Executive Order on Preventing Online Censorship
whitehouse.gov
whitehouse.gov
> Twitter now selectively decides to place a warning label on certain tweets in a manner that clearly reflects political bias. As has been reported, Twitter seems never to have placed such a label on another politician’s tweet. As recently as last week, Representative Adam Schiff was continuing to mislead his followers by peddling the long-disproved Russian Collusion Hoax, and Twitter did not flag those tweets. Unsurprisingly, its officer in charge of so-called ‘Site Integrity’ has flaunted his political bias in his own tweets.
https://twitter.com/kateconger/status/1265675205680099328
Plus the response from Jack Dorsey yesterday:
> Fact check: there is someone ultimately accountable for our actions as a company, and that’s me. Please leave our employees out of this. We’ll continue to point out incorrect or disputed information about elections globally. And we will admit to and own any mistakes we make.
"Newly released documents show he [Adam Schiff] knew all along that there was no proof of Russia-Trump collusion."
https://www.wsj.com/articles/all-the-adam-schiff-transcripts... 11589326164
So why not put a disclaimer on every politician that says there WAS collusion, or claiming to have evidence of collusion?
https://www.justsecurity.org/63838/guide-to-the-mueller-repo...
It's almost surreal that users named Overtonwindow and Simulacra are pushing the "no collusion" narrative
Much of the HPSCI majority report is also contradicted by:
- bipartisan Senate reports
- the Special Counsel's report
- the Special Counsel's indictments
- the FBI, as well as the intelligence community (in toto)
- the DOJ and intelligence Inspectors General
There are _legal_ approaches to address the real issue of online censorship:
1. Actually amend the Communications Decency Act Section 230
2. Exercise antitrust authority to break up platforms that exert monopoly influence
3. Encourage free market alternatives to established platforms
I believe that online censorship of political viewpoints is a real and serious issue, but it needs to be addressed in a lawful manner. Between this and the EARN IT Act, we are entering extremely dangerous territory for free speech online and I fear the short sighted politicians and DOJ are missing the forest for the trees when it comes to pushing these policies.
2. WAY easier said than done. The FTC started investigating Microsoft in 1992, but it was not until 2001 that the courts settled the matter and Microsoft settled. Nine YEARS. So no, this is absolutely not a top option for the administration because they've got only four years left.
3. Forgive me, I don't know where you are located, but this is kind of the mantra for America. Companies from Google to GAB to that decentralized network I can't remember the name of, have tried to compete. They can't - possibly because the companies are too powerful.
Oh, and it's not unconstitutional, unless you have a specific clause in the Constitution that I am not seeing? At best it's not within the boundaries of Executive Orders; banning guns is definitely not within the boundaries but the Left wants to do it anyway.
Unfortunately CDA is written in a way that broadly allows tech companies to censor any content that doesn’t fit their commercial or political narratives. It’s a poison pill to Internet discourse at the endpoint we’ve reached where three or four companies control that vast majority of online speech.
In a sense, the president is declaring Twitter and Facebook to be “public utilities,” an admission of defeat for the free market ideals that we pretend this country champions.
Only a change to the law or reimagining of the Internet can fix this. I don’t share your pessimism that this is impossible. I think decentralized/P2P platforms do have a place and a chance to unseat tech incumbents. Remember what happened to Yahoo and AOL? I just don’t think that our current set of tech companies are immune from the same sort of abandonment and irrelevance. A moment is coming where everything changes.
True, but it's within the executive branch's purview to... interpret the law a bit, as they execute it. Of course, then it's on the judicial branch to determine whether or not that was okay.
> In a sense, the president is declaring Twitter and Facebook to be “public utilities,”
This is actually one of the most interesting parts of this, though it definitely will be tested by the judicial branch here. Trump has decided Twitter constitutes the modern equivalent of the "public square", where people are entitled to speak freely. ...Apart from the fact that it's corporately owned, I'd totally agree that that's true: Modern free speech has moved entirely to media (TV, Internet, Radio, etc.) which are all owned by corporations.
Now, where that gets interesting is that the government is required to allow you to speak freely... corporations aren't, according to current interpretations of the Constitution. The Supreme Court, however, has vastly expanded the application of the Bill of Rights before though. It's presumably possible that a future court could decide that social media companies must allow people their town square.
Now they want to argue that they can force a business (Twitter) to do something that business (Twitter) doesn't want to do?
I think you may have gotten off on the wrong exit. One was a religious freedom case. The other is ordering the government to investigate Twitter for violating Section 203. Two..totally different things. The Executive Order can't force Twitter to do anything.
Yesterday's draft:
> The working group shall also collect publicly available information regarding the following:
> (i) monitoring or creating watch-lists of users based on their interactions with content or users (e.g., likes, follows, time spent); and
> (ii) monitoring users based on their activity off the platform.
Final version:
> The working group shall also collect publicly available information regarding the following:
> (i) increased scrutiny of users based on the other users they choose to follow, or their interactions with other users;
> (ii) algorithms to suppress content or users based on indications of political alignment or viewpoint;
> (iii) differential policies allowing for otherwise impermissible behavior, when committed by accounts associated with the Chinese Communist Party or other anti-democratic associations or governments;
> (iv) reliance on third-party entities, including contractors, media organizations, and individuals, with indicia of bias to review content; and
> (v) acts that limit the ability of users with particular viewpoints to earn money on the platform compared with other users similarly situated.
This is troubling to me. Can this be used to mean "anyone I label anti-democratic"?
I've discovered some interesting new websites!
Twitter will be liable for content posted, therefor won't they start censoring things so they can't be sued? This would make them also liable for Trump's tweets if those tweets aren't removed...
First option, what you described. If they want to make comments about the content of their platform (i.e. fact check something) then they have to 'go all the way' and 'editorialize' everything. (No more Section 230 protection)
Second option, which I think still exists (I think?), don't make any comments about the content, and behave strictly as a platform. In that case, all legal protection under Section 230 still applies.
Idk if this is a decent analogy, but it seems comparable to the classic anonymous swiss bank account. Either the bank completely protects all personal information for everyone, or it has to move out of switzerland and give up all its anonymity. (I know the analogy isn't accurate, but it seems like a decent mental model.)
I don't think the stuff on Twitter has often been held up as an example of healthy dialog. Other than that, I agree.
The scope of publisher liability makes that impractical for a user-submitted content site.
> Second option, which I think still exists (I think?), don't make any comments about the content, and behave strictly as a platform. In that case, all legal protection under Section 230 still applies.
Not only don't make comments, but don't control content at all (at least, except (and making errors of interpretation may be dangerous here) removing actually illegal content; this has (among other things) significantly adverse commercial consequences.
Honestly, it might be nice to end up with a greater divide between the commercial and non-commercial parts of the internet. I agree, it will be very hard to control all the content on e.g. Twitter; the degree of cleanup required to pull it off might limit the users to a small fraction of the current number. We might end up with commercial sites that are much more tightly controlled.
However, what about sites like HN? I think there'd be more of those. Dang does great work, but I think (?) most of the content control is done by users. It might be really nice to regain an internet that isn't dominated by profit-seeking.
HN has nowhere near enough active management to safe from liability without Section 230, but enough to be at risk of losing Section 230 protection especially for a government effort overtly motivated by perceived anti-Republican bias (which HN is regularly accused of exhibiting and reinforcing via it's moderation policies.)
I'm pretty sure YC wouldn't risk running it if Section 230 protection with active moderation wasn't available; user-submitted content sites that are side project for a business are even more at risk than ones that are core business; no one is going to absorb substantial liabit risk for a peripheral effort.
Please, if you disagree, reply with why. Besides ad-hominem attacking the person, and if this particular incident is a good example (it is not), explain why fb/twit/etc deserve dual protections?
> (too) publicly played favorites lately.
My view is that private companies should not host and enable content that makes the world a worse place to live.
Places like Gab or Voat have their view of what is acceptable, and I disagree and condemn them for it. Places like HN have a code with which I largely agree, and I commend them for it.
I neither expect, nor desire, companies like to twitter to provide "freedom of speech." Not with the internet and web we currently have, whose technical design overwhelmingly favors bad actors.
And who is to decide what makes the world a worse place?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23345380
And I ask that in addition to your not arguing about something that didn’t happen and how you hypothesize people you cannot name would react, that you make the argument just once and not paper all over a topic with exact copies of it.
If so, that's hilarious because nobody can possibly argue that Twitter's ToS enforcement has been anything close to consistent. The very fact that Trump still has a personal twitter account is proof of that. They're being bit by the dog they refused to muzzle.
Laughing so hard at this. Did you forget a /s?
My understanding is that this is the problem that people have with this, and most people who are in that camp also hate Trump.
In my opinion, Trump's racism and other aspects are quite odious, but I want to believe that in this case he actually is fighting against censorship. Because it does seem that conservative viewpoints are being censored.
If this a trick, then we are more screwed than I thought. Because the left-leaning group actually seems to be asking for _more_ censorship.
Trump is worried about conservative accounts being censored or shut down with no opportunity for appeal, for instance, but the very same demands for review may help people locked out by broken algorithmic systems on purely non-political errors.
And fundamentally, it's way overdue that we stop giving tech companies immunity from prosecution for their platforms. Right now everyone is focused on using Section 230 as a carrot that requires tech companies do things to continue to receive it (EARN IT, etc.) but we really just need to remove it entirely.
I hope this helps at least open new opprotunities for social media whose likes we have never seen before. Both better curation and more open-ness are potentially up for grabs. Surely this is only an opprotunity to anyone with a sharp mind.
Not that it matters. Nobody seems to believe the administration can actually do this. And Twitter (or your personal forum) can continue to boot trolls, Nazis, or heads of state posting targeted harassment at widows, and do so in good faith all day long.
What really happened is that the hard, valid questions about how much power social media companies have, how they should ensure free speech without enabling the worst elements of society, how appeals on moderation should work etc, just got sucked so deep into the screaming partisan meat grinder that there is now no chance of making any progress on them.
This definitely isn't true. The reality is that you are never automatically responsible for what someone else does. (It makes no sense!) Tech companies would like you to believe that Section 230 is some fundamental bedrock to the Internet, but it's not, it's just a get out of jail card for ad companies acting badly.
> Nobody seems to believe the administration can actually do this.
There's probably some manner of activity executive departments such as the FTC and FCC are capable of doing. Though it's definitely true that Congress-passed laws (unfortunately, including Section 230 of the CDA) stand above the regulatory power they have. But this order may be a precursor towards a larger push to scale back or (ideally) remove Section 230 in legislation.
> just got sucked so deep into the screaming partisan meat grinder that there is now no chance of making any progress on them
I actually disagree here. The vast majority of issues that require legislative attention aren't getting it because they're not loud enough to be put as conditions upon other things happening. Legislatively a lot of issues are at a complete standstill. But once it becomes a hot button issue, legislators are more likely to pack it in here or there until something moves on it.