It's an interesting mind exercise. What happens with blatant spamming, or bots, is the government allowed to interfere with those? Or does the 1st amendment block that too?
I aint no lawyer, of course, but this doesn't seem inconsistent with other arenas of free speech. Even literal public squares don't have infinite space. If some group tried to go occupy a government-owned park with a few thousand people more or less permanently, preventing anyone else from ever getting access, that would be illegal. Rationing and rate-limiting are not censorship, though presumably at least some people subject to it will probably try to say they are.
> Rationing and rate-limiting are not censorship, though presumably at least some people subject to it will probably try to say they are.
When rationing and rate-limiting are applied on the basis of the content of the speech, then yes is is absolutely censorship and there are supreme court cases to back that up.
Absurd idea, but amusing consequences if you ignore the obvious roadblocks.
But in terms of a nationalized social media network, I can't imagine it going well. The lack of innovation in the government would probably mean the site gets overwhelmed and taken down shortly after it was made.
The social media platforms need some sort of speech regulation enforced on them. Imagine if AT&T cut off your phone call because you started talking about Donald Trump or Hunter Biden's laptop.
Social media companies enjoy immunity under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act[1] but then editorialize their platform to allow only conversations socially acceptable.
Enforcing free speech on the platforms, as its accepted today by the courts[2], with criminal penalties for noncompliance, is the only solution.
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230 [2] https://www.uscourts.gov/about-federal-courts/educational-re...
Without Section 230 Twitter would be liable for every evil thing that is said on their platform.
What Section 230 does is create a category in which you are not liable for the content on the platform but they specifically setup limited rules for what can be censored. All censorship must be done in good faith. Lewd, obscene, harassment etc is censorable. But again good faith, you cant just say everything is harassment or obscene so you can censor speech.
So absolutely, twitter is legally obligated to allow free speech. The big controversy is that they are clearly in violation of this but nobody is punishing them. They just get away with it.
>It's an interesting mind exercise. What happens with blatant spamming, or bots, is the government allowed to interfere with those? Or does the 1st amendment block that too?
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of-
(A) 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, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or
So twitter could ban porn under lewd category but they choose not to do. Same with gore and obscenity in general.
You dont have to censor these things, but you can if you please.
Censoring political speech under any of those categories is going to be virtually impossible to justify that they are doing this in good faith.
Section 230 was created to encorage online moderation by removing the liability that moderation would bring in an offline context.
I did copy and paste the law. It's clear to me what is says and the free speech that is required. Censorship must be done in good faith.
>Without section 230 companies have a choice to either do no moderation or to assume full liability as publishers.
Without section 230 they would assume full liability as publisher.
>Section 230 was created to encorage online moderation by removing the liability that moderation would bring in an offline context.
Section 230 was created to allow entities like twitter to exist. Without section 230 twitter stops existing.
Let's be realistic, Elon just put $9 billion down because his poll showed significant problem with censorship. Fixing this will take twitter from $40 billion to much higher.
The CDA was from 1996. What social media predated 1996? Even ICQ does not predate the CDA.
> It doesn't anywhere require good faith.
I literally copy and pasted the law. It literally has the words good faith in it.
>The entire legislative history is on record. And it long predates Twitter.
Section 230 long predated all of the things. It is how they function today.
Forums existed well before 1996. Both CompuServe and Prodigy were found liable for things people posted on forums on their platforms.
Dont take me as opposing the CDA. I think Section 230 is superb and necessary.
What I believe is that we simply enforce the rules. Free speech is guaranteed on twitter.
https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referre...
And sorry, I should have been clearer on good faith. The section preventing providers being liable as a publisher (which is the core of s.230's value to social media platforms) has no good faith requirement. "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." (s.230(c)1) is the whole clause. Platforms don't acquire intermediary liability even if they delete every post praising the Yankees while laughing maniacally and falsely claiming it's a result of profanity use. They simply aren't "treated as the publisher or speaker" full stop.
The good faith language comes from (c)2, which further limits liability (to the speaker) for good faith removals on the grounds that the speech might be offensive. That's not an intermediary liability issue, as such, though.
We are arguing over a moot point. If section 230 or whatever does not provide for free speech. Then that is what needs to be improved upon. Perhaps make it more clear that free speech is guaranteed.
The problem is that people have wildly different takes on how to "fix" section 230.
One group wants to eliminate the liability protections, regardless of how much moderating you do. The concern is that this basically makes hosting user generated content at any sort of scale impractical from a business perspective since scaling competent human review to reduce the legal liability below the value per user is impractical for any sort of modern social media.
One group want so eliminate section 230 so only companies that do no moderation have liability protection, forcing social media companies to stop doing any moderation. The concern here is that some level of moderation of abuse / spam seems necessary to keep platforms from degrading into wastelands that no-one wants to use.
The moderate middle ground is reforming section 230 to limit the types of moderation activity that can be performed without losing liability protection.
This last seems politically unlikely as it doesn't provide a political win, despite being good for society.
One group wants to eliminate