Trump's executive order targets political bias at Twitter and Facebook: draft
reuters.com
reuters.com
What rules do newspaper editors have to play by, exactly? Most of the major outlets are 24/7 propaganda machines. Calling any particular politician out on lying is hardly controversial for them, depending on who the politician in question is.
If you want to know what rules newspapers follow, ask a journalist about their laws and ethics rules and ask a lawyer about publisher rules. I can't give legal advice.
Hell, half of the 2016 campaign was about jailing the other candidate. Nobody else in any of the recent races has behaved in such a way. No president since Nixon is so quick to fly off the handle over being called out on what they are saying. If Biden were running on a Jail Trump campaign in 2020 (since it is now politically acceptable to do that sort of thing, I guess), you may have a point that the two sides behave the same way. They don't.
As for journalists - do you seriously think most of the talking heads on Fox News follow journalistic ethics? If you do, I don't think conversation is necessary - because we don't have a common understanding of either the content of Fox programming, or of ethics.
>Hell, half of the 2016 campaign was about jailing the other candidate . . .
That's not what we're talking about. People (who don't actually care about free speech in principle) are saying that this is a free speech violation in principle (legally, it is sound). The FCC might attempt to treat social media companies like newspapers. This is not a big deal. Bad orange man has not censored newspapers. Your tweets are safe.
Is this executive order one of those cases?
I think that is not what Trump is asking for.
Either way, the only intention behind this drafted order is entirely self-serving. It's a complete knee-jerk reaction.
By doing this Twitter is behaving as a publisher. Then why should Twitter not be treated like one?
From wikipedia[1] (my emphasis):
> The First Amendment (Amendment I) to the United States Constitution prevents the government from making laws which regulate an establishment of religion, prohibit the free exercise of religion, or abridge the freedom of speech, the freedom of the press, the right to peaceably assemble, or the right to petition the government for redress of grievances.
Also, called it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23322683
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_...
The White House wants the FCC to treat certain social media companies as if they were newspapers. That's it. Do you think there is a first amendment issue with how the government is treating newspapers right now?
It's relevant here because the constituion is the highest legal document in the country. Something that republicans selectively forget.
>Something that republicans selectively forget
ok... Go tell it to a Republican then.
This isn't just about facebook and twitter, it's about every site that allows user generated content, reddit, Hacker News, Instagram, heck even Stack Exchange counts, I'd imagine.
Reddit has banned whole sub-reddits and shadowbanned others, Hacker news has human mods who make qualitative decisions to curate conversations on this site.
This hits every forum, every newsgroup, every site that has user generated content.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230
(A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected;
Moderation does not have to be systematic, transparent, unbiased, or applied fairly.
The combined parts 1 and 2 of the "Protection for “Good Samaritan” blocking and screening of offensive material" mean that you are not responsible for the speech you host, but you can also not be compelled to host speech you choose not to host.
First amendment is the issue, what do you think "publisher" vs "platform" is about? It's about who should be sued for bad speech. What happens if FB is responsible for everything you say? More censorship. What happens if you are responsible for everything you say? Less disclosure.
Right now we have a situation where the platform owner can collect the fruits of popularity, while the platform users experience basically no-liability gossip. More speech, but are we healthier as a society for it? Maybe sometimes the answer isn't always making sure we have more free speech.
Also I'm not sure how lawsuits help out in the world of little people, because only big people can sue, and they only sue big targets.
> The gameplan might be to build a direct connection between the vast financial resources of the republican party and their ability to influence online audiences
Assuming that there is some "game-plan" is far fetched. If Twitter hadn't done this there wouldn't be a hue and cry in the first place. No one asked Twitter to attach its own opinion to the tweet. It did it on its own volition.
The fact is that Twitter is heavily tilted towards the left. Jack Dorsey is himself a self-declared left-leaning liberal. India has had its fair share of random banning of right-leaning accounts with those accounts not violating any Twitter policy. After hue and cry those accounts are reinstated. Once reinstated, there is no explanation given as to why the account was banned in the first place and why the account was reinstated. And it has happened multiple times!
If you are going to preach about democracy and fair play then first start at home. Else it will just reek of hypocrisy. And people hate hypocrisy more than lies. At least you know when someone is lying. But you never know when someone is being a hypocrite until you dig his/her past!
And who decides whether the citations are factual? Does Twitter decide it? If Twitter decides it then isn't it behaving like a Quasi-Judicial body? If it is like one then it is no longer a platform. You cannot call yourself a "platform" and then suddenly decide to change the character of your business and behave like an arbiter. There is a reason why you mention your nature of business while setting up your company. That way the authorities know what regulations will apply to you. If Twitter is behaving like a publisher and the publishing regulations do not apply then you are creating a monster in the process! And for what justification? Just to take on a politician whose term is fixed? Twitter is going to exist even when Trump isn't the President. By allowing Twitter to get away with this you are going to be setting a precedent for other companies to behave in a similar fashion. Then what is the point of rules and regulations? No one will follow it. Every company will decide to modify its nature of business as it sees fit.
However, are providing fact-checking links really being an arbiter when it's just a link to fact-checking sources? You could criticise those sources as biased, but as fact-checking, one would also need to find flaws in the facts-check itself for it to be anything substantial, and not just FUD-raising.
The extra notices could also have been separate posts by Twitter, or any other method/design of informing users. Twitter is mandated to inform or remove possible factual errors in their platform, in order to combat fake news and undue external political influence.
There is no right for anybody to tell blatant lies and to suppress fact-checks as protected by free speech laws. Some of it are not lies and not that exhaggerated, so it's hard to draw solid lines in the sand. Fact-checking seems a reasonable alternative. Mitigations have already been mandated after last election to combat fake news. Twitter being the owner of both platform and expression of content, is the final decisionmaker of their own social media platform, unless violating Constitution, regulation or laws. This expression is probably mostly covered by 1st Amendment and property laws.
Everything drastic starts off with a minor tweak. A minor change. These minor changes in a business' character add up to create a monster in the end. And we all know how companies keep changing policies that give them more and more control. We want the exact opposite. These are platforms for a reason. That is the beauty of it. If you want to tamper with people's opinions then you are no longer a platform. You are an editorial. You just cannot use a space you have given to someone to add your own views. There is no two ways about it. Even if they are a private company, they have a public platform that is used by everyone. And with that kind of power comes greater responsibility.
Whether Trump lies or not, the mandate for electing an alternative is always with the People of the United States. But you have no alternative to Twitter when it comes to ease of instant communication with millions of followers. What Twitter has done has a chilling effect. Adding notices now depends on some employee inside Twitter. Today it is Trump, tomorrow it can be someone else. It all depends on that employee's mood/feeling/bias. And as far as fact-checking is concerned we know how easy it is to "manufacture facts". Manufactured facts were used for waging Wars. Some of them on fellow humans. Some others on drugs like Marijuana. And those manufactured facts were never cross checked.
Some others are even worse. Let us take WHO for instance. What do you say for this: https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152
"Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China"
We all knew there was clear evidence of human-to-human transmission because of the lockdown imposed in Wuhan, the number of people falling sick and the rapid construction of hospitals by the Chinese Government. Yet WHO chose to lie. Did Twitter try to fact check this? This tweet is still on the platform. We all know now that it was a lie from the start. This lie put millions to suffer and killed hundreds of thousands of people around the World. Yet Twitter isn't doing anything. Not even attaching a "Fact Check" against that monstrous lie.
> Twitter is mandated to inform or remove possible factual errors in their platform, in order to combat fake news and undue external political influence. > Mitigations have already been mandated after last election to combat fake news.
Who mandated Twitter to take on this role? The US Government? I haven't come across any law that mandates social media companies to combat fake news/undue external political influence. If you have any reference I would be happy to read more about it.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=no+clear+evidence+who
There was a huge debacle at the time with Facebook CEO visiting different countries' authorities and the Cambridge A. scandal:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=social+media+combat+fake+news+cong...
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=social+media+combat+fake+news
Though active admin moderation on social media, forums and even news sites has a long history before that as well.
Do you see how quickly the cookie crumbles? What Twitter has done has a chilling effect. If it cannot justify on what policy it decided to attach a notice to a politicians tweet it won't stand a chance in convincing that it is just a platform and not a publisher/editorial. Especially if it targets a single politician and the rule was not used for any other politician.
That someone blatantly bullies people and lies on such a platform, would get anyone else banned or at least posts moderated. Lying/deception, defamation and "hate" speech is not protected speech. Some of it may even be punishable by Law.
Twitter still has the option to ban the president. This is not censorship either. Prudent moderation is being performed daily on many social platforms.
Maybe it is time to review the power of social media platforms (so I do see your point).
Though, I suspect a prudent review would end unfavourably for bullies, trolls and liars, at the very least for unprotected speech and especially speech violating established Law.
Exactly. So Twitter should have shown it has the balls and banned Trump "just like everyone else". It had the policy backing it up. It wouldn't have caused Twitter to be dragged into this controversy of becoming a biased publisher instead of a neutral platform.
> Lying/deception, defamation and "hate" speech is not protected speech. Some of it may even be punishable by Law.
Yes it is. But Twitter is not the Judge, Jury or Executioner. You have the courts for it.
> Twitter still has the option to ban the president. This is not censorship either. Prudent moderation is being performed daily on many social platforms.
Nope. That doesn't cut it. Your hatred for Trump cannot be a justification for misuse of power by Twitter. If Twitter tries to be an arbiter then it loses the ability to call itself a platform. It can either allow/disallow posts. It cannot decide to add to/edit/remove the post in question. This makes it an editorial/publisher and no longer a platform.
You may think both are the same thing. Both are "moderation". Nope. Imagine you are in a debate and you are the "moderator" of the debate. You have these rights: allow the speakers to speak when their turn comes, disallow speakers from speaking about certain topics. If the debate goes South you have every option to stop the debate. You can kick out a speaker if you feel the speaker is not adhering to the rules. All this is valid and is part of "moderation" as the speakers have come on your "platform".
But just because they are on your "platform" does not mean you have acquired rights over them. They are still individual entities. Now imagine if you are a "biased" moderator. You do not like a speakers point and you decide to add to/edit/change it. But you do not want the speaker to stop talking (lest you be accused of bias) so you instead take a sticky note, write down your counter opinion and attach it to the speakers forehead. Would the speaker be okay with that? Now that is invading that speaker's personal space. Just because you are a moderator you do not get to own the speaker or add to/edit/change his words. You can ask the speaker to leave (or ban) which is perfectly within your right. But you cannot have a notice stuck to his opinion. Then you are not a platform. An editorial does precisely that: edits out the bad parts, fixes the language, makes it better for consumption, fact checks, ensures that it isn't held liable for any wrong doings and then and only then will it allow the content to be published.
Btw, calling out a bully and liar to be a bully and a liar, is not "hatred", when it can be so easily documented.
It would have caused Twitter to be dragged into a much bigger controversy instead. Which you're right, they probably should, but have so far proven afraid to do so.
Honestly, that part seems very reasonable. If a platform curates or modifies content or promotes it beyond what some system thinks the specific user might like, then yes, the platform should be responsible for that content.
The real question would be, should the platform become responsible for all ontent, or just the content it curates / modifies / promotes?
My opinion is that this should work on a per-content basis, where the platform only becomes legally responsible for a unit of content once it associates itself with it by promoting, modifying, etc. this content. Whether it is realistic to enforce it this way is, of course, another question.
You can see the problem if Twitter allows politician A to accuse politician B of eating babies, but getting all high and mighty about politician B doing the same to A.
Any platform has the ability to modify anything on it. Does that make them tacitly responsible for all the content on it? No, that is just silly, and that's the way the law looks at it too.
However, too many are invested in maximally extreme, literal parsings of every syllable uttered by Donald John.
The Left understood BHO figuratively, the Right, literally.
The Left understands DJT literally, the Right, figuratively.
We might all benefit from a deep breath.
There are many people that believe Twitter is biased in favor of conservatives simply because it allows some conservatives to speak at all...
Tankies, though, I don't know whether they tend to get banned.
So curation independent of the wishes of the user is a central feature, making this sound like platforms would become really responsible for moderating what they publish. Historically this has been seen as completely cray-cray by the platform owners and they've fought it off successfully so far.
Imho that's exactly what Twitter does want to avoid under all circumstances because it would basically make ad-automation more risky.
Google dealing with regulation around advertising for medical products chose a blanket ban for any and all ads on a large range of keywords for some areas, and will only manually allow e.g. the manufacturer of some medication to buy ads. Automatically judging the legality of ads / tweets is too risky, and doing it manually is too costly (and still somewhat risky).
If an HN admin removes a comment on a post, they've curated that discussion, effectively.
Then they'd be responsible for the comment that got removed; what's the problem with that? It's not like they'd be modifying one word in a sentence and not want to be responsible for the next one.
This kind of thing should obviously work on small data units, like tweets, posts, etc.
Once they've curated a conversation (removing comments) are they responsible for the ones they didn't remove in that conversation as it's implicit approval?
It could very much be argued that they curated the post, and if they're responsible for removing it from the front page , is that a form of censorship...
The point I was making is that things that could apply to twitter also apply everywhere there is user generated content.
Maybe the line should be form vs. content; removing a post because of strong language (if the site specifically does not allow it) is different from removing a post because of an expressed idea. There's also a clear difference between presenting something demonstrably false as fact and and questioning the reasoning by which such falsehoods are identified. Both might be expressions of conspiracy theory, but should be protected by a persons freedom to express their opinion, the other is a lie.
If you suggest that platforms cannot remove other content, a lot of actions from people like reddit to remove objectionable content are banned, similarly here. Content has been removed from HN for example for "not contributing to the discussion", that's a subjective opinion, but one I'd suggest that site owners are entitled to.
Also when you start getting into very fine grained distinctions (for example have some of the things president trump has said been "demonstrably false" or not?) the chances of a law accurately capturing that requirement in such a way that a massive number of lawsuits are not started are (in my opinion) low.
Opening the door to that kind of lawsuit would seem likely to destroy smaller, less well funded sites, whilst larger players could likely weather the storm.
Not manually though. If you post a link to Twitter, a bot will do its thing and fetch a thumbnail. They will not do that only for some tweets but not others.
> if you change your website's theme or design in future, you modified all of user content as well
Hardly, but more importantly: you don't modify user content based on the user content in question. If you add a new script that will uppercase the first letter of all Tweets, you're altering user content, but I doubt there will be an argument about editorializing since you're applying it to all content.
Such ideas are certainly worth discussing, but I don't see how it would work. If the platform is suppressing some items then it is in effect promoting all the items it doesn't suppress, so would be responsible for them. The only way to avoid responsibility would be to present everything to the user, including the most blatant spam, in no particular order. Or you could allow certain kinds of "curation", perhaps, but if the curation is anything other than filtering by application of a published algorithm, then probably the platform would have to take responsibility for anything that doesn't get filtered out. But filtering with a published algorithm wouldn't stop professional spammers.
Here's a random idea: delegate the filtering to lots of separate smaller companies which would be a less juicy target for lawyers and it wouldn't matter if they went bankrupt every now and then.
Deciding what traffic to allow on the networks is OK but services shouldn’t be allowed to police things on their own platform.
But calling CNN a fact checker on the president is so inherently stupid, it's asking for trouble. And of course CNN couldn't get their facts right either, so they are blatantly just representing the other side and not "facts".
Twitter really could have done a better job here.
Besides, all news outlets post a bunch of BS under the cover of "analysis", "opinion", and "op-ed" pieces. Those are all carefully crafted to engage a target audience. NYT does it. WAPO does it. CNN. They are all running outrage factories just producing slightly different flavors..
That's the point, me thinks
Linking to related media resources makes total sense.
That’s what they have done in the past and what is a direct reaction to what went down during the last US presidential election.
Since this is the President Twitter feels understandably uncomfortable with just banning that person, so the next best option is to provide context to what they said. Seems reasonable to me.
You can quibble about details, but the basic idea seems sound to me.
You can also quibble about inconsistent enforcement and what not, but as far as I know Twitter is just coming down extremely hard on election disinfo (for understandable reasons), so that’s why they are so on this (and not, say, harassment and hate speech – which to my mind is also a very big problem on Twitter and where I see many failings in Twitter’s insufficient reaction).
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good. So often in these discussions people aim for perfection which in this messy reality is an impossibility. But saying “Well, perfection is impossible, so we will just do nothing.” or even “Well, there are complexities here, so we will just do nothing.” is just lazy cowardice. Or ideologically motivated.
I am interested in what you think about that, ignoring Trump for a second.
In that context I’m totally fine with what Twitter did. However, maybe something that looks superficially similar (posting a link to some white supremacist website below a tweet of some politician) might not be.
I know that looks pretty similar but I think that those are the complexities our society has to deal with. Sometimes someone is just wrong and their wrongness is fucking dangerous to society and then it is ok to react.
No bright line, only complexities.
My argument is Twitter is a private company. While private company should be able to control what happens with their platform, they have increasingly reached a size where they are public utilities. I believe an elected government (with its own biases) should decide what goes on a published platform than twitter. Because i have no way of questioning Twitter’s decisions. I can question the government and elect a new one. I can’t elect a new Jack Dorsey.
Every court’s jurisdiction only applies within that country.
What if an American court’s order goes against a European one?
What if Twitter moves to a different jurisdiction which has less oversight and buys out the courts? Not probable. But I wouldn’t want a utility to have so much power. Sorry.
Is there concrete evidence of bias? Being critical isn't the same thing
I can't imagine it would be easy to regulate a service that isn't really location dependent.
--- EDIT:
Of course they could also attempt to separate this fact-checking from their platform, for example by having another company build browser-extensions and endorse these extensions in some way. How far they could go with this is beyond my understanding of the legal system of the USA, but I imagine it should be doable to some extent.
This only works if you actually block EU visitors. Otherwise, you still fall under EU jurisdiction if you appear to have or address users from the EU. It would probably affect you similarly if you have users from the US and are located outside of it.
Enforcing fines is another matter, but the US would certainly have no problems there (see Kim Dotcom raid).
They could survive just fine as a communication tool but not so much as a business.
> The order asks the FCC to examine whether actions related to the editing of content by social media companies should potentially lead to the platform forfeiting its protections under section 230.
> It requires the agency to look at whether a social media platform uses deceptive policies to moderate content and if its policies are inconsistent with its terms of service.
Is there any merit to this?
> Called the White House Tech Bias Reporting Tool, it will collect complaints of online censorship and submit them to the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
> It requires the FTC to then “consider taking action”, look into whether complaints violate the law, develop a report describing such complaints and make the report publicly available.
Except for the Fact
1. It was on opinion not a statement of fact that needed fact checking
2. Twitter supports directly an opposing opinion
3. The "Fact Check" organizations linked are provably bias and are not fact check organizations
4. The links went to opposing opinion pieces not a statement of fact
> There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent. Mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed. The Governor of California is sending Ballots to millions of people, anyone living in the state, no matter who they are or how they got there, will get one. That will be followed up with professionals telling all of these people, many of whom have never even thought of voting before, how, and for whom, to vote. This will be a Rigged Election. No way!
This composed two tweets. It's from an authority figure (granted, one known to be extremely untrustworthy). There are many statements of "fact", or what any reasonable reader would take as assertions of fact.
Sentence one:
> There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent.
This is clearly a statement of fact. It's asserting (and context is important here, because Trump has repeatedly said mail in voting is rife with fraud) that mail-in voting is rife with fraud. Even a charitable interpretation would have to see this as intended to degrade trust in our voting system (to what end?) and discourage voting. If I say "The sun will rise tomorrow", it's a statement of fact, even though it's about the future.
> Mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed.
Again, this is a statement of fact. There is no qualifying clause to make this opinion, such as "I believe", or "I think".
> The Governor of California is sending Ballots to millions of people, anyone living in the state, no matter who they are or how they got there, will get one.
Another statement of fact, this one clearly about the present.
> That will be followed up with professionals telling all of these people, many of whom have never even thought of voting before, how, and for whom, to vote.
Statement of fact.
> This will be a Rigged Election.
Again, a statement of fact.
That's five lies in 6 sentences.
Now let's look at the Fact Check link - it goes here: https://twitter.com/i/events/1265330601034256384
This is a feed leading to many articles from many sources about the matter in question.
Zero lies in 6 sentences, says I.
https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/politics/nj-naacp-leader-cal...
https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/corruption-allegations...
This EO seems to be a nothingburger, the courts have already established that the text of 230 creates broad immunity, they aren't going to defer to the FCC about that.
Has the FTC even established that platforms have obligations towards their non-customer users?
The ToS will be written to allow discretion; that is why Trump hasn't been banned.
I don't doubt the US government could do that to an extent, but how much legal precedent is there for doing it? I find it very hard to believe that Twitter (and arguably many other companies in the sector, and possibly other tech companies too) wouldn't immediately lawyer up and challenge any thing like that. Not least because Twitter could start playing dirty too i.e. lobbying etc.
Government decisions get challenged from inside the government (or own administration as seen from the migrant ban) let alone externally by legal teams with practically unlimited budgets (remember that the church of Scientology successfully "beat" the IRS)
Censorship platforms, even the “good guys” who only censor occasionally or predictably or “according to law” (or whatever), are all vulnerable to this. The state can threaten them with guns and imprisonment, ultimately, and they have no immediate recourse. The content comes down. Maybe it gets restored later, after the election or war is over. Maybe it doesn’t. Either way, it comes down today. Neither Jack nor Sundar are going to jail to protect your hosting account showing videos of war crimes.
This is an inherent danger in all censorship platforms. Whether you like Jack or not, trusting him not to censor arbitrarily (while Twitter always has the technical capability) is not a reasonable choice for the society-wide message bus.
This failure mode is inherent in these censorship-possible systems, and it must be addressed if we are to maintain publishing that cannot be suppressed by the state during emergencies.
The guns are implicit. The threat rarely needs to be so direct.
Imagine what happens if Twitter continues to do the legal publishing things that Twitter does on twitter.com, and the state arbitrarily changes the liability protections of the CDA out from under them, and Twitter tells them to piss up a rope.
Next, Twitter’s bank accounts will eventually get looted, and if they opt out of the traditional state-controlled no-burden-of-proof banking system[1] to continue operating and paying staff, you can bet your ass that their resulting shutdown will be at the point of a gun, because payments outside of that system are already illegal without a special license.
That’s the only authority the state ultimately has: the claim to legitimately use violence to enforce the law: the law, as we are about to see, that can be changed arbitrarily by corrupt politician edict.
(The last time I recall him doing so was by an EO that overturned decades-old published and written BATFE interpretations of existing federal law (and assurances related to same) regarding bump stocks. The lawsuit proceeds, but good luck to you while you rot in jail for years if you are in possession of a bump stock (which were legal for decades) in the interim.)
Twitter didn't even censor the president, they just added a link below some lies he posted. He's been breaking their TOS habitually for some time and rather than ban him as they would anyone else, they made a special public TOS-exception for "newsworthy" bigwig public figures like him in their rules. The president gets to tweet things that would get you, a non-president, quickly banned from Twitter.[1] He's explicitly whitelisted as exempt from Twitter's usual control over twitter.com.
Now, the federal government is going to actually censor Twitter on his order, simply because they had the audacity to amend information to tweets from an account that they declined to suspend out of courtesy despite it breaking their rules for years.
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2018/01...
This is exactly why Twitter is an editor.
> the federal government is going to actually censor Twitter on his order
Wrong. They will instruct the FCC to treat Twitter like a newspaper.
If you remove section 230 protections for UGC from companies that "editorialize" under this definition, what will happen is that the only hosting companies that will remain in the wake of that are the ones large enough to be "too big to fail" (or friendly enough with the feds) like AWS and Azure and the existing social media giants.
That makes the point-and-click censorship situation much worse, because then the only places you can reliably host are already integrated with the angry despot's military for realtime censorship as we saw demonstrated for us in the case of Wikileaks, and ongoing across the world.
You do not want to live in that world. Already we have companies like Facebook disabling links in comments on Instagram to control the flow of information and attention. I don't want a web where all of our communications flow through 4 companies who can disappear our accounts and 100% of our private or public communications down the memory hole with no audit trail or legal recourse whatsoever.
If 4 companies control the internet, having the government restrain from censoring them doesn't fix the problem. What do you think we should do? I'm at a loss here.
Let's keep the context of this label around the post on mail in votes "would be a free for all on cheating, forgery and the theft of Ballots" in mind. This is attacking democratic constructs with goal of subverting it. There is no ideas to improve the very system that the current steward of our democracy should be owning .. just throwing mud to cement power.
Twitter has to try to provide context to these anti-Democratic government broadcasts or least it loses any notion of private free press. I.e it might as well be state run if it does not have the freedom to structrue the presentation of platform participation.
The US Postal Inspection Service (the mail has their own feds, did you know?) would take well beyond the window of the election results being declared if some criminal decided to take the same blatant measures to defraud an election by mail as they did to defraud the electronic voting systems the last election, which were fraught with actual issues of undefined electronic voting integrity (which, of course, fails unsafe, because you're not going to re-do an election when the numbers don't match). It's entirely plausible that the last US presidential election was stolen electronically and the perpetrators simply got away with it because computer security sucks.[1]
Ultimately, voting is a hard problem, and it's not really solved presently (in person, electronically, or by mail) from a technical/attack perspective. There are so many ways to straightforwardly attack the system right now if you're willing to risk a billion years in jail if you're detected, most of them related to the ways that electronic votes are collected[2] or the ways that votes are transmitted to central tabulation.[3] These systems fail unsafe, even when discrepancies are detected.
(My own personal theory about this is that if election results take too long to become "official", people will lose faith in the process itself, so getting to "done" is in general more important to most involved than getting to "perfectly accurate".)
Vote-by-mail has a different, but also still large and present, attack surface, especially if you (as above) are willing to do Big Deal Federal Crimes Involving The Postal Service to subvert it, which I believe is entirely on the table for the highest office in the land.
I don't care for the president or his tweets, but to call this one in particular anti-democratic might be a stretch, too. The US presidential elections simply are not secure in any meaningful way right now, and switching to mail won't fix (or worsen) that. (I know it's not a popular thing to point out that the US election security emperor has no clothes, but it's unfortunately true.)
It's not antidemocratic to say that it's fairly likely that elections have been, and will continue to be, successfully hacked. (The tweet in question is, of course, using the concept as a weapon to further a specific antidemocratic agenda, but that is another matter entirely.)
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/17/17582818/election-softwar...
[2]: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-voting-machine-...
[3]: https://time.com/4599886/detroit-voting-machine-failures-wer...
Finally,
> might as well be state run if it does not have the freedom to structrue the presentation of platform participation.
Totally with you on that one.
Non-censorship platforms: drinking water mixed with sewage
Why does your email has an anti-spam filter again? Isn't that censorship?
Spam Filtering is not censorship because it is acting on my behalf on the emails that I receive. As a private person, I have the right to apply any filters on conversations I am a direct part of.
What I don't have the right is to apply my filters/opinions on others without their consent. Doing this would be censorship.
Further, a lot of the major infra providers will shut your sh down if they think you are being a bad citizen(complaints, bounces, etc). Sure, you can find _some_ provider that won't; but DJT can find _some_ blog platform that will post his all his BS without fact checking it as well.
What the hell does this mean? As it sounds like they're arbitrarily creating a list of people they'll actively target for enforcement of state laws.
The law should be written such that if you go beyond removing spam and illegal content, and especially if you are editorializing user-submitted content, you are are a publisher, rather than a re-publisher.
This will put large platforms in a situation where they will have to chose whether they maintain neutrality. Each platform can then pick whether to be a publisher or a re-publisher.
The tagging incident just accelerated the idea that social media shouldn’t enjoy the cost benefits from being classified as a publisher or a platform depending on how much it costs to answer a legal question poised to them.
This has nothing to do with free speech, so I completely expect the conversation to go completely off the rails.
Twitter censoring conservatives wouldn't be a big deal if Twitter had more competitors. America keeps on saying it's committed to free and open markets. Why doesn't it make one here?
Break up Twitter. Or make them open up their protocols. Or whatever. I don't care. Just promote competition. Enough of these quasi-fascist state regulated oligopolies run and reaped by 1-3 companies while the rest of us stand in the bread lines. It's not the American way, not the democratic way, not the capitalist way, and I'm sick of it.
I haven't seen a free market in America in decades.
Free markets can be destroyed by governments or by megacorps, but most often they're destroyed by a collaboration between the two.
Put two and two together and resist.
How much evidence of this in practice is there (I mean evidence of systemic bias throughout the site beyond what could reasonably be expected with millions and millions of tweets etc.)? The fact the Donald Trump himself tweeted this [1] recently and it's still up, suggests they aren't exactly thorough.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/05/28/trump-ret...
Maybe it's totally co-opted by industry incumbents, and serves as a moat against competition. Maybe it's about electoral politics. IE, the problem is stifling of specific voices supportive of Trump... or the opposite. We can't even hope that it will be designed logically to serve a principle or goal.
I'm not saying regulation (or better legislation) isn't necessary. Twitter set out to be the "public square" and succeeded. It's a privately controlled public square. This is a problem for democracy. It's no joke either. Twitter & Facebook can and have been the launch point for elections, revolutions, coups and such. "It's their site, they can do what they want" is not, IMO, reasonable.
On a related point "platform monopolies," are a well established problem, and we've even had some court ruling to that effect. Courts are narrow though. Legislation is the only way to establish principles.
This should be a "step back and think big picture" situation. Establish principles that guarantee freedoms, media diversity or whatever the goals are. Instead, the debate will be dictated by electoral considerations... on both the pro and con side. I doubt they're even thinking past the immediate election.
I am aghast that there's any support of this in the once-countercultural Silicon Valley. It's abhorrent and shameful, and it makes me fear that maybe the gravity well is already too large to escape.
In scenario 2, this backfires phenomenally against the very bullshit that Trump is trying to protect - the goal of section 230 seems to be enforcement of terms of service, and the first action of companies trying to enforce their terms against hate speech and lies will be to block Trump and his entire cohort.
Seems like a risky play, threatening someone with legal action if they don’t destroy you hoping that the threat will get them to stop destroying you.
This might also just the universe conspiring against Trump - he’s plugging OAN and Fox is slowly inching away from him, choosing to break on mask wearing. His Twitter soapbox now carries a bullshit warning on the stuff he says, his other platforms will follow, now that precedent has been set. The Democrats have chosen a nominee white enough to appeal to Trump supporters but black enough to have Obama in his corner. A black man was murdered by a MAGA cop, causing riots and police overreaction. There might not be an avalanche yet, but this is the scene where there’s a slight rumbling sound and everybody looks up at the mountain.
No I hope they do, because Trump will select another platform, and that Platform will see a HUGE boost and hopefully start to crack the foundation of the Silicon Valley social media oligopoly
I want to see a return to Open Protocols, and Federated Communications, not 4 or 5 companies controlling most human communications
I know HN will focus on the Trump part but I am more interested in hearing about what you think of section 230, safe harbour, social media as publishers.
However, such social media platforms can either exist in any form protected by freedom of speech, or they cannot exist at all. This as no moderation is illegal and frowned upon, purported to sway public opinion with false data.
The thing is, the power games are inseparable from the mechanics, no matter how well-intentioned on either "side". The inevitable outcome is separation of users, which happens again, and again. What we will see coming is the Great Divide, caused by social media technologies, powered by tribal human nature and selfishness.
Twitter is already giving the president a lot of leeway in what he can say.
If he wants special privileges and communicate as the president he can use the official communication channels.
It seems to be increasingly lost on the US government (and people) that the presidency is an institution, not a person. If Donald Trump starts a barfight in a nightclub he can get arrested like everyone else.
So I imagine an effort to distance themselves from the outright lies of the commander-in-chief was token resistance to this role, probably aimed at mollifying the collective consciences of the employees.
But it's doomed and they've fallen into a trap. Here's how this is going to go:
There is simply no line in the sand you can draw between objective truth and objective lies. What's more, even if you can, propagated lies exist because people want to believe them and they see any effort to disabuse them of their provably false views (eg vaccines cause autism) as biased actors trying to hide the "truth".
Human nature can be ugly at times.
The take on Section 230 is actually an interesting one and I imagine that's going all the way to the Supreme Court if the administration pushes on this. Like you can remove objectionable or illegal content from your platform (in fact you're required to by law) and still maintain safe harbor but where does that end? If you're Google you don't want Youtube filled up with a bunch of racist crap. It's bad for your brand. That content may fall under free speech (from a S230 perspective) and if you decide to remove it for the health of the platform and/or the value of your brand, does safe harbor still apply?
Whatever the case, this administration needs to lose in the next election. Badly. The attack on societal norms and institutitotions is unprecedented and reprehensible and I so would like Trump, McConnell, Ivanka, Jared, Pompeo, Barr and a whole bunch of others to end up in prison after all this is over.
This is what scares me the most: in the Watergate era even Republicans found Nixon's behaviour beyond the pale. I am utterly convinced that if that happened today there'd be a strict party-line vote as the President's party would happily look the other way.
Look no further than the administration's so far successful efforts to block Congressional oversight. At no time in history did any administration think it was totally above the law. Make no mistake: that's what they're doing. Worse, no administration so blatantly engaging in obstruction would've continued to have ~40% of the population support it no matter what. Thanks to decades of gerrymandering in state Houses and voter suppression that 40% almost controls the election by itself as higher-population states are essentially disenfranchises in the modern electoral system.
For the record, I'm against the popular vote deciding the presidential election but that's a whole other topic.
How anyone who can call themselves "Christian" and support this president and his policies is utterly beyond me.
This already happened. I know it's hard to remember six months ago, but the president* was impeached by the House and was acquitted on a party line vote in the Senate.