Trump signs executive order targeting protections for social media companies | Hacker News Reader

Trump signs executive order targeting protections for social media companies

axios.com

500 pointscdolan941 comments

The biggest takeaway, looking past the headline:

“This week a federal appeals court, ruling in a case brought by conservative activists against social media companies, affirmed that private websites are not public spaces and social media companies don't have First Amendment obligations.

Any truly strong limits to Section 230 would almost certainly require action by Congress.”

> affirmed that private websites are not public spaces and social media companies don't have First Amendment obligations

FWIW this is only thematically related, the order concerns the distinction between immune or non-immune activities under Section 230.

If you publish something defamatory on your blog, and you operate it, you may be liable. Section 230 is there to say that if a website merely retransmits your publication, it is not liable for it, so if you publish that same defamatory statement on Facebook, Facebook is not then liable.

However, the argument with the executive order is that if you exercise a level of deliberate control over the content beyond some threshold, or you augment expression (like Twitter did the other day, adding links to contrary opinion pieces next to the President's opinion), you effectively become a publisher of that content.

It's not a completely ridiculous idea either. Consider how diverse the expressions published to Twitter are; at some point it's not that different to choose not to publish some expression, than to express the complement of that expression yourself.

One potential outcome here -- social media platforms start _more actively_ banning users to prevent potential liability issues, thus fracturing the market. Highly doubt it will work out that way, but it would be nice (well, maybe...).

That would be a spectacular outcome, especially for anyone who likes ActivityPub and blogs, and wants to see them get a fresh shot of juice.

I'm just glad the prevailing call isn't to delete Section 230 altogether, which I think would cause a bit of pandemonium (though maybe that would be a social good as well, and maybe Section 230 was the mistake that made the social media monster).

That would be a spectacular outcome, especially for anyone who likes ActivityPub and blogs, and wants to see them get a fresh shot of juice.

Wouldn't this harm any of these activities, aside from situations where people are directly hosting their own content, because anyone hosting could be held liable for what gets posted?

That's the rub. The fantasy seems great initially for the prospect of breaking up the far too large (in my opinion) social media behemoths but maybe also ruins things for all the potential little guys as well.

Hopefully it will lead to what happened on reddit: the worst go off to a competitor which then fails to gain mainstream attention (e.g. Voat, Gab, etc). While they’ll be in an echo-chamber (which isn’t a good thing at all), at least they won’t ruin other communities.

> the worst go off to a competitor which then fails to gain mainstream attention (e.g. Voat, Gab, etc).

Or, HN :)

The problem there is that these sites have become echo-chambers, where they breed extremism. These kinds of ideologies (E.G. Nazism) need to be exposed to the light, like a bacteria, in order to be shamed and debunked.

This is a nice theory but are there any instances of Nazis being converted to normies because someone told them they were wrong on the internet?

Instead what seems to happen is that normies get pulled into Nazi content because the recommendation algorithms on these sites see heated discussions as engagement and try to feed it.

The only study I'm aware of on that is on Youtube's recommendation algorithm, which found the opposite is true - it tends to steer people away from radicalization.

How does that work out though in practice?

If I go to a bar and there's some guy screaming about his Nazi ideology and the owners don't kick him out, I'm going to just move on.

If some social media platform is full of trolls and hatred and such... people are just going to go away. It becomes a 'race to the bottom'.

Doesn’t that just lead to an echo chamber on the site they left also? When Trump supporters were banned from the political subreddits, they formed /r/The_Donald. And it’s an anti-Trump-criticism, anti-anything-left-leaning echo chamber. But that left /r/politics to become a left leaning echo chamber itself. Now, one can’t have a civil discussion about anything because /r/politics will ban anything saying Trump did anything remotely good, and /r/The_Donald will ban anything remotely critical of Trump.

This is a false equivalence - r/politics is not the left leaving equivalent of r/The_Donald. Trump supporters weren't broadly banned from political subreddits, just the ones that broke the rules did, like everyone else. r/politics is a left leaning echo chamber, yes, but you won't get banned for being pro Trump (just downvoted). On the other hand, you will get banned from r/The_Donald or r/conservative for being anti-Trump.

It's kind of a ridiculous idea.

Before S230 that was the case: Executing any editorial control risked you being concluded to be the publisher.

Online providers said this is bullshit, we want be able to remove garbage -- lies, obscene material, defamation, etc. If moderating makes us publishers over everything on our site and legally liable, we can't do that. Make us immune so we can clean up the worst of things, and you can still always go after the actual sources.

So I think it only makes sense to the extent that the world before S230 also made sense. But that's a world where sites like twitter probably couldn't have come into being.

Without S230 the law is bizarre because it treated running a public venue as equivalently of being a publisher for everything that happened in it. It would be like if I ran a shopping mall and some member of the public came in and started calling you a paedophile that you could sue the mall simply because at other times I removed other people who were urinating on the walls.

On the other hand, there must be a limit on the amount of "moderation" you're allowed to perform before becoming a publisher. If you start labelling content as misleading (but don't remove it) or even if you privilege certain content instead of another (for example, you privilege social media posts advertising a product because it increases your revenue) then you could be considered a publisher.

Let's put in another way: publishers used to produce content (as in select, solicit, remunerate) to further their interests (financial, but sometimes also political, or cultural). Now the big social networks don't need to produce the content, but they can tap into such an enormous amount of it that they can limit themselves to shaping it. Promote certain posts, reduce the visibility of others. The overall effect is the same. You could probably make Facebook or Twitter in a great cultural publications just by tweaking the algorithm that determines the visibility of the posts.

> On the other hand, there must be a limit on the amount of "moderation" you're allowed to perform before becoming a publisher.

That isn't clear to me at all. The publisher is essentially the author from a liability perspective.

I do agree (see my other post in this thread) that there are serious concerns about the moderation power of the operators of these massive online public forums. But that doesn't make treating them as the author from a liability perspective the right tool for dealing with that.

Particularly because in most specific cases where their moderation power might be misused there is no question of liability. Imagine a site where everyone was always honest and nice, but the operator ruthlessly censored all posts by Georgists and S230 didn't exist. Okay, they'd be liable for their users posts-- but so what? There is nothing there for anyone to sue over. The Georgists would still be totally silenced.

> That isn't clear to me at all. The publisher is essentially the author from a liability perspective.

In a newspaper that selectively chooses to print some letters from readers, would the author be the publisher or the newspaper? That's an example of extreme moderation ("out of the 1000 letters we received this week, we will print this one") while Twitter is likely closer to the other extreme ("out of these 1000 Tweets, we'll hide/delete this one").

IMO it's when you start curating and suggesting in complex ways rather than simple "most popular having (user-provided) tag X" ways. Throw in other stuff like monetizability but denying that to some creators, and IMO Youtube is way over the line and the rest aren't far behind, because they can't resist using their position to manipulate what the user sees—there's too much money in it.

Don't all these social media sites augment content with targeted ads?

Is this similar to how the phone company operates? As long as they just transmit your voice to the other party they can't be prosecuted for anything you say. But, as soon as they start listening in and commenting on your words they have to listen to everyone's conversations and comment on all the words. Obviously phone companies don't want to be responsible for everyone's words so they don't comment on anyone's words.

The parallel would be Twitter commenting on a tweet. As long as they just pass the tweet on to other people, without commenting on it, then they aren't responsible for it's content. But as soon as they say "hey, this might be false information" about a specific tweet then they are responsible for the content of all tweets.

Its an interesting thought experiment to assess in what ways Twitter is a "private website".

It really is a public web space that is operated by a private company, but I can't help but feel that the nuances and similarities of what Twitter really is and what responsibility they truly hold in society is above the courts comprehension.

Do you have the right to stand in your community's biggest mall screaming racist things or does the property owner/operator have the right to remove you from the premise?

To play devil's advocate, you can't do that in a public park either. You can be arrested for disturbing the peace or some such. So I'm not sure it's necessarily about private vs public.

I'm not aware of it being illegal to stand on a soapbox and say racist things in a public park. If you're screaming at the top of your lungs, sure, maybe?

Well, yeah, I suppose it depends how loud you're screaming. I was imagining someone shouting as loud as possible, which you'd definitely get stopped for in many places.

Aren't you just talking about the volume then? You could be screaming the most wholesome things about unicorns and rainbows and still be loud enough to be a public nuisance, and loud enough that authorities will have the right to ask you to pipe down.

In America, no matter how big of a community mall, management can always remove you for good reasons (using racial slurs, even at normal volume), silly reasons (they didn't like the color of your hat), or no reason at all, as long as it's not for a prohibited reason (because of your race). Whereas authorities cannot remove you from a public square for no reason or silly reasons, only for good reasons specifically identified by law (like public nuisance).

> Whereas authorities cannot remove you from a public square for no reason or silly reasons, only for good reasons specifically identified by law (like public nuisance).

It depends if you are reported and what for. American authorities have prosecutorial discretion, so they can choose to overlook the "wholesome things shouter", but may choose to charge the "racist shouter" with a vaguely defined law like "disturbing the peace". There are enough laws like "disturbing the peace", "trespassing", and "obscenity" which are largely subjective.

And this is where the courts are also going to need to do some work to decide what exactly is "disturbing the peace". What if someone says that wearing a red hat is "disturbing the peace"? What if someone says wearing an "I'm with her" shirt is disturbing the peace? Who decides when simply displaying a political view is disturbing the peace?

The left can attempt to immediately equate everything to the right of Obama with Hitler.

The right can attempt to immediately equate everything to the left of Reagan with Stalin and Mao.

Who is going to sort this out? Both sides might think they're being perfectly reasonable about their characterization of the other side. And if a judge on one side agrees with them, the alternative viewpoint becomes criminal hate speech. This is very dangerous.

You actually can do this in on public property; see for example the Westboro Baptist Church, which funded itself in part by winning lawsuits against government entities that tried to stop them.

But the rules for many public spaces and all private spaces are fundamentally different because they get to define who can use the property and in what capacity, or face trespassing charges.

I don't see banning a user from social media sites very different from exercising trespassing laws. Should Republicans be sheltered from trespass laws just because the owner of the property might not be a Republican?

Perhaps the best way for social media websites to avoid being is to more clearly define what content violates their ToS. I suspect most people don't read the ToS and certainly don't know how every company chooses to enforce their ToS with enough detail, and that's almost certainly the confusion when social media users complain about persecution.

If you were a president visiting that mall, you would be allowed to do a lot of things that ordinary people would be kicked for.

And we need to consider this. By Twitter's ToS, he should have lost his account a long time ago.

Sure but the mall would certainly be within its rights to put up a sign saying "the president might not be telling the truth today."

But it didn't. Same was with Twitter. Trump constantly was breaking their TOS a lot of people lost their access for much much less.

The President can only play in the mall fountain or whatever if the mall management says he can. If they want to boot him they can. The president is not a king.

You know well that it's not how it works in real life. Everyone would be afraid of repercussions to their business, kind of like the article we are currently discussing.

it's not how it works if you don't want to get harassed and attacked on twitter (and not on twitter), but you won't actually go to jail over it.

The Pruneyard decision [1] though did conclude that the sidewalks (even privately owned walkways) outside a business were quasi-public spaces analogous to public squares.

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/447/74

About your specific question, I would say "standing INSIDE the mall screaming" (screaming anything) would be more similar to posting large amounts of text on someone else's personal Twitter feed.

Whereas simply having your own personal Twitter and saying things that someone doesn't like would be more like standing on the walkway outside a business.

Also, I read the draft of Trump's order posted on HN last night, and it doesn't say that lewd or obscene content can't be removed. If you start using the N word or posting pornography, I think that's still legitimate for companies to remove.

The problem is that the idea of "hate speech" is being weaponized. If someone simply wears a MAGA hat, that's being called "threatening" or "racist". If someone expresses economically protectionist views, they're called "racist" even though protectionism was used centuries ago to protect European countries from other European countries and has nothing to do with "race".

The right could similarly weaponize the idea of "hate speech" by saying that any time anyone mentions any kind of social program spending, that's "threatening" because that's akin to "communism, which has killed hundreds of millions of people".

Now, plenty of conservatives do say they're concerned about the slippery slope, but they don't immediately equate "we should give housing to the homeless" with "put the rich in the gulags", the way the vocal far left equates "maybe we should reduce taxes a bit" with "they're racists who want poor minority people to starve to death".

https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/amendment-1/q...

edit: deleted - the link did not support my claim.

Note that under Pruneyard and Lloyd the limited purpose invitation standard and focus does not apply to private spaces. Thus it matters whether the land is private or public, not the purpose for which the public is invited to enter. The "limited purpose" test examines public or quasi public facilities (i.e., joint public-private parnerships), like airports, to determine whether they would be considered public forums for free speech purposes. (See Hari Krishna vs Lee)

Additionally, public sidewalks in front of stores are considered public areas because of the public easement to use the sidewalk. A private sidewalk is not a public area for free speech purposes (see Lloyd).

[edit: fixed Logan to Lloyd]

You are right - I misread the article.

If Twitter wants to become a publisher they can edit or curate their content to their heart's content.

Web publishers do not need any special protection from well established jurisprudence governing other publishers. It made some sense in the early days when it was unclear how things would turn out, now those protections should be rolled backed or adjusted.

Some malls have "free speech areas" (possibly mandated by local ordinance) and occasionally some groups and individuals do exactly that.

Pruneyard v. Robins says the private owner of the mall can kick you out. But note that state laws may provide state-level free speech rights separately from the First Amendment (and several states have such laws).

In contrast, a public space like a public park is subject to free speech requirements, which is why the Westboro church can scream vile racist things from a playground.

>It really is a public web space that is operated by a private company

No, it isn't, any more than a store is a public space because it has windows the public can see into. You have to sign up for a Twitter account and accept their terms of service to post on the site. It's a private platform run by a private company for its own private business interests.

You have to pay the old telephone company and it's a lot more private communication than Twitter. Yet they had common carrier statis, which is how we should want ISPs regulated. Where twitter and friends fit simply hasn't been defined yet.

The argument falls apart at the ISP level - why does the UN consider internet a human right, but not, specifically, access to Twitter? It may seem like there's no distinction at all but it is there and it is important.

Much better examples than Twitter.

If I have the right to every website then how about password-protected ones. Do I then have the right to demand that Apple give me access to everyone's iCloud website ?

Because you need a phone to phone someone, call an ambulance or the police. You need an ISP to get to the internet.

You don't need Twitter.

Forget Twitter, and substitute “gmail deliverability”? Without that, you cannot run a business.

Do you need Twitter to interact with your bank? To pay your taxes? To buy groceries? Is it the only way you have to reach your family?

When my Twitter account was suspended recently after 12 years, I also lost access to my DM history, including usernames which I had not memorized.

For some of my friends, Twitter was the only contact information I had for them. I have now totally lost the ability to communicate with those friends in the midst of a global emergency, even if I make a new account (which itself would be subject to immediate termination at any time), because I don’t know their usernames.

A few of the closest ones fortunately noticed my absence without prompting, went to my profile, saw it suspended, went to my website (I presume it helped that my username, @sneakdotberlin, describes my website address), and emailed me. As for the busier or less attentive friends? No word yet. :(

You can’t export your data or do “data takeout” from a suspended account, sadly, and you can’t view your DM history either inbound or outbound.

EDIT: Also, I do need Twitter (and a high follower count) to meaningfully interact with my bank or my airline’s (or Google’s) customer service department. The 1-800-i’m-a-schnook line doesn’t seem to get things done.

> You can’t export your data or do “data takeout” from a suspended account, sadly, and you can’t view your DM history either inbound or outbound.

This is a big problem.

That example seems like something you can fix yourself by keeping offline backups of content that you need (general gd practice for all digital content).

More impactful would be access to any accounts which you only have access to with Twitter/Facebook/Google/etc federated login (like OAuth). It's very significant if you can't access your email/cloud/DNS accounts if you make a gray area ToS-violating comment/video on YouTube.

This is not only a big problem, but it seems to be in flagrant breach of GDPR regulations:

https://stiobhart.net/2020-03-18-twittergdpr/

The GDPR simply doesn’t apply to most internet users or most internet companies.

>> Forget Twitter, and substitute “gmail deliverability”? Without that, you cannot run a business.

I was going to say it's not really about access but censorship. Using gmail as an example is nice because I do appreciate their spam filtering which spammers might consider a form of censorship (lack of deliverability). And yet I'm against platforms like twitter censoring things. The spam situation quickly leads into another set of arguments with me about traceability.

I imagine this is because you haven’t been bitten by missing critical emails due to gmail’s overzealous spam filtering.

This has happened to me multiple times. Most people would likely never notice the opportunities they missed as a result of such.

I’m talking about real live false positives, on important messages from real live human beings.

Additionally, gmail spam folders even well run, nonspam, properly configured and secured mailservers AFAICT simply for not being part of the wider deliverability cartel.

That arguably changes when the President starts to use it as a primary means of communication with the citizenry.

They didn't remove his message. They merely pointed out it was misinforming the public.

Speaking of which, shouldn't we make it a crime to lie or substantially mislead the public while holding public office?

Yeah, I don't disagree with their actions in this case -- if anything, they didn't phrase it strongly enough. ("Get the facts about voting by mail," as opposed to "Caution: this Tweet is unadulterated horseshit.")

But I also think that the more Twitter is used to disintermediate political communication, the more it starts to look like a vital public utility. It's tough to say where the line will or should be drawn. I don't envy Jack Dorsey's position, that's for sure.

As far as making a law that prohibits politicians from lying to the public, I don't see a way to write a law like that without making the situation even worse.

> "Caution: this Tweet is unadulterated horseshit."

Except it's not. Trump is right here; most of the confirmed voter fraud is on mail-in and absentee ballots, despite being less used than in-person in the past decades. Switching everyone to mail-in will cause a sharp uptick in voter fraud.

I hear this from friends who are Limbaugh fans, but I'd like to see some other source. Many people on the Left seem to think this whole "voter fraud" concern is a fig leaf for denying minorities their voting rights. When I've listened and asked follow-up questions, the Left's narrative seems more plausible.

PDF of individual confirmed cases: https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/docs/p...

Spot-checking and using search for counts, most are manipulation of mail-in or absentee ballots (many being a bunch of ballots by a single person), with the next highest looking like individual people voting who didn't realize they were ineligible.

OK, now where's the .PDF of individual confirmed cases of in-person vote fraud versus vote-by-mail fraud? We can't compare fractions by their numerators, you know.

The document itself admits that it is "only a sampling," which, in the absence of further methodological detail, should raise their hairs on the back of your neck.

Nobody ever said that vote-by-mail is fraud proof, only that it's good enough. Which it indisputably is, at least as implemented here in Washington state.

> only that it's good enough

Well.. How about another case I just learned of today? 'Cause it kinda doesn't seem like we're even at "good enough":

> “Invalidate the election. Let’s do it again,” said Rev. Kenneth Clayton said amid reports more that 20 percent of all ballots were disqualified, some in connection with voter fraud allegations.

[..]

> In addition to apparent problems with the vote count in Paterson, NBC New York has shown video of ballots left out in building lobbies, of one voter handling many ballots, and reported on postal workers reporting finding hundreds of ballots at a time stuffed in mailboxes in Paterson – and even in a neighboring town, Haledon.

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/politics/nj-naacp-leader-cal...

'Data' isn't the plural of 'anecdote.' What are the actual statistics? Do we even have access to statistics that haven't been cherry-picked by the Heritage Foundation, the DNC, or another interested party?

One good aspect of the vote-by-mail system we use here in WA is that the voter retains a code they can use to verify that their ballot has been counted. There is an auditable paper trail at every step that's accessible to all parties - the voter, the election officials, and the candidate. That's more than you get with many in-person voting systems, especially those involving closed-source machines made by companies with questionable ethics and engineering practices.

Yes, I'm sure it's possible to build a vote-by-mail system that is more prone to corruption than in-person voting. But the point is, it's not necessary.

These don't seem like vast criminal conspiracies. Also, if they can successfully prosecute little cases like these....what's the problem?

"Carlos Lopez and his wife, Luz Lopez, registered to vote and voted on three separate occasions (2004, 2006, and 2007) in Hartford, where they own a furniture store, while actually living in Farmington." (Fittingly, this story is included twice: once with each spouse first).

"In 2009, Lillian Cummings Stevenson agreed to a consent order after the State Elections Enforcement Commission found her guilty of illegally signing and submitting two absentee ballot request forms on behalf of her sons, who were living in Europe. She was given a $200 fine."

"James Bryant, Jr. admitted to improperly assisting voters in completing their absentee ballots in the 2005 Americus mayoral election...."

My understanding is that he supported the concerns about fraud with a specific lie (maybe more than one) about how the state authorities are sending out ballots to everyone, whereas they are only sending them to registered voters.

This could, and presumably is intended to, mislead people on both sides of the political spectrum.

Assuming for the sake of argument that someone could be trying to promote a fundamental truth using lies, it doesn't make it sane to trust or acquiesce as a result of lies.

Maybe in our brave new world, disbelieving in something because it is supported with lies is an example of an ad hominem fallacy?

> Except it's not. Trump is right here; most of the confirmed voter fraud is on mail-in and absentee ballots,

Thomas Bayes is screaming in his grave, something about cancer diagnoses...

Actually I don't know if that's even true. And almost all the significant cases of any kind of election fraud aren't about ballots at all. It's stuff like voting in the wrong jurisdiction, or count fraud, or registration fraud.

Please cite me where you got the info that most election crime is from remote voting. That info doesn't exist.

What does exist is the facts in the WaPo article that twitter linked, which show that effectively zero mail-in ballot fraud is happening.

> They didn't remove his message. They merely pointed out it was misinforming the public.

Why should a private company have this power? I don't think that people who run a successful website automatically are qualified to fact check the president and insert blurbs directly in his messages. That needs to be regulated some way.

If you are using my product to harm others, I should have the right to try to minimize the damage you cause.

This tool is not regulated, they could use it to cause harm. It doesn't matter if it was used for good this one time.

And no, them being a private company doesn't matter. Currently they have a lot of power thanks to them having a lot of important users, and now that they are starting to use that power we need to quickly come up with regulations for it.

Your tone is as if they were editing his message. I don't believe they were doing that in a way that would create any confusion as to what he wrote, were they?

It doesn't matter, they didn't post a message like everyone else instead they made an official statement using their own privileged way. It is fine to do it on this message, I don't see the harm, but if this continues and people gets used to that blurb then Twitter will definitely start misusing it sooner or later. I don't think that companies should have this kind of power to influence public discourse, I might not agree with Trump but I really think that we need to limit the power big tech companies have.

Twitter already limits and controls virtually every other user, so is that a problem, and if so, why is this the trigger?

That's actually kind of funny right there. Politically, internet access is being championed as a fundamental human right (I.e. being classified as a need).

Yet we still have people trying to define what activity on the Net constitutes the necessity that access is supposed to fulfill.

I understand where you're coming from though. I just wanted to point out the amusing dichotomy that stood out in my head.

Right to access the internet is much more important for allowing someone to interact with the government through their various websites and to access sources of information that allow people learn and to fully exercise their rights.

As much as Twitter is important, it's not nearly as important.

If you have followers on a twitter you have already built then it is just as important, especially if you have 20 million followers you stand to lose if twitter just decides they don't like you. For many it is your job, your livelihood, and your outlet to the world. For people and companies it may be the only way to reach out for collaboration with someone who you do not have a phone number yet and a twitter follower count is often used as a indicator that you are who you say you are, a filter of sorts. Since you can't go and meet every stranger in person elsewhere it is a requirement to have. Some people may not use twitter or only follow and never tweet but a lot of people use it as a necessity for communication, their personal well being, and businesses. Like it or not Twitter is worth billions for a reason and that reason is it provides a necessity for many that they cannot get elsewhere. The sheer size of Twitter already self-perpetuates their monopoly over that method of communication. It doesn't matter that you can go to Facebook if Twitter bans you. Take another industry for example such as TV. Disney bought Fox but was forced to sell Fox Sports because otherwise Disney would have had close to a monopoly on sports content as it already owned ESPN. Note it was not TV, it was only sports, a sub section of TV where they were deemed to have too much control. The internet monopolies just haven't had to face a determination of what is and isn't a subsection of social media but to be sure they are monopolies of public discourse.

I think that’s a simplistic view. No one is arguing Twitter is comparable to a store with a display window. The reality is that Tweets are broadcasted to billions of people. It’s a new reality. It’s a newspaper where anyone and everyone is authoring anything, including presidents, and with the roll of a die, the message is amplified to a multiple of the expected audience.

Twitter may technically be a private platform run by a private company, but the issue not one of semantics, it’s about ethics and morals and how we compose a society with mighty power imbalances, fortified by new tech.

Newspapers have restricted what they publish for centuries.

They don't allow libellous, defamatory, salacious or inappropriate comments for example.

So it sounds 'new tech' hasn't really changed anything.

Newspapers hire and pay people to write for them and exercise editorial control on everything that's published.

That's very different from, say, a public restroom where people write on the walls. The owner of the restroom is not responsible for what people write on their walls.

It would be, if the owner began editorializing the content, because the point at which they get involved, they lose neutrality, and therefore Section 230 immunity protection.

> Newspapers hire and pay people to write for them

Newspapers also have zero obligation to convey the words of the President, and by frequently contextualise them.

And newspapers get sued if their paid editors publish defamatory content.

And that's totally fair, because the hired the person, vouched for them, submitted them to editorial scrutiny an, still, decided to publish defamatory content.

> Newspapers have restricted what they publish for centuries.

Absolutely. And they don't say "we're just a platform transporting information", they restrict what they publish.

> They don't allow libellous, defamatory, salacious or inappropriate comments for example.

They do. And they get sued for it, and they can lose, see Gawker. Precisely because they are not like Twitter.

Newspapers do that because they are liable for what they publish. Twitter is not liable for what it publishes. Why should it not be liable? The answer is because they are just providing a platform and others are publishing. But the moment they use their platform to modify and censor what people publish, then they should probably be liable, right?

> But the moment they use their platform to modify and censor what people publish, then they should probably be liable, right?

They've always done some editing and removal of certain content.

In this particular case, was anything modified or censored though? It seems more like Trump had his say, and Twitter had theirs. Is Trump saying that Twitter can't also express themselves on their platform?

but newspapers aren't required to express support for particular political candidates or viewpoints. That can get into trouble for publishing libel, ie maliciously presenting false statements as fact, but the criteria for what constitutes libel are very narrow. A newspaper can certainly publish an opinion like 'Politician X is a fool whose proposal should be ignored.'

> But the moment they use their platform to modify and censor what people publish, then they should probably be liable, right?

There are degrees to moderation, but not to liability. This black or white approach doesn't seem appropriate. They should be liable in a degree proportional to the moderation they introduce.

Why should they "probably be liable"?

Twitter isn't liable for illegal content posted by their users, as long as they take it down in time and make good faith efforts to keep it from being posted in the first place. If they weren't free from liability then a service like Twitter would need heavy human moderation and be extremely expensive to operate - perhaps it wouldn't exist at all.

That's the only reason this non-liability exists. It has nothing to do with moderation or censorship. Twitter, as any other web property, have the right to curate their platform and make it pleasant for their other users. It's their personal property.

I don't see why they should be.

If someone uploads their library of child porn encoded to base64 split across tons of tweets, do you want Twitter to have a choice between removing that content and continuing to operate?

We have 3 options here:

1. No moderation allowed whatsoever on a site without a court order. That obviously leads to a terrible, toxic community with lots of reprehensible content that the average person wouldn't want to participate in.

2. A good faith effort at moderation. This allows the most reprehensible, highest-impact content to be removed and allows users to participate in the moderation process.

3. No content can be published without moderation, on any site anywhere. Want to post a Facebook status? Have fun paying $20 for the privilege of waiting 48 hours for a human to review it.

All of this is irrelevant though, because this executive order is not targeted at censorship. It's targeted at a private individual who voluntarily, for free, passed on a message from one person to many other people and decided to tell them "this seems fishy, you might want to read up on it."

Why have a Supreme Court or even normal Judges if Laws are only allowed to be this binary? Why not option 4 you are allowed to censor if you give reason and the reason is in your TOS. But you are for example not allowed to Edit (Fact Check), Censor or manipulate Votes of your political opponents, or loose your libel protections.

There exist many more options and law is notorious for having grey zones where the complexity of context, and intent and outcomes.

In the specific example of child porn, would removing it be protected speech and a copyrightable work? To my knowledge, no, it is not.

However telling someone "this seems fishy, you might want to read up on it.", attached to someone else copyrighted work, is to me speech. It is also a copyrightable work if its original enough. It could also be a defined as a derivative work if it includes major copyrightable elements of the original, which in this context is likely.

The difference between removing child porn and creating derivative work is one that I don't think courts will have a problem to distinguish between. Both may end up being described as moderation, but the outcome, intent and context is very different.

Twitter is actually required by law to remove child porn, not being forced to keep it up, that would be insane. This isn't a call for no moderation, it is a call for a neutral platform when companies are on the verge of monopolies. They are definitely monopolize your followers, switching platforms is not even a choice. You can work you're entire life building a channel and audience on social media site and they can take it away in a heartbeat and you don't even get a chance to let your followers know what happened, e-mail them even, let them know where they can find you going forward. That's not the worst part, the worst part is they can and do do it without any reason whatsoever, it could be just because someone at the company dislikes what you said. Again this is not about moderation, this is about companies that were built off of being a neutral platform that cannot be sued for liability, like a phone company but are now using their monopoly over your follower's information to hold over you and control what you say. If anything what really needs to be in legislation is rights to notify followers where else they can find you if you are banned or censored.

>it’s about ethics and morals and how we compose a society with mighty power imbalances, fortified by new tech.

But that's not what this is really about.

This is about the President being angry that Twitter fact checked him and using executive power to create a chilling effect against any platform doing so in the future. It's about fears of a nonexistent conspiracy controlling the media becoming the basis for authoritarian laws meant to stamp out that menace - a phenomenon which never goes well, historically. It's about Americans hating "the left" so much that they'll support an obvious violation of the First Amendment as long as it silences their ideological enemies.

> This is about the President being angry that Twitter fact checked him and using executive power to create a chilling effect against any platform doing so in the future.

That is the impetus in this case, but that doesn't mean it doesn't border on questions we've been slowly grappling with for some time now, nor does it mean we have to ignore that question.

> the basis for authoritarian laws meant to stamp out that menace

I'm not sure it's authoritarian to remove their liability protections, is it? In a sense, I think it's an interesting question, if you're willing to editorialize content on behalf of your users why should you get safe-harbor protection? You clearly are willing to put the man power and technology into it, shouldn't you then be liable for content posted on your site?

> It's about Americans hating "the left" so much that they'll support an obvious violation of the First Amendment as long as it silences their ideological enemies.

What's the obvious First Amendment violation here? If you act as a conduit for certain types of speech, you're liable for that speech. We're just bringing "content neutral providers" into the same realm that everyone else already was.

>I'm not sure it's authoritarian to remove their liability protections, is it?

If the intent is to punish critics and suppress the speech of party opponents, then yes. Any authoritarian can justify their actions in abstract and general terms, but context matters.

>nor does it mean we have to ignore that question.

We don't have to ignore it, but we also don't have to accept an autocrat's temper tantrum by fiat as an answer.

>What's the obvious First Amendment violation here?

The purpose of the First Amendment is to prevent the government from infringing freedom of speech - the President is attempting to use government power to infringe freedom of speech, to do exactly what the First Amendment was created to prevent.

Granted, the First Amendment only explicitly applies to Congress, but I feel like if states can be accused of violating it (as they often were regarding quarantine and shelter-at-home orders) then the President can as well.

> If the intent is to punish critics and suppress the speech of party opponents, then yes. Any authoritarian can justify their actions in abstract and general terms, but context matters.

This is literally what Twitter has been doing. Trump's order puts an end to it.

> We don't have to ignore it, but we also don't have to accept an autocrat's temper tantrum by fiat as an answer.

Exactly why Twitter needs to be stripped of their 230 protections.

> The purpose of the First Amendment is to prevent the government from infringing freedom of speech - the President is attempting to use government power to infringe freedom of speech, to do exactly what the First Amendment was created to prevent.

This is the government upholding free speech. Twitter's policies and their selective enforcement of such run directly contrary to the underlying tenets of free speech. This holds Twitter accountable for their "un-American" practices.

Although it may be hard to see through the vitriolic debates currently raging, this will be a net win for the internet. This will encourage decentralisation in so far as there is now a soft power cap on these big tech companies.

> This is literally what Twitter has been doing. Trump's order puts an end to it.

Debatable, on both points. There have been studies[1] that show that accounts are banned, but it's not necessarily because they are conservative accounts or conservative content. In a civil or criminal case, causation must be established. In this case, the president is making it very much more expensive for certain companies to defend themselves.

This EO is more likely to hurt YouTube than Twitter because it has the ability to get the Federal Government to no longer approve grants to Google subsidiaries and for government agencies to stop advertising with them.

> to be stripped of their 203 protections.

You mean The Communications Decency Act, Section 230?

> Twitter's policies and their selective enforcement of such run directly contrary to the underlying tenets of free speech.

That's interesting. Government law enforcers and prosecutors have the ability to use prosecutorial discretion. Are you saying that the government should be able to select who they prosecute, but that private organizations should not be allowed discretion to enforce their own contracts?

If ISPs (where content in a pipe is pretty close to comparable to Common Carrier standards) can't be held up to the standards of Net Neutrality, how can social media companies (where content is much more subjective to interpret as violations of their contract)?

> this will be a net win for the internet

That remains to be seen. I can see it being another tool where the executive branch gets to unilaterally change the definition of which internet companies get protections, not leveling the playing field.

> This will encourage decentralisation in so far as there is now a soft power cap on these big tech companies.

More likely there will be some obvious "unintended consequences" similar to what happened after Trump signed the FOSTA bill in 2018[2] (hint: multiple dating sites, including Craigslist sections, closed up shop). It will very likely increase the cost of being a user-generated content host to the point that only a very select few companies would do it and they will all require arbitration clauses in the ToS to avoid extremely expensive litigation of the CDA230 rules. I expect a handful of forums and lots of news comments sections to close due to this "free speech" Executive Order.

[1] https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/platform-bias.php

[2] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/03/23/596460672...

> the President is attempting to use government power to infringe freedom of speech,

thats an interestating take, considering trump is trying to stop the selective editorialization of individuals covered by the first amendment.

are we really taking twitters side of this because we hate trump so much?

>thats an interestating take, considering trump is trying to stop the selective editorialization of individuals covered by the first amendment.

Again, the first amendment protects those individuals from being censored by the government. Twitter is not bound by the first amendment. They're allowed to editorialize content. They're allowed to curate, moderate, deplatform and ban people.

However, Twitter is also protected by the first amendment, and Trump's executive order is an attempt to erode those protections.

>are we really taking twitters side of this because we hate trump so much?

No. I believe in the right of platforms to censor content as an extension of their own freedom of speech and association, because that still leaves the internet itself free. If one objects to Twitter's behavior, one can always find a new platform or create one. However, when the government attempts to assert censorship over the entire network, that reduces freedom for everyone.

The executive order is not touching the protections of the first amendment. The courts are still to protect them for that as always.

The order regards the additional protections of section 230 which even protect twitter for content that is not protected by the first amendment. Trump is essentially trying to say if Twitter takes sides by fact-checking some tweets, then they are also responsible for all the other "facts" they allow to be posted on their platform without fact-checking. And by the way the courts are still perfectly capable of deciding in favor of twitter regarding blame for all those other posts too. Twitter just won't be shielded by a special law from such decisions.

Anyone who replies to you is guilty of selective editorialization of an individual covered by the first amendment. Except me. I'm not expressing an opinion. It seems unwise in an age like this.

So by your understanding of the First Amendment, if you had a blog with a comment section, I could come by and post spam, or troll and harass other users and you have no right to stop me?

Are you required to let me organize a protest in your front yard? Do property rights not matter anymore?

Trump is the head of the government. In his role, he is attempting to control private enterprise (and failing). It is laughable that you think him a victim given that he has the full force of the federal government at his beck and call. The fact that he has cried like a child about this is embarrassing, petulant, and disgusting.

The talk is about rolling back special privileges that platforms get. Privileges that you and I don't have. If you publish something illegal then you bear the consequences. If a user on Twitter does it then Twitter doesn't bear the consequences, but the user does instead. Doesn't this mean it's the user that's expressing speech rather than Twitter?

> Privileges that you and I don't have.

You absolutely do. The same protection that applies to Twitter applies to a personal blog that allows comments, or any site that allows users to post.

> If you publish something illegal then you bear the consequences.

So let's look at today. You have a tweet from a conservative group that "concludes" that the only way forward for America is violent action, up to and including murder of political opponents. "The only good Democrat is a dead Democrat".

To me, it seems that there is a plausible argument to be made that this group is inciting violence.

And then Trump re-tweeted it, with the additional commentary, "Thanks, Cowboys of America!".

If we want to compare "consequences of speech and platforms", then on one hand we have hand-wringing about "Twitter _annotated_ a tweet with links to resources about the substance of that tweet", versus "group hints at violent oppression of political opponents, and is given the thumbs up by political leader".

I was going to say "I know which one I find more problematic", but lest someone attempt a slippery slope retort, I'll be more clear: I find only one of these actions at all problematic (and it's not annotation of tweets).

If you act as a conduit for certain types of speech, you're liable for that speech.

There's some merit to that position, but things like adding a fact check (which you might or might not agree with) do not incur any sort of civil or criminal liability. You make good points, but we should also engage with the reality that the president and his supporters are demanding a quality of representation/protection for their political views that they don't have any particular entitlement to, and for which no mechanism currently exists in law; it seems (going by the general tenor of their arguments over the last few years) like they want to bring back the 'Fairness Doctrine' that obtained for broadcast media up to the Reagan era to create some protected space for their viewpoint.

I didn't know the Fairness Doctrine was a mechanism to prevent the juxtaposition of opposing views.

> to prevent the juxtaposition of opposing views

The way I interpreted it, your parent comment was arguing the opposite of the way you framed it.

It's a long run-on sentence, but the `;` is meant to be interpreted as "start a new sentence that is related to the previous one"

I don't know what it was arguing. It seemed to be implying that the Fairness Doctrine created a protected space. Didn't it do the opposite?

> You clearly are willing to put the man power and technology into it, shouldn't you then be liable for content posted on your site?

Power and technology can't curate content to the level where you are safe from lawsuits. What you're saying is that if they are willing to do a bit of moderation they should do total moderation.

Again, this has been drafted since at least last summer and has little to do with the recent twitter news.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/28/politics/trump-twitter-social.... > consistent with a draft order whose text CNN first reported last summer

If it has little to do with the recent twitter news, why is it signed today instead of last week?

They were probably waiting for one of the social media platforms to screw up somehow.

1. That link is broken.

2. What was drafted last summer was legislation. Legislation that would likely not stand up to political or legal resistance. This is an executive order to make an end-run around all that "bureaucracy".

> has little to do with the recent twitter news.

This fails the plausibility test. This came hot on the heels of this incident, Trump _said_ it was related to this incident, and that he'd be doing this as result, and the last several years are packed with a multitude of examples of exactly that: Trump knee-jerking an angry response (words, actions, both) to those who he deems to have slighted him.

Can’t edit so here is the fixed link

https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/28/politics/trump-twitter-social...

And no it wasn’t legislation it was a draft of an executive order from last summer as mentioned in this article.

I think you're overestimating the number of users. Hardly anyone I know uses Twitter. It may be a big thing for you but it's largely irrelevant for others. It's an opt-in service

The reality is that Tweets are broadcasted to billions of people.

No, they're not. You have to visit the Twitter website or otherwise pull the data from some source to get tweets.

it’s about ethics and morals and how we compose a society with mighty power imbalances, fortified by new tech.

It's technically trivial to create your own Twitter. There are indeed plenty of competitors to Twitter. Twitter has no moral or ethical obligation to carry lies. Indeed, the opposite is true: because of their market position, they should be ethically and morally obligated to prevent lies from being spread through their platform because they have the greatest reach.

>No, they're not. You have to visit the Twitter website or otherwise pull the data from some source to get tweets.

Would you make this same argument when it comes to privacy? Technically it's your computer sending your data to Google/Facebook, therefore you are giving them permission to use your data, because you're so generously providing it to them. Technically this is true and any real privacy solution would have to address this point, but it's clearly not what is done in legislation.

I don't understand your point.

When you send your data to Google or Facebook by explicitly providing that data, you are giving them permission to use that data for purposes of providing the service for which the data is granted. This is true everywhere, even in the EU.

If you're asking whether that upload would grant Googlebook broader rights to use your data, then the answer is yes in the US because there are no laws currently restricting such use, but no in Europe because EU law says permission must be explicitly granted for other uses.

> No, it isn't, any more than a store is a public space because it has windows the public can see into.

It is absolutely the case in the USA that private properties which are open to the public are regulated as "places of public accommodation" under, notably, the Civil Rights Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act. That includes privately-owned hotels, schools, restaurants, retail, and more.

You're correct that this is directly analogous to a privately-owned website that is primarily geared toward accommodating the general public (like Twitter), but it makes the opposite point of what you intended.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_accommodations_in_the_U...

The difference is that stores and malls invite the public in for a limited non-protected purpose - shopping or other commercial activity.

Twitter invites the public in to exercise free speech, which in a public space would be protected. This invites an analysis that Twitter may be a quasi-public space that offers some 1st Amd. protections.

One way of looking at it is that the internet is the public space, and twitter is a very large private building in that space. Trump can start his own blog any time he wants, hosted on his own site, and be in the unrestricted public space.

It's further complicated by the people who sued Trump for blocking them. They won, he had to unblock them.

Considering they could log out (or open a private tab) and view the content, obviously it wasn't access to the information that was fundamental but the act of the President taking a step to reduce someone's access.

With that in mind, does the host have the authority to take the same action? Why or why not?

This is not a 1st Amendment issue - after all Trump blocking someone doesn't limit their ability to tweet him or at all - but it's a really weird spot of free speech vs private property vs public forum vs public access vs.. ?

As a government official, you cannot take action to try to impede someone's access to your official statements. That is independent of the platform, and independent of how much work someone has to do to still access the information.

But a private company can take action to impede everyone’s access to an official’s statements if they “suppress” those statements... that would mean Twitter has to allow anything any public official, at least in the US, broadcasts via that medium...

You're getting downvoted to oblivion but I think that's a fundamental question in all of this.

Does a private company have the authority to impede access to Official Statements? If so, under what conditions? If no, is it "never"?

This fundamental question has already been addressed by the courts many times.

The answer is yes to your first question. A private company is not required to make available "Official Statements" (whatever that means) using its own resources. The government (in the US at least) must pay for publication and dissemination of "Official Statements."

Fantastic, despite looking, I hadn't found a decision along those lines. Can you give me a case to read? Just the name, I'm happy to do the research myself. Thanks in advance!

And to be clear, I've read the DOJ position asserting that "Trump's tweets are official government statements" (linked in this thread) but wasn't aware of court rulings.

There's probably no decision because it's black and white. For example, many media outlets stopped carrying full Trump press conferences live.

https://www.indiewire.com/2020/04/cnn-msnbc-not-airing-trump...

Please don't imply gamblor956 is just making things up. That's inappropriate. I'm looking forward to reading one of the many cases. It's always good to understand a) what the law says and b) how it's interpreted. They're rarely 1:1.

West Virginia v. Barnett. Rumsfield v Forum.

There are more.

The answers you want are the first search result in Google and Bing for first amendment and compelled speech and are covered by the Wikipedia page on the First Amendment.

I've actually read the Rumsfeld case before but I don't see how it addresses my question from above:

Does a private company have the authority to impede access to Official Statements? If so, under what conditions? If no, is it "never"?

As noted, I suspect this is not a 1st Amendment issue as the "speech" is present regardless and you have organizations, not necessarily people.

The Rumsfield case is literally on point: the government cannot force a private party to present government speech. I don't know how much more on point than they can be.

Twitter is not a legally recognized method of presenting Official Statements, as a matter of law (which sets forth the prescribed methods for making Official Statements). They have no responsibilities to present Official Statements, which means they can "impede" access to those statements on their platform all they like, in whatever manner that takes, from simply deleting such posts to providing fact checks to outright editorializing against the official statements.

As noted, I suspect this is not a 1st Amendment issue as the "speech" is present regardless and you have organizations, not necessarily people.

I don't understand what you're trying to say. This is definitely a First Amendment issue...even the White House acknowledges that this is a First Amendment issue. This order is entirely about trying to violate Twitter's First Amendment rights as a private non-governmental organization.

> Twitter is not a legally recognized method of presenting Official Statements

The Trump DOJ disagrees. Further, the ruling that he had to unblock people on Twitter established exactly that. He had to unblock people because he's making statements about government policy.

Therefore, them muting/hiding/blocking him is impeding access to official government statements.

Further, once they mute/hide/block some of his tweets, they're presenting some but not all.

They would probably be safer to allow all or none. This middle ground is editorial control over government statements which is a bizarre middle ground.. imagine a major announcement or policy change not being reported? Or actively being quashed?

Twitter isn't suppressing Trump's tweets. They're still publishing them...along with a notice that the statements in those tweets are lies, with links to sources documenting the falsity of those statements and the true state of reality (i.e., that mail-in voting is not unconstitutional).

> But a private company can take action to impede everyone’s access to an official’s statements if they “suppress” those statements...

Yes, that is their right to control how their website works.

> that would mean Twitter has to allow anything any public official, at least in the US, broadcasts via that medium...

No, they are not part of the US government, and they are not required to host official US government statements.

But when Trump tweets, are those official statements? (IANAL, and I don't know. I can see why they might be considered to be so, and I can see why they wouldn't.)

A lot of folks[0] are saying yes, they are official statements. But I'm not a lawyer either.

[0]: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=are+tru...

I can't vouch for the source (so do your own research if you're so inclined), but Trump's own Justice Department says they are:

https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/government_says_trum...

Should breitbart.com be forced to allow liberals comments?

I mean, they do allow them, they just get drowned out.

Twitter is not a monopoly therefore every web site would be considered a public web space.

And so if I run a knitting forum I am not allowed to restrict people who want to turn it into a pornography one. And how would it work for spam. This could end up in a situation where a large spammer could force websites to not remove spam.

It sounds unworkable and over the top just to protect some people who aren't even having their rights impeded.

Twitter is not equivalent to some obscure knitting forum. It is huge. So huge that it gets quoted in nearly every mainstream media article. Twitter matters to political discourse, knitting doesn't.

The owners of printing presses have even more power, but the government does not mandate open access to those machines for dispensing speech. Unfettered access to twitter is not akin to free speech.

Twitter is essentially a big public square the results of which end up getting printed by mainstream press. Publishers are also under more legal restrictions than Twitter is.

No, publishers can be as biased as they want, unlike the new requirements here.

Twitter can also go the publisher route and be biased as much as they want.

Newspapers are publishers, and are subject to rules and regulations for being publishers.

Twitter would not be mandate to open up access to everyone. Instead, the proposed legal changes would merely treat them as publishers, if they act like publishers, and therefore twitter would not have liability protections anymore.

So as soon as they make any kind of restriction on the use of their platform they become publishers? That's quite a stretch. That would have the same effect: it would require them to provide unfettered access for anyone, for any purpose.

> That would have the same effect

If they don't like the section 230 laws, that already exist, then they should go lobby Congress to change it or something.

But right now, if you act as a publisher, then you lose certain protections. That's how that law works.

Twitter matters to political discourse, knitting doesn't.

Doesn't matter. Twitter is a privately owned platform not a public one.

SCOTUS has already said that simply being open to the public does not make a business a public platform, see Pruneyard v Robins, applying this reasoning to privately-owned malls.

And yes, that makes all the difference, since SCOTUS has repeatedly held that publicly owned spaces like public parks and main streets are subject to first amendment requirements.

Except it's not nearly as simple as you make out here.

In Packingham v. North Carolina (2017) SCOTUS described social media websites as similar to a public square and ruled that the state couldn't block access to them in an overly broad manner.

Being open to the public does change how a business is regulated (see the ADA and Civil Rights Act among others) even if it doesn't make it a "public platform" specifically. However, a reasonable case can be made that Twitter has _intentionally_ positioned themselves as a public platform and so the case you cite could be argued not to apply.

Alternatively, Twitter could be argued to be editorializing. If that were the case, presumably they wouldn't really be a public platform but rather a publisher. But if that's the case, shouldn't they be held liable for all the nonsense that people post there?

The situation isn't clear at all even though many people on both sides of the debate frequently claim that it is.

That's not at all what Packingham says. That ruling was about a sex offender's right to access a website on which he could engage in first amendment activities without government restriction. It was not about whether a social media website was a public platform or whether the websites had to allow the appellant access. Moreover, many of the activities identified in the ruling also apply to private malls...which the courts have already ruled several times are not public forums for first amendment purposes (Lloyd and Pruneyard).

Being open to the public does change how a business is regulated (see the ADA and Civil Rights Act among others) even if it doesn't make it a "public platform" specifically

This is true. A statute of Congress can place restrictions on businesses. Last I checked, the President is not a member of Congress, and cannot unilaterally override congressional laws.

Moreover, SCOTUS cases have ruled that privately owned facilities are not subject to the "limited purpose" test. It doesn't matter that they've held themselves open to the public, it matters that they're privately owned. (See Lloyd and Pruneyard, explicitly addressing this point.)

You keep citing cases regarding private malls. I previously pointed out that a reasonable argument can be made as to why that precedent should not apply. I don't claim to know what the outcome of such an argument would be in court, only that it is a reasonable one to make under the circumstances (and thus the situation is fairly complicated).

> Last I checked, the President is not a member of Congress, and cannot unilaterally override congressional laws.

I never claimed this? I said only that the current situation was not as simple as you made out. (I would also note that the president appears to be targeting Section 230 protections which is quite a different beast.)

> That's not at all what Packingham says.

Except... it is. In their ruling the court _directly_ compares social media to other venues for public gathering. I'm not claiming that they explicitly rule it to be one way or the other (they don't), but they do repeatedly make direct comparisons that would appear to lean that way.

Except the text of the case itself literally does not do that. You need to read the actual text and not just the summary. Importantly, every time in the case they reference a "social media" website and a form of expression that could occur in a public forum, it is with respect to how the appellant would use that website--to freely express himself under his own first Amendment rights, and they contrast that with the government's attempt to restrict that expression. And as I pointed out, these activities were expressly addressed in the mall cases I cited, in which the courts said it didn't matter that such activities could occur in a mall, what mattered was that the malls were privately owned facilities. (And that is why I keep bringing the cases up--because malls are the closest analog to Twitter. They let people come in and at the time of these cases had millions of customers/visitors annually--on a relative basis, they were more a part of American life back then than Twitter is now.)

I would also note that the president appears to be targeting Section 230 protections which is quite a different beast.

The Section 230 protected are provided by congressional law, so it's not a different beast. The President does not have the power to target section 230 protections. The executive agencies could arguably make rules to change those protections, if they adhere to the administrative rulemaking process and their rules do not contradict the express text or purpose of the law.

I previously pointed out that a reasonable argument can be made as to why that precedent should not apply.

No, you didn't. The ADA (1990) and Civil Rights Act (1964), are older unrelated laws governing different issues. The CDA was passed in 1996, and so jurisprudence and the law itself already incorporated existing understandings of both of those laws...as well as the SCOTUS cases addressing the exact points you raised in your comment (i.e., the mall cases you keep dismissing). The CDA was written in a world where private facilities were not public forums as a result of multiple SCOTUS decisions saying they weren't. And the law reflects that.

A number of serious misunderstandings seem to have developed in our back and forth here and I'm not sure it's worth writing a wall of text to clarify them. Perhaps I didn't previously word things as clearly as would have been ideal.

> > I previously pointed out ...

> No, you didn't. The ADA ...

That isn't what I was referring to. I initially noted that Twitter has very clearly and intentionally positioned themselves as what I can only think to describe as a public platform. Private malls simply do not do that. They are also so many orders of magnitude larger than any private mall that I fail to see a relevant comparison there. It is my understanding that factors such as intentions and size of influence are important in cases like this. I make no claim as to how that argument would go in court, only that it seems like a reasonable one to put forward.

> You need to read the actual text and not just the summary.

I was very careful to clarify that the court did not explicitly rule on that. When the majority opinion goes out of its way to bring such an issue up and makes direct comparisons, I think it is reasonable to assume that they would be open to entertaining such a line of argument. If they thought it was ridiculous then why did they bring it up and go on about it to such an extent?

I initially noted that Twitter has very clearly and intentionally positioned themselves as what I can only think to describe as a public platform. Private malls simply do not do that.

You need to actually read the private mall cases, since the malls actually held themselves out to be replacements for the public square, i.e., to replace Main St and the public park where people used to freely meet and discuss stuff. There is a reason these cases are so important to First Amendment jurisprudence.

The point of the private mall cases is that it doesn't matter if they hold themselves out to be replacements for the traditional public forum, because they're not actually a public forum--they're still just privately owned venues that can withdraw their openness to public expression at any time as a matter of their own first amendment rights.

Twitter is just the new private mall. It may hold itself up to be a public platform, but as a private entity, it can revoke that presentation at any time as a matter of its own first amendment rights.

It is my understanding that factors such as intentions and size of influence are important in cases like this

You would be wrong. This has never been relevant to first amendment cases. Moreover, at the time of the private mall cases, the malls had significantly more customers on an absolute and proportional basis (out of the US population at the time) than Twitter does today in the US.

When the majority opinion goes out of its way to bring such an issue up and makes direct comparisons, I think it is reasonable to assume that they would be open to entertaining such a line of argument.

The ruling does not "go out of its way" to compare social media platforms to public forums. In mentions "public forum" only once, offhand, as one of the ways that social media could be used by the appellant whose civil rights were being violated when the government tried to bar him from using social media. And even then, under the lineage of the private mall cases, it's irrelevant because private websites are still private websites with their own first amendment rights to control the speech that appears on their websites.

There is a large gap between the Twitter user base and the number of visitors in a mall. Are you saying that quantity doesn't matter, we should uphold the principle on its own? I think the more people use a platform, the more society needs to regulate it to its benefit.

Yes. On a relative basis for decades malls were a larger part of American life than Twitter is or ever was. The fraction of people that actually use Twitter is extremely small once you leave SV and Hollywood.

> It is huge.

Currently. Might not be long after this change to Section 230 enforcement.

> Twitter matters to political discourse, knitting doesn't.

I don't follow this logic. There are substitutes for Twitter, even banned users can view publicly posted content on Twitter, and the CDA Section 230 has nothing to do with "political discourse" -- it describes all content.

I'm also fascinated that you used the word "political" and not "policy". All things "political" could vanish tomorrow and the world would be better off. Not being able to discuss policy issues/ideas would be tragic.

> It sounds unworkable and over the top

It easy to make it workable, just claim that general-purpose platforms beyond a certain use size become public forums where freedom of speech must be protected.

[delete]

If an online forum wants to curate speech it should be treated as a publisher. Or, perhaps develop some legal regime that recognizes that smaller forums can be restrict to certain topics, but not viewpoints if they want to retain their immunity against defamation.

edit: deleted some nonsense that I got wrong

Why do you think Twitter is a public space. Your use of twitter is governed by agreeing to its T&C’s. You agree to them when signing up and violating them will result in bans.

You're just repeating what the current state of affairs is. Doesn't mean it has to stay that way.

It would be surprising, but not irrational if courts construe Twitter as a quasi-public forum. Or, on the other hand, if Twitter continues to exercise viewpoint discrimination, it would be reasonable for them to be construed as a publisher and accept the liability that comes along with it.

Then perhaps let us debate that in a reasoned and considered manner, rather than an executive order that Trump himself describe as a lashing out at Twitter.

The executive order signed today is far too detailed and far too nuanced to support the idea that its cause for existence is Trump being upset at Twitter a few days ago. This has been being prepared for a long time.

You underestimate the productivity of some underlings and lawyers pulling an all-nighter.

It's also not Day 1 of "Trump being upset at Twitter for much the same reasons", so no doubt there's been a plan. But ascribing the timing of this EO to "just a coincidence" stretches credulity, to me.

I'd agree that the Twitter Kerfluffle is what surfaced it, but keep in mind that this has been on the radar since at least last year[1] (actually earlier[2]).

The timing of this release is hardly coincidental, but it's been on the minds of the politicians for long enough that this reads to me more like an opportune time to push something forward that's been brewing for a while, rather than an off-the-cuff reaction.

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/15/us/donald-trump-twitter-f...

[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/26/us/politics/twitter-shado...

It's a public space because it's become the dominant platform for political debate.

If you're intellectually honest and advocate for a system that controls people, turn over the keys to your enemies for a dry run.

It's arguably a public accommodation, but public accommodations are still private spaces.

Be aware that the DC Circuit leans left, by a lot -- so it's an unsurprising result.

The Supreme Court may eventually take one of these cases and come to a different conclusion.

Loomer's suit was never going to go anywhere regardless. It was completely baseless.

I'm not sure this is the case anymore. McConnell and Trump have been rapidly filling the courts with young, right leaning justices. See: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/02/28/thanks-tru...

The weird thing is that, a year ago, if you asked me where "private companies should be able to make their own decisions about what content they publish" falls on the spectrum, I would have considered it to be right of center.

I guess it comes down to whether these justices are ideologically "right-leaning", or just Republican partisans.

From my observations left leaning means apply liberal criteria to decisions. Right leaning means adhere to the Constitution and law of the United States of America.

So in this case what does the Constitution say?

And where does the Constitution say that a corporation spending money is speech?

You can twist the Constitution in both directions.

You could say that the value of free speech is so important to society that it is codified on the Constitution. These companies that become big enough platforms should respect that value.

You could also say that the Constitution provides free speech protections to everyone. These companies should benefit from those same protections, thus the government shouldn't be able to interfere what these companies publish.

I defy anyone to write a rule with any kind of specificity for the first case.

User count? Great, while the user count is < N the platform is moderated and popular. As soon as the user count exceeds N it's instantly a cesspool of spam and porn. Then what, it bleeds users and drifts back into the first category again? They're going to write subjective distinctions on the content of the speech into the law to differentiate between spam, porn, porn-spam, and political speech?

It doesn't work! If it could work, please, anyone who reads this comment: Many of us are programmers here, propose a rule that doesn't fall apart.

The second interpretation is at least consistent, even if it does protect corporations.

If Twitter is the devil just leave Twitter, no one has to use it. Gab exists. We have no legal right to access the people who are on Twitter.

>If it could work, please, anyone who reads this comment: Many of us are programmers here, propose a rule that doesn't fall apart.

Legislation has an easy out here: "you'll know it when you see it." Courts would decide and they already need to decide on these distinctions.

>If Twitter is the devil just leave Twitter, no one has to use it. Gab exists. We have no legal right to access the people who are on Twitter.

There's also no reason why the government has to give special protections to Twitter and other sites like it.

How on earth adding a small disclaimer at the bottom of trump lies to prevent misinformation on the electoral process is against free speech?

That is odd as it means there is no left and right debate. A society choose. Law is what the society agreed. And you said the us society you in, unlike Eu say, are right leaning.

Whilst it might be, but is the left in us is already right (like Obama use Romey Insuranve not single payer). Or are we in mix economy some are left some are right. Or left right actually many different things like large and small Gov,liberty, ownership, ...

Or is there something like open source which is beyond left and right but community, not gov vs market etc.

Both right and left adhere to the constitution and law. The difference is that each side interprets the constitution and the law differently.

And how did you get to that conclusion? I mean the "right" has been failing to adhere to the Constitution since like forever. The Constitution does not allow restrictions on abortion, but it was affirmed by Supreme Court by Republican majority. The Constitution does not allow warrantless spying on American citizens, but it was affirmed by Supreme Court under a Republican majority. The Constitution does not say that I am free to pollute your lands with my toxic coal smoke spewing smoke stacks without paying for the damage caused, yet our Supreme Court under a Republican majority has decided it does.

From my perspective, left-meaning means having a close association with reality and pragmatism, and right-leaning means do and say anything to make the rich richer.

Hello, 5-month-old account. Please take the time to substantiate your assertions. For example, I assert that you're observations are ridiculous and here is some empirical evidence on which I base my assertion:

"There were only three areas in which Rehnquist showed any interest in enforcing the constitutional guarantee of free expression: in cases involving advertising, religious expression and campaign finance regulation. Rehnquist was 2.6 times more likely to invalidate laws restricting commercial advertising than laws restricting political or artistic expression. He voted to invalidate campaign finance legislation 67 percent of the time, and he voted to invalidate restrictions on religious expression 100 percent of the time. Indeed, in non-unanimous decisions, Rehnquist was 14.7 times more likely to vote to invalidate a law restricting commercial advertising, campaign expenditures, or religious expression than one involving any other aspect of 'the freedom of speech, or of the press.'"[1]

[1] https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2005-09-06-050906...

Since when is protecting the private property rights of corporations a "left" issue? This is a constitutional issue, and the fact that any court ruling that GOP voters disagree with is now a "left" issue tells you everything you need to know about how far civil discourse in this country has fallen.

Because everything is tribalism now.

You can call the right hypocrites for doing a 180 on corporate property rights and demanding a 21st century fairness doctrine.. but didn't the left do a 180 as well?

Part of them did. Because tribalism. But i think you should differentiate between socialists and liberals, the "left" is broader than the "right" right now. I don't think any liberal wants to nationalize a company like twitter.

Some may want to break true monopolies maybe, but twitter?

Anyway i was convinced by a conservative that big media companies should be partially nationalized (for gov oversight), still i don't think twitter is a big enough natural monopoly to warrant that.

I should have used 'liberals' instead of 'the left'. I fell victim to symmetry.

It has been framed that way by Trump, and it's not exactly subtle. People have also been intimidated into thinking that pointing out Trump's propaganda makes them seem biased.

Have you looked at the circus going on with the General Flynn's case Judge?

There is already a ruling by the Supreme Court where social media sites are referred as the modern public square.

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/16pdf/15-1194_08l1.pdf

Phrasing in dicta isn't the same as a legal holding, though. It's a legitimate point, but not a dispositive one.

Not, it doesn't.

The case was about a government trying to restrict a sex offender from accessing web sites where he could engage in first amendment activities like commenting. The court ruled that they could not, absent a sufficient showing that the restrictions on the appellant's internet usage were necessary to prevent the sex offender from re-offending.

In fact the express language of the ruling states that social media sites are a means for accessing the public square, not that these sites are the public square. Moreover, these dicta statements (i.e., non-binding commentary) are a direct reference to the first amendment mall cases, which similarly involved activities that could occur in a public square. The mall cases held that private malls could ban speech because they were private facilities, thus they were not public squares even though the public could (and frequently did) engage in traditional public square activities in the mall.

TLDR: the private-public distinction matters for First Amendment law. The First Amendment only applies to public properties and public agencies, not private properties or persons.

I don't think that section 230 is about First Amendment. I thought it was about whether a company can be shielded from law suit on the content published on the company's website. That is, how to classify a company as a platform or as a publisher.

First amendment is the issue as we're contemplating who should be liable for the consequences of bad speech. If FB is liable than FB is incentivized to censor risky people; if I'm liable then I might watch what I say on Yelp or Wikipedia.

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, such as empirical claims about businesses.

Anyone who is hated broadly by the internet, whether just or unjust, would like FB to be liable no matter what is right or wrong, because holding hundreds of tiny individuals accountable for tiny wrongs over the web is a losing battle.

> while the platform users experience basically no-liability gossip, such as empirical claims about businesses.

Not true. You can be sued for Libel on Twitter and Facebook [1].

https://slate.com/technology/2012/11/libel-on-twitter-you-ca...

I think the parent comment recognizes that but is saying there is "basically" no-liability because it is so impractical to sue a random internet commenters one by one.

For sure, if you are Elon Musk and you claim on your twitter account that a world renowned diver is a pedophile, you might suffer real consequences.

But if someone posts on my restaurant's yelp page a totally fabricated negative review, what are my options? Even let's say I have video or other evidence that disproves their assertion (unlikely), I will need to quantity the harm that this particular internet comment did to my business, which is in most cases nearly impossible. And all for what? A median wage worker isn't going to be able to cover my lawyers fee's (assuming I can prove malicious intent) before going into bankruptcy.

What businesses really want is to be able to sue Yelp itself for libel. They want to say: "Yelp, you didn't quality control your comments, these reviews are being fabricated. After my 5 star rating dropped to 1, my business’s income plummeted, now pay up."

I don't think it would be a good idea if our laws worked like that, but as the parent points out, the current situation is that the platforms are more or less immune to libel, and suing random internet commenters for libel makes no sense.

People have successfully pursued defamation cases for posts to Facebook and other social media platforms.

Section 230 shields Facebook from liability for these posts, not the users. And Facebook generally responds to subpoenas from a court for IP address data that can be used to identify a the user behind a libelous post...

So what if I say that your restaurant serves old chicken and gives food poisoning? What if too many users each take a tiny stab, repeating the false empirical claim they heard?

The restaurant can sue you for libel.

The restaurant can sue all of the other users for libel, and if it's a coordinated effort or the apparent facts behind each libelous act are sufficiently similar, they can get them joined into a class action imposing joint and several liability imposed on the named defendants (i.e. the few they are able to reasonably identify), meaning that it is now the named defendants' responsibility to find the other users if they want to avoid paying the full damages out of their own pockets.

Believe it or not, all of these hypothetical that techies keep bringing up on HN in this thread as if they were magical logical bullets have long been addressed by courts and/or legislators.

> Believe it or not, all of these hypothetical that techies keep bringing up on HN in this thread as if they were magical logical bullets have long been addressed by courts and/or legislators.

Are you sure you're not engaging in some magical thinking when you imagine Yelp users enjoined as a defendant class? When is the last high profile case where something like this happened?

Repealing section 230 would make twitter liable for publishing trump’s libelous murder accusations and incitement to violence. They’d be forced to ban him.

I’m curious how that would turn out? What would happen if Trump was banned? While I’m against censorship, banning someone for not following your “code of conduct” is well within your rights.

I'd guess Trump would move to a new platform, and take his social media circus with him. Twitter presumably wants to keep that traffic.

The best example is what happened when Alex Jones found himself deplatformed -- although I think the simplest answer there is "too little too late".

You mean enforcing section 230, but you are correct.

It seems risky to take on the platform that got one elected.

Perhaps this will end the same way codifying the word “Marriage” in the Defense of Marriage Act did. Nothing like Federalizing a word.

I don't know why everyone here is upset by this. Isn't this what we wanted? An actual policy debate, decided by the three branches of government - the executive, congress, the Courts - about what kinds of regulations these super powerful social media companies should have to submit to.

Don't fool yourselves, if Facebook or Twitter wanted to swing an election they absolutely have the power to do that. Isn't that a problem that government is supposed to solve? I'm sorry, and I don't like the guy in charge right now either, but regulation really is the only answer here. Maybe calm down for a minute and let this make its way through the Circuit Courts, refined, watered down, etc etc.

All of that aside, I want my distributed and independent internet back. Maybe we should just be teaching our kids the command line from now on because that might be the only way that we can communicate over this protocol in a civil way.

I think some people are upset because he’s not going the proper route. He’s doing an end run around Congress using Executive Orders in an attempt to get what he wants now. Because he knows that something like this would be held up in Congress by the Democrats.

Others are upset because, as the Constitution is written, he cannot force a private website to carry his speech (the Supreme Court has repeatedly rejected “compelled speech”). Although, yes, we should wait for the courts to (hopefully) strike it down.

There’s also the fact that repealing Section 230 would be absolutely detrimental to the internet. Sure, decentralize it all, but, as it stands now, that’s not what the majority of the public want; They want centralization because it makes things easier. Facebook, Twitter, Google/YouTube, etc. are the size they are today because they’re centralized; it makes finding what you want easier.

I'd be interested to see what a Court would say if Twitter decided to straight-up delete his account as a response.

If they make Twitter liable for content this way, Twitter will have to delete his account ;)

This isn’t about repealing section 230, it’s about enforcing it. Twitter is exercising editorial control over users’ posts. That makes them a publisher. I don’t like Trump either but I think he has a point here.

Section 230 does not say “any form of moderation or editorialization makes them liable.” In fact, this what §230(c)(1) says:

> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

Enforcing section 230 would actually mean that Twitter is not liable for what Trump posts. Which is already the case. If Trump were to advocate violence, Twitter would not be liable.

Yes, I read the Wikipedia article as well. Read the section on application and limits:

In analyzing the availability of the immunity offered by Section 230, courts generally apply a three-prong test. A defendant must satisfy each of the three prongs to gain the benefit of the immunity:[9]

1. The defendant must be a "provider or user" of an "interactive computer service."

2. The cause of action asserted by the plaintiff must treat the defendant as the "publisher or speaker" of the harmful information at issue.

3. The information must be "provided by another information content provider," i.e., the defendant must not be the "information content provider" of the harmful information at issue.

By adding "fact checks" to Trump's tweets, they are acting as his editor. This makes them the provider of the information, just as a newspaper editor is the provider despite not necessarily being the original author.

Imagine if dang, the moderator here on HN, decided to edit people's posts with addenda or disclaimers about the factual content of the writing. That'd make him an editor too, rather than a moderator, and then should in fairness be subject to all of the liabilities that publishers face.

> Imagine if dang, the moderator here on HN, decided to edit people's posts with addenda or disclaimers about the factual content of the writing. That'd make him an editor too, rather than a moderator, and then should in fairness be subject to all of the liabilities that publishers face.

Sure, that’d be editing, but what Twitter did was not editing. It’s akin to a reply tweet that was pinned to the top. They did not edit Trump’s tweet at all.

It's not akin to a reply tweet. It was attached directly to his message. It's like if you sent out political campaign literature in the mail and the post office attached a "fact check" sticker to it. That is very obvious editorializing.

If Twitter wants to give their opinions, they should do it through their own official accounts. Inserting content into other people's tweets is not participating on a level playing field. It's subordinating all of the users to Twitter's editorial control.

Twitter's opinions posted next to others still belong to Twitter though. Of course they're liable for the things they say directly.

Section 230 is specifically about removing liability for content they aren't directly responsible for. If you don't want Twitter to have control over their what you post on their platform the only reasonable solution is post elsewhere.

The issue is that it's impossible to run a viable user generated site without some moderation. The difference between 4chan & 8chan is some level of moderation (in addition to removing illegal content).

Although less extreme, conspiracy theories and fake news are bad PR for social media platforms & thus impact their bottom line. Additionally, many platforms currently are under pressure from investors and ad-networks to maintain certain standards.

The amount of moderation was explained in the law, and it certainly could be argued that Twitter is overstepping the bounds.

>He’s doing an end run around Congress using Executive Orders in an attempt to get what he wants now.

And you can thank the previous guy in charge for setting this precedent, that you can do whatever you want via Executive Order. I have little sympathy here.

>as the Constitution is written, he cannot force a private website to carry his speech

Not quite sure this is actually the question at hand. It's about choice of moderation is it not? In any case ... thankfully we have a Court system that is designed to handle these types of questions.

>There’s also the fact that repealing Section 230 would be absolutely detrimental to the internet.

Not following you. Maybe the social media and tech companies have to hire a lot more layers instead of bloating their HR departments. Probably a good development imo, since HR people like to pretend they work in tech but what they really do is bureaucracy.

> And you can thank the previous guy in charge for setting this precedent, that you can do whatever you want via Executive Order. I have little sympathy here.

What is this argument? Why is it always “look at what Obama did! Therefore it’s ok!” when Trump does something bad?

I'm making an argument that Executive Order abuse is bad, but for whatever reason we're only worried about it now. When the guy in charge isn't the usual kind of ... uh ... President. If you want me to say it George W. Bush's EO abuses were also bad.

> And you can thank the previous guy in charge for setting this precedent, that you can do whatever you want via Executive Order. I have little sympathy here.

If you truly think that Obama invented the Executive Order or was the first to use them frequently, you are laughably misinformed. Use of Executive Order has been common for at least 150 years.

I don't. I wasn't clear. EO abuses have been ongoing for at least 150 years, like you said. I'm merely pointing out that we're now only worried about it because Trump is bad and thus now EOs are bad.

This isn't true. Both Bush and Obama were criticized for them (probably other Presidents as well, I just wasn't following politics before then). But that's not what your original statement said:

> And you can thank the previous guy in charge for setting this precedent, that you can do whatever you want via Executive Order.

That statement is just pure bias, not fact.

What? No. Executive order is an order to the executive branch from it's boss the President. It's not going around Congress at all- it's separate from Congress. It's not changing law. All Presidents do this and are allowed to.

You can't do whatever you want via executive order. This is Trump telling the FCC, one of his departments, how to operate, which he can do, as much as I disagree with it.

The powers of the executive branch are not unlimited and not every order is Constitutionally valid. Especially ones restricting freedom of speech by private individuals.

What of the President's freedom of speech? In one possible (IMO likely) context that it will be viewed in by courts or at least the FCC, Twitter edited this President's speech to contradict himself.

You're right, I'm merely defending the executive order and outlining it's not a magic wand that lets the President do everything they want.

In the US, Congress must explicitly delegate rulemaking powers to an executive agency. Absent such delegation, they cannot issue rules that would change the execution or implementation of the relevant statute. (Rules in this context are federal agency interpretations defining or implementing statutes passed by Congress.)

It appears that Congress did not delegate to the FCC the power to make rules under/implementing the CDA, so regardless of Trump's order, the FCC can do precisely diddly squat about changing the rules of the CDA.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/legal-experts...

> repealing Section 230

I don't see how this is repealing anything. It seems like the order is saying that if a company wants Section 230 protection, they have to be very strict about not editorializing anything, and if they do even a little bit, they have to go all the way.

Which, in essence, is repealing it. It’s saying, if you do anything, it’s editorialization. That was how it was before Section 230.

They are allowed to police things that are against their TOS. They just aren't allowed to be biased.

> Aren't allowed to be biased.

Where does this come from?

The headline looks a little repulsive to start but I agree with you that this would be beneficial to start holding companies accountable for the content on their platforms.

That said, I'm not quite sure why Trump would call for it. Doesn't seem like something that would help him.

I don't disagree that policy is required, but expecting policy to correct problems is asking too much. Policy is there to provide guidelines, not create an exhaustive list of what is ok and what is not.

If we do not police ourselves, the government will do it for us. When law enforcement is expected to deal with everything, they become militarized. I'm not sure what this means for the internet.

Could share what regulation you’re talking about? I’m sorry I don’t follow your position when it comes to regulating social media and what regulations are needed. If we use the oil industry as an example I think it’s clear that environmental regulations are needed to preserve ecological environments. What is the end goal to regulating tech giants?

Upholding the bedrock of democracy. The EO spells out the reasoning: https://kateklonick.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/DRAFT-EO-...

I don't understand this point. This is not thoughtful legislation being debated. This is one guy writing some executive order out of spite, which will soon be reversed by the.courts

The concept of regulation in this space may make sense, but that doesn't mean just any regulation will do, and the fact that it's come in the form of government retaliation to Twitter publishing a fact check of a public official is scary.

The problem with Twitter and Facebook is that the lines are getting blurry with regards to public vs private. Like it or not, a couple tech platforms are the de facto new town squares. Not saying I have any answers, just saying it's definitely not a clear issue anymore.

This is a valid argument, but it seems like the proper government response would be to use the tools that were designed to address issues like this such as antitrust law. We shouldn't be bestowing governmental responsibilities on these companies just because we let them become monopolies.

The legislation (Communications Decency Act of 1996) under discussion flows from EFFECTIVE lobbying by telecom monopolies seeking a liability shield [0].

Monopoly power and market manipulation is a second order issue.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Decency_Act

I legitimately don't understand your point here. You seem to be implying that this specific legislation is a form of regulatory capture. Meanwhile nothing in the Wikipedia article you linked seems to support that. It even notes that groups like the ACLU are strongly in support of Sec 230. I don't think the ACLU normally does the bidding of big telecom.

Either way, if the root cause is telecom monopolies, let's actually try to fix monopolies rather creating a new category of private company that becomes a public good through its monopoly.

My point is that an anti-trust lens isn't adequate if legislation keeps getting passed that rolls back regulation [0] and promotes formation of trusts.

The CDA and §230 was part of the broader Telecommunications Act of 1996. Look at the outcome, which sure seems like "regulatory capture" to me:

> Before the 1996 Act was passed, the largest four [Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers] owned less than half of all the lines in the country while, five years later, the largest four local telephone companies owned about 85% of all the lines in the country.

It's also possible that the ACLU's interests will conveniently align with a subset of interests for third parties when the third party's liability is reduced.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996...

But the current discussion is specifically about this one small aspect of that overall bill. Whether the overall bill is regulatory capture or not is irrelevant to the discussion of the merits of this specific section.

I appreciate your nuance.

I'm skeptical about claims that the overall bill (i.e. de-regulation) and §230 (i.e. liability shields) weren't intertwined.

My lay understanding is that §230 came about because (i) telecom providers and ISPs were getting sued for trafficking third-party content; and (ii) they started running to pro-business legislators for protection.[0]

Again, my initial reaction was to the claim that the anti-trust controls would be effective in order to police things. That seems like a last resort; and requires first UNWINDING a lot of other legislation that appears to shield the formation of trusts.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...

Like it or not, a couple tech platforms are the de facto new town squares.

I'd agree, but de facto is not de jure. And if we're going to make them into public spaces legally, it's certainly not going to happen through an executive order. It would require an act of Congress, similar to the restrictions and obligations placed on broadcasters.

By the same token though, as per the tweets assertion (I have not read the EO personally) it looks like a good chunk of the teeth of this bill is "preventing the government from advertising on a platform that doesn't X", not "creating legal consequences for a company that doesn't X", which is... Not at all the same.

They are in part the same, as the Supreme Court has ruled.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Minimum_Drinking_Ag...

As HN is fond of saying, judges are smart enough to see through attempts to hack the law.

And yet taking a person across state lines to kill them in a different jurisdiction is federal crime thanks to the interstate commerce clause.

Except that SCOTUS has already at least flirted with the idea (see Packingham v. North Carolina, 2017). Also the executive order in question doesn't have anything to do with public spaces but rather Section 230 protections; the argument is that fact checking is a form of editorializing.

See also this HN discussion about a case[1], where a judge ruled that Trump can't block people on Twitter.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17135945

[1] Knight First Amendment Institute v. Trump, 17-cv-5205, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York

It seems significant that Twitter wasn't a party to that case. People seem to be enthusiastically conflating it with some sort of ruling on what Twitter can or must do. I'm not sure if you are, but even bringing it up worries me.

I think it is pretty clear that fact checking is a form of editorializing. It seems that Section 230 was being applied even if the intermediary was editorializing the content.

Both Packingham and Knight involve government action to deny others access to social media. They don't involve any obligations of social media sites themselves to provide access.

>>Like it or not, a couple tech platforms are the de facto new town squares.

>I'd agree, but de facto is not de jure.

In 2018 there was a decision of a district court[1], subsequently reaffirmed by the Courts of Appeal, that the President's twitter account is a "designated public forum". This was widely reported due to it's "Trump cannot block other users" aspect, but might have interesting bearing here.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_First_Amendment_Institu...

It's disturbing to me that people have picked this up and are running with it as saying something about Twitter and its rights or responsibilities. It appears to me that was simply about the rights and responsibilities of public officials whatever (private) means they use to communicate.

From the previous thread:

"Just because Twitter allows people to block stuff, doesn't mean Trump gets to block stuff.

In a "normal" government, they'd pick a vendor with software that would let them make official policy statements in a way that complied with the laws around people having the right to reach out to their government officials.

Just 'cause twitter's software lets him do something doesn't make actually doing that thing legal, moral, or ethical.

This judgement makes perfect sense and is completely reasonable when you remember that technology is a mere tool designed to serve humans. Just cause you can do something in a tool doesn't make it right."

I agree that at least ultimately Congress and/or the courts need to consider the larger issue. Trump isn't demanding a retraction of a single comment, because the fact check itself isn't the problem. It's a symptom. It's just a "straw that broke the camel's back". People who insist on analyzing the straw rather than the whole load are not discussing the real issue.

The real issue is the extent to which Big Tech platforms can tilt a playing field that a billion people play on. Whether tilting the field to favor their own products, as the EU courts ruled, or their own political preferences or whatever else they want, heaven help you if you are playing against their favored team and have to play on their field. Death by a thousand bad ref calls.

Big Tech is big because of the network effects on the internet, meaning that for many things you want to do, there are lots of choices in theory but just one in practice. They own the whole league. You play on their tilted field or you "can always go start your own" league and play alone. (Google started their own FaceBook. Microsoft started their own phone OS. Now you go start your own Twitter.)

Congress and the courts need to look at these massive network-effects platforms that are claiming the rights of players and non-players and the responsibilities of neither.

"town squares" are not law.

Private property is sometimes public space, especially in Twitter's home of California. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v....

Seems like having the president attack Twitter for their speech (adding extra speech that suggests that some shared information is disputed) is the actual violation of Free Speech. The First Amendment says that the federal government can't stifle free speech, which seems like what is happening here.

That's exactly it. Twitter disseminated the president's words as he wrote them to everyone that wanted to see it. They also said it was wrong.

Fundamentally the whole exercise is an attempt to conflate Twitters (first amendment!) right to speak its own opinions with somehow "restricting" the rights of their subscribers. And that's insane. Just look at how many people in this very thread are buying into the frame by discussing what big companies should be allowed to censor, when of course nothing of the sort occurred at all.

Personally I think that Twitter inserting their own articles is overstepping their own role. Nobody goes there to view what Twitter writes, nobody goes there to care about Twitter opinions. Them doing this forfeits their status as a public square, now they are publishing their own editorialized content, and not as Tweets but as privileged inserts in others Tweets.

Where is a company limited to only one role? Can Facebook not publish a blog and be a platform?

No, not like this. This is like Google or Apple prioritizing their own pages and items in their searches.

Which they are legally allowed to do

It would be different (and fine) if Twitter replied to his tweets with their rejoinders, posting on a level playing field with everyone else. They didn't do that. They abused their position as controllers of the site to insert their opinion into his posts.

Twitter stepped beyond the bounds of being a neutral platform with moderation. They took up the mantle of editor and began editing people's posts. This should disqualify their safe harbour protections under the Communications Decency Act. This has nothing to do with the first amendment.

Um... can you cite the explanation of why the safe harbor provisions of the CDA are conditioned on being a neutral platform? That's not how I understand the law.

You're stretching. Twitter did a fact check on the president and he can't handle it, so he's trying to harm the company using the levers of government. And that is ALL that is happening.

The legalese that you're misunderstanding is just cover. And the proof is that no one wants Twitter to be liable for the speech of its posters, because if they were then Trump (who literally just days ago falsely accused a guy of murder on that very platform) would be thrown off instantly.

No. What we don’t want is for Twitter to have their cake and eat it too. That is, to enjoy all of the privileges of being a publisher (editing posts and saying whatever they want) while upholding none of the responsibilities that eg. newspapers and magazines have to uphold.

If Twitter wants to be a communications service (a la Comcast) protected by safe harbour then they need to act like one. That means if they really can’t stand what Trump tweets then they should ban him, just as Comcast would stop carrying a cable channel it no longer wanted to carry.

These social media companies are incredibly powerful and they need to be reined in. It’s as simple as that. This executive order will soon wind up before the courts and that’s where it should be decided.

> Twitter [...] editing posts and saying whatever they want

Dude. They fact-checked a tweet.

This is frequently brought up. Does Twitter want safe harbour? I don't think they need it and I haven't noticed them invoking it. Is that incorrect?

Sure they "want" safe harbor protections because it's better not to be sued. But no, they don't "need" it as a platform really. Lacking that, they'd just start banning folks more aggressively to protect themselves.

Which, of course, is exactly what the president's supporters don't want, given his reliance on the platform. I mean, Trump literally (literally!) baselessly accused Joe Scarborough of murder last week. What do we think is going to happen if Twitter genuinely thinks they might be liable for the president's libel?

The cynical goal, obviously, is just to "hurt" twitter in the abstract, by making them look like a risky investment, drive off advertisers, etc... And that's why this is so distressing: here we have the president of the united states using the executive branch to attack a company simply because he's angry with him and not out of any kind of principle at all.

Twitter's first amendment rights would not be violated, if they were to be treated as a publisher.

This is not about forcing Twitter to do anything. It is instead about having them being treated as a publisher, if they act like one.

I don't know why people are downvoting this. If the president's "attack" counts as censorship then newspapers, writers, and all the rest of us posting here are subject to that same level of censorship.

Twitter is indeed censoring on ideological grounds, just not the president in that one particular instance. To say that Twitter isn’t restricting legal publishing of their users simply isn’t true.

I was quite surprised to find this EO rather cogent and fair and reasonable, and while I was poised to vehemently oppose it, having read it, I find myself in support of it. The arguments it makes are legitimate.

Bedhead's point still stands in isolation from this week's bullshit, though.

Trump will be on to some other highly divisive circus act next week. The question of whether Twitter is a public square will persist.

The laws of America already provide a way to resolve that though. If one company is becoming too powerful and unfairly damaging competition because of it, anti-trust exists.

Arguably twitter isn’t even that powerful except that the president uses it as an official communications platform. Before this current administration, Twitter was circling the drain. It was an afterthought in modern social media. The president pretty much singlehandedly made twitter as important as they are today. If the president doesn’t like twitters TOS he could switch to Facebook and have an even greater reach than he does today. So it’s hard to argue that twitter is actually the problem, but if they are, the easy answer is stop using their platform and switch to a competitor.

Now I'm curious what the historical precedent is for this. What happens (first-amendment-wise) when a company town has a literal private-property town square? Could the company control speech in "its" town square?

For that matter: what about malls? Or university campuses? Or public transit infrastructure provided by private government contractors? What are your free-speech rights when in one of these (privately-owned, public use) places?

I feel like a very extreme edge-case situation could be constructed to test the law here: incorporate a town; and then, as your first act as mayor, sell the whole of the town's incorporated territory to a private corporation. Have the corporation declare that anyone engaging in democratic actions on "its property" (e.g. holding a municipal election) is trespassing. Are you now the town's autocratic mayor-for-life, however-many people may move in?

In the University of California system they set up "free speech zones" for protestors and activists. They're often complete surrounded by chain link fencing with one entrance/exit.

That's a way to avoid having to test the law, certainly. What happens if you don't do that, though—if you have a public-use area, and none of it is a "free-speech zone"?

> What happens (first-amendment-wise) when a company town has a literal private-property town square? Could the company control speech in "its" town square?

Thankfully, we don’t need to imagine what happens: the Disney Corporation has a modern company town (Celebration, FL)[0]; they control a pair of HOAs (one each for residential and non-residential owners). Lexin Capital manages the literal town square, and while I can’t find anything on the topic, I would imagine standard private property rights would apply to the land they own.

[0]: https://celebration.fl.us/celebration-community-governance/

I remember reading that there's some precedent for those kinds of workarounds, and courts have ruled that, when you start looking like a government, then the First Amendment applies, and it came up when the Domino's Pizza owners tried to do exactly that, but I don't know where to look to substantiate that, though someone else might.

This (almost) exact scenario played out in Marsh v. Alabama (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_v._Alabama). If the town is, for all intents and purposes, acting like a traditional town, and with the public having access to it, first amendment rights hold.

Also, worth reading up on Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Community_Access_Cor...)

Furthermore (IANAL) there's a long history of conflict around the boundaries of private vs. public. "Private" clubs (as with companies) are subject to civil rights and other equal protection legislation (sometimes) for example in a way that your outdoor BBQ isn't.

Someone that spends too much time at the bar might mistake that for the town square, as might someone who spends too much time on Twitter.

The more foolish aspect of this is that the President doesn’t have a direct means of striking back against what Twitter actually did (post a Get the Facts link), so he’s trying to punish them by reinterpreting Section 230. This EO definitely has some teeth, but there are provisions in it that I can’t wait to see in court.

Is he reinterpreting 230? I've seen both sides of the spectrum say that social media companies have been interpreting 230 too broadly

Yes.[1] Section 230 is not a new law, but this order is directing his Administration how they are to interpret certain provisions of it going forward with some actions they are to take. It’s important to remember that an Executive Order is not law by decree, it is an official government communication directing the government how to act under the law, as is the President’s prerogative. No matter how you come down on the issue of how social media companies interpret Section 230, a new EO is effectively a new interpretation either narrowing, expanding or changing the scope under which enforcement action is to be taken by the government.

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-or...

He's continuing a push from Republicans to reframe section 230 immunity as only applying to "neutral" platforms [1]. The problem is this then gives the government a big stick to control them on relatively subjective grounds.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...

The first amendment only protects from limits placed by the government, not if it’s a public or private setting.

Thats true it’s becoming unclear, but only sociologically.

Legally, it doesn’t matter if people think of Twitter as a public space. No amount of perception turns twitter into a governmental organization or subjects it to laws that only pertain to the government.

This case is even further from the first amendment because Twitter didn’t prevent any speech. It just exercised its own right to free speech alongside the president’s free speech.

Nobody has the right to uncontested or un-responded-to speech.

I wanted to share a debate on topic "Constitutional Free Speech Principles Can Save Social Media Companies from Themselves".

https://www.intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/constitutional....

Main Points from the page.

- The First Amendment is content-neutral and provides a nonpolitical framework for regulating speech. It would behoove social media companies to abide by it.

- Rather than resort to censorship, social media companies can offer users tools that block unwanted content, including content that could be hurtful or offensive.

- Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms have become the new public square. Rather than resorting to corporate speech policies, these companies should promote free speech principles in the U.S. and abroad.

- Social media companies are global. The U.S. Constitution is based on American values and, therefore, should not be used to regulate international platforms.

- The spread of hateful digital content dilutes meaningful discourse and, in some cases, causes emotional and physical harm. Social media companies have a duty to offer safe, welcoming platforms for users.

From election interference to “fake news,” nefarious actors are using social media to undermine democracies and deepen partisan divides. Social media companies must act to prevent this type of conduct.

The Debaters

David French - Senior Writer, National Review

Corynne McSherry - Legal Director, Electronic Frontier Foundation

Nathaniel Persily - Professor, Stanford Law

Marietje Schaake - International Policy Director, Stanford's Cyber Policy Center & Fmr. Member, European Parliament

Is the problem not precisely that there are very apparent and relevant conflicts between these points? Reconciling free speech with "offer[ing a] safe, welcoming platforms for users" is exactly what's at play here when it comes to TOS and deleting content.

> "Rather than resort to censorship, social media companies can offer users tools that block unwanted content, including content that could be hurtful or offensive."

I think this is an interesting idea, but I think it would effectively mean de facto speech censorship like HN has with flagged/dead comments. Sure they exist, but most users don't have them on, and the larger the forum, the more annoying having them on will be. Given the amount of spam/hate comments on Twitter, no sane user would ever turn that feature on. So you end up right back where we are now, only by technicality they aren't censored. I suppose a positive, but then it gets right back into editorialization arguments re what content is flagged or "blocked".

> Social media companies must act to prevent this type of conduct.

Even if most can agree here, this doesn't appear to lay out concrete policies, nor does anyone appear to have any proposed that align with these main points that I know of. I didn't watch the media specifically so if you have any detail on those specifics or any concrete recommendations they make, a summary would be very much appreciated.

Regardless of ones views pertaining to the current president, does anyone feel comfortable with so called "fact checking"? I do not like anyone acting as the sole arbiter of truth, whether it be the president, the pope, or the random fellow screaming in the park. I prefer that corporations trust their users to make their own choices about what people say instead of making edits or including addendum's to peoples posts. The people made the platform successful, let the people decide what is wrong and what is right, what is true and what is false, what is fact is and what is fiction.

> let the people decide what is wrong and what is right, what is true and what is false, what is fact is and what is fiction.

No freedom is lost here, people can (and will) decide that the factcheckers are wrong and dumb.

Leaving it up to the users makes it so a single group can dominate discourse, either through preying on ignorance or bots or paid users. Fact checking isn't perfect, but neither is anarchy.

Not agreeing or disagreeing with you here, but Jack Dorsey claims that they are not being an "arbiter of truth" here: https://twitter.com/jack/status/1265837139360485376

Nobody is acting as a “sole arbiter of truth.”

If you and I meet in a bar, and over some drinks I tell you that I’m the CEO of Uber, and the tavern owner leans in and say, “No he’s not,” how is that being the “sole arbiter of truth?” If I don’t like it, I should meet you somewhere else.

This is also no different than if Daniel Dale interviews me, and I say I founded YCombinator. When he prints the article, he says, “Reg lied.” How is that making Dale the ‘sole arbiter of truth?”

Nobody told Trump to use Twitter. He’s actually better off on Twitter than I would be in either of the scenarios I mentioned, because moments after he tweets, millions of his followers can reply and agree with his statements.

There is no way Twitter’s “fact check” is the sole arbiter of truth, when everyone can read thousands of replies that disagree with what Twitter claims are facts, and when Mr. Trump can say whatever he likes on the news, or when calling into some Fox show, without Twitter ‘fact-bombing’ him.

I mostly feel uncomfortable that we've fallen to the point where the president is pretty brazenly trying to undermine a democratic election.

Seriously. Trying to stop voting-by-mail in the midst of a global pandemic is nothing short of voter suppression.

He said the last election was rigged too.

I think they should have just banned him without any reason but that they felt like it and they could.

Instead, this was an attempt to high-road one of the most powerful trolls in history, and high-roading a troll is the absolute most losing strategy around. Basically, however imperfect you are, that's how much ammo you've just given the troll. Twitter is very imperfect, so 1/10, tactless strats imo.

And the whole "fact-check" thing is just such a bad idea in general. Twitter really needs to hire some trolls to pass these ideas passed first.

Why would it be bad idea? It's pretty easy to just throw WikiPedia links at lies. Of course with AI/ML/deep-learning. Will it be perfect? No, of course not. Would it help? I think it would. At least it is worth a few tries.

> Why would it be bad idea?

Because whether you want it to or not, it empowers trolls.

The following is counter-intuitive, it goes against our best nature, it's even tragic: you can't high-road a troll. Trolls are in a race to the bottom, so being on the high-road is setting yourself behind.

You want to fuck with Trump? You're going to have to either force a race-to-the-top narrative on him and his followers (not even a pandemic could), or beat him in a race to the bottom. Or just shoot him.

----

That being said, having it be ML would at least lend itself to "take with a grain of salt."

Why would it be counter-intuitive? What exactly do you mean by our best nature? (What kind of behavior, bias, habit, etc goes against it?)

Oh, you mean "fact checking" empowers trolls. Yeah, sure, strictly speaking any interaction, any expenditure of energy/attention/resources on the troll is a "win" for the troll.

I don't want to "fuck with Trump", I want Twitter et al. to provide some sanity, the proverbial common sense, a grounding for reality. Even if that's just the tyranny of them damn techno-elitist valleywags.

I want twitter to empower me. The users. To help the users to spend less time on trolls. Basically Twitter, by investing in fact checking, helps others. And that's a big win in my book.

Trump and the usual populist will fizzle out. But it'd be nice to prevent the next one, and the next-next one to gain a foothold by spreading lies uncontested. (Yes, of course they'll just find the Twitter of that decade, or do some other media hack, parasites always find the weak spots, but none of this means Twitter and the various online community providers have to capitulate and just give up because trolls.)

Twitter is obviously less moderated than, let's say a subreddit, or HN, because it has a very direct financial dependence on a basic level of drama. And they're trying to rope-walk between irrelevance and first-past-the-post idiocracy.

> Yeah, sure, strictly speaking any interaction, any expenditure of energy/attention/resources on the troll is a "win" for the troll.

I don't think you have a much developed "troll framework" in your mind.

I believe you're a good, noble person, and I really want your life to be amazing for that. Unfortunately, what you said implies you think trolls are just trying to take energy. That they have no point. Seemingly, you're missing even the most basic and fundamental aspect of trolling: to show the other person is also a self-absorbed asshole who cheats and lies when they can, but then on top of that is too weak to admit it to themselves.

Trolls pick on "holier-than-thou" people because they live in a self-centered illusion about how good they are. The truth is, we're all garbage, selfish beings that do everything for ourselves and take credit for anything we can get away with. Fact checkers included.

The only way to approach a troll is as a fellow stupid piece of shit. So ignoring trolls is a pretty POS move... ignoring anybody is shitty. But to really show you're a piece of shit, you have to same something lame before you ignore them like: "ur mom." You need to prove not only that you don't give a shit what they say, but also that you've got no "good human" bubble to pop. Whoever says the most loses.

Banning him would be great for popcorn.gif but it almost guarantees you create a rising threat plastered over mainstream media when he picks a rival network. Surely that would be a monstrous commercial risk?

Many of these facts are not even complicated things that require "arbitration". Trump has claimed in the past on Twitter that vaccines cause autism, promoted poisons as a cure for diseases, and that the country is being "invaded" by refugees. Propagation of such misinformation can lead to loss of lives and we end up blaming the same social media companies for not flagging factually incorrect content. Let me put it simply - Trump blatantly lies and there are bots that spread these lies on Twitter. No private company with any semblance of conscience and public responsibility would allow this to happen. Twitter doesn't have the gall to suspend his account. I'm happy they at least take a small step to point out these lies. Looking at how low a bar Americans have for their politicians shock me.

In this particular case, Trump is right, and Twitter is using its fact-check with false information. Just scroll through the confirmed cases of voter fraud here, it's mostly mail-in and absentee: [PDF] https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/docs/p...

How exactly does 1000 cases of fraud over 40 years back up his tweets in any way? The voter fraud argument is a political weapon for voter suppression. Not to mention that mail in ballots are already in existence. Heck, I've used them the past 5 years myself.

It's the proportion. A significant amount of the fraud is in mail-in voting, which means it's significantly less resistant to fraud. Shifting everyone from the more-resistant in-person voting to the less-resistant mail-in voting will result in a sharp uptick in voting fraud.

This is exactly what Trump said in the tweet.

> This is exactly what Trump said in the tweet.

No, that is not what he said. This is the tweet excerpt:

> "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."

"substantially fraudulent" is not 0.0000001% of ballots (that's napkin math of ballots since 1980). If mail in ballots are 10x more likely to be used in fraud, then 0.000001% is not either. This is factually false and the "fact checking" was applied as such.

We've always had these "arbiters of truth", and I don't know of a good way around it. As long as someone's filtering what you see (be it journalists, or recommendation algorithms on social media platforms), they're influencing what gets presented to you and how - and if you don't do filtering, there's simply too much for you to get any useful information.

According to Twitter, the reasons they added the warning to Trump's tweet as as follows:

- Trump claimed that mail-in ballots would lead to "a Rigged Election." However, fact-checkers say there is no evidence that mail-in ballots are linked to voter fraud.

- Trump falsely claimed that California will send mail-in ballots to "anyone living in the state, no matter who they are or how they got there." In fact, only registered voters will receive ballots.

- Five states already vote entirely by mail and all states offer some form of mail-in absentee voting, according to NBC News.

Also, keep in mind that Twitter did not add the warning just because they thought the information was incorrect. They added the warning because they believe it was incorrect AND because they felt it's purpose was "manipulating or interfering in elections or other civic processes" (https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/election-inte...).

I'm not sure how I feel about points 1 and 3, but point number 2 seems like a pretty fair reason to label the tweet with the warning, IMO. Trump provided factually incorrect information about voter registration to his millions of followers.

I agree I don't want them to decided what is right and wrong, but if they hold themselves to the rules of only labeling confirmed incorrect information about civic processes. I have no problem with what they are doing.

> The people made the platform successful, let the people decide what is wrong and what is right, what is true and what is false, what is fact is and what is fiction.

That's not what is happening anymore though. Large chunks of Twitter are not run by "the people" anymore. Twitter is in an endless battle with large groups of bots designed to present carefully curated misinformation as organic.

It's easy to say Twitter should just be hands-off and let the people decide, but that isn't an option unless your definition of "the people" is small special interest groups who have paid bot farms to push their message.

Turn off the Api Or limit it in a certain way and kill or limit the bot? Let us be human first.

Regards the debate of flagging or counter fact stating, it is hard question. Debate on

While the API makes it easier, tools like Selenium mean you don't really need an API to run a Twitter bot.

This is the conclusion I think I am coming to on this issue. So long as only verifiable facts are presented as a counter point, then it isn't really even editorializing, let alone censorship. Editorializing is defined as presenting an opinion - if you present a verifiable primary data source and nothing else, you are by definition not editorializing.

> ... does anyone feel comfortable with so called "fact checking"?

This has nothing to do with any real person, but is just a hypothetical situation pertaining to this question in your post:

Let's say an account X with many followers calls you a pedophile. You're not, of course, so you responded and said you weren't, but since the followers tend to like X, they don't listen to you. X's followers then dox you, find your address, and start making threats to you outside of the realm of social media.

Does the model of "the people decide what is wrong and what is right, what is true and what is false, what is fact is and what is fiction" hold up here?

Fact checkers are necessary because otherwise people will believe a bad thing and commit crimes? Committing crimes like threatening people is not the natural outcome of the freedom to decide for yourself what you believe.

I'm not sure the term "natural outcome" is very meaningful. Things either happen or they don't. It's a possible outcome and possible enough to merit discussion.

But let's take bad effect down a notch, from a crime to just an unpleasant consequence if you want. Let's say instead of getting doxxed and physically threatened, you just get turned down for a job offer instead. What about that?

(Not a lawyer, but have run a forum for 15-20 years and survived many legal threats.)

You would potentially have legal recourse against the author, and the platform if they didn't act on you reporting the content. I don't know how that would apply were the author in another jurisdiction/country. I don't know if it's universal, but in Australia you'd request identifying information (IP and timestamp) from the platform via lawyer or police, they'd comply and remove the post if appropriate, and then you'd take the information to the owning ISP, get more detailed information and take the author to court.

I would guess that if the content were brought to the platform's attention and they didn't act reasonably, you may have recourse against them.

The debate here as I understand it is about not illegal but misleading, distasteful, harassing behaviour.

It's much harder in the US. You may want to read this. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/john...

Not sure which bit in particular, but the YouTube response says what I was trying to say - you need to demonstrate that something was legally questionable before they will comply and identify a user.

With my forum, I ask the disgruntled user to have their lawyer contact me as a form of pre-action discovery. That weeds out the ones complaining without a leg to stand on and gives me a little bit of protection. The timestamp and IP address (at least with Australian ISPs) is rarely a slamdunk, and it pushes the real judgement on ISPs who have established systems, and police.

BTW, this is just incredible: "An Economist/YouGov poll in late December 2016 found that 46 percent of Trump voters and 17 percent of Clinton voters thought Pizzagate was real."

The opposite could also happen. You are not a pedophile. The mob says you are a pedophile. The mob runs the fact-checker, which now says that you are a pedophile.

Any “fact-checker” is going to have the problem of needing to arbitrate truth, depending on your arbiter you can have lots of different truths. You include facts that help your case, and ignore or downplay facts that do not help your opinion.

It's not working out so well.

If Trump can post claims about voting by mail, why can’t Twitter?

How could a fact-check not be considered free speech like anything else and why shouldn’t twitter be able to post content?

because they're a platform not a distributor, or however the argument goes

Here is the text of the executive order (draft): https://www.scribd.com/document/463379849/Draft-Executive-Or...

Here is the audio version: https://playthis.link/https://pastebin.com/0mzv8heR

Thank you! After reading several contradictory and confusing articles, I found the actual order very clear. I would encourage others to take a look.

Agreed! I've started reading the actual laws and legal orders much more often recently. I'd already been in the habit of diving into source code when confused about how a (software) library/tool works, and I figured this wasn't all that different.

I've been surprised twofold:

1. to find out how often journalistic coverage is misleading or incomplete

2. to find out how often the legal text is actually fairly succinct and coherent, even to a layperson like myself

Oh my goodness is he a big dumb stupid moron.

At the risk of this being downvoted to oblivion, why doesn't he think that Twitter, a privately run company, has the right to fact-check claims made on their site? Even if there were some secret evil liberal agenda on Twitter, which there absolutely is not, why aren't they allowed to do that exactly? Is he planning on holding Fox News to the same standard and make them put less racism apologia on their network?

Well, is Verizon allowed to use packet injection to "fact check" a website you view over their internet connection?

Because seems to be presenting themselves as a neutral platform, which they have shown themselves to not be.

EDIT: Just to clarify, obviously Twitter is not presenting themselves to users as a neutral platform. But for legal purposes, they are cloaking themselves in the same privileged status as a phone company, when they clearly are not.

A) Twitter has never presented itself as a neutral platform. They've banned white supremacists, dangerous conspiracy nuts like Alex Jones, and even left-leaning people like Destiny when he joked about how he was going to bomb Comcast.

B) Verizon (Comcast, Spectrum, etc...) are closer to something like a utility. I wouldn't be supportive of a water or electricity company not providing services to people I disagree with. Twitter is not a utility, it's a glorified fortune-cookie-sharing site. It's a not a "right", and there's no reason that you should feel entitled to it.

Twitter is _the_ place where political discourse happens not just _a_ place where it happens. It's an unfortunate state of affairs that they happen to be a private company with a bias.

Here's simple fact check. Twitter is not _the_ place where political discourse happens. You're discussing politics on HN right now.

It's the place that regularly gets quoted on major networks and newspapers. This is a minority website with nowhere near as much impact.

That still doesn't make it _the_ place for political discourse. Reddit gets quoted quite often. Tons of politicians do AMA on Reddit and Facebook. Just because Trump is on Twitter doesn't make it special.

Every major public figure is on Twitter. That is the difference. Reddit is still small fry.

That's not how these kinds of "facts" work. If someone tried to use this during some kind of proceeding the court will determine this. (Using a jury or not, expert witnesses or not, doesn't matter.)

Usually fact checking "services" like snopes.com, politifact, or WaPo with the pinocchio heads, have a consistent model about what they are willing to touch, how they approach it, and how they determine factualness, etc.

Just throwing out that Twitter is or isn't _the_ platform makes no sense.

I believe they can, comcast actually has injected javascript into websites in the past using a similar technique.

https://gizmodo.com/comcast-to-customer-who-noticed-it-secre...

can you imagine the horror on HN if this were really a thing?

No need to imagine it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15890551

1. Verizon is a common carrier, Twitter is not

2. Twitter has never had any obligation to be a neutral platform

> Because seems to be presenting themselves as a neutral platform

Eh? Twitter bans accounts _all the time_. It hides stuff from search, and hides potentially explicit content behind an "are you sure you want to see this?" It is in no way a neutral platform. Fact-checking world leaders was originally conceived by twitter as an alternative to just banning them when they get dangerous.

> Eh? Twitter bans accounts _all the time_. It hides stuff from search, and hides potentially explicit content behind an "are you sure you want to see this?"

Right, so why are they trying to claim that they are a neutral platform then, for legal purposes, when they very clearly are not one??

Twitter responds to any lawsuits by claiming that they are a neutral disinterested platform, when they very clearly are not. They enjoy the same legal protections as the phone company, when they obviously are not at all the same!

> Right, so why are they trying to claim that they are a neutral platform then, for legal purposes, when they very clearly are not one??

Where are they claiming that? There's no such requirement under the CDA (if there was, then any website with a stated political or other stance and a comments section would be in serious trouble).

> Twitter responds to any lawsuits by claiming that they are a neutral disinterested platform, when they very clearly are not.

Examples of this?

> They enjoy the same legal protections as the phone company

No, they don't. Totally different protections.

Legally they can probably get away with it, since it has happened with other ISPs. The technical reason this doesn't happen is due to your connection a website being encrypted.

> But for legal purposes, they are cloaking themselves in the same privileged status as a phone company

Hum I don't think that could possibly be true. What leads you to think this? Phone companies existed before Section 230 and as far as I know their behavior didn't change. Have you read Section 230? It definitely reads like it was passed to give entities like Twitter more power to delete objectionable content and it definitely doesn't read to me like it obligates them to be neutral.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230

The order does not say that they don't have the right to fact check. It simply says that they don't have the right to fact check and enjoy section 230 immunity.

FoxNews.com has comments on their website.

By the logic of the order, Fox News should also lose their immunity and be liable for suit for anything posted by commenters to their online articles.

This. Exactly.

Where have Fox News editorialised users content?

> FoxNews.com and FoxBusiness.com do use moderation in an effort to maintain a safe and respectful environment in our online community. If your comment or username includes vulgar, racist, threatening, or otherwise offensive language, it will be removed.

https://help.foxnews.com/hc/en-us/articles/233194608-Do-you-...

It's disingenuous to compare political speech to, for example, copy/pasting the N word a dozen times. It seems reasonable for a "neutral" platform to allow "moderation" of the latter, but perhaps not the former.

The question was

> Where have Fox News editorialised (sic) users content?

not

> Where have Fox News editorialised (sic) users political speech?

so my reply should in no way construe my opinion of what is or is not political speech.

Now that we've established that Fox News does in fact editorialize user content, we can move on to the original question of whether or not they should now

> be liable for suit for anything posted by commenters to their online articles

> pretending content is not often political speech

The person you are replying to explicitly said that is not the point in the larger issue.

Sorry, you don't just get to decide what is a larger point in some discussion.

The law is capable of distinguishing between ideas, including whether content is good-faith speech or trolling. Pretending the two are the same and that a law could not possibly allow for a platform to moderate the latter without sacrificing its "neutrality" seems unreasonable.

I think it is a valid question that could be scrutinized in court, but there is no need to be obtuse about the fact that these are different categories of speech that the law could treat differently specifically with regard to how it would categorize ("neutrality" of) a platform on the internet, not whether or not the speech is entirely forbidden period.

The point of the order is to say “publishers” do not have Section 230 immunity and that Twitters actions constitute making it a publisher.

Fox News is already publisher under any reasonable definition.

Under section 230, Fox News is not liable to suit if someone not affiliated with Fox posts illegal content on their comments on their website.

They are liable to suit if Fox News employees post illegal content on their website.

Twitter has the exact same treatment under the law today. It’s not liable for suit when Trump tweets lies about Joe Scarborough. But if @jack or @TwitterSafety tweeted the same lies, it could be sued in court for libel and section 230 would not be a defense.

Fox and twitter are already equal in eyes of the law today.

This actually happened to a news site in Estonia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delfi_AS_v._Estonia

There was a later ruling in Hungary that seemed to go the other way though: https://globalfreedomofexpression.columbia.edu/cases/magyar-...

That's wrong. They have the right to fact check. They simply might not have section 230 immunity with respect to the fact check because that is self-generated content.

They still enjoy immunity with respect to user-posted content, because that is part of the explicit language of the statute and a Presidential Order can't override statutory language.

Sometimes I wonder why Twitter doesn't just ban his account like they would any other troll on the internet.

I'm not sure if you mean this seriously, or in an exasperated but joking manner.

If you are serious, it's because Trump has done more for the legitimacy and usage of Twitter than any engineer, businessperson, or celebrity other than Dorsey & cofounders.

To be clear: Twitter may take a tough official stance against Trump, but behind closed doors he is the MVP.

Twitter stock 2013-2020 [1] vs. S&P 500 [2] supports your claim. My take is its a combination of political divisiveness in the US alongside larger influences (i.e. Trump) inflating audiences / ad. revenue.

[1]:https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TWTR/twitter/stock...

[2]: https://www.macrotrends.net/2488/sp500-10-year-daily-chart

Maybe...

I saw it posted somewhere that because 80m people follow Trump, he sways the monthly actives... but there are others with more followers than Trump.

I don't think there is enough evidence of his impact to the stock price.

edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-followed_Twitter_...

That made my curious about what Twitter accounts have the most followers. The top 10 are [1]:

1. Barack Obama, 118 million.

2. Justin Bieber, 111.

3. Katy Perry, 108.

4. Rihanna, 96.

5. Taylor Swift, 86.

6. Christiano Ronoldy, 84.

7. Lady Gaga, 81.

8. Donald Trump, 80.

9. Ellen DeGeneres, 80.

10. Ariana Grande, 74.

The next highest politican is Indian Prime Minister Modi, at #17 with 57 million. The Office of the Prime Minister of India is at #42, with 35 million. Obama, Trump, and Modi are the only politicians in the top 50.

The only individuals in the top 50 who are not those three or entertainers (counting athletes as entertainers) are Bill Gates at #22 with 50 million and Elon Musk at 47 with 34 million.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-followed_Twitter_...

They might have more followers, but I'd be interested in seeing that in relation to how often those accounts tweet (tweets per year?).

Obama has a huge advantage over Trump and Modi. When you make a new account, Twitter normally suggests following Obama. That gets him followers for zero effort. On the other hand, new accounts that immediately follow a bunch of people like Trump get hit with random annoying account restrictions that might cause a person to hesitate or even delete their account.

Followers are largely irrelevant, here. Trump's tweets are cited on a weekly basis by hundreds of publications globally. More people view trump tweets not-on-Twitter than on the platform.

Obama has 118M followers, whereas Trump's tweets have reach on the magnitude of billions of people. Had Obama been a Tweeter-In-Chief like Trump while he was president, his tweets would've had a similar reach.

This is obviously not true; Twitter was widely used long before Trump and the vast majority of the current user base does not follow Trump at all.

>This is obviously not true;

Follow numbers matter little, if at all. In fact follower numbers are a rounding error in this context. Trump's tweet's reach is on the order of billions of people; hundreds of news organizations cite his tweets on a weekly (sometimes daily) basis, and orders of magnitude more bloggers do so as well.

It's absolutely true, but people may not like to acknowledge that.

> Trump's tweet's reach is on the order of billions of people

I think you vastly overestimate the number of extremely online politics people who pay close attention to Trump's tweets. People use Twitter to follow their friends and celebrities, not because of Trump. Only a minuscule fraction of the attention that Twitter receives is attributable to him.

I would. After all the attacks against them he has made, I would have done it a long time ago.

Jack Dorsey has responded to this question multiple times in several places-- I heard him address it in the Making Sense podcast by Sam Harris some time in the past year. He seemed to show a firm grasp of the nuances involved.

Here is a quote from him: "Blocking a world leader from Twitter or removing their controversial Tweets would hide important information people should be able to see and debate,” [...] “It would also not silence that leader, but it would certainly hamper necessary discussion around their words and actions.”

He apparently feels there will be wider discussion from all parts of the political spectrum if things are left as they are. Should Trump move to a platform where he has more control over the format, it might just make it easier for him to suppress or obfuscate dissent.

I don't know if Dorsey is making the right call here, but he has clearly thought about it a lot, and discussed those thoughts publicly.

If Dorsey banned his account, it would probably be a shitshow. Right wing trolls would come out in droves (even more than they do now).

If Twitter did ban his account, what about other equally bad but smaller accounts? How many can they ban?

It seems like Twitter is in a lose-lose situation here.

Twitter is in a very winning situation. Before Trump took office and started tweeting a lot, the relevance of Twitter was often up for debate. Now they're a place where people get the latest updates from a world leader. That's great for Twitter.

> what about other equally bad but smaller accounts

Twitter bans many other equally bad ... and many other much less bad accounts.

> I don't know if Dorsey is making the right call here, but he has clearly thought about it a lot, and discussed those thoughts publicly.

Similarly, I'm conflicted. I understand Jack's argument, but I'm not sure he's making the right call here. It is highly unlikely Trump could build a platform or co-opt one that has the reach of Twitter. And arguably, the terms of service should apply equally to everyone on the platform. Trump has engaged in hate speech and targeted his followers against individuals in a way that probably destroyed their lives (death threats, etc.). IMHO, Twitter should enforce their TOS against all users in a fair and equal way, regardless of whether they are POTUS or a normal citizen.

> It is highly unlikely Trump could build a platform or co-opt one that has the reach of Twitter.

Thought experiment: if instead of posting on Twitter, he sent an e-mail to a few thousand journalists?

I never use or consume Twitter, but I see screen captures of things Twitter posts all the time.

Granted: one big thing this approach misses is the back and forth. I gather Trump re-tweets quite a bit of stuff, and responds to others. I guess that could be simulated via e-mail.

My point is that as far as his ability to be heard, I don't think Twitter is necessary.

He can't control the narrative if he depends on what journalists choose to report (or not), and how the story will be editorialized.

Twitter gives him direct access to his electorate, which is extremely valuable.

How that wouldn't be replicated in a matter of weeks? He can just start posting on donaltjtrump.ru and people will check it. They can throw together a notification app.

Dorsey is right to want to encourage broader discussion across the political spectrum on topics. But the current fact-checking approach is flawed as it requires human judgment, which is hobbled by people's biases and potential lack of topical expertise.

A better approach may be to offer a resource page that shows every news article on the topic, with guidelines on political leaning, how credible each article is etc so that readers can exercise their critical thinking to figure out what to believe. For example: https://story.thefactual.com/news/story/239362-Social-Media shows 285 related articles.

Disclosure: above page is from my startup, The Factual.

Can you cite exactly how Twitter isn't ensuring that bias + topical expertise are being disregarded in their fact checking routines...? They generally have in-house people + partner companies doing it.

Your entire post just reads like an advertisement for your project, which a number have tried and hit the limits of effectiveness on.

The page you linked doesn't contain explanation at all, what is a very important part of fact checking (if it can be automated, it can be tricked). It should probably contain a mix of automatic links with multiple independent human fact checkings that explain why a side should be picked over the other.

>But the current fact-checking approach is flawed as it requires human judgment, which is hobbled by people's biases and potential lack of topical expertise.

This is a true statement.

>A better approach may be to offer a resource page that shows every news article on the topic, with guidelines on political leaning

...seems to just introduce another level of bias. Every "media bias" website touts "objective analysis" while in the FAQ they admit to relying on a panel that they assure you is 100% objective. How do you guarantee that these ratings are not "flawed as it requires human judgment, which is hobbled by people's biases and potential lack of topical expertise"? See: allsides.com[1] and Media Bias Fact Check [2].

Looking at your employee page, you seem to have exactly zero employees with any significant background in journalism. What "topical expertise" does Factual provide that a layperson doesn't have? How do you minimize human judgement?

This reads to me as "You shouldn't use Facebook because you're the product, not the customer, which leads to bad incentive alignment. Use Twitter instead."

[1] https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-rating-method... [2] https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/methodology/

He keeps it only because of his current title. I would not be the least bit surprised if he loses it the second another person is elected president. He will definitely lose it once another person is inaugurated.

Why do you say that Trump will definitely lose it once another person is inaugurated, but only maybe when another person is elected president? Honest question.

Edit: I know election and inauguration are separate, I was wondering about the significance of this to Twitter.

Trump would still be president between the election and inauguration.

Thanks.

Because it does not happen the same day.

Wasn't the rumor he saved twitter? Some other platform would love to have him I'm sure.

Because he's the bloody president of the United States of America.

This should be a well-known fact but some people still don't accept it, 4 years after he was elected (will 8 years do the trick?)

"It also asks the Federal Trade Commission to report on acts of political bias collected by the White House"

Is this not similar to the approach and actions of other large State actors out there that hold a lot of authoritative power?

I posted a comment yesterday saying how this power grab was no different from the CCP and my post was voted into oblivion by people.

From a 3rd country's perspective, really, all authoritative countries look the same in their policies barring nuances.

The word "asks" is important here, as the FTC is an independent federal agency and not under direct authority of the President.

Of course this is being handled ham-handedly, but it seems to me that section 230 is a ludicrous piece of legislative malfeasance that allows content publishers to duck the legal responsibilities of publishing while profiting from behavior that is obviously publishing.

I can't see how a Twitter/FB feed is substantively different from a curated "letters to the editor" section in a newspaper and I cannot for the life of me understand why it is treated different legally.

Would love to hear arguments that either 1) these social media sites are not actually publishing or 2) social media publishing is somehow different from publishing in other media.

Without S230, Twitter and Facebook would not curate or moderate any content - you'd be constantly bombarded by a torrent of spam, vitriol and disinformation.

With S230, companies can remove the worst, most obvious ofenses without fearing being held accountable by the things they didn't find.

That sounds to me like the outcome of both options are:

1) Toxic, awful to use sites with no personalization (custom recommendations, curation, etc)

2) Sites get more careful (and expensive to operate) because they don't want to get sued.

I really doubt #1 is even a tenable business. Who uses a site like that? On the other hand I really like the idea of more careful social media sites.

Under (2), I don't think it's a matter of expense. As a publisher, you'd need editorial control over all users content (literally billions of people).

A publisher platform with a billion users is untennable. There isnt enough money or people in the world to police it.

Maybe the distinction between publishers and platforms is too archaic for digital platforms.

About 1, you can demonstrate that with the various chan sites and with the gab.ai Twitter clone.

> I can't see how a Twitter/FB feed is substantively different from a curated "letters to the editor" section in a newspaper and I cannot for the life of me understand why it is treated different legally.

Both companies offer non-algorithmic feeds where users are 100% in control of what they see. Even with an algorithmic feed, users are still doing far more curation than any "curation" that an algorithm does, which is random at best in terms of intention by these companies at a political level.

I don't see how we interpret that as publishing any more than posts on a forum. The only "editorial" stances these companies take is to moderate content - not delete or edit, only flag and delete. This case is only really interesting because it's a new type of flagging that has not been broadly applied yet against a president.

I'm not sure how we got the question reversed - how in the world is Twitter/Facebook considered a publisher? They have millions and millions of users that write whatever they want without any editorial help, only moderation like that of most all internet forums.

This begs the question - what is "publishing" defined as, and what are the relevant features? I'm hard pressed to think of a useful definition of publishing that includes Twitter/Facebook.

Feed structure and content aside, is writing and applying a custom TOS that covers content not editorializing/publishing?

This is the crux of the argument from the political right at the moment: Twitter is deciding what sort of content is and is not allowed on their platform according to some sort extrajudicial rationale. I don't understand how that isn't publishing.

I'd bet any definition of publishing includes exerting control over which content to display, when to display that content, and where. These companies do all of those things.

> is writing and applying a custom TOS that covers content not editorializing/publishing?

For the specific TOS in question I see no way this counts as that. It is simply banning things like pornography, hate speech, and cyberbullying among other things. How that becomes "editorializing" is crazy to me and doesn't seem like a good faith argument.

> I'd bet any definition of publishing includes exerting control over which content to display, when to display that content, and where. These companies do all of those things.

The exerting here is incredibly minimal at best though. There is also no literal editing of material, affiliated writers, or strong voice selection done by Twitter. At the end of the day, the users decide what they want to see so long as it applies to the TOS. This is wildly different from any publisher such as a news outlet.

If we stretch the definition of publisher to its ends, comically so, we can absolutely get Twitter and Facebook under it. We'd also eliminate any prior meaning of the word.

Should YCombinator be responsible for the comment you just posted here?

Eugene Volokh with some legal analysis: https://reason.com/2020/05/28/platform-immunity-and-platform...

Official page for the EO: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-or...

I’d much rather platforms like Twitter just ban users who violate the TOS even if they’re politicians. If you’ve ever followed Twitter accounts of local politicians you can see that it provides a framework for civil debate without restricting speech.

What our president doing is abusing opponents using his popular twitter account as a megaphone while violating the TOS.

I'm of the belief part of the reason Trump ran for President in the first place was because he knew various investigations were in action against him and that eventually he would be prosecuted. By running for President, he turned every illegal thing he has ever done into a political issue, instead of a legal one.

In the US, we have a long history of allowing politicians to get away with illegal activities in the name of not rocking the boat. Every once in a while someone comes along and tries to use that to their advantage, and ideally the system would punish them by media pointing out the issue and people not voting for them. But somehow, due to some nexus of insanity, someone like Trump was catapulted into office.

I wonder how upset free speech advocates will be about an executive order that trumpets free speech but is intended to punish twitter for exercising free speech?

Twitter responded to a message from authority by adding their own, dissenting message, not censoring the first message.

I guess this kind of double-speak is what we can expect now.

You should read the signing statement for the CARES act.

The Executive (created to execute the laws enacted by Congress) states that they WILL NOT execute a portion of Congressional Law (the portion that stipulates oversight of the Executive) because they “don’t understand” and because the Constitution has a clause stating that they (the Executive) must execute the laws faithfully.

I think it is the patent for “what to expect moving forward”.

Wait, if this was somehow enforceable wouldn’t the order make Twitter liable for trump posting misinformation essentially making them legally required to censor or flag him?

I think it may actually be a way to empower companies to gain more access to information. If the companies are responsible, then they will want to sue the users for violations and personally identify them. A side effect is that they will have some government agency deciding what is acceptable or not. Much like China.

> If the companies are responsible, then they will want to sue the users for violations and personally identify them

I think you're drastically overestimating the profitability of a single twitter user.

They have hundreds of millions of active users. It would probably be far easier and more cost effective to ban every user that causes them any amount of grief, than to investigate and potentially sue them.

They already ban users. This change would fine companies that ban racists and conspiracy theorist because some conservative claimed oppression of free speech.

Where exactly is there liability for misinformation?

Fraud and libel come close, but there are important requirements in both cases beyond truth value.

Without any attempt to weigh in on political sides, this debate made me think of an interesting "hack" to act as a publisher while enjoying the protections of a platform:

1. Start a website where users are able to write arbitrary articles.

2. Have a bot systematically spam your site with all possible articles (suitably limited so as to make this technically doable).

3. Systematically weed out all the articles which are NOT equal to the articles you actually wanted to publish.

Voila, now you've published all and only the articles you wanted, and yet you're just an innocent platform, not a publisher!

If your site is sufficiently widely used, you can even cut out step 2 and replace it with organic human beings.

The law isn't really hackable in the same way a machine is, because the law isn't interpreted by a machine, it is interpreted by a court, which would take all of the above into account when applying the law.

Bingo. At least if anyone could figure out that you were doing it (including, e.g. discovery finding emails where you discuss it) any could would happily see right through it.

That's not so much of a "hack", more like "fraud with enough extra steps to make it difficult to prosecute".

That doesn't mean that it wouldn't work. Adult websites have been accused of something similar: as the version goes, they'll take your (illegally published) video down on request, no questions asked, but "someone" will upload it again later.

I've never heard of anyone being prosecuted for this, though, which means that either it isn't true, or it is and your plan would work just fine.

> That's not so much of a "hack", more like "fraud with enough extra steps to make it difficult to prosecute".

Demonstrate that users on Twitter aren't bots. Otherwise I don't see a difference here.

It's not clear why this is a binary category at all. If we want to treat first-party content differently from third-party content, just do that?

https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230/legislative-history

> The Cox-Wyden Amendment: Section 230

> Worried about the future of free speech online and responding directly to Stratton Oakmont, Representatives Chris Cox (R-CA) and Ron Wyden (D-OR) introduced an amendment to the Communications Decency Act that would end up becoming Section 230. The amendment specifically made sure that "providers of an interactive computer service" would not be treated as publishers of third-party content. Unlike publications like newspapers that are accountable for the content they print, online services would be relieved of this liability. Section 230 had two purposes: the first was to "encourage the unfettered and unregulated development of free speech on the Internet," as one judge put it; the other was to allow online services to implement their own standards for policing content and provide for child safety. Seeing the crucial importance of the amendment, the House passed it 420-4.

"encourage the unfettered and unregulated development of free speech on the Internet," as one judge put it" is being forgotten by a lot of comments here.

EDIT: I seem to get downvoted on anything remotely political on HN. So I am glad this EO was passed and hoping it gets enforced.

What's interesting is we're both reading "encourage the unfettered and unregulated development of free speech on the Internet," and my take on it is that yes, section 230 is there to explicitly protect Twitter under this circumstance, and you take it as giving Trump the ability to censor them.

Thankfully, one of the authors of the section in question has actually stated exactly what it means: https://twitter.com/RonWyden/status/1266052221072019456

"As the co-author of Section 230, let me make this clear: there is nothing in the law about political neutrality. It does not say companies like Twitter are forced to carry misinformation about voting, especially from the president."

Why did you ignore the part that the amendment was written by 2 people - Chris Cox (R-CA) and Ron Wyden (D-OR)

Somehow you only quoted what the Democrat says but not what the Republican says. Quite dishonest of you.

Because Chris Cox hasn't said anything about the issue.

They co-authored the bill. They almost certainly had similar aims when doing so.

If there is no indication the other party has any difference in opinion, has not spoken out to disagree with the party mentioned, and there is no real reason to believe there would be a difference in opinion, why should I not be allowed to quote the only explanation from an authoritative party on the matter?

The answer is that that's perfectly allowable and that I am not being dishonest.

Until the tools, devices and technology needed to access the internet are free and universally available to all without restriction, these sites/services are no more of a public square than a country club is a public park.

And no. A public library terminal is not universal access...

Nothing is "free", there are always constraints and opportunity costs. For example if there's a rally in DC, how many people can go there? It costs a lot of money, they have to get time off work, organize transport and lodging, etc.

Sure, there are material differences between - let's say local politics, where the bar is showing up at the town hall - and getting on Twitter. But that difference is becoming more and more meaningless. Especially that the nexus of power seems to be shifting away from the physical and more toward the virtual/digital.

Public square. Not the Capital mall. This isnt about discourse with your leaders, nor protests. Its about the ability to speak ones mind without THE GOVERNMENT stifling you. That is the opposite of what Trump is trying to do here...

The origins of both Free Speech and the so-called Public Square are closely tied. In fact, in some nations there is literally a place to go, stand and speak, available to anyone. In the public square. For free, not a penny of cost, not a ounce of censorship.

If Trump felt so strong about this, he could make internet access a universal right and then forced the ISP's and to make it available everywhere for free. He could then subsidize the costs of the devices and assure that there was universal access. But that's not what he wants. He wants attention and to distract you from the horrors of his incompetent failings as a leader.

Given the concentration of user-generated content on these platforms' market regulation is needed. Twitter/Facebook have a monopoly by virtue of the "moat". Once someone generates their own content it's only accessible through one platform - that is a monopoly. This market needs innovation and competition. Don't break them up just force them to compete by removing the moat.

The big problem that needs to be addressed is network effects. When the feature that matters most to users is the presence of other users, the result is a platform that can do all kinds of harm.

The power and money in Big Tech result from platforms where network effects leave users, businesses, competitors, even other countries unable to switch to or create viable alternatives. In theory they can, but in practice, they have to be where everyone else is.

If Twitter, for example, were an open protocol that you accessed through your ISP like email to join the world conversation, their own opinions wouldn't matter more than anyone else's. If instead there is a single company that decides who gets to say what on their platform, and network effects build a castle wall, regulations should force a change (such as opening the protocol) to make alternatives viable.

>>If instead there is a single company that decides who gets to say what on their platform, and network effects build a castle wall, regulations should force a change (such as opening the protocol) to make alternatives viable.

yeah, twitter could implement plug-in choose-your-own fact checking, but that would create a scary market outside twitter's control. Since the number of twitter users is roughly finite this could mean a reduction in attention share to twitter proper...

How can they comply with "EARN IT" if they can't moderate and censor?

What's surprising is how often I encounter fellow Americans mistakenly asserting the first amendment extends beyond government and into the private sector.

It's like they've never even been to a movie theater where they need to shut the hell up or leave.

And here we have a US president signing an executive order in response to being moderated on a web site after years of arguably excessive tolerance of his b.s.

I'm not sure how much more embarrassed I can get for my country.

Most people totally miss the point.

The first amendment is there from preventing the government from controlling the speech. Exactly what Trump is doing to Twitter right now.

> Most people totally miss the point.

Because 'free speech' is literally _all they know_ about the subject. If they did look it up, they would literally see the very first words of the first amendment: "Congress shall make no law (...)".

Literally about the legislative branch. Every other consequence of the First Amendment comes from that. Other laws can be more specific and may grant more rights, but this just specifies what the government can't take away.

> "Congress shall make no law (...)"

The Bill of Rights has also been extended to apply state governments, based on the 14th Amendment:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporation_of_the_Bill_of_R...

Apologies if this is a stupid question; I'm a foreigner so I can't understand freedom like Americans do.

But if the first words are "Congress shall make no law", does that mean that the President and his executive orders are not bound by the First Amendment?

The president has no authority over this subject matter except that given him by congress.

This executive order is a directive to the FTC and FCC, which are both bodies created by congressional law.

As a result, neither has power to violate the first amendment since by virtue of being created by congress, they are subject to the literal reading of “Congress shall make no law”.

For what it’s worth - the 14th amendment passed after the civil war has been read to extend the protections of the bill of rights beyond their literal sense anyway.

Technically yes, other branches are not bound by the first amendment.

By the spirit of the law, no. A lot of historical laws and constitutional writings were to limit power of the government in general. When the constitution was actually written, the executive was just a puppet with military commander powers. But over the centuries there has been power creep into the executive.

Such battles end up in supreme court and the court decides ultimately what interpretation would hold up. The current supreme court is republican/right wing leaning which often ignores the spirit of the law FWIW.

Actually, the way it works is:

legislative branch - writes the law

judicial branch - interprets the law

executive branch - executes the law

FCC, FTC etc were created by legislative branch to make governing specific areas more streamlined, they are still bound by whatever legislative branch is bound.

> FCC, FTC etc were created by legislative branch to make governing specific areas more streamlined, they are still bound by whatever legislative branch is bound.

I would recommend reading up on historical executive orders held judicial review and how they impacted operations of 3-letter organizations

> If they did look it up, they would literally see the very first words of the first amendment: "Congress shall make no law (...)".

The great irony is that the same people will happily quote "... shall not be abridged" when it comes to the next Amendment.

>I'm not sure how much more embarrassed I can get for my country.

Just wait until tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that...

That's because these companies function in a way that is between the private and public sectors, and are getting more so. There are plenty of precedents for this, e.g. utilities, and the way we generally address such gray areas is regulation. It's interesting in this case that the side that usually calls for regulation is citing the arguments of the side that's usually against it, and vice versa. (Corollary: no one actually has any principles about this. People care only about their side and pivot like a weathervane depending on its interests. Is there even a single example to the contrary? That would truly be a mutant.)

Social media are the broadcasters of this age. I see no reason why they should be exempt from the same rules and regulations as old school broadcasters.

I believe the correct model for large social media platforms (for example above 10m users) is that of a telecom provider.

Comcast can't block CNBC or Fox and at the same time nobody assumes that Comcast is responsible for view expressed on the networks it carries

Pretty sure comcast is legally allowed to block CNBC or Fox.

Cable channels regularly get dropped from lineups due to disputes over fees. Here’s a recent example of NBC in threat of being dropped. https://www.pressherald.com/2019/10/02/spectrum-may-drop-nbc... Edit: that link has a paywall, but here’s another discussing cable channels being dropped https://www.post-gazette.com/ae/tv-radio/2016/02/14/TV-Q-A-D...

There’s no general right to force cable providers to have your cable channel.

Comcast pays to carry CNBC and Fox content. They can freely decline to pay the content providers what they wish and drop their content. It is not an uncommon occurrence.

Fox and NBC cannot provide air time for one political campaign and deny air time for an opposing political campaign. Twitter is more like Fox and NBC rather than Comcast.

Twitter is nothing like Fox and NBC, unless they've managed to pick up a broadcast license without anyone noticing.

Fox and NBC are only required to provide political campaigns equal access because of their licenses to exclusive use of portions of the public spectrum.

Cable channels like CNN and Fox News don't use this spectrum, and thus don't have the same requirement. Twitter is more like a cable channel than a broadcast station.

The legacy OTA broadcasters were granted exclusive licenses to large chunks of a scarce natural resource (RF spectrum). Their public service obligations are essentially their payments on those licenses. Cable channels are under no obligation to carry news programming, for example, and are allowed to swear.

I don't think it holds up to say that because the internet is not a scare natural resource, rules have to be updated as situations evolve in multiple areas.

@closeparen is not saying "because" they were just explaining the legacy scenario that got us to the classifications used today

>The legacy OTA broadcasters were granted exclusive licenses to large chunks of a scarce natural resource (RF spectrum). Their public service obligations are essentially their payments on those licenses.

This seems like pretty strong implications of cause and effect. Doing something as a payment in return of a service (license).

I did not read as strong implication. Some but not strong.

the word "essentially" and my a-priori knowledge that OTA broadcasters have to also pay cash-money for the license and have other obligations.

I see the scares-resource as one of the many factors for OTA classifications different from webApp.

Fixes for this issue have to cover many legacy and many new complex factors

If you want to apply a rule like "speech must be a net positive for society according to me" in the general case, the rule you need to update is the first amendment. It's specifically because of that spectrum gift that the government can be so aggressive about public good with OTA broadcasters. Speech doesn't come under government control just because it has a large audience or is culturally important.

FCC regulations are pretty antiquated. Imagine not being able to curse on social media, for example.

> What's surprising is how often I encounter fellow Americans mistakenly asserting the first amendment extends beyond government and into the private sector.

It's a confusion between the First Amendment and the principle of free expression, which is kinda forgivable given how closely they are related.

Not at all, they're directly at odds in this case. The President using presidential authority to restrict what twitter can say on their own platform is directly violating the first amendment to restrict twitter's free expression.

You can argue that twitter is also restricting others' free expression, but that is their right, while the government preventing twitter from doing so is a 1A violation.

It would be as simple as you write if social media companies would take responsibility for the publishing rights for what they publish, but they don't. For a long time they are picking and choosing the laws they want to abide by.

> It would be as simple as you write if social media companies would take responsibility for the publishing rights for what they publish

What do social media companies "publish"? In this case, the only thing twitter published was a link to information about mail-in voting[0]. That's it. They did so in the context of a tweet. So at worst, twitter would be liable for any illegal content in either President Trump's original tweet, or in the content I linked at [0]. That is what current US law says.

To change that would require an act of congress or a supreme court ruling. The court is unlikely to rule in favor of Trump[1], as the conservative justices favor businesses rights. So that leaves a new law/amendment to the existing law. That would need to pass the house, which seems unlikely as well.

[0]: https://twitter.com/i/events/1265330601034256384

[1]: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200528/01321044592/two-t...

Twitter is publishing everything any person tweets. Those 2 comments are nothing compared to the power of selectively blocking/publishing users tweets (which communication companies are not allowed to do), but at the same time not be responsible for copyright violations (which other types of media companies are).

Are you familiar with section 230? Which says that under current US law, twitter is not a publisher of the tweets it hosts. It would require an act of congress to change that.

Not to pile on but really do read it. I see how you get to the White House's position but it's a stretch. There don't seem to be any condions tacked on. They don't publish other people's tweats. I think they could maybe be held liable for illegally removing tweats. The protection afforded for filtering does seem dependent on the motivation but I'm not aware of any laws restricting what content they're allowed to remove and again in this case they didn't remove anything

I was working at Google in 2007, and the type of filtering we had was very different from what Google does right now.

We had automated filtering of word lists that took down sites, that were hate words / porn related for protecting children.

Right now I'm paying monthly for Youtube Premium, but I see that the people I'm watching have to be extremely careful to not say a swear word by chance, or even say the name of the COVID-19 virus, because they are scared of losing their revenue stream. I don't see this as fair, because Youtube got so popular _because_ it was allowed to publish anything without being responsible for copyright violations. It would be great for them to do fact checking as long as they are politically consistent.

In EU at least we have the GDPR that limits companies from using our data however they want to, but in the US at this point they need some kind of counterbalance.

Hum, also a YouTube premium subscriber. I think I see the demonization issue as somewhat separate. It's the result of negative news driving advertisers to fear their ads will be places adjacent to content they disagree with leading to negative publicity right? YouTube's options seemed to be either create tools for ad buyers to better manage the political palatability of the content their ads were placed next to or have the big spenders abandon them.

Regardless I wasn't comment on the morality of what big tech companies were doing only the legality. Nothing in https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230 suggests to me that the protections are in anyway contingent on not removing certain content and certainty nothing suggests its contingent on not publishing content yourself in different contexts.

You can't separate demonetization from the question of publishing. Traditional media uses ads revenue for compensating content creators, but at the same time has a responsability for having copyright for every content they publish. Also just by the decision of demonetizing Alphabet gets farther from being just a communications medium earning money from helping the spread of information and getting to be a decider of what those users can communicate with eachother (Joe Rogan is a great recent example).

When a new law is being created, often it is created _because_ something legal, but immoral is being done by a person/company.

Also the law you refer to is a law inside the U.S., but Alphabet earns more than 50% of revenue (and most views) outside US. It was doing illegal business in the EU multiple times on grand scale and was given fines for it.

What law did Twitter fail to abide by in linking a tweet to factual information?

The fatal mistake which will cost the FAANGs billions is in becoming editors rather than facilitators by appending links to Twitter users posts. This doesn't scale (will all posts not edited/ appended to/rubber stamped by Twitter be considered 'true?) and also blows out the already stretched meaning of Section 230. This opens the door to much greater regulation of BigTech internationally.

'Section 230 says that "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider" (47 U.S.C. § 230). In other words, online intermediaries that host or republish speech are protected against a range of laws that might otherwise be used to hold them legally responsible for what others say and do. The protected intermediaries include not only regular Internet Service Providers (ISPs), but also a range of "interactive computer service providers," including basically any online service that publishes third-party content. Though there are important exceptions for certain criminal and intellectual property-based claims, CDA 230 creates a broad protection that has allowed innovation and free speech online to flourish'.

https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230

Section 230 co author twitter (sic) thread https://twitter.com/RonWyden/status/1266052221072019456

>factual information

Well... if you really want to get into it. Twitter can’t “fact check” the original statement. Because it was a prediction.

It hasn’t happened yet. It’s unlikely to be mass scale fraud, of course, but it’s a future event.

It’s his opinion / prediction. As wrong as it is, that isn’t something they should “fact check”.

Twitter picked a really bad tweet to make a stand on. Like it or not, they chose to editorialize someone else’s content, that’s a publisher.

They didn’t have to “break a law” to now be liable for other content they “publish”. That’s all the EO is, that Section 230 doesn’t apply to publishers.

I’m gonna nitpick, but they didn’t editorialize it. They posted their view in the form of a reply. Editorialization would mean changing what he wrote. Literally the root word of “editorialization” is edit.

Twitter as a company didn't even have a presence on Twitter until they posted the fact check.

Does that matter? Are they not allowed to start having a presence whenever they choose?

Allowed to? Depends how you view publisher vs platform.

They are a private company and can do as they like... but if they’re going to “take ownership” of information on their service they are breaking the spirit of neutral carriers and Section 230.

This seems like an odd hill to die on. Surely they could have fact checked 100 different Trump tweets with actual misinformation and not just his concerns/prediction.

I am of the opinion they wanted to do this for awhile, planned it out poorly, and pulled the trigger at the wrong tweet.

> breaking the spirit of neutral carriers and Section 230

Section 230 has nothing to do with neutral carriers. Section 230 does not mention, imply, or otherwise suggest that there is such thing as a "carrier", much less that one need be "neutral".

Here's what it says:

> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider

> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of 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; or

There's a bunch more, but it's all fluff or irrelevant. There are no relevant obligations (there is one obligation that the law has, it relates to kid-friendly modes in websites).

Note that there is no categorization as "publisher" or "platform". You are protected from certain kinds of content. The New York Times, who clearly publishes their own content, still has Section 230 protections for comments made in the comment box on their articles, because that content is not made by the NYT, but by another individual.

Under section 230, you can only lose protection on a specific piece of content if you are deemed to be the publisher of that specific piece of content. So the worst thing that can happen to twitter here is that they are determined to be the publisher of Trump's tweet for the purposes of things like libel and copyright lawsuits.

Given that, can you explain what spirit of the law is violated, and what spirit of "neutral carriers" (do you mean common carriers?) is related or to this?

Ok, that’s fair. Editorialize isn’t exactly right - except - it’s not just a reply. It’s altering the format to include a new entry that no one else could make. I suppose in my mind that’s how I would view an editor redlining something.

Can't Twitter fact check falsehoods that he stated in support of his prediction?

> It’s his opinion / prediction. As wrong as it is, that isn’t something they should “fact check”.

"I believe that if we allow people to leave their homes, everyone will die of Covid-19". Narrator: "There is no evidence that everyone will die of Covid-19, in fact there is plenty of evidence that everyone will not die of Covid-19".

At which point you claim that the original statement, because it included opinion, could not be fact checked, even though presenting sources that counter the priors required for the claims to make sense is a completely reasonable thing to do.

What exactly would be the public benefit of social media companies taking responsibility for user content? As far as I can see this framework does a fair job of making the same remedies available, just against the authors instead of the social media companies.

They will be able to silence those views they don't like and promote the ones they do. It will become readily apparent which side of the fence a social media company is on.

If I own Google and refuse to index and show in search results anything from Huffington Post, CNN, Washington Post is that okay? It is not! Technically, Google is a private entity and can do whatever it wants.

Once a company becomes too big like Twitter, Google, Facebook, they have a moral obligation to stay neutral.

Interesting how opinions expressing a viewpoint that differs from the hive mind gets down-voted.

> Huffington Post, CNN, Washington Post is that okay? It is not!

This happens. Frequently.

Replace "Huff post et al" with "Tiananmen Square" and search while inside China.

Specific to the US, the 1st amendment prevents the restriction of speech by government, which in some cases overlaps into private enterprise.

there are numerous examples when google removes websites from search results because of violating SEO rules and other rules of google.

numerous examples when google removes apps from their appstore.

even numerous examples when they are abusing search and prioritise their own products instead of competitors.

same for amazon.

corporate interests are not moral, dont forget that.

Violating SEO rules is bad and these sites should be removed that can be understood.

Is it good for the democracy if Google removes all results from new sites it doesn't agree with? It should remain neutral as much as possible and not tamper with its search results.

This is not what's happening on Twitter. They're not removing tweets.

They are just using Trump's tweet to promote their own point of view.

> They are just using Trump's tweet to promote their own point of view.

Correction: they're using their own service to promote their own point of view.

I honestly think there are real issues with the public means of communication being privately owned by a smallish number of entities, but it does free expression no good to make the fight about letting lies, disinformation, and other forms of untruth to flow unimpeded.

If an immoral actor reaches a certain size and dominance over enough people's lives don't we generally encourage taking action against that actor?

I would argue that Google has an obligation to be transparent, they do not have an obligation to be neutral. As you state, they are a private entity and can do whatever they want.

If news providers and other knowledge providers are allowed to curate what data they present then I don't think it's reasonable to demand that Google be held to a higher standard. Further, literally nothing is stopping you from creating your own knowledge aggregator if you feel that Google is doing a bad job of displaying pertinent data.

I'm a big proponent of free speech, and have read a bit on the arguments against Big Tech censorship. One of the arguments against Google being able to selectively censor political content, despite being a private company, is that they could be classified as an essential service. I'm obviously getting information from sources opposed to Google's censorship, so I don't know if the wider legal community agrees with that view, but it's worth considering.

Another argument is that they have legal protections as content providers. However, the same protections don't apply to content publishers. If their censorship places them in the publisher category, they could open themselves to lawsuits. YouTube is an example that usually comes up. If a user uploads an illegal video, YouTube has protections against lawsuits. As a publisher, they would have more liability for the content they host.

Talking as an outsider, what's really weird to me is how the things Trump clearly says or does on a whim result in serious, deep debate in all the media and public forums.

He goes "I will build a wall spanning a continent to stop mexicans" and you see deep debate about how effective it would be, the price, the logistics of it... it's clearly a dumb idea, why does everyone pretend it's not and engage in deep consideration of it?

Now I'm seeing the same thing. Extensive debates about public opinion, the first amendment and the difficulties of moderating a service with millions of subscribers, when it is painfully obvious that the only reasoning by the president is "they messed with me so I'm going to get revenge".

The American Presidency is a storied and historic office, not just a job but a symbol of the nation, of its civic and cultural identity, so it has been difficult for a lot of people to come to terms with it being occupied by someone who is quite so openly and vocally a gibbering idiot. Hence the need to pretend that these pronouncements represent proposals into which serious thought and effort has been invested, rather than the momentary whims of a bloviating narcissist.

> it's clearly a dumb idea, why does everyone pretend it's not and engage in deep consideration of it?

I've learned that Trump is an incredibly dull instrument, but the points he raises (when you get past the verbal diarrhea) tend to be things that some significant fraction of his "base" care about or that are not actually novel policy ideas. "The wall" as he describes it is dumb. But it has existed in some form since the 1990s (albeit only segments) and the way he describes it is a simple symbol for people that tend not to know how to "solve" problems related to (illegal?) immigration.

Most average people don't care about policy details so they don't know how to argue them to "win the argument". Trump gives them a sports team to cheer for and simple slogans to shout so they feel like they are participating.

> when it is painfully obvious that the only reasoning by the president is "they messed with me so I'm going to get revenge".

The problems that Trump has with social media companies go back far more than 2 days and a fact checking link. His Attorney Generals (both Barr and Sessions) have been working with Republican state Attorneys General for years to craft a response to what they see is "liberal Silicon Valley techies banning (or shadowbanning or remonetizing or ...) conservative voices". Trump doesn't see a downside to taking this action.

The interesting thing is that there are far more than just political American conservatives that want to see regulation of {YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc}. Elizabeth Warren wrote a detailed essay on medium.com about why they should be more strictly regulated. A crazy YouTuber from San Diego got so pissed at YouTube for banning her account or demonetizing her channel that she drove up to San Bruno (not sure exactly which city/location) and shot up the building. There are quite a few stories of vague ToS being enforced in a not-so-predictable manner which leaves end users with banned accounts (which may be the nexus to more important accounts like email accounts).

I think a lot of people blindly follow Trump because they also hate who he hates. Trump is a divider, and his supporters feel empowered by agreeing with whatever he says.

"The wall" was an issue long before Trump, as is section 230 for social media. So what may seem like childish tantrums, are in reality diversion and deception tactics in order to drum up thirst for reviving underlying political issues. Since there is already a somewhat stifled political debate, the diversion works on all levels, every single time, to spread FUD, disruption, renewed outrage, discordance and confusion.

Additionally, the intervention Twitter seems to have chosen here wasn’t actually to silence the user (who happens to be the current President), but to mark/annotate with a fact check label, which is essentially responding to speech with more speech. That’s entirely compatible with even far-reaching 1A readings and robust philosophical perspectives on it.

And in fact, Twitter’s civil leadership policy has been allowing such users (including Trump) extra leeway.

The fact that Trump is mad about this shows that what he’s concerned about isn’t his own freedoms of speech are being impinged on, but that his freedom from accountability in discourse might be threatened.

Exactly this and I'm surprised that I had to scroll this far down to find this comment.

Extract this scenario out into meat space. Imagine if a town was running a bulletin board where anyone could post town news and a citizen posted a flyer talking about town crime statistics that were wrong. A town employee noticed and posted an addendum identified as being from the town right next to the flyer saying "actually the real data is X". Should town employees not be allowed to do that?

The Cox-Wyden Amendment: Section 230 specifically stated:

"encourage the unfettered and unregulated development of free speech on the Internet," as one judge put it;".

https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230/legislative-history

Why does the US government exist? The only reason is to protect the rights of the citizens.

Once upon a time, the rights of citizens only protected them from the federal government's actions. States could (and did) infringe on these rights. Corporations were much less powerful at this time, so were not much of a concern.

We ended up fighting a war over this, and one result was the 14th amendment, which binds the states to also protect these important rights.

Now a days, corporations are powerful enough to infringe these rights. We've dealt with this in the past when "trust busting" was more of a thing. There is established precedent for not allowing monopolies to infringe on people's rights.

There's nothing special about the "private sector" that allows big corporations to infringe people's rights without due process.

I’m sad to see this downvoted. I’m not entirely sure I agree with your point, as I think the gulf between “profit-seeking corporation” and “democratically-elected government” is a lot wider than the one we jumped between Federal and state government for the 14th. That said, I like that this line of thinking made me question some assumptions I didn’t know I was even making before.

You do not have a right to use Twitter. Currently, in the US, you do not even have a right to use the Internet. Twitter and ISPs may decide not to service you. As it pertains to Internet services specifically, these services are also allowed to moderate content that you post. You are not guaranteed a right for them to host your speech and show it to the world.

If you have an issue with how Twitter, FaceBook, YouTube, et al. moderate content, you are completely free to create your own Internet service which you may moderate as you see fit.

The US government exists to insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, and promote the general welfare. The government is not interested in protecting the rights of citizens. Instead, it is the rights of citizens which are meant to protect us from the government. Other laws may dictate how businesses are allowed operate but the first amendment absolutely does not apply to private businesses.

During the civil rights era, private businesses infringed on people's rights with state government backing. People with the wrong skin color were forbidden from being in certain restaurants or sitting in certain seats, etc.

These were private companies infringing on rights.

The president sent in the national guard.

Again, you are conflating rights granted by the constitution with legislation that dictates how businesses must operate. Racial discrimination in public accommodations, like those that you mentioned, was outlawed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964[1]. In that case, those private companies were explicitly breaking federal law. Rights granted in the constitution are separate and are only intended to protect citizens from the government.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964

The constitution does not grant rights It merely enumerates some of the rights we have.

The civil rights act did not make up any rights - it created law to enable enforcement and protection of rights people already had, but which were being infringed - both by states and by private businesses.

The social media monopolies are infringing on our rights. There may not as yet be a legal remedy for that, but it seems likely that there will be, as in many ways these companies are more powerful and wield more influence over people than governments do.

I think that you have a general misunderstanding on what a "right" is in the eyes of the law[1]. Furthermore, you appear to also have a misunderstanding of the differences between natural rights and legal rights[2].

> The social media monopolies are infringing on our rights

The right to free speech is not a natural right; nor does it apply to anything but freedom from government persecution on the basis of speech. Freedom of speech is a right that is granted by the constitution and has been further defined by case law over the past 250 years. The Supreme Court has pointed out that private companies are not subject to protections enumerated in the constitution, which, again, only apply to the government[3].

[1]: https://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Right

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_rights_and_legal_right...

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Community_Access_Cor...

> I'm not sure how much more embarrassed I can get for my country.

Every election season, I’ve said, “These are some of the worst candidates I’ve ever seen. I’m not sure how much lower the bar can get.” And then it gets lower.

I submit one of the reasons our candidates are so bad is that our discourse refuses to hold them to account. Instead of taking a position and punishing bad acts, we excuse them by telling ourselves the other side "would have been" just as bad. So the lesson successful candidates take away is that they don't need to adhere to principles, because their voters will find some mental excuse (like you just did!) to vote for them anyway.

If you don't want this to happen you can't vote for the administration (not "candidates") who did it. Nothing changes until someone starts losing elections. But my guess is you aren't willing to go that far, because of something about Biden.

Remember that Kennedy won because the mob stuffed ballot boxes for him.

The only thing that's changed every election is that you're 4 years older an paying attention.

>I'm not sure how much more embarrassed I can get for my country.

I honestly used to be proud to be an American. Now I am so ashamed that when I travel (or back in the days when I traveled) I lie and say I'm a Canadian.

This strikes me as shameful behavior.

You should say the truth: you're an American, and Americans have a diversity of views on most subjects, just like every other country.

When conducting business this is more trouble, and causes more discomfort, than it’s worth.

FWIW, I've dozens of backpackers around the world with Canadian flags sewn on their backpacks who later admit quietly they're American.

They said it just makes life easier while travelling.

I used to be proud of our flag and would display it. Now (past 3 years) it has morphed into a symbol of hate and oppression. When I see armed 'protestors' terrorizing a state legislature and waving the flag, then the flag is no longer a symbol of freedom but of intimidation.

You may want to read the history of banana republics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic.

Given the wildness of that particular dark corner of our history, I'm looking forward to reading about the history we're living through now. Hopefully after some emotional remove, like in another ten years.

>What's surprising is how often I encounter fellow Americans mistakenly asserting the first amendment extends beyond government and into the private sector.

I've only ever heard people complaining that people misunderstand the first amendment. I've yet to see someone say they believe the first amendment governs and protects against private censorship.

However, I constantly see people conflating the concept of free speech and the first amendment. Free speech is an ideological principle, not a law.

If you read the first section of the EO it is clear that they are attempting to make an argument that Twitter, by moderating/curating/screening, is no longer protected by section 230, as defined by the famous 90s court cases regarding prodigy, aol, and compuserve. [0] [1]

Spurious argument or not you are mischaracterizing the situation.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratton_Oakmont,_Inc._v._Prod....

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeran_v._America_Online,_Inc.

I'd be curious to hear real lawyers weigh in on this, but... that sounds pretty dubious to me. Executive orders aren't laws, they don't get interpreted by courts in general and they absolutely don't override existing case law! I mean, who cares what the executive branch says about section 230? We know what congress wrote, and we know how the judiciary has interpreted it, because we've already had that fight.

I found the following video insightful:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmBGFVUjCaI

It seems like an executive order is more of a guideline on how they interpret the law. He mentions that congress would need to make changes to the law for it to have teeth. He also said there will be lawsuits on the way.

There's the legality of freedom and the spirit.

I'd be pretty disturbed if an ISP all of a sudden prevented me from contacting wikipedia, or throttled my access to competitors. The ISP is private, but it's not really in the spirit of freedom to do so.

Similarly, if an airline said they won't sell me a ticket because I'm going to a rally for a particular politician. Or if the post office (or fedex) wouldn't carry my letter to the editor because they disagree with my opinion. Or if I couldn't get basic banking, insurance, or other business services because my legal business is politically unpopular.

There also is some legal murkiness because a federal judge ruled that Trump couldn't block people on Twitter[1].

[1] https://www.governing.com/topics/politics/gov-twitter-facebo...

His motivations may be personal but they laid out the reasons for doing it pretty clearly. 230 was being too broadly interpreted, can anyone on either side of the aisle dispute that fact?

I think there are two issues at hand here. The first is related to section 230 of the Communication Decency Act. This section provides a legal shield to companies that act as an intermediary by hosting comments. This legal shield is effective even if the intermediary moderates the comments and provides editorials. The executive action is saying if you are providing editorials, you are no longer just an intermediary and should be held accountable for what your users post. In other words, if you fact check your users posts you are responsible if hate speech or misinformation or child pornography are shared on your platform. I think 2 reasonable people could debate the pros and cons of this.

The second issue at hand is the catalyst for this change. Jack Dorsey picked a fight with a giant orange toddler. For some reason the American people entrusted this giant orange toddler with the full authority of the executive branch of the United States of America. The orange toddler decided throw a fit and use this power that is meant to better the American public to retaliate against this personal attack. This second issue is the one that makes me sad to be a registered Republican and an American.

Don't be sad to be a Republican. Elect better Republicans, and kick out the carpetbaggers.

Those people may know more than you think.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v....

Twitter is a California company.

> movie theater where they need to shut the hell up or leave.

This has nothing to do with anything. The 1A has always been understood as a freedom of content, not form. Noise ordinances and rules are constitutional.

The heart of this discussion is not the freedom of speech, it's the the ability to say whatever you want without consequence.

What Twitter wants, though selective undocumented "curating" of its platform, is the ability to slander, intimidate, harass, terrorize and verbally abuse whomever they don't like, without actually being drug infront of a jury and tried for crimes.

Telco's wanted the same government exemption that USPS had; someone mailed a letter with a bomb, they can't be held responsable. This was something the courts were likely to give them anyway.

Intentionally promoting a user's post containing a manifesto about assassinating a standing president is no different than USPS mailing millions of manifesto letters to people. One mechanism is simply more automated.

Does that mean we can sue Fox entertainment fake news network?

You can already sue them. For example, if Fox runs a segment claiming that you (gulli1010) are a murderer, you can sue them for slander (with or without this executive order).

If someone tweets that you are a murderer, you can't sue Twitter (or rather, if you do, Twitter will be protected by Section 230).

However, suppose Twitter announces the following policy: "Any tweet which calls someone a murderer, shall be deleted, unless the alleged murderer is gulli1010". Should you be allowed to sue Twitter then? That's a more nuanced question. And what if the above policy isn't an official policy but is a de facto policy?

People should look into the Seth Rich lawsuit and Ed Butowsky. Trump forgets his crowd is the one who constantly panders conspiracy theories like PizzaGate and QAnon. This will effectively take them down entirely.

Yes, but at the cost of the entire platform. I’d doubt that Twitter could sustain being endlessly sued over user posts. They’d die the death of a thousand cuts. And a lot of conservatives would be perfectly happy with that.

No one side has a monopoly on conspiracy theories. The Russia collusion was something spun for years by the networks where people under oath said one thing privately and another publicly.

[citation needed]

They have none except Trump's Twitter feed.

From the mouth of Richard Grenell: https://twitter.com/RichardGrenell/status/126602867937061683...

A twitter post? All the intelligence agencies said their was Russia collusion. Remember the President said... Russia, if you're listening?

It seems like the fundamental question is: are services like Twitter and Facebook basically utilities (like ISPs) or are they basically editorial (like newspapers).

That is, there are some private companies, like ISPs, that are seen as part of the basic plumbing of the internet, and which are generally not allowed to editorialize their content (for example, through net neutrality rules). However, there are others, like Yelp, which are seen as publishers of edited and curated content, even if some of the content was written by users and not the company itself.

The question is, have Twitter and Facebook (etc.) become dominant enough that they are essentially utilities, or are they editors of content like Yelp?

> dominant enough that they are essentially utilities

If that statement is true then it's a sad day in America. That means that competition is dead and monopoly wins.

This is a symptom of a larger problem. The Constitution and thusly the election system is woefully out of date and needs a formal rewriting based on a more general and modern consensus of ideas and principals. All of these issues could be irrelevant with an updated and more precise rule of law and government. I think we can all agree that any document which counts some people as 3/5s needs to be reassessed.

Youtube places checks on videos for covid ... Antivax and more. How is what twitter did any different. Why is the conversation about what twitter did and not about Trump getting mad and using an EO to stop people from fact checking him. Why isnt that the conversation.. I shouldnt be able to turn a radio on and not hear how unprofessional and childish and abuse of power this truly is.

This isnt how the presidency is supposed to be used. He got mad and hes trying to silence his critics. Enough with the twitter is right or wrong.. Publisher vs platform. This is the conversation that needs to be had.

There is no reason an EO of this nature should be slid across the desk. A blind judge could see hes reacting to being checked.

> This isnt how the presidency is supposed to be used. He got mad and hes trying to silence his critics.

There is a “reply” button underneath all of his tweets, you know?

It's basically too late.

First, the administration must formulate the rule itself. In formulating the rule, it must also provide supporting documentation justifying the rulemaking, which must include a record of the data looked at in deciding upon the need for the rule, research and conclusions drawn from that data. If the research is external to the agency, they must also justify the selection of research used in drafting the rulemaking.

Once the proposed rule is published in the federal register, there is a comment period of at least 60 days or up to 180 days (depending on the complexity of the rule).

The administration must then spend time reviewing the comments. It doesn't need to respond to comments individually but it does need to address all of the issues raised by those comments, especially if the issues raise constitutional concerns.

Assuming that they get that out of the way without modifying the proposed rule (which could trigger another comment period, depending on the extent of the changes), the final version of the rule must then be published in the federal register.

A final rule does not take effect until at least 30 days after it is published in the federal register. There are very few rules which can be ex post facto (generally only rules that grant additional rights or freedoms, or which are tax-related).

So, even assuming the the crackerjacks in the Trump Administration could get a proposed rule out tomorrow, and review comments after the comment period in one day, they're still looking at 92 days before the rule could take effect, or approximately the end of August.

Note:this doesn't include challenges to the rule proceeding through the federal court system. While SCOTUS could theoretically hear emergency appeals to a temporary injunction or district court ruling on the merits, they've refused to grant appeals in much less contentious cases where they ultimate sided with the administration. If they were to do so, the ruling would come in the middle of the electoral cycle, and it would likely result in the Democrats taking the House, Senate, and Presidency. And then they could simply override the rule using the APA in January.

Note: providing as followup comment since other is very long.

Trump's order is not rulemaking. It's just an order to the federal agencies to start drafting a rule that would strip social media companies of CDA protection. Executive agencies have been designated the power to make legislative rules by laws of Congress (which sets forth the required procedure described above) but this grant does not extend to the Executive Office itself (i.e., the president).

As the Axios article notes, a very conservative appeals court just ruled that under the CDA, social media companies aren't public forums for first amendment purposes, so the agencies would also have to come up with a conforming legal justification explaining why social media platforms are public spaces or otherwise subject to the infringement of their private first amendment rights.

One more thing to consider if twitter/facebook are publisher or not is see how they earn money? They earn money in very similar way like a publisher does, by advertisement. Like any publisher they will want to make sure that content on their platform is "advertiser friendly".

Seems counter productive to the President's intent. If platforms can be held liable for user posts, that will give them a strong incentive to remove anything at all that might even come close to giving them legal liability. So sure, maybe changing the law (or asking the FCC to reinterpret its strictures) would "get back" at the companies President Trump thinks are doing something wrong to him, but the net results would be severe limitations on what he could say on all platforms.

Then he'll claim that he's being censored even more, which is probably exactly what he wants to do to rile up his supporters.

except his supporters won't know about it since he is censored.

The president can't be easily muted in the same way that a non-famous person could. Good or bad, the press will parrot what he says, in any forum.

The President can call a press conference at any moment that will get coverage from pretty much every national media outlet, especially any outlet likely to be frequented by his supporters. Presidents will never be without a method to communicate with their supporters.

The idea is that it would be impossible for Twitter to remove every single Tweet that's libelous, threatening, etc., and so the only way to avoid being sued is to not remove _anything_. That ends up being a policy that is favorable to people who want to spread disinformation.

It would probably results in a mass exodus of discussion on the internet as every single platform from Twitter to niche forums on obscure topics suddenly were not allowed to perform any sort of moderation without incurring legal liability. Thus the decision to abandon the discussion venue or watch it descent into something resembling the toxic cesspools seen in places like 8chan.

I will reemphasize an opinion I expressed on an earlier thread: this is an overtly totalitarian move designed to intimidate and suppress private entities' protected expression, disguised as a reaction to perceived bias (which would still be an invalid pretense for any such order). It's a disgusting attack on an American industry by our own executive.

That own executive will attack any industry he doesn't agree with at any point he pleases. It's how he has done it for years in business and it's how he will do it in politics for as long as he isn't prosecuted and removed from office. As long as the Republicans keep supporting him and have a majority he will just continue to pull more and more crazy stunts and get away with it.

The Supreme Court has ruled that it “does not disable the government from taking steps to ensure that private interests not restrict...the free flow of information and ideas.”

See the case here: https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/93-44.ZO.html

The full text: "The First Amendment's command that government not impede the freedom of speech does not disable the government from taking steps to ensure that private interests not restrict, through physical control of a critical pathway of communication, the free flow of information and ideas."

Twitter is expressing it's 1st amendment rights by labeling tweets. Twitter is not the government, Trump is. The situation is completely opposite what you make it.

I don't agree with the executive order at all, but the person you responded to doesn't have the situation backwards.

People (such as yourself, and myself as it happens) will claim that this order violates the first amendment. However the Supreme Court has explicitly allowed such actions under very specific circumstances. One such circumstance was called out above.

So the question is: would the actions in this case constitute a step to prevent a private interest (ie Twitter) from restricting communication via control of a physical pathway?

How does fact-checking dishonest (or at the very least disingenuous) comments "restrict the free flow of information and ideas"?

The ideas still flow freely. Twitter isn't even forcing more accurate and factual information right next to the dishonest framing. You have to click the link to even see it.

This seems like world class straw-grasping.

A ruling like that makes me even more surprised that the government did not take steps to maintain net neutrality. I would say ISPs are a far more "critical pathway of communication" than Twitter is.

Them taking steps to prevent Twitter from "restricting" information really doesn't follow with the approach this administration's FCC took with ISPs.

No it's not. Twitter currently enjoys immunity from section 230 of the communication decency act. That protection requires that they are not editorializing content. Fact checking content is a form of editorializing. If you want to do that, no protection and you are open to lawsuits. This has bi-partisan support and they are simply reining this in which is long overdue.

That is not editorializing. Day in and day out journalists print news stories that have been fact checked and contain links to source information. And then there’s the opinion section. It’s clear which Twitter was doing, and it wasn’t editorial.

Newspaper doesn’t enjoy the protection of Section 230.

That doesn't matter because we can't even start talking about S230 until we agree that what Twitter did was editorializing, which it wasn't.

> That protection requires that they are not editorializing content.

Please cite the law that says that, because it's certainly not S230.

S230 was specifically made to empower sites to moderate, editorialize, and remove content as they see fit for their platform.

IANAL but I think Section 230 does not extend blanket immunity for any moderation "as they see fit," because then they would be a publisher and should be held up to publisher-type liability.

> Section 230 protect a blog host from liability for “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.” [1]

The phrase "otherwise objectionable" has come under limited judicial review. It is not a unlimited catch-all, but relates back to the meaning and purpose of the preceding language, mainly dealing with mature themes.

The Ninth circuit reviewed a case against Malwarebytes where they were blocking access to a competitor and they were hoping for Section 230 protection, but the Ninth found that "otherwise objectionable" did not extend to anti-competitive blocking. [2]

I think it's also interesting that in this particular case it is not even really a question of restricting access or availability of material. Twitter is editorializing -- essentially adding a Editor's Note to Trump's tweet.

That Twitter has to right to do this is unquestionable. The question is whether in doing so they have crossed a bridge into become a publisher and not a platform protected by Section 230 immunity.

If you read the history / case law which Section 230 is meant to address, the issue was a contrast between Compu-Serv dodging liability from statements posted by users because they were not moderating topics, vs. Prodigy being found liable for user-posted statements because they were moderating topics.

> Section 230 was enacted in early 1996, in the CDA’s Section 509, titled “Online Family Empowerment.” In part, this provision responded to a 1995 decision issued by a New York state trial court: StrattonOakmont, Inc. v. Prodigy Services Co. The plaintiffs in that case were an investment banking firm. The firm alleged that Prodigy, an early online service provider, had published a libelous statement that unlawfully accused the firm of committing fraud. Prodigy itself did not write the allegedly defamatory message, but it hosted the message boards where a user posted the statement. The New York court concluded that the company was nonetheless a “publisher” of the alleged libel and therefore subject to liability. The court emphasized that Prodigy exercised “editorial control” over the content posted on its Congressional Research Service site, actively controlling the content of its message boards through both an “automatic software screening program” and through “Board Leaders” who removed messages that violated Prodigy’s guidelines. [3]

CDA's intention was to allow "good faith" / "Good Samaritan" moderation without triggering publisher liability. The CDA was not designed to totally eliminate the entire concept of publisher liability on the internet.

There is a lesser standard of liability which falls upon distributors based on content which they "know or should have known" violated the law. It's a higher standard than publisher liability because it requires establishing direct knowledge of the offending material. Very interestingly, the courts found that CDA 230 actually precludes even distributor liability in the case the service knows or should have known of the illegal content, because distributor liability is a subset of publisher liability and if they don't have publisher liability then they can't have distributor liability. (I'm sure I'm butchering this explanation somewhat).

This has become a problem as of late with issues like revenge porn or online harassment campaigns where service providers had refused to take down material even after being notified it was illegal, and were getting protection under Section 230 for keeping the content up!

[1] - https://www.eff.org/issues/bloggers/legal/liability/230

[2] - https://www.wileyconnect.com/home/2020/1/22/ninth-circuit-re...

[3] - https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/LSB10306.pdf

From the same article:

> Do I lose Section 230 immunity if I edit the content? Courts have held that Section 230 prevents you from being held liable even if you exercise the usual prerogative of publishers to edit the material you publish. You may also delete entire posts. However, you may still be held responsible for information you provide in commentary or through editing. For example, if you edit the statement, "Fred is not a criminal" to remove the word "not," a court might find that you have sufficiently contributed to the content to take it as your own. Likewise, if you link to an article, but provide a defamatory comment with the link, you may not qualify for the immunity.

You may be held liable for the commentary you provide, but you are not liable for the content you provide commentary for, even if you choose to sometimes provide commentary.

And the next paragraph from that EFF article;

> The courts have not clarified the line between acceptable editing and the point at which you become the "information content provider." To the extent that your edits or comment change the meaning of the information, and the new meaning is defamatory, you may lose the protection of Section 230.

I'm not qualified to say what the limit is, I'm merely hoping to provide some background on how 230 came about and that it does have some form of limits.

What's particularly unclear to me is that if you have a site under active moderation which could even include editorializing some small percentage of the posts that are made, how does that impact the potential liability from posts which you don't editorialize.

Right, again: if your edits cause the content to become defamatory, you may be liable for that specific content. Modifying any particular piece of content does not cause you to lose sec 230 protections in general.

So unless Trump's original tweet, or Twitter's fact check are defamatory or otherwise illegal, Twitter doesn't care.

> of material that the provider or user considers to be [...] otherwise objectionable,

That seems like a pretty blank check for moderation to me, at least. "Otherwise objectionable" can easily be defined in a ToS, and you're off to the races.

It does in English, but in legal construction an ending "or otherwise.." usually limits its scope to items similar to the ones at the start of the list.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/ejusdem_generis

> For example, if a law refers to automobiles, trucks, tractors, motorcycles, and other motor-powered vehicles, a court might use ejusdem generis to hold that such vehicles would not include airplanes, because the list included only land-based transportation.

(I'm not a lawyer.)

Even if that’s your take, doing this with an executive order feels like a totalitarian move.

edited for typos: Honest question with this comment. Which would you rather have controlling content. A private company that has not public accountability or a political official who was put in office via a democratic election? I get that a lot of people do not like Trump, but currently, even if he wanted to be a totalitarian leader the US currently has checks and balances that protect from that.

You ask that question as if it were a choice between the two. It's not. We have neither scenario now, and neither is being proposed.

What we have is private enterprise, and government regulation. Neither has complete control, neither should have complete control.

> even if he wanted to be a totalitarian leader the US currently has checks and balances that protect that.

What checks, exactly? There was an impeachment recently wherein he refused to hand over any documents and witnesses. Those witnesses who chose to testify in the House were retaliated against. The Senate refused to hear any witnesses (a first for impeachment trials in the US). The President argued that if he believes his conduct will help his election, and he believes his election will help the American people, he cannot be removed for the conduct. The senate affirmed this view by acquitting him of the charges and refusing to remove him from office.

Or maybe the IG system checks him and his agencies? Well he's been busy firing any IG who is investigating him or his cronies like Mike Pompeo. Michael Atkinson was fired for bringing to light the fact that Trump was extorting a bribe from a foreign nation using taxpayer dollars. Glenn Fine was to oversee the spending of coronavirus federal dollars, but Trump wanted control of the money himself, so he had to go. Christi Grimm was fired for investigating PPE shortages in hospitals. Her findings flew against the Trump narrative that "everything was fine" so she had to go. Steve Linick was investigating corruption in the State Department, so he had to go at the request of the Secretary of State under investigation. Mitch Behm was investigating corruption of the Secretary of Transportation, who is the wife of Mitch McConnell, who refused to hear witnesses at Trump's impeachment trial. So he had to go.

Or maybe the Justice department is a check? They are supposed to be independent after all. Well, they're busy interfering in cases related to Trump's friends and associates. His Attorney General is happy to run interference for Trump in a number of areas, whether that be misrepresenting the Mueller report, intervening in Roger Stone's sentencing, or declining to prosecute a man who already plead guilty to crimes. Oh, and an internal memo of the Justice Department states that the President is immune from indictment. So there's no check there.

Maybe the court system can check Trump. He's been arguing in court that he has absolute immunity from investigation. He already enjoys immunity from indictment due to a memo written decades ago, but he asserts that he enjoys absolute immunity from even being investigated in the first place. If Congress and the DOJ can't even investigate him, how is the court supposed to hold him accountable?

Americans really love to trot out this trope that we have a "system of checks and balances" as if this is a hack-proof system that is incorruptible. It's failing right in front of us.

I have zero issues with private companies controlling their content. Companies are regulated by laws, if there is an issue with the law, the legislative has the responsibility to change it. Instead here you have a country’s president bypassing the law making system to control a company behavior, that’s by definition an authoritative action as it goes against the separation of powers and responsibilities, which defines in part a democratic system.

Opinions regarding Trump have nothing to do with anything here.

> That protection requires that they are not editorializing content.

It doesn't. Here is its text:

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230

Section 230 grants sites the freedom to moderate content. You've got it exactly backwards.

First: editorializing is not prohibited. Second, moderation has always been allowed. In fact, the main thrust of 230 is to allow moderation activities taken in good faith.

Also if a mass of bipartisan support existed, I expect it would have been rolled into the last changes that modified these liability protections on the topic of sex trafficking content.

No, the truth is that this particular controversy began when the double standard arose on various social media platforms when the current administration's use of social media violated ToS yet was allowed to remain. This in turn prompted greater awareness of all such content and the extent to which it had been allowed or overlooked, resulting in efforts by social media platforms to simply enforce their own ToS.

If there is a problem with the current Twitter actions taken, it's that they continue to try & thread the needle between two opposing goals: Adhering to their own ToS and preserving their platform as something other than a cesspool, and not adhering to their ToS in a way that makes powerful interest groups angry.

Twitter is _the_ place where political discourse happens. It's an unfortunate state of affairs for some that it happens to be a private company with a bias. And for better of for worse it does have a bias.

Who should host this discourse instead? The government? A perfectly impartial Vulcan? CNN? Fox?

It can be a private company it just needs to be regulated. I think you are underestimating how big Twitter is... It's way bigger than CNN its way bigger than Fox in fact those networks regularly quote tweets.

By eyeball-hours, Fox is much bigger than Twitter among American audiences. Viewers tune into it for hours, on a daily basis.

What kind of regulation is it subjected to? It doesn't have to be neutral, and it has a legally-tested right to lie, and mislead. And that's for first-party content directly produced by it.

Do you have a quote on eyeball hours? Fox at most gets 2-3 million viewers at prime time. Twitter has hundreds of millions of users and their reach exceeds even their membership, as Tweets often drive narrative on many other platforms.

You can read the order. Section 230 of the Communication Decency Act set out provisions protecting internet service providers from liability for obscene, lewd, etc content on the basis they are a neutral platform (like an email provider) and not an active arbiter and curator of content published on their page. The law clearly states it's protection for private blocking and screening of offensive material (lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessive violent, harassing, etc). Not for editorial protection. Not for arbitrary enforcement of TOS.

Major networks regularly quote Twitter. I would hate for Twitter to become an echo chamber like Fox news.

So you suggest the government gets to decide, through your proposed regulatory agency.

Looking forward to an army of bureaucrats making sure every tweet is kosher, then? An agency will last longer, with staff that lasts longer, than any single presidency.

Sounds like a nightmare scenario for an "un-PC" asshole like Trump.

I'm suggesting it has the same rules as a public square, which is what Twitter is. No incitement to violence, no obscenity etc but otherwise free.

You should realize those restrictions you suggest are regulated and enforced by the government and are applied inconsistently all the fucking time. Just look at how various different demonstrations in the last 5 years have been treated, and how some of them have ended in violence.

I really don't think you, or Trump, understand the ramifications of what you're asking for. You have this ideal, naive view of what's allowed in "public squares" that doesn't seem to match what happens.

See: Trumps belief he was persecuted by other government agencies. Which he complains about on Twitter. Which would now be answering to a... government agency...

If Twitter were a physical space there would be regular violence that would have to be shut down. The role of the government is to break up the violence if it occurs.

Again, that's a very idealistic "role of the government" that assumes there will never be anyone who interprets what should and shouldn't be allowed differently from you, or in a way that harms you.

And then, once that happens, now you have no recourse - even if you build another platform, it ends up controlled by the same regulators.

If enough people feel that it has a bias, and are discontent with it, they are free to start their own platform. They are also free to not moderate their platform, or even moderate it with whatever bias they so choose.

This has happened a few times (Voat, Gab) and the utopia of a hands-off content platform has never played out to anything other than a cesspool. Popular platforms remain popular and useful because they have the power to make editorial decisions.

I also assert that the world is not locked in to Twitter today, just like we were not locked in to Digg a decade ago. Users will flock elsewhere if they sense a need.

Great and then we will see even more echo chambers.

What people need is not another right wing echo chamber and not another left wing one either.

Twitter was that neural platform for a while where ideas clashed but now they risk the right splintering off and that is not a good thing for anyone.

Letting false election interference stay up, with a link to facts about actual elections, is pretty much the exact opposite of an "echo chamber."

It's easy to parrot oft-repeated slipper slopes arguments, but doing that is actually the echo chamber. Especially when now even bothering to check to see if it applies in certain situations.

People are free to reply to Tweets with sources and facts if they want to. I just don't think that should be Twitter's job.

This case is fair enough but I really do believe in the slippery slope argument.

It's also clearly not an echo chamber to talk about it here considering the number of downvotes I'm sustaining. I'm also seeing posts get upvoted before they get downvoted so it's controversial... Which is a good thing for discourse!

> If enough people feel that it has a bias, and are discontent with it, they are free to start their own platform.

This is, of course, disingenuous. It's like saying, just a monolithic railroad company was about to bulldoze your house in the mid 1800s, "If you're discontent, you can always start your own railroad company." We're dealing with a complex system of interconnected motivations. "Start your own Twitter" is an anti-solution.

Unless I'm mistaken, Twitter isn't really in the business of bulldozing houses or otherwise introducing themselves into your daily life without consent - the simile feels forced.

Wrong, because no one is bulldozing your house.

You’re on a street with a 100 houses and one of them is having a cool party. But the cool kids don’t like you and don’t want you in their house. The other 99 houses (Gab, Mastodon, theDonald.win , bulletin boards, etc.) welcome you in, but you don’t think their owners are cool and don’t want to hang with them.

Should the government force the owner of the cool party house to let you hang with the cool kids?

Many would say that violates freedom of association.

> Popular platforms remain popular and useful because they have the power to make editorial decisions.

Bingo. I think this is a point that isn't made enough: to the extent platforms like Twitter can continue to exist, it depends on their ability to remove spammers, harassers, and other unwanted participants. Imagine using email in 2020 without a spam filter. Because Twitter isn't an open protocol, they provide both the protocol and the spam filter.

To ask them to stop removing any content would be as disruptive to their business as asking GMail to let all emails through.

We really have reached the stage where "facts have a well-known liberal bias", haven't we?

What is and isn't fact is for people to decide by themselves based on evidence. Not whatever Twitter decides is the truth. There are very few hard facts in this world especially surrounding politics.

> There are very few hard facts in this world especially surrounding politics.

Surely this is false. The world is full of hard facts—politics less than the sciences, sure, but still [0]. What are much rarer (non-existent?) are undisputed facts.

[0] To be clear, I distinguish hard facts in politics, like "Trump is the 45th president of the United States", from hard facts in political science, of which there indeed seem to be very few.

> What is and isn't fact is for people to decide by themselves based on evidence.

That is why Twitter is linking some facts to go along with the President's tweets.

Which facts you choose can show bias. Let people supply sources in replies.

Is the free speech of Twitter to be abridged? Section 230 allows good-faith moderation. Whether or not you believe they should do it, current law and court rulings have come down on the side them being allowed to do it and maintain their safe-harbor status.

We are taking about reform not what the current state of the law is. Twitter has an outsized impact for the small number of people who make those decisions.

You have to look at social media like a newspaper that publishes letters to the editor. They're the editor, you're writing letters. The editors are free to throw away crazy letters, edit letters for length, syntax, and content, or discontinue the section entirely. That's what free speech is. If a newspaper won't publish your letter to the editor, you can make your own newspaper and publish whatever you want.

You need a really good reason to take away Twitter's editorial control over Twitter. Please provide one. (The best I see so far is "Twitter is really popular, so they shouldn't be allowed to edit their own website." I am not convinced that that is a good justification for limiting the freedom of the press. If that's where we want to go, I would be the first in line to make sure Fox News drops their conservative bias and gives liberal viewpoints a fair shake. Does that sound good to you?)

What decisions? You think the government should be able to control whether Twitter adds additional context to posts?

For almost 100 years it has been held both in general and by the Supreme Court in particular that the remedy to speech you disagree with is more speech. Do you object to Twitter's ability to have such a disagreement?

Or, as is being proposed, do you believe Twitter should be held legally liable for every nasty thing said on their platform simply because they choose to have an opinion of their own?

To me that seems like a recipe for significantly more banning of content & users by Twitter to avoid even the hint of liability that would come with allowing it to stand.

What is and isn't evidence is for people to decide by themselves based on facts?

Again up for people to decide. Let people post facts and their sources in replies rather than have Twitter do it.

> it happens to be a private company with a bias

Political speech in public squares are what the First Amendment was written to protect. “Bias” isn’t an exception.

Twitter is now that public square.

Then the solution is to nationalize Twitter and enforce the first amendment there, not this.

> U.S. District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald in Manhattan ruled on May 23 [2018] that comments on the president’s account, and those of other government officials, were public forums and that blocking Twitter Inc users for their views violated their right to free speech under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-twitter/trump-u...

What's your point? That's a ruling against Trump, not against Twitter. The President can't arbitrarily block access to his communications.

Not in any way that matters, and certainly not in the legal sense. In a legal sense, Twitter is your neighbor's backyard, and your neighbor is telling you to stop lying about sleeping with his wife or get the fuck out of his yard.

Twitter is so much bigger than your neighbours back yard. Debates between most major public figures don't happen in your neighbours back yard. And it doesn't matter what the law is now, think about what it represents to people first then the future law comes from that.

In the legal sense, replies to tweets of government officials have indeed been public square since 2018.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-twitter/trump-u...

As a member of the government, Trump cannot selectively choose who can or cannot view things that are the public duty of his office. He can't ban people from watching White House videos on Youtube and he can't block people on his public facing government account.

This does not mean that Twitter or Youtube cannot ban them from their site or control what they do on their site. It means the government cannot selectively enforce who can or cannot view their content. If Trump came over to your home and asked to hold a SOTU, you have the right to turn him away. However if you agreed to let him hold a SOTU and he decides to turn away your friends because he doesn't like them, that would be against the law.

There have been rulings protecting free speech rights in shopping centers. There have been rulings protecting free speech rights against HOAs. There are certainly many cases where a private company has tried to leverage power over free speech and lost and this is one of those cases.

What is the alternative? I haven't seen Twitter be too heavy handed, I have yet to hear of a moderation activity on their part that seemed to go too far. If there is something to be frustrated about, it would be their double-standard for world figures that are allowed to violate their ToS with impunity.

I can't think of a single platform with a more hands-off approach than Twitter that hasn't become a toxic cesspool.

To be honest I think they are walking the line right now. I would worry about them taking it any further. The problem is there is nothing stopping them taking it any further.

What’s the bias? It’s verifiable facts versus lies and disinformation.

“ Twitter is _the_ place where political discourse happens.”

Say what? https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/04/24/sizing-up-tw...

Twitter is a minority.

Fox News Channel is arguably the place where political discourse happens. It’s the most popular cable news network in America.

Should Fox News be regulated and forced to have a democrat on each show?

Fox News is subject to liability and lawsuits if they publish defamatory statements on their platform. And that statement by Pew says nothing about the leverage and influence that Twitter enjoys on the national conversation.

Twitter was crazy for Bernie, but Joe Biden won the primary anyway.

Twitter is a self-selected minority of power users. It isn’t “The place” for political discourse, it’s simply a popular online web forum. Facebook is likely at least as influential on politics as twitter is.

That's not real political discourse, that's programming. Also major networks regularly quote Twitter.

The thing Twitter has is that it is a public forum where people who disagree can meet. I'd hate for it to become an echo chamber like Fox news.

They practically do have a democrat on each show. Times have changed, and Fox News is not at all what it once was. They even hired Donna Brazile, famous for slipping CNN debate questions to Hilary Clinton in advance and then being given the job of running the Democratic National Committee.

I'm not convinced it does have any bias against mainstream political ideas (obviously it is biased against things like white supremacy). This just lays bare that the "free speech" advocates are nothing of the sort.

No, Twitter has no bias against "mainstream political ideas". Their San Francisco urban chic politics are the very definition of today's "mainstream". Looking back over history, have mainstream political ideas always been the right ones, more or less? Or have mainstream political opinions frequently been pretty bad in retrospect?

The point of "free speech" is to be able to express opinions that aren't currently "mainstream" among fashionable thinkers. Free speech advocates aren't objecting to a single instance of some company expressing an opinion. That was just a "last straw", it seems. They are objecting to the tactics of Big Tech platforms in general, which use all sorts of deceitful methods to manipulate the visibility of arguments in order to influence the debate while pretending to be merely neutral platforms.

Thank you. Finally some hope. The problem is people think the current political landscape is somehow fundamentally different like history doesn't apply. Big picture view.

Trump is salty because supposedly these social media platforms lean left and are biased against the right. I can bet if it was the other way around, he wouldn't sign this. It is absolutely a partisan thing. I am not even saying whether he is right or wrong in his claim. But he is doing this only because the social media platforms supposedly hurt the right more.

Is providing fact-check links to the tweets of a specific person or group considered editorizing? Twitter said offering fact-check was not editorization, but the critics said that fact-checking a targeted group was. I have yet to see anyone clarify that key difference.

I could see how it would be considered editorializing. I haven't looked much at the facts in this particular case myself, but I've definitely seen cases where fact checks seemed to be dripping with a bias or agenda of their own.

But here's the thing: that's fine! I can see why people would think that Constitutional protections of individual free speech apply on social media, but regardless of if you think they do or not, then adding editorial content to the posts should be protected as well.

Do you think the 1st amendment protects your posts because they're "speech"? Yes? Then Twitter also has free speech on it's own platform, even if it's biased.

Do you think the 1st amendment does not protect your posts, because Twitter is a private company? Yes? Then Twitter is also allowed to say whatever it wants on it's own private platform.

There's a difference between censoring, which is a whole other discussion, and adding editorial or fact-checking content, and I just don't see how anyone can argue that Twitter can't do the latter.

edit: there's also a difference in individual free speech and companies having free speech, but I think Trump is the last person who can make a stand on the idea that commercial interests can't be operated based on individual preferences.

Twitter isn't targeting any specific group so this is a moot point.

They have been and will continue to "fact check" liberals and democrats too.

This reminds me of the dishonest framing of the IRS supposedly targeting conservative non profits for audits.

Yes, it is true Obama's DOJ targeted these groups.

What you'll never hear from the GOP talking points is that the IRS also targeted liberal groups for the same audits.

WSJ Editorial Board's take on this: https://www.wsj.com/articles/twitter-plays-into-trumps-hands...

One key quote:

> On California, Twitter is right that Mr. Trump is wrong. But on voter fraud, it’s complicated. There isn’t evidence of widespread fraud in mail voting. That doesn’t mean there’s no evidence. Last year a close House election in North Carolina was thrown out because of accusations that a Republican operative illegally collected absentee ballots, including incomplete ballots that his workers allegedly filled in. Investigators then also charged him with doing similar funny business in 2016.

Since they do not alter the content of the tweet itself in any way, and since "fact check" link itself does not express an opinion (eg: it just says "get the facts" as opposed to "potentially misleading") then it seems extremely hard to arge that it's editorialising of the tweet. If the fact check page contains very opinionated content written by Twitter employees then it might bring it closer into consideration, but if the fact check page factually summarises and cites external sources again it is hard to argue.

Thank you; I find it concerning that so much of the response to this has been focused on Twitter's behavior, and so little on the President's. I would hope that even people who think Twitter's fact-check links amount to censorship would agree that Trump would be wrong to censor Twitter in retaliation.

Although, I will say that if you've ever moderated a forum or subreddit, you probably know that when you ban a user for stepping over the line one too many times, "I'm gonna shut this place down!" is a pretty common first response. Hopefully cooler heads will prevail and we won't have to find out what happens when the President and the first amendment come to blows.

This attack on Sec 230 is radical and may well have far reaching consequences, but it is in no way totalitarian. It is trying to classify Twitter (& others) as a publisher. The US does not treat publishers in an unreasonable manner.

Yes. It's the sort of behavior one usually sees from lesser-country petty tyrants like Erdogan (Turkey) and Netanyahu (Israel). They're elected, and don't have full autocratic power, but they heavily abuse what power they have to stay in power. This problem was classic among the central American countries and Mexico, although that part of the world is looking up a bit.

Historically, leaders like this are not rare. They're just rare in US history. In the US, they've rarely advanced beyond the mayor level. (See Tweed Ring, Pendergast machine, Daley machine, etc.) Huey Long made it to one term as Louisiana governor; he's the best known US example of the type.

Really curious to hear the rational from supposedly small government republicans

As much as there ever really were "small government republicans" there certainly aren't any today. "Owning the libs" is the only reason the current batch of conservatives gets out of bed in the morning.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/nratv-dan-bongino-my-life-is-...

> Owning the libs

We should call what it is. They working to make the lives of other US citizens as miserable as they can. Whoever does this is working against their own country. This is unpatriotic.

"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."

--Frank Wilhoit

> make the lives of other US citizens as miserable as they can

The main tool that populism leverages is anger. It is true on both sides of the political spectrum.

This is lazy thinking. Telling yourself that the other side is evil is a short-cut for the incurious.

Absolutely. To get a slice of that thinking. Here's Rush Limbaugh:

(backstory: Trump has been repeatedly peddling an absolutely baseless claim that his TV critic Joe Scarborough murdered his employee couple of decades back. Her husband is now pleading that Trump is causing irreparable damage to their family). Anyway, here's Limbaugh:

“The thing here is when you get to Trump and his conspiracy theories, he does it in a really clever way,” he proclaimed. “And this is where people don’t get the subtlety of Trump because they don’t think he has the ability to be subtle. Trump never says that he believes these conspiracy theories that he touts. He’s simply passing them on.”

Asked by his producer whether he thinks “Trump cares whether Scarborough murdered anybody or not,” Limbaugh replied that the president doesn’t care but is tweeting about it “because it’s out there.”

“So Trump is just throwing gasoline on a fire here, and he’s having fun watching the flames—and he’s having fun watching these holier-than-thou leftist journalists react like their moral sensibilities have been forever rocked and can never recover,” he concluded.

Most people, if they spent their time at work trolling and shitposting instead of doing the job they were paid to do, would simply be fired.

he's doing what he was elected to do.

"Owning the libs": Politics is no longer about how best to manage the state.

It's about how to attack the vilified 'other side'. As long as Trump does that, he does no wrong with his supporters.

No longer a society discussing its management. More a cultural civil war. A country divided, weakened.

Some of them disagree with this thankfully.

But to be fair, I've seen a lot of supposed progressives on Twitter suddenly finding themselves very concerned with the rights of private businesses.

> supposed progressives on Twitter suddenly finding themselves very concerned with the rights of private businesses.

Not much wrong with using the tools available to accomplish a goal. The end game is moral and the means aren't that immoral at all.

I have always championed the right to free expression, whether that is an individual hosting content or a company deciding what content it wants to host and how to display it. The government should play no part in either case.

I’m not personally concerned with the rights of private businesses as much as I’m concerned about the unintended consequences of expanding government power.

And yes, that is a new position for me. These past few years have been quite the education about the downsides of federal power as a liberal.

Be careful not to allow yourself to be identified as a libertarian. That will get you ostracized by both sides, almost violently so.

The only thing both sides agree on is that they don't have anywhere near enough input in your life.

This probably has to do with the publisher vs platform debate.

That means it is not about expanding government power but removing protections that the government granted to corporations.

I’ve been over this before. Unless if you’re going to eliminate the ability for Twitter to moderate any protected speech, then this is an expansion of government power. This would give someone in the government the ability to determine what protected speech is immune from Twitter moderation, and what protected speech is not. This is a massive expansion of government power, and turns a two tier speech system (protected or not) into a three tier one.

Can you clarify what you mean?

There is already protected speech. You can say whatever you want as long as its not libel, treason, direct threats, etc.

Twitter has a TOC that is not strictly based on protected speech. They ban people / censor people all the time who violate their TOC but do not violate the law.

Also, it is not going to be certain speech that is protected but certain companies. Its possible Twitter would not have protection but Facebook could.

The core premise of the arguments being raised is that Twitter is being politically biased (citation needed), and that something should be done to make Twitter politically neutral since Twitter is such an important faux public square.

The problem is enforcement. How exactly will we make Twitter be politically neutral? There are two basic ways: you either eliminate Twitter’s ability to moderate at all, or someone has to define what speech is immune from moderation in the name of political neutrality.

The former is disastrous for the quality of these platforms. All kinds of anti-social and unpleasant behavior is protected speech, as is pornography and violent material. I think we can all agree that Twitter is within its rights to say “no porn here”, so we don’t want to set the bar at protected speech.

If we decide that twitter can moderate some but not all protected speech, then someone must legally define what protected speech is immune from moderation, and what protected speech is not. This represents an expansion of government power, as you’re giving the government the power to decide what types of protected speech is more important than other types of protected speech.

I get what your saying now. Thanks.

I think you are making a poor argument. Somebody could take your exact argument and say that you cannot have anti-discrimination laws for hiring or renting.

We would also handle abuses / accusations of abuses in the same way as anti discrimination laws.

I think what conservatives tend to see are a few examples where there appears to be bias. Liberals say something that violates the TOC and it doesn't get censored or when it does it takes longer for it to be censored. When a conservative says the same thing it get censored much faster.

For example an Asian who is liberal saying "white people are bs" is perfectly acceptable but a black conservative person saying "Jewish people are bs" with explicit notice that it is a parody of the first is not acceptable.

There are many examples where this happens but most publicly know cases appears to be against conservative.

This is of course possibly anecdotal but its understandable to come to the conclusion when Jack Dorsey admitted that most of the moderators are liberal.

Its hard to know if there is actual bias since people who don't have a large following don't make the news when they are censored.

I think a way to solve this would be:

1. Have more people with a variety of views on the moderation team.

2. Require multiple people to accept that something should be censored. Ideally people with different views.

3. Have a moderation log that allows watch groups review if they want.

I am not sure if Twitter could ask for political views prior to hiring a moderator so that could be an issue.

> Somebody could take your exact argument and say that you cannot have anti-discrimination laws for hiring or renting.

Only if you’re willing to argue that speech and race are the same thing, or that access to Twitter and housing are the same thing.

You can try this argument, just don’t expect it to persuade many people.

> I think what conservatives tend to see are a few examples where there appears to be bias.

You can spend your whole day trying to prove that Twitter is biased, and you will have completely ignored my actual point. You don’t need to prove that Twitter is biased, you need to prove that Twitter’s supposed biases justifies the government regulating protected speech.

I genuinely couldn’t care less if Twitter is biased if you don’t meet that second, higher bar. Use a different platform, petition twitter, complain here, just don’t ask the government to regulate speech.

> I get what your saying now.

Given that you did not address my core concern, I do not believe this.

Uh... are "progressives" opposed to private businesses having rights?

Depends what they're doing with those rights. See Citizens United vs FEC.

Broadly speaking no, but I don't recall them often being on that side of a given debate.

Colorado bakery. Yes, they're opposed to private businesses having rights, when it conflicts with something they consider more socially necessary.

Exactly, progressives are ok with business right (which often translate to individual rights), just against businesses having all of the rights.

Supposedly being the key word. Those that get into power tend to only grow the size of government and debt.

Yeah, neither party is concerned about the financial well being of the country. Seems like financiers are running things.

It’s the same people who said the deficit was the top priority during the Obama administration. Once in power immediately increased the deficit.

>The draft order also requires the Attorney General to establish a working group including state attorneys general that will examine the enforcement of state laws that prohibit online platforms from engaging in unfair and deceptive acts.

>The working group will also monitor or create watch-lists of users based on their interactions with content or other users.[1]

I'm sure there are plenty of "small government" and libertarian-leaning folks who are now in favor of government watch lists based off who and what US citizens interact with on social media.

[1] - https://www.reuters.com/article/twitter-trump-executive-orde...

To play devils advocate, isn't this a case of _removing_ a law? Sounds like a reduction to me.

Removing a law isn’t the same as reducing governmental power. In this case removing 230 would make what goes on Twitter mostly a matter for the courts, which would be a massive increase in the governments ability to police speech.

The power and scope of the third branch shouldn’t be ignored, and “conservative” in the judicial sense is usually about reducing the scope of life that’s subject to the court’s control.

It would be removing government granted protections that certain corporations have. The law would in all likelihood remain in tact.

This isn't about moderation, or removing tweets or banning people. Twitter changed the content of The President's tweet. When they edited his content, they became a publisher. Had simply removed it, I think they'd still be ok, but when they changed the content, they risked losing their protections under Section 230.

You are incorrect, they did not edit his tweet, they editorialized it. Completely different, and also covered under section 230, and confirmed in court decisions up to the 9th circuit court.

I'll take a stab at it.

The government should only be as large as the entities threatening it's citizens rights.

The scale of "small" is relative, especially when dealing with large multinational corporations.

I'm not a republican, but people on this site might have a hard time making the distinction, so here's my take:

1. These protections shouldn't be necessary in the first place. The first amendment should make most copyright enforcement, libel suits, etc. illegal. Of course, that's not the world we live in.

2. Freedom of association (being able to turn people away from your business) is absolutely a fundamental right, but I have zero sympathy for progressives when they get screwed on this, because they've done more than anyone in US history to eliminate freedom of association. They made this bed, now they have to lie in it. When you give the government the power to force people to work with parties they don't want to, obviously that's going to turn around and bite you in the ass at some point when you lose control of the institutions that decide how you're allowed to choose who you work with.

So, on net, this sucks and I wish it was very different, but I have no sympathy whatsoever for the people who brought this upon themselves.

Ok. My normal account is apolitical and I don't know if I would call myself a Republican, more of a conservative maybe.

Regardless, for me this goes back to the Covington Catholic incident. Nick Sandmann sued the Washington Post, NBC, and CNN for defamation and settled. He had a pretty strong case. I think being able to sue for defamation is reasonable and not necessarily indicative of big government support.

But Twitter can't be sued but that was where the videos of him were posted and it was where a Twitter mob formed and peopled doxed him and started to call for Nick's head. I remember seeing it all happen in real time on Friday on Twitter. By Sunday the news outlets were running with it.

At that time, Twitter wasn't flagging content as misleading however, they were banning harmful rhetoric. I guess to me that sort of activity that happened in January 2019 is harmful rhetoric. The ability to let an angry mob defame someone like that and even threaten someone is something Twitter should take responsibility for. Every other publishing platform is held to those standards. If Twitter is profiting from the use which may include activities like defaming someone, then it makes sense that victims are entitled to some compensation from them in addition to any users. Although I appreciate there are fine legal arguments to be made here.

And for the record, it seems like fairly normal discourse on Twitter to expose people with personal information for specifically being racist, misogynist, etc. without any evidence required and people usually condone this. This definitely can be damaging and I think people who are victims of this justly ought to be able to recover losses. Twitter doesn't seem to have much interest in stopping it like they do other forms of harmful speech so I think victims ought to be able to get justice and that has nothing to do with Trump's tweeting habits.

100k Americans are dead from COVID. There are riots happening in Minnesota. And here we are debating the latest oxygen sucking attention grab by our reality TV president. Let's ignore him

As a random thought, I’ll bet Twitter leadership is absolutely frantic right now figuring out next steps.

I’ve been on that side before and it’s not pretty! Lots of long nights for those folks.

When the social media executives got before Congress and lied their asses off they must have suspected that something like this might happen in the future.

That’s nice. Too bad there are laws and a constitution.

Again, parallel universes.

For half of the people out there, believe it or not, this is Trump sticking up for people's free speech on Twitter.

For the other half, this is Trump attempting to eliminate free speech on Twitter and other places.

In my opinion, eliminating the protections could have a negative effect on free speech. But it also seems like a very bad outcome in general for the companies that they would want to avoid. So it seems like this is being used as a threat to try to get them to take free speech more seriously, so they can avoid that policing.

Another thing is the website or whatever collecting instances of censorship. That seems to indicate that they are genuinely trying to help reduce censorship. Does it not?

All because Twitter dared to fact check him.

devil's advocate: why doesn't Twitter fact check everyone? Twitter is picking sides on a comment made by a user so they should be held liable for that content

Twitter isn't a public right. He chooses to use their platform so they choose to annotate his lies. I don't see how this executive order would even change exactly what started the whole thing.

IIRC, they are not liable if they just host the comments, not if they endorse them. I guess every comment without a "fake /dubious" label is true?

(Cause I'm about to drink a gallon of bleach and eat 2 lbs of raw garlic to ward off Covid as per a tweet's instruction ;) (joking) )

Even if they were the publisher in this scenario and were liable for his comment AND their annotation, there is nothing illegal about it.

Twitter could put "Everything trump says is false!" underneath every Trump tweet and it would still be perfectly legal.

I don't think the executive action targets the fact check label on Trump's tweet specifically. I think Twitter did something that really pissed Trump off and Trump is using Section 230 as leverage and a way to extend the narrative of "Twitter is plotting against me so don't believe everything you read."

This is neither here nor there but I have considered my self a republican for the last 28 years of my life. This president's actions make me feel physically ill.

People have a right to communicate, if a few platforms have the power to block all communication maybe they should be.

So, some kind of socialized national communication place?

How does adding a link prevent anyone, let alone the most powerful person in history, from communicating?

> People have a right to communicate, if a few platforms have the power to block all communication maybe they should be.

Hm.... I don't see how Twitter is preventing anyone from the right to communicate, nor do I sense that Twitter has the power, even if it worked with the next 3 largest social media platforms, to "block all communications." Last I checked, the internet would still exist if Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin shut down.

Either they're a public utility or they have control (and thus should have some degree of liability) for what is transmitted/published on their platform. They can't eat their cake and have it too!

Platforms have removed harmful content, for example terrorist propaganda or child pornography with 230 protections intact and governments appeared to welcome it so I think you can actually have your cake and eat it too, or at least you could until you fact checked Republicans I suppose

Platforms both enjoy first amendment protection to moderate their platforms as they see fit as well as protection from liability under 230. They are not mutually exclusive, and platforms have been moderating their content for decades. In fact most online communities could not even function if they had no right to moderate.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/04/no-section-230-does-no...

They _are_ liable for many things published on their platform. And they are also allowed to moderate content in whatever way they want. I don't see a problem as you are free to go start your own platform and presumably it would be popular if this many people have a problem with the existing censorship.

This honestly seems to be the model that Republicans have been pining for all along, they just don't like that they or their supporters are falling victim to its design.

Classic Trump. He does nothing, claims he’s victorious and his fans eat it up.

I think the obvious answer is limited manpower. It makes logical sense to prioritize fact checking efforts on a tweet viewed by a million people above a tweet viewed by 10 people.

Because there's a difference between me lying to you, and your government lying to you.

Well, Trump is the President. On the list of people worth fact checking, he's probably at the top.

Also, they are fact checking other people - for example, they've fact checked Chinese politicians tweeting propaganda about COVID starting in the US.

Well the fact check they added is their own content, so of course they would be liable for it. But it's still constitutionally protected speech.

> why doesn't Twitter fact check everyone?

They fact check everyone who represents more than 10% of their total traffic.

It just so happens that only one of those people tweets information that needs fact checking.

Brazilian president has been "fact checked" multiple times.

Same for Venezuelan dito.

I'm not sure it's a good thing to be in the "Bolsonaro, Maduro, Trump" list together but they seem to have a lot in common.

If I remember correctly, there was never any conclusive proof that voting fraud happened with the insecure Diebold voting machines in 2004.[1]

Those machines stored voting tallies on unencrypted compact flash cards, and there were massive other flaws in their security. But those machines were so insecure, that it would be difficult to prove fraud even happened if it had occurred.

Twitter chose a the wrong tweet to fact check. They are now asserting that a black-box mail voting system that has never been tried on this scale is secure, and we should just stop asking questions.

If I said that I was skeptical of the outcome of the elections that were conducted with voting machines made by Dick Cheney's company, in swing states, running Windows 98, am I going to be fact checked?

I'm really amazed at amount of trust people on HN are putting in mail in ballots.

Voting by mail can be done securely, but there are major problems with the current proposals. Just because Trump said it doesn't mean it is not true. My understanding is that the current proposals do not meet international requirements of transparency to qualify as truly fair.

[1]: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2004/03/diebolds-politi...

In a similar vein here's Jerry Nadler discussing paper ballots susceptibility in NY circa 2004: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3zxnnJHKu8

Has it just been decided by Twitter now that the truth is that mail in ballots are 100% secure and anyone questioning our election integrity is just spreading dangerous misinformation? Seriously?

It seems like a really open-ended thing to fact check.

I wish we had asked more questions about election integrity before 2016. I think it is better that we have a robust discussion about this NOW, before the election.

The most important thing about elections is that they be trustworthy by the majority of the population. Without sufficient transparency and oversight, actual security is meaningless. The Computerphile did a two great videos about the dangers of electronic voting:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs

It seems like mail in ballots re-create the same problems with electronic voting, except that we are just adding an extra layer to it.

But, I know that countries like Germany and Switzerland have instituted some fairly robust means of securing mail in voting -- none of which we are considering. Simple things, like having the affidavit be on the same piece of paper as the ballot, and having ensuring chain of custody of the ballots by only having postal workers pick them up directly from voters.

Are we allowed to express our concerns about this? I for one do not want to make things worse this time around. Is the discussion about this really ending because Twitter decreed it so?

That's election fraud, not voter fraud.

Because fact checking all of their users would be impossible.

I'd say fact-checking your top-50 users is a good idea, for statements which are completely and unarguably false beyond all doubt.

Visibility is a good metric to use when targeting false information. If an account with 0 followers is sputtering garbage, not much harm is done. But if an account with millions of followers is sputtering garbage, maybe it's more worth the effort.

Beyond that, YouTube has been heavily moderating content on covid. They display labels very similar to the ones Twitter is under fire for now. The only fundemental distinction is everybody agrees the virus is a plague.

They also added a fact check to a tweet insinuating that the virus originated in the US: https://www.axios.com/twitter-fact-checks-chinese-official-2...

Here's the tweet: https://twitter.com/zlj517/status/1238111898828066823?s=20

Or at least people with a critical mass of followers.

Because for lesser mortals, Twitter just bans people who violate their terms of service. The President is "too big to ban," but violates the TOS. This was a "compromise" solution, which obviously is not going to work.

For normal (high profile) people engaging in this sort of thing, they'd just delete their accounts. A while back, presumably due to questions over Trump, they said they weren't going to delete world leader accounts, but they might fact-check harmful lies.

> devil's advocate: why doesn't Twitter fact check everyone?

They're fact checking more than just Trump:

https://twitter.com/icecube/status/1265623592764534784

https://twitter.com/zlj517/status/1238269193427906560

It is impossible to fact check a prediction. Fact check "The sun is going to turn red supergiant in 9 days" ...

This is the point that most people seem to be missing and this is where Jack Dorsey seemingly made a huge mistake. I don't know if he did it on purpose to force his company to do something he knows should be done, but he doesn't have the will to see it through, or if it was just a really bad decision.

Yes, it is. Mankind's amassed knowledge of physics, chemistry, and astronomy has lots of evidence to demonstrate why that would not happen, and when it probably will. That can be compared to the evidence you have to show for your claim, which is nothing.

But that's entirely his point. Facts can be backed up by evidence. As you rightly pointed out, he can provide no evidence as proof of his wild prediction. We can make predictions based on scientific facts, but a prediction itself is not a fact.

Some predictions are known with enough certainty that they would be very accurately called facts. Example:

Fact: The sun will rise at 5:50am in San Francisco tomorrow.

False: The sun will rise at 10:00am in San Francisco tomorrow.

It certainly seems that mail-in voting is more easily corrupted than going in person and showing ID and voting in secret.

There are tradeoffs with accessibility, of course, but it seems depressingly easy to sell a mail-in ballot to someone else or to be verifiably coerced by a boss or family member into voting a certain way.

All-in-all Trump tweets worse, dangerous lies on a daily basis so it's bizarre they're pushing back now on this.

If we're just thinking of ways voting can be corrupted, in-person voting can be coerced too. Boss forces you to take a photo of your ballot as you vote in the booth, etc.

In reality, several states have had mail voting for years- Oregon for decades- without coercion being a problem. Millions of votes cast without the problem you suggest. It's not a problem, despite using our imaginations to come up with ways it can be.

> Boss forces you to take a photo of your ballot as you vote in the booth, etc.

You can take a picture of the ballot with your boss's choice but then spoil it and get another one.

> several states have had mail voting for years without coercion being a problem

How do you know this? How could anyone know if a wife voted the same way as her husband because she wanted to or because he just filled out both mail-in ballots himself?

There are differences in scale too; It's hard to steal a ballot, for example, when only 1% of the population is voting by mail. It's easy when 60% of mailboxes have a ballot in them on the same day.

Finally even if it hasn't been a problem so far, it is not a "fact" that it cannot and will not be a problem in the future.

> Finally even if it hasn't been a problem so far, it is not a "fact" that it cannot and will not be a problem in the future.

Twitter said no such thing, however. Twitter's annotation simply noted that Trump's claim was "unsubstantiated". They did not make an assertion of the inverse of Trump's claim.

> How could anyone know if a wife voted the same way as her husband because she wanted to or because he just filled out both mail-in ballots himself?

This could be easily said about in-person ballots too. 8 states require photo ID, and many people will be covering their faces when they vote in-person anyway.

This has been in the works since last summer - it has little to do with the recent twitter spat.

Edit: I find it funny someone claiming it was due to fact checking downvotes me because I fact checked them.

Source?

https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/28/politics/trump-twitter-social...

> consistent with a draft order whose text CNN first reported last summer

This was not because of Twitter fact checking him. Trump had signaled he was looking into social media bias prior to yesterday.

From 5 days ago: https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/23/21268433/president-trump-...

Twitter can fact check him behind door all they want. As long as Twitter does not alter the published content of specific users by adding editorial annotations, they deserve the Section 230 protection. As soon as they modified or editorialized user content, they are a publisher. Media publishing companies don’t have Section 230 protection.

I think this executive order is an abuse of power.

However, I do think Twitter could have handled it differently. For example, every time you're looking at posts from any blue-checked elected official, perhaps links could show up on the right hand side column for several fact-check websites. It would be nice to have arrangements with major newspapers, both left and right leaning, so un-paywalled news analysis can be one click away, too. This would help some people who truly want to be better informed.

Why is this the First Amendment issue? Trump was not blocked from tweeting. Twitter just added one small sign next to his tweets.

Even Trump owns his tweets and Twitter owns the rest of the webpage.

It doesn't have anything to do with blocking Trump or fact checking him. It has to do with bias against conservatives. Trump had talked about this well before he was fact checked.

From a few days ago (prior to Trump being fact checked): https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/23/21268433/president-trump-...

How can these changes improve social media? Is there a silver lining here?

If it were the other way round, the media would be howling for regulation.

For a second I thought this was a headline from Iran or Russia.

Ignoring the mechanical-legal aspects of what Section 230 already does, the discourse on this has been a shining example of logically inconsistent philosophy.

The Citizens United v. FEC decision indicates that corporations have free speech rights similar to those of individuals. Logically, if you agree with that part of the decision, then you should also agree that the government can't punish Twitter for doing this, and vice versa.

Yet very few people seem to hold either of those combinations of views. There are a few principled civil libertarians who are fine with both super-PACs and what Twitter did here. There are a few principled fair campaign advocates who think it's theoretically permissible, if inadvisable, for the government to stop what Twitter did here.

Most people seem to take one of the inconsistent positions.

This tension comes from the fact that there don't exist any "traditional public forum" online. All venues online are private spaces, yet some act as extremely convincing replicas of public spaces.

While I don't agree with this weird S230 opposition, the general sentiment that people expect to have a similar protection for free speech that they enjoy in our public squares, street corners, libraries and parks in the online alternatives to these things... isn't really a crazy one.

It's also a tenshion that exists in offline form. Increasingly there are gigantic public "downtown" areas which are privately owned (on land taken from the public through eminent domain then sold to developers), where people's free speech is heavily curtailed.

The general idea that just because the physical manifestation (or legal structure) behind our traditional public spaces is changing our effective right to free speech shouldn't change seems like a reasonable idea to me.

Also the general idea that twitter itself should automatically be free from regulation in how it restricts others due to its own free speech seems extremely specious to me. Twitter is a business, it operates to make money. While businesses have free speech right, commercial operations have a strictly lower level of rights in many areas. Twitter has only refrained from banning the president, who regularly and flagrantly violates their rules, because he makes them money. If twitter consisted primarily of its owners speech no one would visit it. It is effectively a place of public accommodation and its value stems entirely from the public's use of it. We traditionally impose significant regulation on how private businesses that serve the public operate, including extensive rules ensuring equality of access and against discrimination.

This executive order seems pretty foolish overall. But a law that set a threshold where a service like twitter become a "public forum"-- places where the public use is the whole point-- and they had to meet a much higher standard when they wanted to silence people or ideas (beyond "our AI picked you at random, tough luck") and had provide effective modes of redress might be important to preserving people's effective freedom of speech in the long run.

> The Citizens United v. FEC decision indicates that corporations have free speech rights similar to those of individuals

Individuals have the freedom of speech, but the can also be sued for liable for the things they say. Twitter can't be sued, because they are "re-transmitting" information. That's why Elon was sued for his "pedo guy" tweet and not twitter. Am I missing something here?

It seems like it makes corporations more like people in that if they curate content [in some vaguely biased way] then they can be held liable for that act. Because by doing that they are exercising their freedom of speech.

I think an interesting question is what will become the threshold for acceptable curation. Is it just illegal content, ex. CP. It seems like this has the potential for more legislation defining speech.

Post and discussion of the actual executive order: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23343313

Another example of blatant political use of the justice system. If a company becomes a problem to the Trump regime, they will use the full array of existing laws to prosecute them, at the same time when they are dismantling legislation that targets their allies.

What I find weird here is that the president is transparently stating that he is doing this to help is own political interests. I would have hoped that any presidential action exercising executive power (of any kind) with the stated intent to influence his own electoral chances in an imminent election would be considered an illegal act, based on intent alone.

It is not dissimilar to the original immigration bans where they were struck down initially because Trump openly expressed the intent that they were designed to achieve an outcome based on race, even though in technical implementation an argument could be made that they were not.

Why is this the First Amendment issue? Trump was not blocked from tweeting. Twitter just added one small sign next to his tweets.

Even Trump owns his tweets' content and Twitter owns the rest of the webpage.

If I worked at Twitter, I’d write this below his tweet on the subject:

Fact check: As a member of the executive, not legislative branch, Trump does not have the authority to modify existing legislation.

Twitter, Facebook etc created this problem (exemplified by Trump) and continue to benefit from it. Social media has significantly amplified expressions outrage and taken an active role in spreading those messages, which in turn has given rise to all manner of demagogues and populists. If the day ever comes that these companies are forced to atone for the corrosive effect they have had on discourse and politics all over the world, it can't happen to a more deserving group.

Make social media a public utility

Asking obvious question: Who's building/has built the block chain based, untamperable twitter alternative?

After just under four years of scorched earth resistance we now get this new EO. I am only surprised he waited this long.

And to think, just this morning you were claiming the text of this order was probably a forgery because it was so shoddy and inconsistent.

I used to work at a sub-cabinet bureau that had much, much higher standards than we’re seeing out of the executive mansion now. I’m disappointed.

Is it not the case that the fact checking is not going to change any of Trump's followers? If all the bullshit that he has been spewing over all these years has not deterred his followers, showing facts will not. It is been clear that Trump's only agenda is to make people turn against each other and profit from it and he will keep using any chance he gets to do that.

There are many people who are new on the Internet, or simply doesn't know much about politics, etc.

I think adding context, trying to be more rational (even and especially with using tools/technology) is something everyone, who isn't so lucky as to have been born into a life of careless dumbness, values.

You know, it would be pretty funny if Twitter banned Trump's account because of some TOS terms have or something. If he actually causes them enough problems over this such that they are already paying for it, it might be worth it as a power play on their part.

Trump definitely depends on Twitter far more than Twitter depends on Trump. He could move to Facebook/Instagram, but I just don't see that being a move he would want to do, partly because the type of communication doesn't seem to be the same, and partly because it would be a huge admission of defeat, where he couldn't bully a person or company into doing what he wanted.

Twitter would likely see a big dip in usage, at least for a short period, as some Trump loyalists boycotted it, but I imagine a lot of them would be back. There's also the rights of a private companies to control their own service which is a traditional Republican belief, but I doubt that would matter much, as the current political climate doesn't seem conducive to politicians adhering to past beliefs, not matter whcih side of the divide they are on.

why would Twitter ban their most popular user? not in a million years... they need him just as much as he needs them.

> they need him just as much as he needs them.

Not if he's threatening their business, and I think you overestimate how much Trump brings to Twitter. I'm sure he drives a level and engagement and discourse, but that's still going to be there to a large degree even if his account isn't. It's not like people aren't posting news clips about him from other websites all the time.

Trump is one of many thousands of popular people driving engagement on Twitter, even if he's high up on the list (but he doesn't have the most followers, he's not even in the top 5 apparently.[1]) On the other hand, Twitter is the one preferred platform for Trump to speak to his followers. Press briefings and official statements are a distant second. The fact that he announced his official plans to counterattack Twitter on Twitter first says it all.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-followed_Twitter_...

> Twitter is the one preferred platform for Trump to speak to his followers

Funny you mention that, Trump doesn't realize the real power he has to help solve his own problem AND benefit the rest of us, is by lending his voice to a different platform. If, like me, you believe the solution to the stranglehold that the current social cartel has had for the past decade is to build new, competing platforms, and encourage their growth, then it's easy to see how getting Trump to use a different site would be beneficial, regardless of what he's spewing.

> If, like me, you believe the solution to the stranglehold that the current social cartel has had for the past decade is to build new, competing platforms, and encourage their growth

I think that's half of it. The other is a lot of time. It seems pretty clear to me that different age groups use social media in different ways, and I'm not sure it's a behavior that stays with the cohort as it ages, or is associated with that age itself.

My teenage children use whatever social network they feel like and don't really care for Facebook or Twitter. Does that change as they get older, or does it mean that in 10-20 years those companies will be less relevant (unless they buy the up-and-comers, like Facebook did with Instagram)?

I think Trump definitely has the ability to put that to the test though, and that you're right in that he's got a lot of pull to cause at least a short term shift based on the narrative he expresses.

> You know, it would be pretty funny if Twitter banned Trump's account because of some TOS terms have or something

I mean, if section 230 were to be weakened, they would probably _have_ to, to protect themselves from liability. For libel, for a start.

This came up when the "fact check badge" was discussed here yesterday.

I fully agree. Ban the president for literally no other reason than the lulz. Just to troll him. But then they did the typical limp dick liberal thing and tried to to high-road a troll, once again giving the troll the upper hand.

You can't high-road a troll. Now they're stuck in a position of having to maintain their haughty better-than-thou "white knights of facts" position for as long as they can, all while being attacked from every angle. Every time they try to position themselves as knowing better, the facade cracks a bit. They'll be dealing with baseless accusations, but each one will still push the point that maybe they don't know what they're doing. That maybe it was a bad idea.

When dealing with a troll, just say you did because you felt like it and leave it at that. If someone calls you dumb, double down. You wanted to, so you did. No regrets.

Seriously, people (liberal especially) have no understanding of trolls whatsoever and it's a massive unpatched security threat to the country.

Biting the hand that feeds him. I think this is a strategic miscalculation.

In a world without Section 230 Twitter would be more likely to censor Trump to avoid liability for what he says. But I think the real goal to intimidate platforms into allowing right-wing disinformation propaganda, it's disgusting behavior from a president.

Where there is liquidity, you mustn't mess where it wants to go.

It's sad but the internet has a lot to answer for, the ability for us to access unfiltered and blatantly false information and for it to appear no different to peer reviewed and true information is leading humanity to disaster. Ideally we'd be able to have a chain of trust of information, the same way we have a chain of trust for certificates, with peer reviews from experts giving credence to articles and statements.

Some stuff is plausible but wrong, like taking certain antiviral drugs to combat Covid. Others completely defy everything we know about physics, like 5G spreading Covid. And some stuff is true, like staying at home breaking the chain of transmission. But people believe all of the above and none of the above appear different or are treated differently on social media sites.

Some of the opinions and statements that influential people say are dangerous and either harm directly or cause others to harm and a lot of them build on existing divisions further breaking apart our communities.

A few days ago we had an earthquake in my home city, our liberal prime minister was having a live interview when it happened. On news sites when they played the interview the comments were full of people saying it was Trump blowing up tunnels which were being used to traffic children as sex slaves by the liberal government.

That's obviously insane, not least because I live on a group of islands 3,000 kilometres away from the next country and that's one hell of a tunnel, but also because that's not a thing that governments do in transparent and well run democracies.

Unfortunately there's a subset of the population who are unstable and prone to believe anything, and the fact that it's discredited probably drives them to believe it more. But there's a much larger subset who are susceptible to arguments but not critical of them and may be more inclined to see reason if given information backing that up.

So, the question is how do you debunk blatant falsehoods while still balancing peoples freedom to believe what they want.

Can someone just give me a magic potion where I don't have to hear about Trump and his daily antics anymore ? This guy sucks the oxygen out of everything without adding any value to humanity

Let us all hope Trump does not get into WoW. But seriously, politicians and journalists have openly called for twitter to ban Trump and I am sure there is more going on behind the scenes

A rule like that would effectively ensured Trump won't have an internet platform. No company wants to be liable for the content he posts.

> "Currently, social media giants like Twitter received unprecedented viability shield based on the theory that they are a neutral platform, which they are not," Trump said in the Oval Office. "We are fed up with it. It is unfair, and it's been very unfair."

What examples of this unfairness are being referred to? I never understand why journalist don't press harder and follow up with obvious questions. Same with "many people are saying" style statements.

Journalists do followup with obvious questions, but the WHPS doesn't answer them.

Why do they not keep pushing back with "you haven't answered my question" though? If it's so easy to ignore hard question, why doesn't everyone just do this to avoid criticism from the press?

Because then they don't get invited back to the next press conference, and they get fired, because their spineless employers want their journalists to be present at press conferences. Meanwhile, the press conference room can always be filled with sympathetic media reps.

> If it's so easy to ignore hard question, why doesn't everyone just do this to avoid criticism from the press?

Have you seen how this administration has been running press conferences? It's not an entirely unprecedented trainwreck (when any administration is in scandal mode, it behaves in such a fashion), but it is unprecedented for how frequently it has had to operate in scandal mode.

Its supporters, of course, point to this sort of thing as an example of the bad liberal media bias that is being mean to the greatest man in the history of this country. The WHPS of the week could spend every single conference reading from a phonebook, and it still wouldn't change anyone's mind on anything.

He has no examples, it's just word salad.

The premise is also false - the shield from [liability] applies regardless of the political affiliation, motivation, or actions of the platform. He's trying to convince people that Twitter had some kind of duty to remain neutral, but they really don't. Twitter would have just as strong of a case under current law if they came out and said "yep, no conservative viewpoints allowed here."

> "yep, no conservative viewpoints allowed here."

At least it'd be clear if they said so, nothing worse than the current situation where they think it but won't say it because it'd be bad for business.

I mean, I even disagree that there's major 'anti-conservative' bias at all.

Some prominent conservatives have been banned from the platform, like Alex Jones, but it wasn't due to their views on Keynesian economics, it was for spreading outright lies about Sandy Hook.

Diving deeper into almost any of the examples that people dig up as 'anti-conservative bias' reveals trolling, hateful attacks, or other bad behavior, completely independent of the author's political views, and earnestly deserving of removal.

Exactly, for some reason people will throw out toxic lies, racism, conspiracy theories, etc. and then act like those are just their 'political views'. I hope we aren't at a turning point where conspiracy theories and suppression of journalism is a 'political viewpoint'.

> I mean, I even disagree that there's major 'anti-conservative' bias at all.

Are you a conservative yourself?

I'm gonna take a guess that you are not so how would you know?

It's a real question, no trick.

My counter argument to yours is that Twitter has a major anti-progressive bias. This can be shown by the number of people that have been banned due to responding against racism.

Since you're not a progressive, you can't counter my claim as there's no way you would know about any anti-progressive bias.

Indeed I wouldn't dare, I don't follow any progressives (I think), don't read their tweets, don't get the recommendations they do etc.

Now I can tell you as a conservative, because I experience it every day.

Are you implying that twitter doesn't allow conservative viewpoints or that obvious lies ARE conservative viewpoints?

I'm implying that twitter favor non-conservative viewpoints, tolerate them because obviously it's good for business, but do whatever they can, without getting caught, to favor more liberal viewpoints.

Curious to see if there's evidence for this. I am not sure how one would go about measuring this - but perhaps it would help if you elaborate on how this favoritism manifests in the way Twitter operates. Is there anything like that or is this based more on your personal feelings on the matter?

It's my own experience.

Here's an example:

I have 2 accounts, one that I use for politics and news, conservative leaning, WSJ, Thomas Sowell, Peter Robinson (Uncommon Knowledge), Kimberley Strassel... that brand of conservatism, not talking about the crazy alt-right shit here which I don't follow, and a second account that I use for my work with only software dev stuffs and mainstream/more neutral media, Reuters etc, nothing that could brand me as conservative.

On my political & news account I'm always getting recommendations for CNN and other left-leaning commentators and media (no recommendation for other conservative outlets) at the top of my recommendation list, or some kind of outrageous claim that a right leaning person would have done, for example, right now got:

"Kellyanne Conway compares voting in person to waiting in line for cupcakes".

Another one: "Trump makes unsubstantiated claim that mail-in ballots will lead to voter fraud"

I also got "Don Lemon" on "Trending".

That's the kind of recommendation I'm not getting on my work account, where it's mixed between news (without any outrageous/divise claims unless there's really something crazy that happened that day) and other subjects targeted to my interests.

Is it a scientific proof, no, but once you spend enough time comparing with multiple accounts like that you can see a pretty clear pattern on how they try to influence, and it's not subtle even.

Just not true at all, there's tons of conservatives on twitter not having any problem at all. - Trump's problem, and that of his allies, is that they talk bullshit all the time. It is lies, half-truths, threats of violence and insults all day every day.

Yeah, this seems more about an attempt to compel speech (require companies to publish falsehoods that are convenient or desirable for current political leadership), than an ostensible attempt at "freedom of speech" or "neutrality".

Either they can control the content, or not. Do they have editorial control?

> What examples of this unfairness are being referred to? I never understand why journalist don't press harder and follow up with obvious questions. Same with "many people are saying" style statements.

The "unfairness" is a fact check that got attached to a couple of his tweets: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/12652558351245393....

Journalists do press him for details, but they get answers like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNlSRd2w5IA.

This action concerns, among other things, U.S. Code § 230.

> Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) of 1996 (a common name for Title V of the Telecommunications Act of 1996) is a landmark piece of Internet legislation in the United States, codified at 47 U.S.C. § 230. Section 230(c)(1) provides immunity from liability for providers and users of an "interactive computer service" who publish information provided by third-party users ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...

Through his action, the president appears to be directing the executive branch to use a more narrow interpretation of Section 230 than has been used previously:

> ... Section 230 was not intended to allow a handful of companies to grow into titans controlling vital avenues for our national discourse under the guise of promoting open forums for debate, and then to provide those behemoths blanket immunity when they use their power to censor content and silence viewpoints that they dislike. When an interactive computer service provider removes or restricts access to content and its actions do not meet the criteria of subparagraph (c)(2)(A), it is engaged in editorial conduct. It is the policy of the United States that such a provider should properly lose the limited liability shield of subparagraph (c)(2)(A) and be exposed to liability like any traditional editor and publisher that is not an online provider.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-or...

(c)(2)(A) reads:

> (c) Protection for “Good Samaritan” blocking and screening of offensive material

> (2) Civil liabilityNo provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of—

> (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; or

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230

To summarize, the president is directing his administration to disregard "Good Samaritan" protections for services that don't strictly meet the exception given in (c)(2)(A).

The phrases "good faith" and "otherwise objectionable" seem broad enough to allow just about any form of censorship a company might want to engage in, while continuing to enjoy Good Samaritan protection.

If so, what exactly does the administration gain here?

The nice thing about Trump having the emotional self control of a toddler is that we don't have to wonder if this was really part of some larger plan. We know without a doubt that this was because Twitter subtly showed him an ounce of disrespect. Tech companies should therefore realize the futility of trying to negotiate with this administration.

Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't it Twitters first amendment right to respond to Trump's tweets? Does not seem like this is censorship to me.

"There's nothing I'd rather do than get rid of my whole Twitter account." - Trump

He doesn't care about the truth, and is trying to take advantage of our desire for neutrality and free speech to push lies. It's possible for us to be nuanced, and not let him ruin Twitter/Facebook/etc with bad-faith arguments.

Maybe Hacker News should post factchecking links under every Rustlang post.

"fortran 77" - username checks out.

On a more serious note, I have been dipping my toes into Rust and it seems fun. I suppose, I'll have a more considered opinion of it once I actually build something substantial with it.

It's not often I side with Donald Trump on anything. But I think it's high time, the likes of Twitter, Facebook et al got a good kicking.

To be fair, the problem is not with the sites themselves. They are private companies and [within the law] can do whatever the hell they like with regard to who can use their platforms and what they can say while doing so.

The problem is that these type of sites [and especially Twitter] have been elevated by the rest of the world and transformed from being outlets for vacuous chatter into being the official conduit for 'news', for any lazy journalist who can't be bothered to research a story properly.

Even on such esteemed organisations as the BBC and Reuters, it's becoming increasingly common to see news articles in which the 'sources' are little more than lists of what various parties said on Twitter. And on a smaller and even local level, more and more companies are only contactable through their Twitter accounts or Facebook pages. I even got message from the UK Government's unemployment service a few days ago, informing me that they would be announcing nee vacancies on their Twitter account, from now on.

Now, as I said, that's not Twitter or Facebook's fault. It's the rest of the worlds fault for increasingly elevating them to this pseudo-official status. But it does create the situation whereby anyone who's not on Twitter or Facebook is increasingly disenfranchised from having their viewpoint heard or from participating in the great and small issues of the day.

And what if Twitter or Facebook decide to ban a user or suspend an account? That user has no recourse but to plead with the company in question to reinstate them, which is entirely arbitrary decision. There is no legal recourse, as there would be if some authority tried to remove a person's vote or to ban them from speaking, writing or otherwise putting forward their opinions in the 'real world'.

As chance would have it, I've run into this myself. About a year ago, I logged into my Twitter account to find that it had been suspended as had my business Twitter account --with no reason given and nothing that I had done [that I can see] to have justified this. I never verbally attacked anyone or posted anything dodgy. I can only think my accounts were mistakenly caught up in one of Twitter's periodic automated sweeps, after which they proudly announce they've removed X-million bot accounts.

The only recourse is to fill in a form asking them to review the account suspension. Which, needless to say results in nothing but an autoreply, assigning you a case number. And then... nothing.

Likewise, as chance would have it, just today I logged into a Facebook page I'd set up for my business to find a message saying that had been suspended for "suspicious activity". Again, nothing I can see that i've done that could possibly justify that. In fact, I don't do FB at all. So I don't even interact with that account apart from to occasionally post links to the latest 'thing' I've made and am selling on Amazon. I've not even added any friends to my FB account, so I couldn't have 'offended' any one! In order to lift that suspension I was asked to verify my mobile phone number [OK... with great reluctance] and then upload a photograph of myself, so they can 'verify' me [WTF? Am i applying for a passport to the fucking internet now?

Now, I know those last few paragraphs sound like I'm just whining and crying because I can't use Twitter or Facebook any more. I'm honestly not. I couldn't give a flying fk about either of them. I only created accounts on both because [as I intimated above], with the state of the internet today, we've arrived at a point, where, for a lot of people, Twitter and Facebook ARE the internet. It's where they talk to their friends, where they arrange their social lives, where they do their shopping, where they read their news, where they run their businesses and where they exist online. So, sometimes, you've just got to swallow the rising vomit and at least establish a token presence there, just so people know you exist.

Anyway, given that's the state we're in, should all that vast mass of human commerce and interaction be dependent on the whims of a couple of monstrously rich individuals and a couple of monstrously rich corporations? It's a toughie.

On the one hand, I'm generally opposed to government interference in how people run their lives or their businesses. On the other hand, I believe in freedom of expression and freedom of access to the media and the government, which isn't dispensed or withheld at the whim of a few individuals.

How long until a few big tech companies move their headquarters to Dublin and wish mr Trump good luck in ever collecting any more taxes from them?

Or maybe Brussels like the Eclipse foundati did?

Good. Here's hoping Trump and the social media companies destroy each other. May a better world rise from the metaphoric ashes.

From day one it seemed to me like Trump's main goal was desecrating the federal state institutions. Seriously, the guy seems as if he cares only about stepping on the constitution and laws. Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't POTUS executive orders only serve to direct the federal government, his employees? Twitter is definitely not a federal agency. Why are a lot of people treating this situation like Trump is able to circumvent the legislative branch?

Part of the premise is directing the agencies not to spend money on those platforms that violate the EO.

But does the US government even now buy any of Twitter's advertisement?

I don’t know. Would be a pretty shallow threat if not maybe?

To repeat my comment from a different thread:

If we accept corporations as people, I wish some of the ones with actual power had the backbone to do a bit of civil disobedience, instead of rolling over at the first sign of trouble. Twitter should double down and add a fact-check sticker to every single Trump lie, past and current — to hell with lawsuits and the FCC. Otherwise, we'll "maybe parts of this sound reasonable" our way straight into a goose-stepping, thought-shaping, Republican-ruled dictatorship. Surely, even the people who scoffed at this idea a few years ago can see this future taking shape.

I am aghast that there's any support for 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. Meanwhile, people like Zuckerberg and Musk are tripping over themselves to appease the ruling party.

(Just a reminder that earlier today, Trump retweeted a video declaring that "the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat." I suppose this is one of those good old fashioned Republican values that our liberal bias works so hard to suppress.)

Unfortunately I've found axios to be too biased (largely by omission) to be reliable.

Staying focused on the actual details of the tweet that spurred this order, Twitter's response highlights the problems inherent with content moderation.

There are hundreds of documented cases of people being convicted of mail in ballot voter fraud. In Paterson NJ there was an all mail election recently that is causing significant problems. I shudder at the thought of that playing out on a national scale.

Yet in spite of those facts, Twitter feels that Trump's warnings are somehow wrong. In light of the facts I think his fear is justified.

Twitter is a private company but we restrict the activities of private companies all the time. I see no reason why we shouldn't have a serious conversation about placing special restrictions on internet platforms' ability to censor users.

Hurry up and finish a fast decentralized anonymous web before the US turns into China.

It wouldn't be China. In China there is truth, truth and only truth. The truth approved by government. US turns not into China, but into Russia, where there is no truth, only lies. Literally. Because the only way to categorize all sayings into truth and lies is to pick some political side and stick to it. One cannot believe to any authority: politicians, scientists, journalists, government officials... they are all lying. Some probably are not, but you have no ways to find out who is.

I don't think there is legal basis for Trump's order, but Twitter is wading into murky territory with their actions.

Twitter's "fact check" singles out a specific Trump tweet. It's clearly a human intervention by Twitter staff, not user generated content. The subject of Trump's tweet was a political dispute, and while Trump certainly had false statements in his tweet, that's basically par for the course on Twitter.

This raises a bunch of questions. Why is Twitter singling out Trump for his false statements? If AOC or Bernie Sanders make false or misleading statements about economics (which they frequently do), will those also receive fact checks and warning labels?

We have seen this also with the coronavirus breakout. Medium and other publishers removed posts based that were sanguine data analysis (nothing inflammatory) because they were against the prevailing media sentiment. For example this Medium post [1] was removed based on its content. It did not contain anything inflammatory, violent, or otherwise unsavory. Medium just didn't like what it said.

At what point does Twitter or Medium cease to be a neutral discussion platform, and become more like a publisher that pushes a specific narrative (like Fox News, the New York Times, CNN, etc.). They are certainly within their rights do curate/moderate their platform, but if this continues, we need to start thinking of these companies less like user driven platforms, and more like opinionated publishers.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200321144004/https:/medium.com...

> Why is Twitter singling out Trump for his false statements?

They aren't. They've labeled other tweets before.

> If AOC or Bernie Sanders make false or misleading statements about economics (which they frequently do), will those also receive fact checks and warning labels?

Presumably, yes.

Economics is quite different than election interference, so I'm not sure that Twitter would make any "fact check" statements when it comes to economics.

The idea of "facts" in economics can't extend very far beyond metics and other numbers, as most of the rest is up to vigorous theoretical, political debate. If this original poster is so keen on fact checking the "economics" of a certain political sides, it seems likely that they are not concerned with actual facts but rather deeply held theoretical and political beliefs that they have elevated to "fact" status.

It does make a lot of sense to fact check the most viewed tweets first, doesn’t it? If you want to stop the spread of misinformation through your platform, you don’t start with the tweets of a rural politician with 8 followers.

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At what point does Twitter or Medium cease to be a neutral discussion platform, and become more like a publisher that pushes a specific narrative (like Fox News, the New York Times, CNN, etc.).

What does "neutral discussion platform" even mean? My understanding is that Fox News, New York Times, CNN, etc, all benefit from protections against what users post in places like comments sections, etc.

This whole "neutrality" aspect seems like a talking point meant to attack social media platforms from a strawman perspective of "Only 'neutral' platforms are allowed protections from liability" that doesn't seem to actually be related to the law itself.

I don't think there is legal basis for Trump's order, but Twitter is wading into murky territory with their actions.

I wouldn't consider basic moderation activities as "murky territory".

“Neutrality” seems pretty obvious: don’t assume as the platform that you are able to tell “facts” more accurately than those participating and thus take no stance on the truth of the statements made by participants. It’s comical to think that anyone has the ability to be the arbiter of truth and specifically in this case, the truthiness of the statement is completely unverifiable as it’s a forecast.

BTW, don’t think voter fraud with mail in votes is possible? Think again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCrae_Dowless

The GOP knows it’s an issue better than anyone since they leverage it heavily.

You aren't describing "neutrality" you are describing "feigning ignorance". And even if this could be considered "neutral" why is that something to push for (not just on Twitter but on every private business/platform/etc in existence) and what does this have to do with the law in question?

It is exactly describing neutrality on truthiness. There literally is no other definition. You take no side on truth.

I wouldn’t, nor have I seen anyone, suggest that this is something to push for on every private business/platform/etc in existence. The point to be made is twofold:

1) Have the large social media platforms developed into general spheres of public discourse and thus have become central to ongoing function of public life? If so, then ANY active control over the narratives allowed on the platforms if is of critical concern to the function of Democracy.

2) Separate from point #1 which is broader than Section 230, is whether or not control over the narratives allowed on the platforms is equivalent to editorial moderation at publishers, changing them from being governed by Section 230?

To be clear, I don’t know the answers to either of these questions. But I sure as shit know that I would prefer major realms of public discourse to be free of some bull shit “arbiter of truth” controlling the presentation of people’s thoughts in them.

Again, this entire mess is because they chose not to enforce their own TOS when it comes to the President's account. Twitter is trying to control the damage, and opted for something that doesn't solve the problem, infuriated the President, and will result in greater problems going forward.

Twitter ceased to become a platform when they changed the content of The President's tweet. They literally editorialized his content. That act made them a publisher.

They also cut off the corners on his profile picture, listed a bunch of replies from users in a particular order (almost definitely not curated by humans, but it _could_ be?), reserve the right to make those replies more or less visible in relation to the tweet, added some widgets which make it very easy to report (and hide) an abusive tweet... The content he provided is a <=280 character string. It is reproduced verbatim.

This is a pretty rational argument. Where does one draw the line with "fact checks". I don't like Trump at all. Which is why I don't like seeing "My political tribe disagrees with you" down votes. Shouldn't we be better than that? In general the HN crowd tends to be for free speech and less with platforms censoring or restricting people. Now yes Trump says downright false things all the time, and IMO is a dangerous person. But let's take him out of the equation and look at this objectively.

A good documentary that outlines how social media becomes more of a publisher is The Creepy Line. https://www.thecreepyline.com/ The movement to rein in the abuse of Section 230 has been going on for a while, but is finally starting to pick up steam. Odds are, given that this is an election year, they had this ready to go in the background if Twitter tried pulling something like they did yesterday, which is why it only took a day be signed.

> Section 230 was not intended to allow a handful of companies to grow into titans controlling vital avenues for our national discourse under the guise of promoting open forums for debate, and then to provide those behemoths blanket immunity when they use their power to censor content and silence viewpoints that they dislike

About time. Social media should have been commoditized and decentralized by now, joining the group of email, DNS etc. Social media companies enjoyed milking free user content for 15 years, it's about time people take hold of their own intellectual property in the fediverse.

Another source with some remarks from a Democrat FCC commissioner: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/05/28/trump-s...

Democrat is not an adjective.

It's a common usage, but mainly among non-Democrats. And it's not a compliment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democrat_Party_(epithet)

You’re barking up the wrong tree. I wrote “democratic,” thought it looked wrong as it seemed more the adjective of “Democracy” rather than “member of the Democratic Party,” didn’t want to look it up on my phone because I cannot multitask for the life of me on my iPhone, and there you go.

Anyway, you do realize that the very fact that I was linking to "here's what someone in a position to challenge or at least refuse to enforce this inanity" implies that I'm scarcely trying to side with the party backing the trigger-happy president, right?

You felt the need to refer to someone as a proponent of democracy?

Other way around, obviously.

Ok. Thanks for the correction, I explained below. I think you knew what I meant, though.

I thought you can use any noun as an adjective in English.

If this does reach the FCC, based on Pai's last handling of the network neutrality comment period, we can assume another debacle of public interest.

Why not refer to her by name? Her press statement was in this morning’s FCC Daily Digest so it is not a horrible thing to say that Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel made a statement. Here’s her original statement as released: https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-364605A1.pdf

Because a) most people don’t know her by name b) her name is not my reason for recommending the article but rather the combination of her part affiliation and position, and c) I’m on my phone and it makes referencing articles a pita.

Is it such a big deal that I didn’t use her name?

I would love to see a law that for corporations, once the corporation exceeds some commercial threshold (e.g. 1M customers or 10M/year revenue or whatever) then you are no longer allowed to discriminate against your users for any reason other than violation of non-discriminatory terms of service.

I don't think that companies that achieve near-monopoly status should have the right to arbitrarily cancel, shadow ban, hide from search, delete content, flag content, "fact check", label, or otherwise interfere with users' use of the service.

This is not a "free speech" issue, it's a "when you have monopoly power and positioning in the market, there are no alternatives" issue. Visa refusing to process CC payments because they don't like your politics, is not a power that I want them to have.

If you're a tiny boutique company, discriminate to your heart's content. When you get big, I don't want you to have that power anymore. If you don't like it, then eschew the current fashion of companies to value growth over all else.

I'm not sure I agree with this, though I think it's an interesting idea.

The threshold you've suggested seems way too low. 1M customers or $10M/year revenue isn't "near-monopoly", it's barely a player in the game.

Completely fair, and maybe the idea isn’t the right way to do it, but I am frustrated with the cancel power that many companies wield in our society and hadn’t seen this proposed anywhere. And corporations are controlled by people, usually a small number of people with unbelievable ability to wield power:

https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_5839cf32e4b000af95ee5b68

The problem is defining what those "non-discriminatory terms of service" are and applying them evenly to everyone. That's why Facebook is making a theoretically independent content review board - things aren't black and white, especially in today's climate in which people just deny facts. Trump's issue with Twitter illustrates this point - he's just factually incorrect about a lot of his voter fraud claims, but he calls it discrimination against his view point and he's got millions of people who support him in that.

So where's the line? I think anti-vaxxers should be censored because their viewpoint causes actual harm to people, but they would obviously argue otherwise. You can say that anything that causes harm is not permitted and call that a non-discriminatory term of service, but whenever you apply it, the person you're applying it against is going to claim discrimination.

A lot of people don't like FB's stance of letting anything go in terms of political ads, but they don't have a good alternative, because otherwise any stance they take will face claims of discrimination. In that case, I think the government should be defining what is acceptable content for political ads and leaving it to FB to enforce, but of course the people in government are more biased than anyone.

It is, to say the least, a tough problem.

I'm baffled by how short sighted and ignorant this line of thinking is.

Do you feel the same about email spam filters?

I think it’s completely in the control of the users, so it’s ok. Also I can always look at what was filtered and “fix” mistakes. Likewise, I have no problem with a button that a user can press that says “I don’t like this person, don’t show me their stuff anymore”. I just don’t want the company to press it for me as if the content never existed.

This is long overdue. Social media companies grew their networks without censorship, but when they got sufficient monopoly and network power started censoring generally only in one direction.

>generally only in one direction

Do you think it's really a coincidence that the side that promotes racism, xenophobia, homophobia, etc is the side getting 'censored'?

Seems like a natural result to me.

They have clearly stated TOS. You can read it at https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-rules Now, they do a crap job of enforcement, but it appears that that crap job is omnidirectional in its failings.

Here's how it breaks down for this particular case. People are afraid to vote because they don't want to get COVID-19 while standing in line waiting at the polls. So states are letting people vote by mail. The problem with that is that Republicans tend to lose elections when everyone who is allowed to vote votes. So Trump, in an attempt to win the election, is sowing seeds of discontent with regards to mail-in ballots, claiming that fraud will be widespread. The goal is to get people to pressure states to not allow voting by mail, thus suppressing votes from people scared about COVID-19 (which tend to be poorer people that can't afford a $200,000 hospital stay), and thus leading to a Trump reelection. Twitter has stepped in to say "hey, voting by mail is not a new thing and there wasn't really a lot of fraud".

That is not censoring a conservative viewpoint. It's just giving people some facts. Here's Trump's opinion, here's some data, make your own decision.

I am sure that if Joe Biden started tweeting random conspiracy theories, Twitter would fact check those. But he doesn't, so we don't get to see that in action. Just because a conservative person in power tends to lie and start conspiracy theories on social media, doesn't mean the platform is biased against conservatives. It just means that they're not going to publish falsehoods without a little asterisk.

Some days I just have trouble getting out of bed, he is over 70 years old I'm just fascinated with his agile work and energy to fight anything that comes against him. His choices are debatable abut That is definitely some form of leadership.

leadership is definitely not the word I would associate with this individual.

While it is impressive, I'd call it a side effect of his narcissism rather than leadership.

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