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."
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)