There's a big difference between a private company determining what is hosted on their servers vs. the U.S. government forcing a private company to censor speech.
Turns out, they don't need to. Due to the fact that most people do not exercise any real control over the devices they use to read most expression, all they have to do is be able to regulate trade between app publishers and the {App,Play} Store.
This is how the US government is presently engaging in censorship of apps published by ByteDance (and soon Tencent). They can prohibit Apple/Google from transacting with the publisher, and because Apple/Google control the phones of the end users, the end users are effectively prohibited from reading the content published by that publisher.
It's an end run around the constitution.
Second, despite the claims of the president, the white house does not have the power to block TikTok or Bytedance from the public. The president can only block armed forces from installing apps on their owned devices.
Android is also problematic on that aspect, even Epic Games gave up on distributing Fortnite outside the Play Store.
If the most well known game in the world can't make it outside the Play Store, who could?
Whatever sweetheart deal Epic worked out with Google in the end doesn't discredit that they successfully sold hundreds of thousands of copies outside of the the Google Play store.
This argument also intentionally ignores the existence of the Amazon app store on Android.
They specifically state that they failed due to the constraints and had to back to the store.
> This argument also intentionally ignores the existence of the Amazon app store on Android.
Yeah sure, there's a few other minor stores but they are nowhere near the size of the Play Store.
Additionally we could compare to other markets, if you compare the number of companies which can host your website and the number of companies which can host your app, the numbers are going from hundreds of thousands to less than 10 for apps even by counting almost irrelevant stores.
Even though consumers will simply move to another ISP just like they are free to move to another website.
So I'm not sure what part of it happening before makes it seem unlikely to happen again.
ISPs shouldn’t even be able to see what goes over their wires.
Facebook is not an ISP.
And no, Facebook is a website and app(s), not a common carrier.
Also, I note that you didn't list MasterCard, which has been known to cut perfectly legal businesses loose... and that's a very small industry. You have what? Visa/MasterCard, AMEX and Discover, pretty much.
Now, you can muddy the semantics by saying, "Isn't every website an information shipper?" and even then the answer is still no, that still does not make them a common carrier.
There are what people want Facebook to be, which is some system supporting of their own political views, but the bad faith arguments to project Facebook into being an ISP are not sound.
Facebook's social function is as a distributor of broadcast information and carrier of peer-to-peer information for two billion people. Further, network effects mean that Facebook's size makes it a natural monopoly.
There is no shortage of historical evidence that unregulated natural monopolies are bad news for everyone except their owners, and, given that Facebook's function is the distribution of information, the natural path for regulation in a free society is a common carrier designation.
Both are private ownership of public spaces.
So are media networks like CNN, MSNBC, Fox etc. They are private too. But they are still regulated. They can't post whatever they want and are held liable for any news that they present to their audience. Social media companies aren't regulated in the same way. They have more powers than the Government because they can literally censor anyone's speech they want. They can ban anyone they want. If they are left-leaning they can ban right-leaning content. If they are right-leaning they can ban left-leaning content. They are also not regulated like media networks because they are given immunity from liability through Section 230. They can never be held liable for what is posted on their platform. It is like having the cake and eating it too. Heck, they can even censor the US President's tweets and videos. This makes them extremely powerful. It is surprising to me that US citizens are perfectly fine with this setup.
They are. It is called "The Communications Act of 1934" in the United States. They are completely regulated by the FCC in US. They are regulated differently in different countries. In US, as an example, they have rules on political advertising. They have "equal time" rules where every political candidate "must" be given equal time and opportunity to air their viewpoints. No such regulations exist for social media companies.
They can be held liable for fake news or slander. Social media platforms cannot. Only the content posted in the editorial is considered personal opinion and not the position of the News Organization. That is the only page/section in the newspaper/news that does not expose the News Organization to liability/slander. That is why you have a separate "Editorial Section" in a newspaper where the editor can give his/her opinions without exposing the newspaper to liability. But of late, the news agencies have started using other pages for giving their opinions too (from harmless clickbait to downright slander) which is again a very risky choice to make. This exposes them to liability/slander. This is why regulation is so important. To ensure what is legally allowed and not allowed. News agencies are bound by such regulations. Social media organizations are not.
If news agencies publishes a hit piece on me that is obviously false, I can sue the news organization for slander. The news organization cannot claim that it believed the news reporter/agent who passed on wrong information about me and get away with it. The ultimate publisher is the news agency. Period. That is why the organization can be sued.
But if a user posts a hit piece on me in a social media platform I cannot sue the platform for allowing the user to post slanderous material. Because the platform shields itself from liability by taking advantage of the provisions of Section 230. This is because it calls itself a "platform" and not a "publisher". This is fine by me as long as it remains a platform. But once it starts censoring opinions (like Twitter/Facebook deleting Trump's tweet) then it no longer is a platform. It is now behaving as a publisher. Then why should it be protected by Section 230?
> because that exposes them to civil liability
Exactly. They are regulated. Even if a news agent publishes a fake story, the organization is responsible for it. They cannot carry it forward without verification because if they do, they end up becoming liable. Not the news agent. That is the whole point. The recent case that comes to mind is when Nick Sandmann was falsely accused of being racist against a Native American by all left-leaning media organizations (CNN, Washington Post etc). When the fact were completely different (if you watch the video in its entirety). He sued these media organizations and won. They had to settle the 250 million $ lawsuit. Can he sue Facebook/Twitter which carried this story more than any of the media organizations did? Nope. That is the reason why I say that social media organizations enjoys powers that neither the US Government nor the Media enjoys.
> There's no obligation to show the President's content there either. They can choose not to show right-leaning or left-leaning content
Yes that is right. But when they do show the President, then they have to let him have his say. They cannot either censor him or change what he meant. If they do that then they open themselves up to defamation/liability depending on what they actually did. Social media companies do not have any such issues as they are unregulated.
You can read more about Media Regulation in the United States here: https://courses.lumenlearning.com/americangovernment/chapter...
The whole point of Section 230 is to allow platforms to moderate their content without becoming liable for it.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/08/13/610/section-230-...
> The classic example involves Yelp, explains Jeff Kosseff, a cybersecurity law professor at the United States Naval Academy and author of The Twenty-Six Words That Created The Internet, a book about Section 230. If someone posts a defamatory restaurant review on Yelp, Section 230 ensures that the restaurant can sue the person who wrote the review, but not Yelp itself. It protects everything from Facebook and YouTube to the recently deplatformed 8chan.
> Section 230 also says that platforms can’t be held liable if they take down any content they or their users consider “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable.” In other words, they are not obliged to host anything they don’t want to.
I am not against Section 230. I am against platforms misusing Section 230. They are a platform until they behave like one. When the platform itself starts behaving like a publisher rather than a platform then why should provisions of Section 230 apply?
> Section 230 also says that platforms can’t be held liable if they take down any content they or their users consider “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable.” In other words, they are not obliged to host anything they don’t want to.
So was Trump's video about kids being "almost immune" to Coronavirus "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable"? Which one was it? Are you seriously telling me that the President of the United States video about kids being "almost immune" to Coronavirus is in some violation of policy while porn/gore content that is posted on these platforms not? I have personally reported so many of these videos and they still haven't been removed. And if political issues are the reason for censorship then what about the other politicians in US and around the World who say as bad or worse things as Trump? Will same rules be applied there as well or not? If not, why not?
> In other words, they are not obliged to host anything they don’t want to.
Then will these rules be applicable to everyone? In that case, I can give you a million tweets and comments that are "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing or otherwise objectionable" which haven't been removed yet. Nor has Youtube removed "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing or otherwise objectionable" videos from its platform.
It is clear bias at play here. If you try to tell me that it is not then you need to take a hike.
The law was designed to allow platforms to remove content without being legally liable for all of the content. If you disagree with that then you disagree with all of S230, and you need to campaign to have it removed and replaced.
> So was Trump's video about kids being "almost immune" to Coronavirus "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable"? Which one was it
It was "otherwise objectionable", because it's factually incorrect. Children do get covid-19, children do spread covid-19. They're unlikely to be harmed by covid-19, but that's not the claim he made, is it?
> > In other words, they are not obliged to host anything they don’t want to.
> Then will these rules be applicable to everyone?
I genuinely don't understand how you don't understand this. "not obliged to host it" means "they don't have to host it", it doesn't mean "they have to search out everything that violates their policies and remove it".
There is no need to campaign really. I am not an American but US laws govern these social media companies that operate in India too. I have experienced first hand how these social media companies operate here in India and know their biases clearly.
But the US Government is already exploring it: https://www.project-disco.org/innovation/072920-what-is-sect...
and here: https://gosar.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=...
> It was "otherwise objectionable", because it's factually incorrect
I don't understand "otherwise objectionable" to mean "factually incorrect". There are people who genuinely get a wrong idea of some process or procedure because not everyone is technically well versed. If I tomorrow say that stuxnet virus harmed my PC the technical minded you might say that it is factually incorrect because stuxnet is a worm and not a virus. So would you then censor my right to say it incorrectly? Do you want me to communicate to you perfectly and if not, that communication must be censored? Any reasonable person will allow that much of leeway. Not everyone can have perfect communication skills. Not everyone can be well versed in everything.
Anyways the point is that "otherwise objectionable" is too broad a term. For me, killing animals for food is objectionable. For you something else might be objectionable. That sort of power is not reasonable by any means for a platform to have. For instance, Twitter did not censor Ilhan Omar when she tweeted falsehood against Nick Sandmann and other Covington students. She later deleted that tweet when the true story came out into the open. But the damage was done. An innocent student's life was put at risk. All because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
"In her tweet, Omar wrote that the male students were "protesting a woman's right to choose & yelled 'it's not rape if you enjoy it' " and "taunting 5 Black men before they surrounded Phillips and led racist chants.""
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/426635-omar-deletes-tweet...
and this:
https://twitter.com/NRCC/status/1088163426172633095
Did Twitter act on it? Nope. Why did it not when it was not just factually incorrect but also put a child's life at risk?
But truth be told I don't want Twitter to act on any content that is not illegal (like child pornography, terrorism, scams etc). In true spirit of Section 230, I want her tweets to remain for as long as she desires so people see for themselves what she represents. I want Trump's tweets to remain for as long as he desires so people see for themselves what he represents. Now that is a free platform right there.
I don't want social media companies to baby sit me. I don't want social media companies to tell me what to see and what not to see unless that material is banned/disallowed by law. I don't want my viewpoints censored because it doesn't match with the ones running the platform. Is that too much to ask for?
> They're unlikely to be harmed by covid-19, but that's not the claim he made, is it?
"Almost immune" qualifies as "unlikely to be harmed". Unless we both are referring to different dictionaries. This is nitpicking to be honest with you. It is only because it was Trump who said it that it is being made into a huge issue. Just like everyone took objection to Trump calling it Wuhan/China Virus when every outlet (CNN, MSNBC, Fox etc) was calling it by that name way before Trump even said it. Because "orange man bad".
> I genuinely don't understand how you don't understand this. "not obliged to host it" means "they don't have to host it", it doesn't mean "they have to search out everything that violates their policies and remove it".
It means precisely that. They have to search out everything that violates their policies and remove it. Because they said they are incapable of doing that, activist groups demanded them to provide tools which can be used to report such violations. But those tools are pretty much useless as I have repeatedly tried removing videos that blatantly violate their own policies but to no avail. Pornographic and Gore content is not allowed on Youtube according to Youtube's own guidelines. Yet those videos don't get removed and instead get "Age restricted". Because clearly they want that ad money more than following the rule of law.
As for Section 230 protections for civil liability: Instead of suing the platform where the content was posted for slander, you'd sue the individual that posted it. S230 protections do not extend to where the platform's own speech (ex, Twitter's blog), and they don't shield the actual speaker, where you can still recover damages. Your own example goes to this end - Twitter didn't publish anything, CNN did, and he was able to convince a court that it was slander, so he was able to recover from CNN.
In a hypothetical world, Facebook could decide that masks wouldn't work.
And there's nothing we can do about it except screaming at facebook?
That doesn't sound good.
I've heard that part of that clarity was because Cold War holding the US in contrast to the Soviets was itself a bit of perception management or PR. I could speculate on other factors, but I'm sure some historians and social scientists understand it vastly better.
Anecdotally, I do remember a time when, say, TV news programs would at least set some good examples of reasoning, not lower themselves closer to the transparently bad Fox News or talk radio behavior, which seemed to be to be even more ridiculous than what we'd been told the Soviets did. (Of course, the US has a history of abuse by those who control presses, but the institution still seemed to have merit.)
And I don't recall hearing of anything, even a decade ago, like apparently large numbers of people acting against their own other interests, solely for the adversarial sports team fan idea of "owning the libs". And also some inexplicably self-defeating behavior from elements of "the other side" (though I don't think that notion of "sides" is accurate or complete.)
I've been wondering whether the US populace used to be better at critical thinking. It's felt that way, but maybe the examples I'm aware of aren't representative.
Where we are now, talking about dotcoms being asked to gatekeep speech, I have only an ordinary citizens' understanding of many of policy issues, but I do have an experienced technologist's understanding that some of these dotcoms haven't been pinnacles of trustworthiness, integrity, etc. And the civic-minded American me wouldn't trust any of those dotcoms very far at all, with something that seems so fundamentally important to what I've grown up believing are bedrock principles of the US.
I haven't used Facebook for at least 5 years now. I use WhatsApp occasionally, so you can in fact, be blocked on Facebook and live. You cannot be blocked from participating in society and be free.
The Constitution places restrictions on what the government can do because government overreach is a particular, unique problem. It also provides for popular election to the government for the same reason - and nobody says that it's bad that we can't elect Facebook's leaders.
Now, perhaps the argument is that Facebook has grown too large and too powerful, to the point where Facebook censorship is worse than government censorship. If that's happened, that means we should have regulated Facebook a long time ago (and if we don't, we're on our way to your favorite cyberpunk dystopia where corporations are the real governments), and we should get around to doing so. But it hardly means that we should give in, treat Facebook like a government, and start saying "Facebook shall make no policy" any more than it means that we should vote for Facebook's CEO.
Or who spends the most on ads.
> Citing “partner sensitivity," the rep noted that PragerU runs a lot of ads, and argued that the content in question qualified as opinion and was therefore exempt from being fact-checked.
Are you saying you want to take that freedom away from private businesses?
To be explicit since for some reason people here are afraid to come out and say this: yes, I want to take that freedom away from American businesses and I would if I could. (I'd take it away from European businesses too.) That's what a law is - that's what every law is.
Both have competitors who can supply fungible services to the market, some of which are typically very close, sometimes "just a click away".
I'm sure there is already something that is illegal for companies to do or say or censor.
Why not adding one more thing which is fake news?
It's a possible idea that doesn't sound far-fetched.
>You did not answer the question - Do you want to take that freedom away from American businesses?
Yes, I absolutely am. I am proposing that we legally enshrine political ideology as a protected class, as has been the common custom in the US until very recently. Freedom of speech is the most fundamental human right, and it needs to be protected in all venues, both public and private. Infringing on corporate personhood is a small price to pay for a free and open society.
Edit: (comment thread is too deep and not able to reply directly)
The recent trend of trying to silence political opponents represents an existential threat to our democracy. I'm really baffled how others in this thread are not able to see why that is. Nowhere in this discussion have I claimed to be persecuted, or have I even established what my political leanings are.
You can wish you were a victim of persecution for your political choice, but it is still your choice, and as such, people can also choose to not employ or serve you for your decision.
Also, why did you just create a throwaway just to make that comment?
Anyway, I would argue that simply protecting immutable characteristics without also protecting certain actions does not make sense. For example it makes no sense to protect sexual orientation but not the action of holding your partner's hand in public or publically saying that you are of a certain orientation - after all your employer/person that you are doing business with would likely not know your sexual orientation without doing either of the above actions.
https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/california-employmen...
That's what genuine, old school liberalism looks like, kids.
“Political ideology” is infinitely extensible. To enshrine it as a protected class removed all meaning from the latter.
> as has been the common custom in the US until very recently
The Revolutionary War was a political question. How were Loyalists treated? Following that, how did Federalists and Jeffersonians interact in the social sphere? More recently, how did the labour union debate get peacefully resolved? Or American participation in WWI get non-violently debated?
Now, I might think that Chick-fil-A is making a bad business decision, but part of what it means to be in America is that you have the freedom to make bad decisions.
Certainly, as someone who has voted Democrat, is religious, and is not white, I believe that the three of those are of quite different levels of voluntary choice on my behalf and I don't think that laws/social norms that apply to the most involuntary of those should apply without change to the most voluntary of those.
The principle of free speech restrains them. Nothing does—nor should—stop them.
Civil freedom of speech is difficult to enshrine into law. It balances against other freedoms in a complex, unpredictable way. (For example, the freedom of assembly. If someone says something distasteful, one should be free to not associate with them.) But it has its place as a cultural value.
It is also sensitive to context. A bumper sticker on an employee’s car is quite different from one on a customer’s.
In America, the default is that private businesses, even those who provide a service to the public, get to choose who they engage in business with and how, with no interference from the government. There are very narrow exceptions (Civil Rights Act, ADA, antitrust, etc.) when absolutely necessary.
The First Amendment was adopted in 1791 [1]. The Dutch East India Company was founded in 1602 [2]. The British East India Company even earlier [3].
Massively powerful global corporations pre-date the United States by a century.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_Unite...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_East_India_Company
[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company#/media/Fi...
Giant corporate entities with incentives intertwined and power competing with established governments have been a thing long before Facebook rose to prominence and long before the US Constitution was ratified.
You are projecting presentism to assume that the 'founding fathers' were ignorant to large corporations.
Sorry, where are the armed men operating directly under Facebook’s officers’ command, raining down atrocity and terror on entire subcontinents of humans?
The salt monopoly and taxes was at the centre of one of the most important events in Indian history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_March
That's literally the opposite of what is alleged to be happening. Facebook's fact check policy is notionally implemented by third party fact checkers over whom Facebook exerts no control. But the contention in the article is that Facebook executives then intervene in the process to UN-flagging content that fits their personal political bent.
Is their process rigorous, public, and auditable?
It seems like just another private org that can determine what is true or false.
If someone has to do the job, I'd rather my government do it.
Government definitely shouldn't be the one to decide what is and isn't fake news [0].
> - But facebook taking out fake news based on its own judgement with absolutely no due process is obviously okay???
Since it's a private company I feel it's ok. Personally I'm more right-wing / libertarian oriented and I feel my Twitter account got banned because of me expressing more right-wing views. I tried to ask Twitter employees what was the offending post that got me banned, but never got a response. At that point I stopped using Twitter altogether.
I feel Jack Dorsey himself is more open to different view points, but perhaps many of his employees are more left-wing oriented and might feel it's their mission to curtail right-wing views, but this is just my gut feeling that I can't proof.
Since it's a private company I feel it's ok they operate like that. But at the same time I won't bother with Twitter anymore (I also don't use Facebook by the way).
---
- Fake news is bad
- Government taking out fake news is actually bad??
- But facebook taking out fake news based on its own judgement with absolutely no due process is obviously okay???
Now it becomes a shouting match to get Facebook to ban posts/people they don't like.
Who can harass Facebook employees the most will probably win the shouting match.