Trump sues Twitter, Google and Facebook alleging 'censorship'
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Filing the case is reasonable on its own. Leveraging the fundraising opportunity it creates is normal politics. Insisting the core motive IS fundraising is mind reading.
If you disagree with the conclusion then okay, go ahead and make an actual counterpoint. That's the whole point of discussion. Don't go accusing people of such outrageously ridiculous things as thinking that they have telepathic powers. You know perfectly well that sort of hyperbolic nonsense won't sway anyone.
Twitter & Facebook were waiting for the perfect storm:
1. Their decision had to have good optics—the company had to appear, to the public, that it was doing the right thing.
2. Their decision had to be consistent—the relevant policies had to be written down and enacted long in advance.
3. Their decision had to have the right timing, politically.
I’m also sure that there’s a massive stack of CYA documentation that these companies can produce on a moment’s notice. It’ll be interesting to watch the court case, because I’m interested in seeing what kind of CYA documentation these companies produce. They knew that Trump is eager to litigate. They knew this lawsuit was coming, and they were preparing for it long before they banned him.
Is this an instance of shadow-banning? My understanding is shadow-banning is when a user thinks they're contributing, but nobody else (except admins) sees their contributions. I think that's how it's used on Reddit, at any rate.
When this country was founded Government was by far the most powerful agency in people's lives. Merchants where important, had a lot of influence but still could not be too aggressive with a regent.
Today the Government has far less influence over your daily life than large corporations and you employer. In 1776 most people where farmers, the only agency that could deny your livelihood was the government (they ultimately had control over your land). Today government policies have far less of an impact than your employer on your livelihood.
The fact that a handful of oligarchs can decided that Trump doesn't need a voice is not democratic solution to a politician I radically disagree with that I would like. If you feel like the list of things you can't say publicly without ruining your career is shrinking, that is certainly a threat to the spirit of free speech.
The solution entails more than questioning the philosophical idea of "Free Speech", it involves considering the nature of government and human rights in an entirely different light than the currently dominant neoliberal economic consensus.
So arguing that the façade of a private company being allowed to shut you down is somehow rational is nothing beyond absurd. If you cannot express your speech anywhere because a mob disapproves, you don't have freedom of speech. Freedom of Speech is not "Freedom to only listen to the things I want to hear." Otherwise there is no free speech, just what is culturally acceptable.
> the façade of a private company being allowed to shut you down is somehow rational is nothing beyond absurd
Indeed, it is, but that's where we are.
> a mob disapproves
In this case, it's not a mob. It's a handful of people who care more about making money than upholding rights.
> there is no free speech, just what is culturally acceptable.
"Yet if all cannot be of one mind—as who looks they should be?—this doubtless is more wholesome, more prudent, and more Christian, that many be tolerated, rather than all compelled. I mean not tolerated popery, and open superstition, which, as it extirpates all religions and civil supremacies, so itself should be extirpate" - John Milton, "Areopagitica: A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing to the Parliament of England", 1644 https://www.gutenberg.org/files/608/608-h/608-h.htm
Free speech has always been constrained by what is culturally acceptable.
A better title.
As a political office holder, he is not a private citizen. His speech is by definition government speech. Attempting to force private entities to broadcast government speech is...precisely the opposite of censorship.
I live in Canada and not the US so I know little about how US laws work, but it does seem that both countries need to work on addressing the power that giant tech corporations have over speech.
Ideally I would like some sort of government sponsored, decentralized platform similar to matrix, but I imagine that both governments are incapable of producing or unwilling to produce anything of the sort...
I'm also very wary of government intervention given how little representation both the US and Canada peoples have, compared to who actually lobbies politicians.
As much as I do not care at all for Donald Trump, I do still want people, whose ideas I do not agree with for the most part, able to speak their mind.
The issue isn't Donald Trump being silenced, the issue is wannabe tinpot dictators like him trying to coerce private business into doing his bidding. That's the actual free speech issue if there is one. Nobody should be compelled to host anyone else's speech.
Social media sites are not 'de facto public squares' in any way. It's trivial technically to create an alternative site to the incumbents, that's why there's already like half a dozen alternatives spawning around Trump's political ecosystem. It's just that the content on those sites is so godawful within days of them going online that everyone runs for the hills who has a few brain-cells left.
It is so ridiculous to paint people like Trump, literal oligarchs, as victims of private business lol.
That’s without even talking about stuff like being kicked off app stores, AWS, other hosting, or even their domain name.
There's absolutely no right for you or anyone else to have a guaranteed audience, though plenty of politicians try to make it so by using taxpayer money to let you know they stole some money from one taxpayer and gave it to a larger voting bloc friendly to them.
So, yeah, it's a few days of work to build a twitter replacement, but if you want that audience, you have to put in the sweat to build it, not just jump up and down and demand that you have a right to one that someone else built.
You can be on a dozen social networks, or on none, and hitting enter and going somewhere on the internet takes (almost) the same time regardless of where you go,in other words Facebook is trivially replaceable the same way it replaced MySpace, regardless of how large it is. The question is whether Facebook exercises market power, not whether it is large, which is the exact same flawed argument that people use in regards to Google.
What actually has public character is the physical infrastructure of the net, maybe the ISP level, but not digital products, at least none I have seen yet.
Unless the government (the people) buys it and funds it through taxes, it doesn't seem to be anywhere near the concept of a public square, just like a newspaper isn't a public square, and the commercial TV and Radio isn't a public square either. Neither are phones. Or billboards.
If something becomes ubiquitous enough to be regarded a public square, we either have to make it one, or fix the reason why a commercial for-profit company is regarded as public square in the first place.
Although it was the FCC under Trump that, in 2017, removed common carrier status as a requirement for ISPs. Hard to make the case that ISPs are not common carriers but Twitter is.
This would be ideal. The network effect is strong. As Barrin92's response to my comment stated, anyone can make an alternative site. But all of the value comes from the large networks of people on these sites.
I would prefer if such a "public square" site weren't for profit, if I'm going to be honest. Not sure how well that would work, but profit motives introduce too many flaws for such a necessary part of society. OTOH, so do influences from other means...
Works perfectly fine. There are plenty of alt-platforms that are based on self-hosted principles like that (Mastodon, Pleroma, Matrix), and all of them are about the most "free" platforms (rather, protocols) you can find.
Misrepresentation of the publics interest and voice will continue to occur. There is no solution that I'm aware of.
I don't understand why many liberals defend a corporations freedom to silence speech but get angry when conservatives in the government do it. Six of one, half dozen of the other, it's still speech being silenced by someone more powerful than you. But one being a corporation and one being a politician doesn't change the fact that both limit freedom of speech protected by the constitution.
Because it’s a false equivalence that has nothing to do with being “liberal”.
The government has the power of coercion. No corporation has that by law.
In general, you are conflating the right to free speech with the privilege of easy armchair dissemination of one’s speech. Simply, your right to say anything doesn’t extend to forcing the world to disseminate and listen to what you have to say. Frankly, that extension is very much 1984.
In extremis, Trump has the means to publish a newsletter and nobody is stopping him from doing it.
The answer is: no you don't. Because the government enables these companies to do these things that enroach upon your rights while making people like you believe you still have said rights simply because it's not the government proper doing it. The government and through lobbying can influence and control a lot of what you do without legislation you know.
Common carrier: service provider is not responsible for any information customers transmit.
Publisher: service provider is responsible for which customer-supplied information is transmitted.
Section 203 bends the line between these, absolving service provider from liability of content while allowing good-faith effort to cull bad content. T/G/F broke that line by conflating “opposing views” with “bad content” unto sociopolitical ends.
At some point a court or legislature must clarify that making bad-faith deletions of content nullifies the 203 protection. Here we go.
(I'm not a conservative, but I can appreciate that there are still clear heads on the right who have interesting things to say even if I disagree with them.)
This desire to re-imagine 230, to invent these differing categories, or to imagine additional obligations to carry content, is fabricated made up nonsense with zero basis in fact. It's a complete schtick. Personally, to me, it comes off as a vengeful control act, often by influences/camps who rightfully these platforms should want to stay away from for good cause, but that's a weakly held opinion of myself.
I normally am horrified by corporate rights, by treating corporations as people, but in this case, I 100% think 230 did the right thing, and allowed companies to build the sites they wanted to build, rather than having to get swamped by whomever came by & wanted to use the site for whatever dreadful horrible affairs they wanted.
The law says "any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable."
Otherwise objectionable is a pretty broad brush to take down anything you want, THAT YOU DONT LIKE. And thats the point. If you build a platform you can host whatever you want, and if you take down things you dont like, that doesnt make you the speaker of what remains. What would a "bad faith" removal of non-objectionable content even look like? Removing it just to annoy the person, basically "don't pick on people for fun?"
Imagine if youtube took down spam, and in doing so became the speaker of every other video it hosted.