderator you do not get to own the speaker or add to/edit/change his words. You can ask the speaker to leave (or ban) which is perfectly within your right. But you cannot have a notice stuck to his opinion. Then you are not a platform. An editorial does precisely that: edits out the bad parts, fixes the language, makes it better for consumption, fact checks, ensures that it isn't held liable for any wrong doings and then and only then will it allow the content to be published.
Btw, calling out a bully and liar to be a bully and a liar, is not "hatred", when it can be so easily documented.
It would have caused Twitter to be dragged into a much bigger controversy instead. Which you're right, they probably should, but have so far proven afraid to do so.
First amendment is the issue, what do you think "publisher" vs "platform" is about? It's about who should be sued for bad speech. What happens if FB is responsible for everything you say? More censorship. What happens if you are responsible for everything you say? Less disclosure.
Right now we have a situation where the platform owner can collect the fruits of popularity, while the platform users experience basically no-liability gossip. More speech, but are we healthier as a society for it? Maybe sometimes the answer isn't always making sure we have more free speech.
Also I'm not sure how lawsuits help out in the world of little people, because only big people can sue, and they only sue big targets.
This isn't just about facebook and twitter, it's about every site that allows user generated content, reddit, Hacker News, Instagram, heck even Stack Exchange counts, I'd imagine.
Reddit has banned whole sub-reddits and shadowbanned others, Hacker news has human mods who make qualitative decisions to curate conversations on this site.
This hits every forum, every newsgroup, every site that has user generated content.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230
(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;
Moderation does not have to be systematic, transparent, unbiased, or applied fairly.
The combined parts 1 and 2 of the "Protection for “Good Samaritan” blocking and screening of offensive material" mean that you are not responsible for the speech you host, but you can also not be compelled to host speech you choose not to host.
What rules do newspaper editors have to play by, exactly? Most of the major outlets are 24/7 propaganda machines. Calling any particular politician out on lying is hardly controversial for them, depending on who the politician in question is.
If you want to know what rules newspapers follow, ask a journalist about their laws and ethics rules and ask a lawyer about publisher rules. I can't give legal advice.
Hell, half of the 2016 campaign was about jailing the other candidate. Nobody else in any of the recent races has behaved in such a way. No president since Nixon is so quick to fly off the handle over being called out on what they are saying. If Biden were running on a Jail Trump campaign in 2020 (since it is now politically acceptable to do that sort of thing, I guess), you may have a point that the two sides behave the same way. They don't.
As for journalists - do you seriously think most of the talking heads on Fox News follow journalistic ethics? If you do, I don't think conversation is necessary - because we don't have a common understanding of either the content of Fox programming, or of ethics.
>Hell, half of the 2016 campaign was about jailing the other candidate . . .
That's not what we're talking about. People (who don't actually care about free speech in principle) are saying that this is a free speech violation in principle (legally, it is sound). The FCC might attempt to treat social media companies like newspapers. This is not a big deal. Bad orange man has not censored newspapers. Your tweets are safe.
Is this executive order one of those cases?
From wikipedia[1] (my emphasis):
> The First Amendment (Amendment I) to the United States Constitution prevents the government from making laws which regulate an establishment of religion, prohibit the free exercise of religion, or abridge the freedom of speech, the freedom of the press, the right to peaceably assemble, or the right to petition the government for redress of grievances.
Also, called it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23322683
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_...
The White House wants the FCC to treat certain social media companies as if they were newspapers. That's it. Do you think there is a first amendment issue with how the government is treating newspapers right now?
It's relevant here because the constituion is the highest legal document in the country. Something that republicans selectively forget.
>Something that republicans selectively forget
ok... Go tell it to a Republican then.
I think that is not what Trump is asking for.
By doing this Twitter is behaving as a publisher. Then why should Twitter not be treated like one?
Either way, the only intention behind this drafted order is entirely self-serving. It's a complete knee-jerk reaction.
> The gameplan might be to build a direct connection between the vast financial resources of the republican party and their ability to influence online audiences
Assuming that there is some "game-plan" is far fetched. If Twitter hadn't done this there wouldn't be a hue and cry in the first place. No one asked Twitter to attach its own opinion to the tweet. It did it on its own volition.
The fact is that Twitter is heavily tilted towards the left. Jack Dorsey is himself a self-declared left-leaning liberal. India has had its fair share of random banning of right-leaning accounts with those accounts not violating any Twitter policy. After hue and cry those accounts are reinstated. Once reinstated, there is no explanation given as to why the account was banned in the first place and why the account was reinstated. And it has happened multiple times!
If you are going to preach about democracy and fair play then first start at home. Else it will just reek of hypocrisy. And people hate hypocrisy more than lies. At least you know when someone is lying. But you never know when someone is being a hypocrite until you dig his/her past!
And who decides whether the citations are factual? Does Twitter decide it? If Twitter decides it then isn't it behaving like a Quasi-Judicial body? If it is like one then it is no longer a platform. You cannot call yourself a "platform" and then suddenly decide to change the character of your business and behave like an arbiter. There is a reason why you mention your nature of business while setting up your company. That way the authorities know what regulations will apply to you. If Twitter is behaving like a publisher and the publishing regulations do not apply then you are creating a monster in the process! And for what justification? Just to take on a politician whose term is fixed? Twitter is going to exist even when Trump isn't the President. By allowing Twitter to get away with this you are going to be setting a precedent for other companies to behave in a similar fashion. Then what is the point of rules and regulations? No one will follow it. Every company will decide to modify its nature of business as it sees fit.
However, are providing fact-checking links really being an arbiter when it's just a link to fact-checking sources? You could criticise those sources as biased, but as fact-checking, one would also need to find flaws in the facts-check itself for it to be anything substantial, and not just FUD-raising.
The extra notices could also have been separate posts by Twitter, or any other method/design of informing users. Twitter is mandated to inform or remove possible factual errors in their platform, in order to combat fake news and undue external political influence.
There is no right for anybody to tell blatant lies and to suppress fact-checks as protected by free speech laws. Some of it are not lies and not that exhaggerated, so it's hard to draw solid lines in the sand. Fact-checking seems a reasonable alternative. Mitigations have already been mandated after last election to combat fake news. Twitter being the owner of both platform and expression of content, is the final decisionmaker of their own social media platform, unless violating Constitution, regulation or laws. This expression is probably mostly covered by 1st Amendment and property laws.
Everything drastic starts off with a minor tweak. A minor change. These minor changes in a business' character add up to create a monster in the end. And we all know how companies keep changing policies that give them more and more control. We want the exact opposite. These are platforms for a reason. That is the beauty of it. If you want to tamper with people's opinions then you are no longer a platform. You are an editorial. You just cannot use a space you have given to someone to add your own views. There is no two ways about it. Even if they are a private company, they have a public platform that is used by everyone. And with that kind of power comes greater responsibility.
Whether Trump lies or not, the mandate for electing an alternative is always with the People of the United States. But you have no alternative to Twitter when it comes to ease of instant communication with millions of followers. What Twitter has done has a chilling effect. Adding notices now depends on some employee inside Twitter. Today it is Trump, tomorrow it can be someone else. It all depends on that employee's mood/feeling/bias. And as far as fact-checking is concerned we know how easy it is to "manufacture facts". Manufactured facts were used for waging Wars. Some of them on fellow humans. Some others on drugs like Marijuana. And those manufactured facts were never cross checked.
Some others are even worse. Let us take WHO for instance. What do you say for this: https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152
"Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China"
We all knew there was clear evidence of human-to-human transmission because of the lockdown imposed in Wuhan, the number of people falling sick and the rapid construction of hospitals by the Chinese Government. Yet WHO chose to lie. Did Twitter try to fact check this? This tweet is still on the platform. We all know now that it was a lie from the start. This lie put millions to suffer and killed hundreds of thousands of people around the World. Yet Twitter isn't doing anything. Not even attaching a "Fact Check" against that monstrous lie.
> Twitter is mandated to inform or remove possible factual errors in their platform, in order to combat fake news and undue external political influence. > Mitigations have already been mandated after last election to combat fake news.
Who mandated Twitter to take on this role? The US Government? I haven't come across any law that mandates social media companies to combat fake news/undue external political influence. If you have any reference I would be happy to read more about it.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=no+clear+evidence+who
There was a huge debacle at the time with Facebook CEO visiting different countries' authorities and the Cambridge A. scandal:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=social+media+combat+fake+news+cong...
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=social+media+combat+fake+news
Though active admin moderation on social media, forums and even news sites has a long history before that as well.