The Texas law text[1] says it only protects 'users' which are defined as people. And even then the law only prohibits censorship for specific reasons.
It doesn't say companies can't ban users for running bots. Even if the messages the bot is posting are protected the fact of running the bot itself should still be a bannable offense if it's not allowed in the TOS.
[1] https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/872/billtext/html/HB00020F...
For some definitions of low cost-of-living, sure. In this law specifically:
Sec. 120.002. APPLICABILITY OF CHAPTER. (a) This chapter
applies only to a user who:
(1) resides in this state;
(2) does business in this state; or
(3) shares or receives content on a social media
platform in this state.
They forgot (4) can afford a lawyer.
This law will only benefit those with deep pockets.
In each of those cases, the original speech is a user's, and the bot is merely following the human user's publication instructions.
Twitter remains free to write and enforce an acceptable-use policy that disallows "bot-like" behaviors, as long as the policy and enforcement is viewpoint-neutral.
how does twitter disprove bias?
Furthermore, such a requirement would backfire spectacularly on the conservative right; consider all the other areas where disparity of outcome arises today.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-algorithm-crackdown-...
As for common carriers, one of the usual differences between a common carrier and a not-common-carrier is that a common carrier can't tell what they're transporting. If I throw a box onto a fedex truck, they don't know what's in it. Same for a train (and they're allowed to refuse if they believe it's something they can't transport successfully or safely). The same general concept applies to telephone operators, in that they can't wiretap you, and often ISPs, since they're just transporting opaque encrypted bytes. But tweets and posts on public facebook pages or on reddit are public, the company can see them.
They can tell what they're transporting, they're just not allowed to. Telephone operators could wiretap you (and use speech recognition to censor), ISPs could monitor unencrypted data, and even for encrypted data, monitor metadata like which server you connect to. Even FedEx could x-ray packages, or use drug sniffers.
Anyway, you claimed this law violated previous precedents, but you've only responded about how it's different from previous precedents.
Sure there are some differences, but how are those differences material to the question of whether governments are allowed to regulate "fair" or universal access to communications tech?
Common carriers have to do this (they have to know who you're connecting to or shipping to etc.).
> Anyway, you claimed this law violated previous precedents, but you've only responded about how it's different from previous precedents.
No, I said the ruling violated previous precedents, which is obvious, up until today (and in other circuits), the very clear and obvious precedent was that the 1st amendment covered corporations. The first line of this ruling contradicts that.[0]
"Today we reject the idea that corporations have a freewheeling First Amendment right to censor what people say" is a fundamental misreading of the constitution, and flies in the face of first amendment precedent. This ruling isn't about the government's particular ability to regulate particular industries, it's "corporations aren't protected by the constitution".
[0]: Aside, yes the law is also bad and likely is unconstitutional for much the same reason, but that's not the argument I was putting forward.
And that is completely consistent with precedent that the First Amendment actually protects people from censorship. The companies are using the twisted logic that there is a first amendment right to restrict free speech.
This is not the precedent! The first amendment absolutely allows citizens to engage in editorialization and "censorship".
The first amendment protects you from the government! And it gives me the right to assembly, including assembly with others in the form of a joint business venture! And if I assemble with others, very importantly: I don't lose my constitutional rights. Because even when I am assembled, I am protected from government overreach.
The Bill of Rights doesn't protect you from me, and it never has. The Bill of Rights does not protect you from censorship, and it never has. The Bill of Rights does precisely one thing: it protects you, and me, from the government and government overreach. And the government preventing me from speaking against you is government censorship of me.
Like, the ACLU, EFF, and Cato Institute all filed amicus briefs supporting NetChoice (previously when the even dumber part of this ruling was before the Supreme Court).
Edit in response to the below:
no, social media sites aren't common carriers, and you've already admitted that your whole fairness doctrine schtick is a stretch, since the internet's infrastructure isn't licensed by the government (and of course, it cannot be: I don't need a license to upload things!) Treating point-to-point social media, such as instant messaging, like a common carrier might make sense, but a reddit comment or a tweet don't resemble what common carriers carry or how common carriers work. They don't have a destination.
It's also, of course, important to note that there is no constitutional right to ship goods, so while it may be reasonable to regulate such industries, regulating a company whose product is speech is much more tenuous, so while the government can absolutely do common carrier things to a shipping company, it is enjoined, by the constitution, from making a speech company a common carrier.
Edit again:
Phone companies don't produce speech. I cannot hear what you say on the phone. I can see what you tweet. You might rephrase it as publishing vs. messaging. The regulations on a company whose product is publishing cannot be treated the same way as anything else (cue irrelevant arguing about a misunderstanding of section 230). Reddit and twitter and such allow me to publish what I say. T-mobile ships what I say. Common carrier regulations apply only to shipping companies, not publishing companies.
I didn't mean to imply that the First Amendment forbids private censorship (other laws do that). What I meant was, the First Amendment protects people from censorship, when it applies. It's perverse logic to claim that an amendment that prevents government censorship really means that there's a right to censor.
And everything about corporations is an irrelevant distraction; the law would also apply to an individual who owned and operated a social media network entirely by themselves as a sole proprietor.
Edit in response to edit:
> you've already admitted that your whole fairness doctrine schtick is a stretch
No, I admitted that there are some differences. The essential argument, that the First Amendment does not forbid such laws, remains relevant.
> social media sites aren't common carriers
They are if the government says they are, as recently happened to ISPs. This law doesn't exactly do that, but it has similar effect, and that's relevant because it shows that laws with this effect are constitutional.
> [the government] is enjoined, by the constitution, from making a speech company a common carrier.
Phone companies transmit speech, and are considered common carriers.
Edit again:
Whether the communications tech is one to one or one to many, the speech is still the speech of the person communicating, not the tech company. Any free speech rights belong to the writer, not the company that owns the wires or software involved in transmission.
Publishers are something different entirely. Their core business is content creation, not operating the printing press or website. They pay their writers and tell them what to write about. They own the content they publish. And yes, they are responsible for what they publish.
The core business of a publisher, historically, has been the facilitation of scalable access to content created by other people. Even newspapers don't really "tell them what to write about", they hire (or use freelancers!) people who work on their own stories and submit them to the paper. And while newspapers do usually own the content they publish, they don't always, and book publishing houses rarely do.
So the WaPo's and HarperCollins's of the world are a lot more like the YouTube's and Reddit's than you seem to think.
And yes, the individuals who write the articles have first amendment (not "free speech", nobody in the US has a "free speech" right, that isn't a thing) rights. But so too do the Washington Post, and Penguin RandomHouse.
And even though lots of people have had OpEd's in the NYT, and even though Hachette has published books by tons of authors, they're under no requirement to publish my works, because they fully and totally have the right to not enter into a relationship with me, and have the right to not assist me in broadcasting my content. And the first amendment protects their right to associate with and how they want to, and that includes not associating with me.
I want to emphasize this by the way, because earlier you said
> it's arguing that censorship isn't speech
And this fundamentally doesn't matter, because the first amendment protects a number of things that aren't speech, including assembly. I can assemble with whom I want to (and also refuse to assemble with those I don't want to). I cannot be forced into service of any particular individual, and this is true for common carriers, they're not in service of an individual, but of an item. As soon as the thing you're doing is promoting an individual's words or brand, you're not doing what a common carrier is doing.
Shipping a box is exactly the same whether it is your box or Donald Trump's box. But broadcasting a speech on my loudspeaker isn't the same if its your speech or Donald Trump's. As much as you wish it to be, you cannot make those two situations the same.
> I cannot be forced into service of [again meaning doing business with] any particular [party]
In many cases you are free to refuse to do business with someone, simply because no law exists against it. But you don't have a right to refuse; the government can pass a law punishing you for refusing; and they have passed many such laws.
For example, in many states, you are forbidden to refuse to do business with Israel.
And you're forbidden to refuse to do business with people for a variety of reasons called protected characteristics. The list of such characteristics has grown quite long and includes (in some states) political affiliation, belief, or activity.
From that standpoint, this law is not unusual at all.
Due to a constitutional amendment! And even in California, companies are free not to do business without you based on your political beliefs they just can't retaliate against you in the workplace. And of course, the whole discrimination thing only applies if there's not a legitimate non-protected class reason, as we know from masterpiece cake shop.
> For example, in many states, you are forbidden to refuse to do business with Israel, and have been for many decades
Those laws would be unconstitutional and unenforceable. Actual on the books anti-bds laws are much more limited, usually only banning government contractors from boycotting Israel, and even that much more limited stance may be unconstitutional (see a recent Texas anti-bds law that's currently enjoined by the district court due to it's infringement on a corporations first amendment rights!...https://www.salon.com/2022/02/02/anti-bds-law-in-texas-free-...)
There are lots of unconstitutional laws on the books (miscegenation is illegal in a few states, technically), they just can't be enforced, but you aren't doing yourself favors by citing exaggerated, clearly unconstitutional versions of dubiously legal laws as a defense of this one.
That's quite a weak example in which a single low-level judge issued an injunction but "stopped short of fully blocking a state law" and an advocacy group claimed the law was unconstitutional.
Anti-BDS laws have existed in many states for quite some time, under many different courts, and not been overturned. So until a SC decision finally finds such laws unconstitutional, I will continue to accept that they are, even though I am strongly against them.
> the whole discrimination thing only applies if there's not a legitimate non-protected class reason
Protected classes vary by state. In Texas, because of this law, political belief is now effectively a protected class, at least w.r.t social media.
As you said, Twitter can still claim "a legitimate non-protected class reason" (like, the account is a bot) for terminating accounts, but can't "discriminate" against political views.
The California version forbids retaliation in the workplace, the Texas version forbids retaliation on social media. They aren't so different.
That's fine, but they still don't do what you claimed. Your said the laws prevent me from choosing but to do business with Israel. That's not true. That law has the government put a particular line in it's contracts. The government, when acting more or less as a private actor, can do what it wants with it's contracts, even things that would be unconstitutional if passed as a blanket law.
> As you said, Twitter can still claim "a legitimate non-protected class reason" (like, the account is a bot) for terminating accounts, but can't "discriminate" against political views.
It already does: threats of violence are like the primary reason accounts are removed. Being republican isn't carte blanche to threaten or harass people, and neither is being a tankie, and that's why Twitter removed accounts from all sides of the political spectrum without discrimination!
> In Texas, because of this law, political belief is now effectively a protected class, at least w.r.t social media.
No, that's not at all what that means. For one just no. But second, this law goes beyond that and bans speaker neutral, content based policies that aren't indented to discriminate, like for example saying "you're not allowed to threaten to kill people on our platform".
And here we are. These corporations want to have their cake and eat it too...
At the time a lot of people have considered the very concept of platform as evil for this reason ("protocols not platforms"), but this was also related to issues coming from their use of closed source software, and more importantly : antitrust - the mere size of these corporation makes them at the very least "friendly elephant in a china shop" kind of evil, but the USA didn't want to shut down the GAFAMs considering the immense not so soft power their monopolies give them in the world.
A less radical proposal was to have some allowed middle ground between common carrier and publisher : "displayer", but this would still need to come with severe restrictions to what these companies are currently enjoying in the current "lawless" void : again, restrictions on size, kind (think Wikipedia or archival), running as a for-profit, forced usage of interoperable protocols, use of open source software, have been suggested and even somewhat put into practice in recent EUropean laws (though it is suspected that due to the heavy lobbying that the GAFAMs have done, the end result is more that the current laws are helping them by making it harder for new competitors to emerge, while they are so big they can bear the regulatory brunt).
(P.S.: It's kind of amusing to see Texas Republicans to be a shining beacon of liberalism...)
> the point of this law is to get around a federal law. States can't do that, that's the point of the supremacy clause.
How many states have made marijuana legal despite federal law?
The federal government choosing not to for most cases, and choosing to functionally defer to the states does not affect what it is allowed to do.
And there is a difference between making something illegal and making something legal. Once the federal govt says something is legal, supremacy prevents states from making it illegal (remember the Republican talking point about how the Dems could pass a national abortion legalization law? That works because of the supremacy clause).
Like it's really clear at this point you know basically nothing about how the us legal system works. Because you keep bringing up these things that just are not relevant. And I don't really want to teach you.
You're forgetting the much easier, and historically important, method of simply opening the packages and looking inside.
Edit: Skipped a step: When spent by a corporation, the courts have ruled that money is speech. Therefore, the bot's output is clearly the speech of the corporation, which is definitely a person.
No they are not. They share some specific rights as people, but are not people. A corporation can’t be murdered, can’t vote, can’t be imprisoned, can’t marry another person, etc.
The big ones being that they can be sued and charged for breaking the law, you can't do either of those things with, say, a rock or a dog.
They can also sue you back which is, admittedly, less fun.
This is actually something I had not fully considered. I had always considered odd modifiers to create a non-central example of the category, rather than creating a new category.
To take your example of a sperm bank, I had always considered that to be a kind of generalized version of a bank. A general "place you can deposit things for future use".
Do you have any other good examples? I'm gonna have to let this roll around in my head for a bit to see what the implications are.
> a supply of something held in reserve
> a place where something is held available (especially : a depot for the collection and storage of a biological product)
Both of which fit food bank, seed bank, and sperm bank.
Which means that a sperm bank probably is properly a bank, although used without qualification, most people probably mean money bank (or are being intentionally ambiguous to avoid the stigma of needing a food bank/going to a sperm bank).
Don't you dare dash my dreams of getting married to Costco.
Being offensive is not the measure for applying censorship.
With email, if you don't want to receive someone's emails anymore, you unsubscribe. Or put it in spam (equivalent to social media block) and you won't see those emails anymore.
"Platforms" claim that because they're platforms, they have a duty to "remove toxic elements from the platform". That doesn't work when they're practically monopolies for online speech, i.e. when if you get banned by one and you're famous enough, you get banned by all of them.
Gmail regularly does both of these things to me despite explicit filter rules to the contrary.
If you are a US citizen, even if you’ve never lived in the US (born to a US citizen parent), get on over to https://fvap.gov to get yourself registered and request your absentee ballot. Hurry up, because the deadline for most states is rather soon, and a lot of them still require the registration to happen via paper mail - plus, you need time for the ballot to get to you and for you to mail it back.
As long as the US is going to insist I report all my German income and accounts that I’ve already paid Germany’s well-collected taxes on, you’re darn right I should have the right to vote!
Just don’t have one centralised overlord.
How is this different from the current internet?
> Tying (informally, product tying) is the practice of selling one product or service as a mandatory addition to the purchase of a different product or service. In legal terms, a tying sale makes the sale of one good (the tying good) to the de facto customer (or de jure customer) conditional on the purchase of a second distinctive good (the tied good). Tying is often illegal when the products are not naturally related.
I'm not interested in hashing out a complete argument and coming to a vacuous conclusion with some other random on an internet forum, I'm just saying that there seems to be a reasonable argument to be had in this direction.
It could be effectively a crowdsource / peer recommended model where you opt in to aspects of the bubbles. So my elderly parents could get some of the safety guidance mirroring mine (eg weeding out conspiracy thought or spam) but then also picking up aspects that mirror older peers (eg reflecting their more traditional tastes)
Right now there's a remarkable amount of undesirable content that gets through that ought to be easy to filter. On Twitter you see it a load with searches for regular terms that show up inappropriate content for the term, yet you don't want to set content filtering or it cuts things that are genuinely interesting but edgy!
- Google (including GMail)
- Meta (Facebook, Instagram)
If someone thinks far right content is reasonable and good it would be refreshing to hear that take.
Instead people bend themselves into logical pretzels to oppose the idea of moderation for supposedly “content neutral” reasons. It’s tiresome.
That straw man incinerated and replaced with "mainstream conservative content", you still are not going to get any examples because the one providing that will be voted/flagged into invisibility, or if not that, the resulting discussion will be derailed into quibbling about the specific example rather than the much more important general principle.
It would be not at all honest to imply that this forum is anything but generally hostile to the American right, regardless of how extreme or not the take is. With that in mind, it is no surprise that specific positions are only ever mentioned indirectly, or negatively.
[1]: https://sanctionssearch.ofac.treas.gov/Details.aspx?id=8759
Should a million or two people be allowed to enter the country with no rules or oversight. Again, far right.
Should parents have a say in child’s education. Far right question.
Those three actual opinions are completely uncontroversial. But people pretend other issues are those issues so they can be the common-sense instant victor.
What mostly gets banned at big social media sites is spam and bots. The political speech that does get banned is overwhelmingly violent.
The right gets banned more because there is no liberal equivalent of the Christchurch shooter, the Buffalo shooter, the El Paso shooter, the Charleston shooter, the Tree of Life shooter.
The last president got kicked from Twitter because he tried to violently overthrow our government.
Kiwifarms was finally taken down by cloudflare only because of immediate threats of violence.
The right wing in the US has a violence problem. Culture war junk and social media moderation policies pale in comparison to this problem.
>Kiwifarms was finally taken down by cloudflare only because of immediate threats of violence.
A single threat of violence originating from a long dormant account which had posted once, in 2018. It was reported multiple times and removed by Kiwi Farms moderators within 30 minutes. It wouldn't be unreasonable to conclude that there might've been shenanigans at play. Possibly by the same actors behind the DDoS campaign.
Imagine if Bell was touchy about letting "undesirables" use their service.
It’s not. It’s about individual private publishers, of which there are potentially infinite. That is the beauty of the internet.
EMail is one such example: there is no meaningful way to filter spam, so the peering relationships between mail providers break down unless they each implement some sybil-proofing on their own side. The end product is that everyone is forced to use a provider like Google, and play a corporate-political game to stay in good favor with their peers. This is because there is no spam-resistance on Email application level
We've seen a similar situation this week with a controversial forum called KiwiFarm taken down by DDoS. They need to maintain a political relationship with their DDoS-protection provider, CloudFlare, who also controls a massive chunk of the internet infrastructure. This is all so that there can be a central entity that discriminates on the traffic, as there's no spam resistance features on IP level.
uBlock Filters, but for Twitter.
uBlock Filters, but for ...
Just let us choose which ones we can activate, and if we want to see the unfiltered list we'll turn it off and refresh.
Sign up for Twitter. Immediately you're greeted with a list of "suggested filters" that will pop up again and again, using dark patterns eventually, until you either give in or are tricked into adding Twitter's highly recommended "safe filter plus package" that uses the exact same shadow bans and biased algorithms used by default today.
Actually, I suspect that such a law would be on even shakier First Amendment grounds, but here's a test that might bring this regulation into the realms of competition law rather than regulating speech:
Whenever a (sufficiently large) platform makes a UI change about which the FTC receive multiple negative comments, that platform is required to run a poll of (some random subset of) its users, with a wording specified by the FTC, asking the users if they like the change or they find it manipulative.
If most users think that the change is negative, then that's a de facto / prima facie case of the platform abusing its monopoly power to the detriment of its users, since if there were a free market then those users would simply move to a competing platform.
You don't receive the OP's messages unless you are friends him them, or change your default settings to allow strangers to message you.
As for phishing attacks: Education is helpful. It would help if organizations with legitimate flows that are indistinguishable from phishing attacks were made liable. (Mortgage industry: I'm looking at you.)
Blocking unpopular content doesn't become a political act just because one side produces more of it than the other.
No, it's users trying to censor what they don't want other people to be permitted to say or see.
Twitter users have a "block" button; they're free to use it, and thus limit what they themselves will see.
>Perdí varias cosas en Buenos Aires... No me quejo. Con tantas personas perdidas, llorar por las cosas sería como faltarle el respeto al dolor.
Translates roughly as:
>I lost various things in Buenos Aires... I don't complain. With so many people lost, to cry over things seemed to lack respect for suffering.
In a kind of similar vein, you're complaint about Twitter users being silenced lacks some respect for people who are actually being silenced. Although I agree with your underlying sentiment.
The original statement I replied to — which was also the first time "silenced" was used in this thread — was:
> Being kicked off Twitter isn't the same as being silenced.
In reply, I asked "What would you call it?".
In any case, do we really want the government to start dictating to private sector publishing companies what content they must publish?
Yes, I think we do, if it’s in exchange for their currently privileged position.
Currently, they operate with the privileges of a common carrier, and none of the responsibilities.
They shouldn’t have the privilege of being shielded from responsibility for what they publish on behalf of others, while also claiming that doing so represents their own protected speech.
If they want to editorialize, they can be treated like any other publisher, and be held responsible for what they publish — including disinformation, libel, harassment, et al.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier
> A common carrier in common law countries (corresponding to a public carrier in some civil law systems,[1] usually called simply a carrier)[2] is a person or company that transports goods or people for any person or company and is responsible for any possible loss of the goods during transport.[3] A common carrier offers its services to the general public under license or authority provided by a regulatory body, which has usually been granted "ministerial authority" by the legislation that created it.
They were granted the traditional privileges of common carrier status under section 230 of the CDA, but none of the responsibilities.
Refer to the “telecommunications” section of the Wikipedia page you’ve cited, where this specific topic is covered, along with additional references for further details.
Being a "Interactive computer service" != being a "common carrier". Pointing to Section 230 as an example of "common carrier" statues is massively misunderstanding the "ISPs as common carriers" debate.
Social media can definitely be used to silence people, but I don't think that's mostly what's happening (for the most part) wrt big tech banning certain controversial content on their platforms.
Why is a “social media” company headed by the most popular “conservative” in America failing?
Why can’t FoxNews create its own social media company?
"If they don't like it, why can't they just create their own internet that we will not be able to access?"
https://time.com/6209392/truth-social-financial-problems-tru...
Trump is supposedly a billionaire. He couldn’t fund the equivalent of Cloudflare if he desires? He couldn’t find enough like minded investors?
In any case they are simply mastodon forks, are they not? I can't see why it would require massive funding. I don't think the failure of truth social speaks to the failure of "splinter" forums at large.
What word should we use to describe the viewpoint-based prohibition of someone’s speech?
Alternatively, conservatives are all about the free market. Let them create a platform where their views can be heard.
Common carriers are private companies required to guarantee non-discriminatory access to the public.
They do this in exchange for a shield from liability for what the public says/does/transfers via their service.
The legal framework for this dates back to English common law, and applies to telephone companies, airlines, freight carriers, taxi companies, and just about any other company that provides public services under the privilege of a government-granted shield from liability.
The only companies of this type that this doesn’t apply to are ”interactive computer service” providers, because they were granted a special privilege cut out in the Communication Decency Act of 1996, while we asked for nothing in return [1].
That’s the issue, here.
If the NRA wants to launch an “interactive computer service” that publishes user content, then yes, I think they should be forced to either accept liability for what they publish, or accept they they must serve the public without viewpoint discrimination.
If RedState wants to host a comment section, then I think the same rule should apply to them, too.
ISPs, too. This is the fundamental concept on which all arguments for net neutrality rest.
[1] Not entirely true; the liability shield of the Communications Decency Act was intended to counterbalance the criminalization of user transmission of “obscene or indecent” material on the internet.
The indecency clauses were struck down by the courts, leaving the privileges and none of the responsibilities.
The whole law was a broken, idiotic idea and should have been scrapped entirely.
(1) That the invented classification was a mistake, and should be rectified, and
(2) How that invented classification — and the privileges it granted — was made in trade for something we never received (and never should have asked for): criminalization of “obscene or indecent” material on the internet.
I'm not sure whose arguments you believe you're rebutting, but they're not mine.
Giving people option to filter out what they don't want to see is fine; but the moment when (aside from reporting illegal stuff) you block content for user B because user A asked, it quickly becomes picking a side and censoring the other side.
Instead, let people pick their moderators / editorialization.
The are de facto acting as publishers because of that.
Go make a service. Like a photo-sharing service. A service like that should obviously feature user comments, right?
And, then users start posting millions of blatant racist, misogynistic, pedophilic and false shock propaganda comments. But, if you decide you don’t want to personally spend your own money propagating this repulsive material using your own servers, large men with guns and dogs will drag you into a cage.
That’s what these laws mean. Don’t sugar-coat them.
It seems like this ruling pushes us along that path.
1. Political content that is not only unaligned, but diametrically opposed to political content I've previously consumed. 2. Random "Free" movie and youtube original content suggestions (effectively ads, on a supposedly ad-free account).
If you have a genuine need to post something, waiting 5 seconds is not a big problem. But if your goal is to spam 1000 of something, now you need to wait 5 seconds between each post, and the task can be made progressively harder so that by item 1000 it's a 5 hour calculation rather than 5 seconds.
People should be able to opt into a variety of filters, some even provided by third parties, to clean their feed according to their views. That won't cause an issue with the senders as the receivers are entitled to filter what they read. People can have control but Twitter can't dictate.
Source: search for "Peñabots". There are great detailed documentaries about how far this went. That's one example, but this is ongoing for every major (geo)political topic and big businesses / hedge funds and the media "news" companies they own.
Sec. 120.002. APPLICABILITY OF CHAPTER. (a) This chapter applies only to a user who: (3) shares or receives content on a social media platform in this state.
But this doesn’t mention barring banning accounts because they break ToS about bot usage.
Give users intuitive filters? Give users the ability to create invite-only communities? Etc.
Twitter noticing and blocking your user account doesn't get them off the hook, according to the definition of user in the law.
This is a very well-explored area of law, and nobody is confused about the definitions of the terms used here. Even the government has reasonable authority to restrict speech based on time, place, or manner (e.g. by disallowing amplified sound systems).
1) The right to publish content that is not in line with mainstream politics
2) The right to spam replies against tweets of people you don't follow (directly or indirectly) for the purpsoe of marketing
These two things are largely orthogonal.
Most likely it'll apply in whatever cases Texas's govt wants. That is, the vague law will be basis for selective enforcement, like GDPR. There's no other way this can work.
Talk to real people. Go outside.
Edit -Didn't realize he meant video counts
"Will this also apply to [completely unrelated issue]? Bet they didn't think of that."
What?
“I can draw a vague parallel with this other thing, so clearly it’s basically like the nazis and/or stalin”
Decentralized defenses against bots will be far more effective than the central planning of information ecosystems we have today. Just watch.
Consider that this situation isn't like email spam filtering. I can't run a spam filter on the Twitter app on my phone. And if Twitter is not allowed to filter spam, that's it: no spam filtering for Twitter users.
That's nothing fundamentally preventing this. It's Twitter themselves who've decided not to allow you to do this. Were their app more open to extension you would be able to download and configure a spam filter of your choosing.
What these people want is very simple: a clear standard uniformly applied and not done so in a partisan fashion. Everyone is onboard with preventing the scenario you brought up: it’s not killing free speech, it’s stopping egregious spam. This is completely orthogonal to that.
This is about not getting banned for disagreeing with one side’s political ideology. We’ve managed to do that before - even just a decade ago, and manage to do it now on other platforms, all without ridiculous hypotheticals like this one every occurring.
One your last paragraph: yes, you’re 100% exaggerating. This scenario is as reasonable as saying “legal self defense is dangerous because just think of all the bad actors that will murder and call it self defense!”. It’s just nonsense and goes against all evidence.
So I create a bot that spreads my opinions by replying to millions of other Tweets. Anyone who mentions the politician of interest will receive a reply from "me" (my bot) within 2 minutes. Now I will be heard by millions, and my lawyer is ready should I be banned from the entire site.
Now imagine many people doing this, what a cesspool, you make a Tweet and the bot flood gates open. You Tweet about your grandchild and 30 seconds later you have 400 replies expressing "political opinions" about shady websites with cheap Viagra. Twitter can't ban them though. Welcome to truly free speech. You better learn to code if you want to be heard.
We're already at the point where websites can't control bots. AI that can write better than most humans is knocking on the door, and it can run on my personal computer. This law will only make it worse by adding real legal risk to banning suspected bots.
Am I exaggerating here, or is this actually possible? This feels like a loss in the humans vs bots battle more than a political one.