State bill would let you sue social media giants for political censorship
bizpacreview.com
bizpacreview.com
In those cases many would say 'well, do it yourself and be the politician or the dev if you want change'. In social media's case, where's the free market people saying why not just be the change you seek, aka, use another platform or create another platform instead of blaming it on the man keeping you down? Did they stop using those terms because it's not a convenient mantra for their party now? Maybe they should pick themselves up by their bootstraps, stop blaming others and create their own hosting platforms.
At least they have an option. For those censored by politicians and laws, it takes so much more to change a law than it does to create your own http server and speak freely on it.
Because I'm pretty sure that protections equivalent to those in the First Amendment have been found applicable to the states under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth, and with that in place there doesn't seem to be any way this can be Constitutional.
That’s already the case for the USA. You can also create religious organizations and ban gay people from employment there.
There might be enough uncertainty to at least not get the law immediately overturned, but I'm no expert.
So the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which restricted that right, would be a precedent from different protected classes.
FWIW, here's a thread for the Ars article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25806151
Interesting that he has set the threshhold at 1 million users. How many websites are over that threshhold. Would this incentivise more small websites. Are small websites better than large ones.
They are considering something similar (or not) in Poland:
I find it funny that if everyone in the state was a user of a platform, they would be immune from the law.
Freedom of speech isn't freedom of reach. Just because you can't say something on my server doesn't mean I'm censoring just like you can't say anything you like in my house or to or about my kids lest I be free to kick you out. Where's the freedom to host a sovereign domain without someone telling you that you have to host certain content?
Sounds like the bill's as hypocritical and disastrous as the people wanting to implement it.
This seems to be the crux of it:
> 2. If an interactive computer service provider restricts, censors, or suppresses information that does not pertain to obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable subject matter, the interactive computer service provider is liable in a civil action for damages to the person whose speech is restricted, censored, or suppressed, and to any person who reasonably otherwise would have received the writing, speech, or publication.
Later (6a) it seems to specify that it's
> material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable...
Soooo, what's the point of this? If I am a provider and I personally consider Trump to be "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable," then I can ban him without being affected by this bill, right? Does anyone think Twitter or FB or any of these groups banning Trump didn't find him objectionable?
Am I completely misreading this?
I don't think so. If it actually did anything on its face, it would violate the Constitution and and also the explicit safe harbor for moderation in Section 230. It's seems to have been written specifically to avoid hitting the Section 230 moderation safe harbor, so it does nothing. But it provides the sponsor the ability to pretend to be doing something, and to xpoint to having sponsored a bill on the issue in campaign material, while conveniently ignoring that the bill would do nothing at all.
Oh, wait, reading it myself, it gets a bit worse on the “intentionally does nothing" front in Section 1, para. 2: “This section only applies if the interactive computer service provider: a. Is immune from civil liability under federal law;”
“We are going to make them civilly liable under state law only if the feds have expressly preempted our ability to do that.” Oh, okay then.
This legislation is purely performative.
Freedom of speech isn’t protected between to private citizens.
EDIT: downvoted for stating facts. Oh HN constantly believing you’re better than Reddit et al...never change.
There’s a good case to be made that Twitter isn’t Caesar and their lawn isn’t the Forum of Rome, there isn’t a good case to be made that their lawn is actually public property and should be treated as such just because they spent a decade deluding themselves and others.
Social media isn’t a utility either, and no one has yet to make a case why Facebook and Twitter specifically should get special privileges and powers by society when they are in fact just corporations. Somehow or other we don’t treat bank lobbies like utilities and they are arguably even more important to society than 280 character text messages with funny moving pictures attached.
I'm not making a case that their platforms are some Forum of Rome, or that their "lawn is actually public property." I'm also not proposing that Twitter or Facebook be given "special privileges and powers" based on their potential status as utilities. I'm proposing that they be obligated to uphold special restrictions and be subject to public oversight that, in my opinion, goes hand-in-hand with their monopoly or duopoly-like status in many countries. Currently, it seems like they have the best of both worlds: the benefits of existing marketshare (and perhaps governmental legislation that hampers new competitors) in a market that is inherently biased towards the largest players alongside the lack of oversight and social responsibility that we attribute to private entities.
US law is concerned with the US. If Canada replaced their phone system with Facebook tomorrow, that’s the Canadian Parliament’s problem, not Congress’. Mind my central focus on US law is within the context of the comment you originally replied to.
> I'm proposing that they be obligated to uphold special restrictions and be subject to public oversight that, in my opinion, goes hand-in-hand with their monopoly or duopoly-like status in many countries.
You are proposing to treat them like they are special because you perceive them to be something they are not. The fact that you and I are having an exchange right here on a relatively obscure non-Twitter and non-Facebook website is proof enough that there are alternatives, and there are many many alternatives. If the entire Internet was somehow destroyed tomorrow and couldn’t be repaired, maybe some wizard did it, our First Amendment rights would continue to prevail, but we would probably be back to exchanging letters in the mail for our communications and meeting new people at the bar, assuming the phone system as it exists today went with the Internet to Hell.
At least in that case we wouldn’t be discussing new and exciting forms of cronyism with companies that didn’t exist 20 years ago.
That...doesn't follow.
Read the first five words of the 1st Amendment. It is not a rights grant, it is a prohibition on the legislature of the US Government, but the US Government is not the same as the State governments, and the State governments are not subordinate entities of the US Government, and the United States Constitution is a document that formulates and determines the powers of the United States government, with only a few words to spare on the States. You didn’t mention your country, but most likely this is very different than your own country.
Most States have some sort of equivalent in their own Constitutions, although I have found most of them to be poorly written compared to the gold standard of the First Amendment.
This law would never stand a Supreme Court challenge thanks in part to Citizens United.
Nothing to do with Citizens United. There is no “independent political spending.”
It would fail on the basis of the First Amendment. The courts have ruled on forced speech and forced assembly. And political affiliation is not a federally protected class, so there isn’t even wiggle room.
The Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment right to free speech applies to corporations and thus the government cannot limit their political spending.
Now that corporations have codified Political First Amendment rights, this proposed law would clearly fail a SCOTUS challenge.
Citizens United reaffirmed corporate personhood and the Constitution’s protection of all persons, natural or legal. But that is old case law.
The novel part was ruling that “independent political spending” counts as First Amendment protected speech.
This has nothing to do with the first amendment, or free speech or anything like that. It is simply regulation around an industry.
We regulate all sorts of industries. Food gets regulated in the name of public health, cars get regulated in the name of public health, broadcast TV gets regulated in the name of public health. All sorts of stuff. In fact I'd say that government regulation has become the rule, not the exception.
The argument here is: suppression of dissenting opinions is bad for public health. That's all. No "freeze peach" arguments, no first amendment (or citizen united haha) arguments. None of this craziness. It's just government finally coming in to regulate how these GIANT corporations operate their business, JUST like every other business gets regulated.