Twitter is a reflection of society. Twitter can't fix society, only censor its speech, which never works.
Congress needs to look at extending First Amendment protections for users of social media such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google.
Congress needs to look at extending First Amendment protections for users of social media such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google.
People honestly can't even handle free speech in real-life, let alone anonymously on the internet. We literally have to create barriers around Planned Parenthood because people use free speech to berate women who are already suffering.
Speech needs to be protected, but when it starts to encroach on my pursuit of happiness it's a problem. Facebook, Twitter, etc don't need to become chan sites.
For most of modern history, speech has been censored in some form or another by governments. Naturally so, as any kind of divergent thinking can be dangerous to power structures (this hasn't gone away). In 1663, John Twynn, was tried and executed in England for printing material that suggested that perhaps the monarchy should be beholden to the people. The Sedition Act of 1798 was passed by the American Congress and signed into law by President John Adams. Namely, it prescribed fines and imprisonment for those who "write, print, utter, or publish... any false, scandalous and malicious writing" against the government. This was used to jail several members of Congress, among others.
Modern free speech jurisprudent didn't start to develop until as late as 1917. The Espionage Act of 1917 was enacted at the start of World War I to prevent actions that were seen as unfavorable to the war. The Supreme Court upheld the law as not violating freedom of speech in Schenck v. United States. I believe there was a subsequent 1917 or 1918 case that began to turn the tide (the reference escapes me at the moment and I'm at work), but it wasn't until 1969 in Brandenburg v. Ohio that the Supreme Court ruled that inflammatory speech is protected as long as it satisfies a two-prong test:
1. The speech is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action," AND 2. The speech is "likely to incite or produce such action."
The case concerned an Ohio Ku Klux Klan member who was recorded saying particularly horrid and denigrating things about African Americans, but, notably, nothing specifically threatening. The Supreme Court upheld your right to say things like "I think we should kill all Jews" because, although a terrible thing to say, statements like that aren't imminently encouraging lawless action and not likely to do so.
Past that point, the Supreme Court has regularly upheld this interpretation of the first amendment. The best argument against a more European, say, interpretation of the first amendment is that, simply: governments only ever censor speech that they don't like. That's why the Espionage Act was used to incarcerate the likes of Emma Goldman and not, say, the people who were helping organize lynchings. If you were to enact hate speech legislation, and history bears this out, the people most affected are the minorities: black people, Jews, Muslims, LGBTQ people, pacifists, communists, anarchists, socialists, etc. Think about all of the police that shoot unarmed black men. Can you seriously imagine police forces across America protecting the speech of someone that calls for the abolition of the institution that person belongs to?
So that's a brief history and law lesson (caveat: I am neither a lawyer nor a historian). This is certainly a larger discussion to have, and I very much enjoy debating things like hate speech legislation and speech restriction in general, but I'll leave you with this for now.
Edit: I'm also wondering why the great examples of free speech that people reach for are always racism. It's not really surprising that racism is allowed in a country founded on racism. It might be more interesting to look at what has actually been banned in American free speech law over the years.
The "ag-gag" laws that were recently overturned are one thing I'm thinking of. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_libel_laws are another.
Grandparent was arguing that people can't handle free speech and that:
> Speech needs to be protected, but when it starts to encroach on my pursuit of happiness it's a problem. Facebook, Twitter, etc don't need to become chan sites.
I hear this a lot, particularly from the left (although the right does it too), on the grounds of protecting people from "harmful" speech. I disagree with that, which is why I responded, because I don't think enough people know about the modern interpretation of free speech and the long, storied history it has (not just in the US but everywhere). I certainly had no idea before I started reading.
> I'm also wondering why the great examples of free speech that people reach for are always racism.
It's not that they're examples, it's that the landmark Supreme Court cases that established our modern understanding of free speech typically involved the KKK and nazis (c.f. National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie). In other words, people with horrible beliefs are the only reason why you can stand on a street corner and preach about socialism, communism, anarchy, etc (which might be "horrible beliefs" too, depending on the individual). 100 years ago, someone distributed a gentle poem by a socialist and was put in jail, and it was legal. Do you want to go back to that? Because it is absolutely possible.
Some famous free speech cases have involved protecting the expression of 'horrible beliefs' (to use your phrase) but to suggest that all free speech jurisprudence stems from those cases is simply not true.
Pornographers of various kinds have made more (and better) arguments in favor of free speech than any political actors I'm aware of, and to cite the KKK as the harbingers of free political expression is to ignore the significance of cases like Cohen v. California (from 1971) where a man convicted of disturbing the peace for wearing a jacket bearing the words 'Fuck the Draft'in a court house had his conviction overturned.
National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie isn't so much a landmark case as the most recent one, and one that punts on the fundamental issues at that. Terminiello (including the dissents) is a far better template to work from.
> In 1663, John Twynn, was tried and executed in England for printing material that suggested that perhaps the monarchy should be beholden to the people.
The alternative is that we end up with a future where more and more of life becomes privately owned and we end up either in online 'company towns' for our social interactions, or else we end up exiled to virtual ghettos where we are unable to interact with others if we go against whatever the dominant ideology happens to be.
I think it's workable. Once you both market yourself as an open platform for discussion (as Twitter and many other social sites have done) and reach a certain level of use (which I think we can debate on, but certainly Twitter who has world leaders making official pronouncements on it would clear that bar), some kind of oversight should kick in to prevent abuses.
Ignoring the moral implications of holding a gun to a business owner's head and forcing them to run their business the way you want, are we not opening up the doors for legitimate censorship down the line?
If we're concerned about world leaders making official pronouncements on Twitter, why not just dictate that they don't do that and instead utilize a different platform? Something decentralized preferably.
It wouldn't be that much of a legal stretch to say that the service is acting as a common carrier, and that they can either advertise honestly or be regulated. Twitter wants to have it both ways, where they can advertise as a space for public discussion when it suits them and fall back on the "private company, our back yard" defense when their behavior is questioned. This is the real problem.. there's nothing whatsoever wrong with operating a curated service as long as you are clear that's what you're doing.
As an alternative (and entirely off-the-cuff) legal theory, the communications decency act holds a provider harmless for what their users post, but critically, they lose that protection once they start exercising editorial control.
I'd aay that most large social networks already crossed that line. I also think most companies would ease up on the censorship if they knew that the alternative left them open to suit for libelous etc. content on their service.
I don't want to be mean, but the actual situation makes me think that they are sort of new parasites for the commons (seen as an organism), sort of a cymothoa exigua [0] of public speech.
Since a comment like yours is so rare, I tweeted it :) [1] and I plus it with a post [2] I wrote after looking for laws concerning cultural genocide. Because, dramatic or not, that's the reality of the phenomenon, sadly.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cymothoa_exigua [1] https://twitter.com/mbuliga/status/969646621981138946 [2] https://chorasimilarity.wordpress.com/2017/11/10/genocide-as...
This makes me wonder if phone companies have the right to disconnect customers based on political speech they don't like.
If, say, Verizon decided they didn't want to "facilitate extremism," and decided to cancel the plans of politically unpopular organizations or its members, is that allowed? What if they decide that they don't want to have any of that 'filth' on their network, and disconnect anyone communicating to/from Verizon numbers if they are politically undesirable?
Also note that telecoms companies have the law on their side against "obscene" or "harassing" phone calls, in a way that doesn't seem to apply to other internet communications.