Today’s dissent is tomorrow’s hate speech. We are sliding down the slippery slope.
It’s really easy to say you defend things when it’s theory and not “a bad man who says mean things”.
It is a slippery slope, and we’re already well down it. Too many people continuing to cheer it along until it’ll be too late.
It’s a private company! Build your own Facebook! (Nevermind that Google with their nearly infinite money tried and spectacularly failed). Ignoring the reality it’s a monopoly.
The spirit of free speech extends past the US Government. If it’s not illegal it shouldn’t be censored by what is effectively a common carrier, this is why everyone is in a rush to expand what is illegal.
A store owner may be unhappy when some guy stands right at the entrance telling everyone that the same stuff is available cheaper across the street. While it may be a complete truth, I find it very hard to blame the store owner for kicking that guy out.
Facebook is not a store though. It's essentially a communication monopoly - akin to a utility company, which legally has a "duty to serve".
While in theory there are alternatives to, say, electric public service - from building your own electrical company to using wax candles, in practice it has been recognized by courts [1] that access to electricity, water and phone is a basic necessity in a modern society.
Any corporation which has more than 1 million users who operate user-generated content in the country should be a common carrier similar to the telecom industry or railroads.
So you are agreeing that they are publishers and not platforms? Yet they continue to get away with claiming immunity for "being a platform".
Rosa Parks should have just started her own bus company too?
Railroads, telecom, electricity and water companies should be able to refuse service too?
Are you against the FDA, EPA, FCC, FEC etc?
How about Net Neutrality? Private businesses should be able to charge whatever they want and for whatever content they want right?
How about the government-forced lockdowns forcing private businesses to shut down and go bankrupt?
And how about the baker who refused to bake cake for the gay couple for religious reasons?
> Facebook is not a communication monopoly
They are openly coordinating with other tech companies and even the state government of California. Over 50% of the population's viewpoints are being censored/throttled. Zuckerberg was coordinating with government employee Fauci to censor the lab leak and other news. When exactly does someone become a monopoly in your book?
Under American law, a business has the right to refuse service to customers, but you can't discriminate against customers based on certain clearly enumerated factors such as race, religion, sex or national origin. Facebook is not a public utility and has no duty to serve.
They are also not a communication monopoly, because they are not the only way you can communicate online. You are free to use E-mail, telephone, and many other messaging systems that do not moderate content.
I'm not sure what the rest of your comment (Rosa Parks, EPA and lockdowns) has to do with Facebook's business.
Funny enough, FB used the exact opposite excuse to get away with anything they get sued for. Section 230 was supposed to only apply for platforms, not publishers. Publishers like NYTimes can be sued for knowingly publishing false libellous content. But you can't sue FB for the same because they claim to be a platform while acting as publishers. Currently they are "having their cake and eating it too".
> I'm not sure what the rest of your comment (Rosa Parks, EPA and lockdowns) has to do with Facebook's business.
It has to do with how your logic was used by people in the past to discriminate based on race. The "it's a private company" crowd forget that at one point, segregation, Jim Crow, slavery etc were all allowed. We had to write laws to prevent that from happening. Same needs to be done with any company which has more than a million user generated content users.
> They are also not a communication monopoly, because they are not the only way you can communicate online.
I have already addressed this in my original comment but you are cherry picking and ignoring it.
Section 230 says that web sites are not liable for user generated content. If facebook published a blog post, authored by facebook, you could sue them for that. But you can't sue them for a comment made my another user, much as you couldn't sue the NYT for a comment someone left on their website.
Note that in both contexts, the NYT and Facebook are both acting as publishers, but are still not liable for the user generated content.
One can choose to moderate content, and still retain section 230 protections, in fact that's the entire point of 230, to encourage sites to moderate content without increasing their liability. The legal context, original authors, and judicial history all support that interpretation.
> We had to write laws to prevent that from happening.
Well, you're simplifying a bit here. Jim crow, slavery, etc. were all legally mandated. But you're correct that when the forms of mandated discrimination were no longer mandated, many were also made illegal.
When they use "algorithms", they are equivalent to publishing. Similar to how newspapers can't just publish everything. They make editorial decisions on what to publish and what not to. The "algorithms" are the editorial decisions. That makes them a publisher. How's this a misunderstanding of the law?
No, that's the point. Facebook, even if it moderates content, and no matter how it moderates content, still isn't liable for failing to moderate some content.
The misunderstanding is so completely fundamental: Section 230 doesn't actually make any distinction between "platforms" and "publishers" that entire distinction was made up by conservative pundits.
The relevant section of 230 is, in full "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" (there's more, but it has to do specifically with child porn). You can't "lose" section 230 protection by doing or failing to do certain things or acting in a certain way. The law just doesn't include anything about that.
> When they use "algorithms", they are equivalent to publishing.
No, moderation is not equivalent to publishing, and the legislative history of section 230 makes this incredibly clear. Prior to 230, a website operator had two options: they could attempt to moderate content, but in doing so invite liability, or they could do no moderation at all and have no liability. Section 230 provided "good samaritan" protections to allow site operators to moderate user-generated content without inviting additional liability (the wikipedia section has a good rundown of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230#Background_and_pas...).
So yeah, there's no such thing as a platform, everyone is a publisher, and all publishers have section 230 protection which allows them to moderate user generated content without inviting liability. You've been lied to about the law. It is intended to allow website operators to engage in certain forms of "editorial decisions". That's the point. That's why congress passed it.
You are talking about how things are right now and I am talking about how things should be to make things fair. 2 very different things.
Your logic would have been used to claim slavery/segregation/Jim Crow/railroads is okay because it's the law!
Trillion dollar companies deciding what can and can't be said, promoting some view points, and suppressing others. They've gone from platforms to publishers. That's how we get the "lab leak" debacle.
Online “platforms” have always been publishers; CDA Section 230 was adopted expressly to preserve that without exposing them to traditional publisher liability.
You may have pivoted to that now, but no, you started by talking about what you believed the law was, and how you thought Facebook was breaking it.
I have no problem with you being of the opinion that we should regulate publishers. I mean it's usually a first amendment violation, but I too want some of those on occasion. However just understand that the law does not, and never has, made a distinction between a platform and publisher. That difference was invented in like 2017.
If the head of government and de-facto head of the ruling party isn't the establishment, what is?
I mean this honestly. To me the establishment means being able to influence the ruling class. Despite trump's presidency, in several important policy points, where he clearly stated his policy, his rules were violated by a seemingly out of control bureaucracy.
The us diplomatic staff to Syria was caught bragging that the army had left 900 troops without informing the president. How is that establishment. Quite clearly, someone else is in charge
I don't know, you'd need to ask him. My guess is that he was informed that it would be infeasible and dangerous to pull out all of the troops immediately, and took that I to account.
The major complication here is that trump had a pattern of lying and blistering to the American people. But given that the trump white house is on record that hundreds of troops would remain in Syria indefinitely, and that there was no specific withdrawal timetable, I have a hard time seeing how this was them disobeying his orders. Do you know the order he actually gave the military, or are you assuming the simplified speech was the extent of it (when it's clear that his actual orders, thankfully, had more nuance)?
Edit: I looked further into this, is appears to be not that the military lied to trump, but that a trump appointee lied to trump. Which like, still bad, but not a conspiracy by anyone except trump's own staff. Perhaps he should have hired better people, or perhaps he just didn't care.
He was still lied to. Any decisions he made were based on lies.
> Perhaps he should have hired better people, or perhaps he just didn't care
The problem is the bureaucratic class.. ie those qualified to run these things all have similar views, regardless of party.
Trump did not share those views yet still had to pick from them. The american people also don't have those views, or at least a large percentage of them don't. This myopic perspective amongst Al the bureaucratic class is what people call 'the deep state'.
A president that wants to get rid of this ought to embrace the unitary theory of the us executive and start making decisions and managing the various departments himself. for example, if a president believe hi predecessor bribed a foreign country, he can simply ask the other country to investigate, and has whatever foreign policy levers he has to get compliance, like us aid.
Unfortunately, when you do that, the ruling class doesn't like it and then they try to impeach you.
I mean that's what happens when there's a single party running Washington DC, but most people don't see it.
This begs the question.
> Unfortunately, when you do that, the ruling class doesn't like it and then they try to impeach you.
This reads as unfounded conspiracy. Your thesis is that impeachment by republicans was both a real threat to trump, but still failed, as a threat to step in line? Why are they still clinging to him as head of party then?
Where have you been? They're not. At least not the elected ones.
Trump is broadly popular with the voters and with a select few republican office holders that you end up hearing about a lot because the gop voter base loves them. The establishment gop.. not so much.
I mean the head of the RNC is Romney's niece . Do you think she really likes trump? Or Mitch McConnell, current highest ranking republican.
So either the establishment supports him, or he's more powerful than the establishment and they're forced to support him. Anything else and he'd be gone.
Because they want his endorsement to be voted into power.
Look, if the GOP voters get their way and remove every so-called 'RINO', and install Trump supporters, I will agree that Trump has become establishment. But until then, it's obvious he wasn't. When he had both branches of government with Paul Ryan as speaker, he still couldn't get his agenda through. Both the GOP house and the dem house stopped his agenda in various different ways.
Consider the border wall. This is incredibly popular amongst his base. The same base that voted Paul Ryan and his ilk into the house. And did they continue this agenda? No. They actively prevented it. Trump was -- his entire time in office -- a lone ranger. I don't see how this is even controversial.
Contrast this with Bush, who did have periods of GOP dominance, in which he got everything he wanted pushed through (his wars...). Or look at Obama with Obamacare and the dem house.
This was obvious to me from Reince Priebus on. McConnell and Graham played their parts until they didn’t have to anymore.
How do people seriously not see this?!
Having autocratic control of the government and policy isn't what makes you establishment or not, because politics is complicated. It's also not clear what "establishment" we're talking about now. The decision to ban trump was derided by pretty much everyone on the right, even the people you've called "establishment" GOP politicians. So if Ryan is "establishment", and Google was acting against Trump and Ryan when they banned him, which "establishment" were they working with?
I'd think that the people who were glad when Twitter and Facebook banned Trump, aren't exactly opposed to this new law, likely thinking this would never be used against them. But as we learned from the JK Rowling affair, an opinion that is progressive or PC in 2021 might not hold up to standards 5 or 10 years later thanks to the purity spiral[1].
[1] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Purity%20Spi...
Interesting... I would have normally assumed that everybody who's upset by this law would have been upset by Trump's ban and vice versa.
I may hate what you (anyone) have to say, it may hurt me to hear it, but i will do whatever I can to defend your right to say it! Because unlike many who cheer this on, I've lived in a country that followed this to its logical conclusion (USSR). It was not fun.