Florida will fine social media companies that bar candidates

Looks like that happened relatively recently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NBCUniversal#Comcast_era_(2011...

but cable TV's cables do use public streets and right of ways, negotiation of those franchise often include lease agreement terms that require the cable company to carry a city's public access channels .....

The point is that it settles, once and for all, the role of government in policing social media. If social media really is the replication of the public town square, then one that has the same operating model is called for.

Doesn't matter if people want to go there. The point is that it exists, and the model is governed by the taxpayers.

To be clear, in my vision of this, people would be allowed to advertise however they want. Businesses could have accounts. But having a space for ads and then using behavioral ad targeting would be out.

A more generous interpretation is "no ads allowed" means the platform is not funded by advertising, but by public dollars. That way the system design does not become so maliciously driven by engagement/addiction metrics

Sure! Your account is going to be linked your driver's license. It's your space. Go nuts!

>It would be unusable. Porn is legal, gore is legal, hate speech is legal, as is any threat that’s not likely to cause “specific and imminent lawlessness”.

Such is the nature of living in a free society. Certainly there are ways, in even the most basic social media platforms, of un-following / blocking certain posters. And if the content isn't targeted by algorithm, should be fairly easy to avoid content you don't want to see.

Any if not, well, there's always Facebook and Twitter.

Comparing politicians banned for violating social media ToS to Rosa Parks is... insensitive at best.

Ah, this argument.

Generally speaking, we’ve held as a society that the rights of free association are very strong, but not absolute. We only allow the government to abridge these rights when the state has a compelling interest in doing so.

Obviously you’re aware that we have decided as a society that there are certain “protected characteristics” that cannot be the deciding factor for free association, including race, religion, sex, among other things. These are selected due to their immutable nature (religion is a special case I’m not going to explain here), and we’ve decided that it’s worse for society that people be excluded from economic or social participation based on who they are than it is for the government to override the free association rights of those who wish to discriminate.

Political affiliation and speech is not a protected characteristic, because it is a choice. You can choose to not only change parties, but also change how you communicate such things. In fact, many institutions fundamentally demand the ability to exclude people based on their political affiliation, including primaries and political groups. We literally could not run a primary, caucus, or PAC without the ability to discriminate based on political affiliation.

To continue the metaphor, this is less like someone getting kicked out of a shop because of their race or gender, and more like getting kicked out for refusing to wear pants.

Given the ideologies in the court these days, I would expect them to focus on the Article 1 question first, but it’s not unlikely that speech would make it into any opinion. The court has a lot of classical liberalism, but a strong preference for narrow and incremental decisions.

>Private entities have no legal obligation(thin "town hall" argument or not) to respect free speech, and are absolutely empowered to police content as they see fit.

Indeed, thats what this whole discussion is about: creating laws to protect individuals speech from corporations.

Laws are not static.

Private entities also had no legal obligation to serve black people or gay people not long ago, but we changed that too.

As your XKCD comic is merely arguing from a position of conservative legal authority, it could have applied just as well to blocking black and gay people when that was not protected by law.

Yeah. If they're going down this route, why not forbid blocking anyone at all unless a court mandates it?

Politicians already have special rights and restrictions.

Here's the argument. Democracy requires that politicians have the ability to contact potential voters. There are contribution limits as well as spending limits. In politics most of the money is spent trying to contact voters.

So tech companies banning some politicians but not others is a contribution in kind to a campaign.

The value of a verified Twitter account is far more than the direct contribution limit.

Therefore either all politicians should be allowed, or all must be banned from Twitter.

The FEC is unable to do its job because the Senate hasn't been confirming appointments.

So now states are trying to pass laws to fill the gap.

"hate speech" has become such an overused, loose term that its losing its original meaning

So long as it's not criminal, yes.

I'm not saying I like the idea, but it's vastly better to me than to have the Overton window chosen by the platform provider. If you can propose a way to stop bad-faith candidates from abusing it, that'd be a great thing, but it's secondary to preserving the ability for political candidates to state their positions, whatever they are.

Why?

I want politicians to post on whatever people are using to get information. Almost nobody I know my age is regularly watching the news on TV, or checking the local paper's website. They might have other channels, but they certainly don't have other channels with the same reach.

Just buy one share of stock on Robinhood and attend a shareholder meeting on the roof of one of the Frank Gehry designed buildings.

Edit: I guess it would be a battle of Corporate Lawyers vs. State Lawyers. Everyone ends up wasting money all around.

Well, then you arrest people, or seize their assets.

I am sure that some bank, that has any presence in Florida, will go along with it.

What, are you going to convince the banks to pull out from Florida as well? Sounds unlikely to me. The banks will just follow the government order.

That depends on a number of things. Is the subect a Public figure or not? Do you know that claim you are repeating is false? Do you have a reasonable belief that the rumor ia true? How many people are you talking to? Are you repeating the claim out of malice?

It's virtually impossible for a politician to win a defamation suit in the US. The bar is incredibly high.

You don’t get to point to centuries of free speech tradition as a justification while you advocate directly for undoing some of that tradition. That’s not a credible argument.

> Politicians are bound by literal centuries of free speech tradition and precedent. I trust them much more than I trust activists in Bay Area meeting rooms who believe that a company's mission should be promoting a worldview they got from Tumblr and Twitter.

But...that centuries of tradition means that companies, whether as a result of activists in meeting rooms or otherwise, get to make those decisions, and politicians don’t. By transferring that power from private actors deciding what ideas to use their own resources to transmit and promote to politicians, you would terminate that free speech tradition.

You’re proposing giving jurisdiction to politicians, you just don’t seem to be aware of it. Someone, somewhere will need to decide what speech is and is not “censorable” (a gross abuse of that word) above and beyond the regular standard of “protected speech”. Basically nobody wants to live on an internet where Twitter cannot moderate some protected speech , as that’s how you end up with 4chan. Hate speech is protected speech, pornography is protected speech, as is all kinds of harassment and bullying. Someone will need to draw the line for what can and cannot be moderated on all platforms, and that is a huge amount of power to hand out.

It’s also fundamentally unconstitutional. You cannot do this via legislation alone. The courts have long held that forcing someone to speak is as bad as punishing someone for speaking, and there is no constitutional framework for anything other than protected and unprotected speech. The courts will strike this bill down, it’s pure political theater for the base.

No. “Hate speech” is a vague BS term that can be applied to anything that disagrees with any established political group. I would rejoin the military to fight in a war that keeps “Hate speech” out of the US law books. The first amendment shall not be infringed on even if whatever being said is the most hateful diabolical thing imaginable. Absolutely no exceptions.

You should read up on the tolerance paradox. The people behind this FL bill are the type to abuse such tolerance, all while telling bakeries it's chill if they refuse services for gay wedding or similar.

Ok. Let's talk it through.

Government says you're not allowed to ban speech on your property. Tough shit, they say, you're a public forum and no one can avoid using you. Twitter is basically the railroad! But, yes, ok you can ban "hate speech," and presumably illegal speech, like repulsive pornography.

Who decides what the hate speech is? It's not longer the platforms, their owners, or their users. Users can't leave a platform if they dislike the hate speech policy, as every other platform is homogeneously bound by government regulation to allow and disallow the same forms of speech.

The government is now in the business, by virtue of requiring no private censorship, of defining what "acceptable" speech is. What if the political environment becomes even more fraught, and one side makes the argument that the core ideology of the other side is fundamentally 'hate speech?' Worst case, they're elected with enough of a majority to start banning such speech on all private companies' platform (hopefully at this point Americans are using platforms hosted in Europe). Best case, social media is a wasteland, with one side convinced by the norms of the time that the other literally shouldn't be allow to speak - it's hate speech! Which is defined and regulated by the government! Controlled by my party!

To the point of your analogy, speech in the form of sending an HTTP post request to a private website is not the same as traveling on a railroad. The forms of traveling on a railroad while behaving horribly are well defined and easy to regulate. Ditto the carriage of information over wires for the internet - that should be a common carrier. Running a social platform is not the same as carrying unknown packets of information.

When information so carried by a common carrier is composed to make complex political speech on privately-held platforms, which are themselves expensive pieces of property which exist to make a profit, the government should back off. The platform is itself an expression of free speech and free enterprise - it is not common property, and despite the over-puffed impression of Twitter lately, it is not, by any means, the only public forum.

To stretch your analogy, this is more like the government defining what sort of conversations can be allow among the passengers of the railway.