If a firm’s core business is disseminating others’ speech, then that should weaken, not strengthen, the firm’s argument that it has a First Amendment right to censor that speech. In PruneYard, for example, the shopping mall was open to the public—but for the purpose of shopping, not sharing expression. So it was perhaps tenuous for the State to use the public nature of the mall to justify a speech-hosting requirement. Cf. PruneYard, 447 U.S. at 95 (White, J., concurring in part) (noting that California’s hosting requirement involved communication “about subjects having no connection with the shopping centers’ business”). But here, the Platforms are open to the public for the specific purpose of disseminating the public’s speech. It’s rather odd to say that a business has more rights to discriminate when it’s in the speech business than when it’s in some altogether non-speech business (like shopping or legal education).

A point a lot of commenters here seem to be missing is that it would be perfectly legal under the law to ban all discussion of politics, regardless of viewpoint. The law just says that if you're a site with more than 50 million users, you cannot dictate which political parties your users are allowed to write favorably about and ban users for having opposing viewpoints.

[0] https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/21/21-51178-CV1.pd... (PDF)

Then you get to negotiate with the government and the courts about what they consider to be political speech or not. And suddenly you no longer live in a country that has a meaningful First Amendment.

Yes, the government decides all the time, in a long standing and well studied legal history, about what is or is not speech.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that the primary purpose of the court system, with regards to free speech cases, is deciding what does or does not count as speech.

The overarching issue is that I don't see what the first amendment has to do with this at all. Corporations have zero obligations to anyone under the first amendment, which only applies to the government.

Section 230 was a give-away to corporations that allowed them to privatize and co-opt the public square; they reap the economic benefit of being shielded from liability for what people post, but none of the responsibility to carry everyone's speech.

If we want to preserve free speech in the public square, some form of balance has to be restored, either by:

1. Eliminating the section 230 liability shield that allowed them to privatize public discourse in the first place.

2. Requiring privatized "public squares" to operate more like common carriers.

Solution (1) — eliminating section 230 — would likely make it infeasible to run a private website carrying public speech.

Texas seems to have attempted a nuanced version of solution (2): in exchange for being granted the privilege of being shielded from liability for the speech they carry, platforms of a size large enough to justify treating them as a "public square" must meet common-carrier-like requirements that prevent them from discriminating based on viewpoint.

This sounds so reasonable and nuanced until you reach this final phrase: "prevent them from discriminating based on viewpoint." Doing that requires the state to determine what speech is "un-biased, politically neutral speech" and which speech has a political "viewpoint." And under this law a government will determine this at the point of a gun, not the people operating individual websites.

(Because obviously if you implemented this in a truly content-neutral way along the lines that you suggest for a common carrier, every platform would be overrun by spam. So there has to be a decision about what constitutes biased speech, and that means political figures will be making determinations.)

This isn't theoretical. Nobody in this country even agrees on what "political/biased" speech is. Things that used to be broadly accepted by our whole society no longer are. I'm not going to go into examples, but you know exactly what they are. And you probably disagree with half of them. This law means that you won't get to decide, the state and the courts will.

If your problem is the over-concentration of social networking companies, I'm happy to agree. I urge you to support laws that reduce the power and userbase of these firms in a content-neutral way -- without placing the government in charge of what speech is "ok".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230#Platform_neutralit...

Given that hate speech (the context of that quote) is very often political and/or protected free speech, I don't think one of the two authors of the bill agrees with how you're interpreting it.

I’m not debating whether section 230 is functioning in accordance with its authors’ intentions; frankly, what they intended doesn’t matter.

Section 230 was a totally inappropriate give-away of unique privileges without requiring commiserate public value be returned in-kind, contrary to our long history of requiring that common carriers serve the public without discrimination in exchange for the unique privilege of being shielded from liability.

I see where you're coming from, but I frankly believe that the internet as we know it is fundamentally unworkable without the ability for some platforms to restrict the voices of some users. It's also fundamentally unworkable if we make the platforms liable for the users words.

I'm up for solutions like breaking up the larger platforms so that users have more choice, but I consider 230 to be integral in mass user interaction.

To put it another way: I'm uninterested in an internet where websites are legally forced to either be sterile and userless or act like 4chan.

- it's reputation is attracting trolls

(BTW, does 4chan even have the minimum 50M monthly users to qualify ?)

- it has that anonymous (rather than pseudonymous) social convention

I see a lot of "the sky is falling" reactions here, but even if large websites were prevented from banning content, nothing forbids them from allowing users themselves hide the (pseudonym-linked) content that they deem undesirable, a feature that is already widespread.

(Also, large platforms are not the Internet, and not even the Web, and I would be happy to see them gone.)

Social media sites are not the government -- they have their TOS like everybody else does. Love it or leave it.

It should also be noted that conservatives absolutely believe in banning speech they don't like. So it's not the principle of it, it's the power.

Which only applies to the Federal government. States have had rules about speech since forever.

Texas wants platforms with > 50M users to treat political speech equally. That's well within a State's right to acquire that protection for its citizens.

Other states can choose different rules, or to leave their citizens with less rights, it's up to them.

This is a very classic "the good of society balanced against the rights of the private citizen/organization".

This isn't about private corporate rights, it's about the good of society against those private corporate rights.

You may disagree with where exactly this lands, but I doubt you disagree with the premise that personal rights must be balanced against the greater good (queue hotfuzz reference).

If you think you do, ask yourself if you feel the very idea of hate speech shouldn't exist. There are those who do, but more typically, people just disagree with where that idea lands rather than the idea itself.

But at the core of all the arguments this is the idea that’s trying to be settled.

And really it’s more complicated than all that because it boils down to the algorithm deciding who to show the posts too.

An unbiased algorithm is impossible.

Show all political messages to all people, now you’ve just incentivized politicians to have multiple people full time jobs be to produce more messages.

False. Twitter's original algorithm (everyone you followed in reverse insertion order) is trivially unbiased.

The bias creeps in when they analyze the content of the speech (or who specifically likes it or…). You can 100% do an unbiased algorithmic feed that re-orders (or omits) things.

Twitter and Facebook could do it today. They shadow ban and suppress all sorts of things (beyond kicking actual human users off the site).

This gets dangerously into the "whataboutisms" of toxic discourse. Especially when they are not presented in at all an even or good faith manner.

You can make any discussion political, but that’s not at all the same.

I mean, you are correct that there can be neutral discussions. Typically, neutral isn't as neutral as you'd think.

"Oh, I ran into Lucy at the supermarket today"

"Awesome, did they have that new brand of ice cream?"

"I didn't see it, but they did have a massive sale on strawberries."

"Darn, I guess I'll check Market Cart next time I go."

---

"Oh, I ran into Lucy at the supermarket today"

"Did you hear she voted for Tom?"

"Oh... uh, no?"

"I dont know how people can enable such evil. Did they have that new ice cream?"

"No, but they did have a massive sale on strawberries"

"Oh, I heard they donated to Tom, so I don't want it in my house anyways."

I think this is the heart of the problem. These social media companies didn't merely build agoras, they built amphitheaters. They build amphitheaters so large that control over the amphitheater makes you a kingmaker. Now they can't let go of that control, because doing so would risk the wrong people using it.

They never should have built amphitheaters this large in the first place. Better if they had built thousands of smaller amphitheaters, or none at all. Stop giving anybody bullhorns that can reach millions of people. Let ideas reach millions of people the natural way. One person tells a few hundred people their ideas, using the un-amplified power of their own voice. If what they say has any sense, each of those hundreds can tell hundreds more, and each of those can tell hundreds more again. That's how one person can reach millions, without the existence of massive kingmaker amphitheaters.

It would solve all the issues with private people/companies having too much sway. And the disconnect people have trying to reason about someone with that kind of world altering influence.

It would be like monopoly laws but for amphitheaters. I think we’d need to be much more aggressive with the definitions though and having fewer than 10s would trigger these laws.

The law at issue still allows forums with 49,999,999 or fewer users to discriminate based on political viewpoint. It only says sites larger than that need to allow all political viewpoints (but only if they allow any political viewpoints, and only if they have users in Texas).

Legal: Message board with 49 million users that says "no Republicans allowed."

Legal: Message board with 51 million users that says "no politics allowed."

Legal: Message board with 51 million users (none in Texas) that says "no Libertarians allowed."

Not legal: Message board with 51 million users (some in Texas) that says "no Democrats allowed."

You would think that the judges would realize that it's in their best interest if they want this to stick to throw their political opponents a bone, but... nope ?

I think moderation gets exponentially more difficult, the larger a community is.

There's probably something in the legislative history[0] as to why that particular number was chosen, but I keep getting 404s and certificate errors when I try to click on links to the remarks.

[0] https://capitol.texas.gov/billlookup/History.aspx?LegSess=87...

In this case, these are platforms that don't target a local community specifically, so it does make some amount of sense that the number is based on the population as a whole.

One way to look at this is to consider that the 2016 popular vote difference between Trump and Clinton was 2,868,686 which means if your platform can change the votes of 3 million people then it can change the results of the biggest election (even if the bias of the electoral college were removed).

Of course that's begging the question, but it's not hard to imagine that on a site with 50 million active users, the most susceptible 10% could have their voting decision change based on the world they see and the arguments they read through social media.

This also assumes that there is an imbalance in terms of which side does more "influencing", or which sorts of arguments it is easier to convince susceptible people into believing.

This law is limited to platforms with > 50 million MONTHLY active users.

People talk about 2nd order effects all the time, here's the really interesting part.

These companies will suddenly be incentivized to clearly identify bots as not-real-people due to this law. Imagine how much power this will take away from those with the platform to scale bots.

You can disagree with the specifics, but the spirit is in the right place.

I do, as it happens, believe it is a problem that Twitter censors so much speech without 'legitimacy'. Not because they censor the wrong things, but because their censorship without legitimacy fuels a persecution complex.

This is mostly a problem because Twitter is so big. And I don't think starting alternative Twitters (like truth social) is a good solution, mostly because it partitions the conversation even more.

this includes things like legislation determining how to “appropriately” handle user data. it would be very easy to make it too expensive for any one person to “appropriately” handle user data in their webapp, which is my concern with the current twitter drama

I have no interest in establishing my own chalk board, nor do most people.

The only tricky part (which is perhaps even worse already with the "cloud"), is that some legislation is needed to simplify transfers (and not just the file ones) from one ISP to another, like we already have with phone numbers.

BigCorp.com will not.

If you can serve more than two dozen people you're not a home, pub or private property, you are by definition a public square.

A concert venue can't evict someone for smuggling in alcohol?

If it's a website with over 50 million users, and it's designed explicitly as a place for these users to express themselves, then calling it "a public square" seems entirely warranted.

If speech has shifted online, to massive social media websites like Twitter, and you don't protect it there, then you have no free speech in your country.

There is no Free Speech if you can't speak freely where speech is actually happening.

So if nearly all speech is moving online to massive social media sites, and you can't speak there freely, but instead your speech is subject to the whims of random employees - there is no Free Speech in this situation.

> It certainly doesn't mean speech without consequences of any sort nor does it mean that you automatically get an audience for it.

But it does mean you can speak. Even if there may be consequences, and even if you don't automatically get an audience.

That's the right I'm supporting here, against an alarmingly large group that seems to consider this right to be no longer necessary, and even undesirable.

> Freedom of speech, of the press, of association, of assembly and petition -- this set of guarantees, protected by the First Amendment, comprises what we refer to as freedom of expression. The Supreme Court has written that this freedom is "the matrix, the indispensable condition of nearly every other form of freedom." Without it, other fundamental rights, like the right to vote, would wither and die.

https://www.aclu.org/other/freedom-expression

As expression increasingly moves online, we will have to find ways to protect it online. A future in which the vast majority of speech happens in private online platforms, that may curtail it at will, is not just dystopian but goes against core American values, and the essence of freedom.

Core american values? There's massive censorship of pornography, there are noise laws, library books are being challanged and removed. A town voted to defund a library because they wouldn't remove a book. Explain to me how it's a core value?