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.
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.
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.
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.
Dude. They fact-checked a tweet.
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.
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 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.
Trump will be on to some other highly divisive circus act next week. The question of whether Twitter is a public square will persist.
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.
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.
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.
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
>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.
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_First_Amendment_Institu...
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."
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.
Private property is sometimes public space, especially in Twitter's home of California. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v....
Monopoly power and market manipulation is a second order issue.
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.
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...
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...
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.
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.
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-or...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...
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?
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/
Also, worth reading up on Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Community_Access_Cor...)