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Comment by WaitWaitWha | Hacker News Reader

Social media cannot embrace the immunity and authority, but none of the responsibility.

Social media can and does have both.

The whole point of Section 230 immunity is to basically neutralize the platform's responsibility so in that case they shouldn't care who says what and let the opposing sides battle each other on the merits of what's being said.

So why do they maintain huge and cumbersome speech codes and rules of what can be said on their platforms?

It's simple. Threat of regulation. The tech monopolists are like the old time robber barons of the early 20th century with their mega corps (railroads, oil, tobacco, etc). They are trying to hang on to their behemoths' power and appease political forces at the same time.

Well, also threat of losing advertisers, which is their major source of income.

In many cases, advertisers have been pressured by activists on pain of having their brand actively smeared by those activists. This leaves the question open as to how much advertisers would be motivated to withdraw their custom, absent such campaigns, or the chilling effect of the possibility of such activism.

Well sure, but that’s part of the free market, and has nothing to do with pressure from the government. The government pressure story is just not convincing to me.

I am not sure that political activists employing threats to achieve a political goal should be considered part of the free market.

The CDA as we know it definitely needs to be abolished. It was written long before Facebook and YouTube became the arbiters of truth for many people.

Let's be real. Social media doesn't have a choice. They are pre-empting orders for the government or they have already received them. There's a direct line from the white house to social media platforms. Youtube and Google is a business after-all. And the federal government could make it very hard for them to continue

From a press conference from July 15 2021

> Q Thanks, Jen. Can you talk a little bit more about this request for tech companies to be more aggressive in policing misinformation? Has the administration been in touch with any of these companies and are there any actions that the federal government can take to ensure their cooperation, because we’ve seen, from the start, there’s not a lot of action on some of these platforms.

> MS. PSAKI: Sure. Well, first, we are in regular touch with these social media platforms, and those engagements typically happen through members of our senior staff, but also members of our COVID-19 team, given, as Dr. Murthy conveyed, this is a big issue of misinformation, specifically on the pandemic.

> In terms of actions, Alex, that we have taken — or we’re working to take, I should say — from the federal government: We’ve increased disinformation research and tracking within the Surgeon General’s office. We’re flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation. We’re working with doctors and medical professionals to connect — to connect medical experts with popular — with popular — who are popular with their audiences with — with accurate information and boost trusted content. So we’re helping get trusted content out there.

https://mleverything.substack.com/p/what-would-government-ce...

Since the government is leaning on them to do it, this is clearly a Constitutional right to free speech issue.

read it again WE do NOT HAVE FREE

we have instead a limited notion of free political when and where it does not immediately cause death of others as that would be denying them life and pursuit of happiness under the Declaration of Independence.

Big difference

To be clear, I don't know about this case in particular, but the current administration has admitted to be in direct contact with social media platforms to tag "problematic" posts. And they may not even need to because the implicit threat is there.

I used to be part of the "its a private platform" group, but I asked myself the question, what would actual government censorship look like. And I couldn't think of an answer that would make what we have today not censorship.

If the social media platforms in question are taking down posts on the recommendations (or demands, take your pick) of the White House's senior staff, then I think it's fair to say that they are State Actor's.

Or when they are being paid by the government, which is indeed the case with covid messaging, just like they do all other MSM. Hence the lawsuits against Facebook for censorship because they are acting as agents of the state.

If they are, they need to stop.

That is essentially the novel legal theory behind Donald Trump's lawsuit against several social media companies. He claims that by following federal government censorship requests they are essentially acting as an arm of the government, and thus users should be entitled to 1st Amendment free speech protections. There is no case law to support Trump's claim so I expect he will lose, but I guess we'll see.

https://www.npr.org/2021/07/07/1013760153/donald-trump-says-...

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