Congress Escalates Pressure on Tech Giants to Censor,Threatening First Amendment

Re:Congress Escalates Pressure on Tech Giants to Censor,Thre... by mpalmer on Saturday February 20, 2021 @04:17PM (#26208069)

Makes sense. I was coming at it from a taxation perspective rather than the "we're shutting you down" angle. We tax plenty of things that have societal harm - cigarettes, alcohol, etc. Speech is definitely too slippery a concept though.

But what about reach? Could we theoretically tax businesses based on the volume of people their content reaches, thus bringing in public revenue and/or disincentivizing:

- virality for the sake of ad impressions

- too-large (social) media networks

I'm sure it'd be phenomenally difficult to measure, but easier to pin down than arbitrary speech.

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Re:Congress Escalates Pressure on Tech Giants to Censor,Thre... by dabbledash on Sunday February 21, 2021 @02:16PM (#26216223)

I don’t know enough to say confidently.

Personally, I’d be suspicious of a rule like that. In the end, it has to be enforced by the executive and it sounds a lot like “all speech will be tolerated except speech that spreads widely enough to be a threat to existing power.”

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Re:Congress Escalates Pressure on Tech Giants to Censor,Thre... by Dracophoenix on Tuesday February 23, 2021 @05:12AM (#26235594)

That sounds suspiciously like an Internet tax. Congress already passed a law banning such taxes.

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