U.S. appeals court rejects big tech’s right to regulate online speech

This opinion is just badly written and badly reasoned. It's not even well written enough that it is worth trying to debate. Of course the judges in question were rated unqualified by the ABA (which is a really low bar) so not surprising.

It’s a pretty abrupt turnaround from the same legal movement that brought us Citizens United.

I’d be interested in a fair (i.e. not overly critical or fawning) book length history of the Federalist Society and how it’s evolved.

The last paragraph of page 111 is interesting because I don't think the majority opinion tries to rebut that criticism, and it destroys the premise of most of their arguments.

It's also interesting to compare the tone of the two opinions. The majority is theatrical. That's not what I want to see from a court. Unfortunately, it's hardly unique to this court.

The term “conservative” means nothing if you apply it to a court which has overturned years of legal norm across various areas of law.

In one case the corporation is speaking. In the other the corporation is facilitating me speaking to you (like a telephone wire).

That strikes me as a pretty clear distinction.

My hair is not blown back at all here.

If social media wishes to be immune from lawsuits regarding the content it publishes, section 203, then it should not have the ability to censor such content for an explicit commercial revenue model.

I understand why people hate that opinion, because they want civil discourse and nearly free access to media online. Uncensored content pushes normal people out.

Those things are great, but are ultimately out of alignment with a commercial revenue model. The result is social media imposing an algorithmic bias to increase engagement, the results of which are often toxic, and that toxicity ultimately pushes normal people out anyways. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.

The distinction the court is drawing isn’t about corporations versus non-corporations, but speech versus moderation.

You say moderation is about “editorial control” but that’s exactly the debate. Is Facebook moderation equivalent to the NYT deciding what to publish and not publish?

When someone reads a Facebook post, does anyone think that Facebook is the speaker? That legal fiction is attractive for various reasons, but I don’t think it’s such a slam dunk. I think there is a fair argument that Facebook is a pipe for someone else’s speech.

> That Amendment, of course, protects every person’s right to 'the freedom of speech.'

Wow that's just made up! All the amendment says is "Congress shall make no law...".

These are supposedly originalist judges but really they're just culture warriors.

1st amendment states: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;"

Note, it does not say anything about corporations. It simply says the government cannot put you in jail for freedom of expression. Ergo, it's totally within any establishments rights to ask you to leave if they don't like what you have to say. That is very different from the police coming in and arresting you.

with that logic i dont think an en banc ruling would result in anything different

But the Supreme Court is more likely to agree with the other appeals court, or otherwise modify the scope of the texas law

> How the 1st Amendment might protect a corporation's religious POV but not its exercise of editorial control is a very good question

I don’t think this court buys the idea that the platforms exercise editorial control. For example:

“But the more fundamental problem with the Platforms’ reliance on Herbert is that they do not have an “editorial process” that looks anything like a traditional publisher’s. See supra Part III.C.2.c. Herbert involved discovery into how an editor selected, composed, and edited a particular story. See 441 U.S. at 156–57. But the Platforms, of course, neither select, compose, nor edit (except in rare instances after dissemination) the speech they host. So even if there was a different rule for disclosure requirements implicating a newspaper-like editorial process, that rule would not apply here because the Platforms have no such process.”

Or:

“ The Platforms are nothing like the newspaper in Miami Herald. Unlike newspapers, the Platforms exercise virtually no editorial control or judgment. The Platforms use algorithms to screen out certain obscene and spam-related content.8 And then virtually everything else is just posted to the Platform with zero editorial control or judgment. “Something well north of 99% of th[is] content . . . never gets reviewed further. The content on a site is, to that extent, invisible to the [Platform].” NetChoice, LLC v. Moody, 546 F. Supp. 3d 1082, 1092 (N.D. Fla. 2021). Thus the Platforms, unlike newspapers, are primarily “conduit[s] for news, comment, and advertising.” Miami Herald, 418 U.S. at 258. And that’s why the Supreme Court has described them as “the modern public square.” Packingham, 137 S. Ct. at 1737; see also Biden v. Knight First Amend. Inst., 141 S. Ct. 1220, 1224 (2021) (Thomas, J., concurring) (noting Platforms are also “unlike newspapers” in that they “hold themselves out as organizations that focus on distributing the speech of the broader public”). The Platforms’ own representations confirm this.9 They’ve told their users: “We try to explicitly view ourselves as not editors. . . . We don’t want to have editorial judgment over the content that’s in your feed.”10 They’ve told the public that they “may not monitor,” “do not endorse,” and “cannot take responsibility for” the content on their Platforms.11 They’ve told Congress that their “goal is to offer a platform for all ideas.”12 And they’ve told courts—over and over again—that they simply “serv[e] as conduits for other parties’ speech.”13“

They kind of have a point. The platforms seem most interested in minimizing financial costs like the hiring of moderation staff and loss of advertising and reputational costs like PR damage and pissing off sensitive users. They don’t seem to have any particular editorial mission. They seem to mainly want to grow and profit. I actually wonder if they would have a stronger case if they were avowedly advancing a leftist agenda. IANAL

I'm not a lawyer but I don't think this would apply to bots.

The Texas law text[1] says it only protects 'users' which are defined as people. And even then the law only prohibits censorship for specific reasons.

It doesn't say companies can't ban users for running bots. Even if the messages the bot is posting are protected the fact of running the bot itself should still be a bannable offense if it's not allowed in the TOS.

[1] https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/872/billtext/html/HB00020F...

Let each user block what they don’t want to see. With filters, ai, etc. Don’t have a centralized “overlord” decide what an individual is allowed to see. That should be obvious and not controversial.

In Reamde, Neal Stephenson posits a future where we pay individuals/services to filter and prioritize the unordered deluge of data from the web.

It seems like this ruling pushes us along that path.

The problem here is accountability, with traditional solutions you can't have accountability and anonymity, anonymity encourages bad behaviour but also encourages sharing your thoughts without censoring yourself, maybe in future you will be only allowed to post when your account is registered using your special ID that every citizen will get from government saying "this is a real person" but you will not know who it is, and then appealing blocked account will be regulated by special law for social networks with more than x million users. This will limit bot usage to minimum, free speech problem would be partially solved because now you can be identified the same way as you would on the street IF you break the law but if you are not breaking any law then social network employees or other participants in the social network will not know who you are or know what's your name if you don't want them to. Maybe something like that would work?

Congrats, you're reinventing this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serdar_Argic

One thing you can do, though it would take a lot of energy, is to add a "submit" button to your bot that you would have to click in order to tweet each tweet. That way it would be you who tweets it, though a bot did the hard work.

This does not sound to me like an issue of free speech more of one of you abusing an online service. Use of a bot maybe is against the services tos. So it’s not the content of your message rather the method you abused to spread it?

> Twitter can't ban them though.

People should be able to opt into a variety of filters, some even provided by third parties, to clean their feed according to their views. That won't cause an issue with the senders as the receivers are entitled to filter what they read. People can have control but Twitter can't dictate.

Once they figure it out they'll write a special case against using bots, but troll farms will be alive and well. At which point the site will switch to more stringent sign up requirements, as another post said.

This ruling appears to apply to the content of speech. There's nothing that says you couldn't rate limit replies to prevent spam. Limiting posts to 1 per 30 seconds, or linking the number of replies you are allowed per day to your rate of organic interactions with other people would be a way to effectively eliminate these sort of bots without censoring based on content.

You're literally describing Twitter here.

Source: search for "Peñabots". There are great detailed documentaries about how far this went. That's one example, but this is ongoing for every major (geo)political topic and big businesses / hedge funds and the media "news" companies they own.

I was assuming your question would be answered in the article but I guess they really didn't go into much detail. The short answer is no; the law is much more narrow than that, more about banning politicians to influence elections and bots are excluded.

I assume so, from reading this (posted in a deeper reply)

Sec. 120.002. APPLICABILITY OF CHAPTER. (a) This chapter applies only to a user who: (3) shares or receives content on a social media platform in this state.

That's basically what Twitter is right now, with the exception that their moderators ban those they don't agree with. So you get millions of sockpuppets saying the same thing. What a great way to manufacture consent.

> Texas law that bars large social media companies from banning or censoring users based on "viewpoint,"

But this doesn’t mention barring banning accounts because they break ToS about bot usage.

You are under the assumption that Twitter or other platforms will not innovate or attempt to adapt to the new legal landscape they find themselves in.

Give users intuitive filters? Give users the ability to create invite-only communities? Etc.

To use a bot you need to register an API key for it. Twitter or such could simply revoke the API access. The user is still free to post manually and their free speech is not impinged.

The solution is an individual's freedom of association. Something more intuitive than the block function or setting account to private, would be nice though.

They're free to ban bots. That would clearly be a viewpoint-neutral restriction on content/behavior. "Using a bot" isn't a viewpoint, and banning bots is not a viewpoint-based restriction on user expression.

This is a very well-explored area of law, and nobody is confused about the definitions of the terms used here. Even the government has reasonable authority to restrict speech based on time, place, or manner (e.g. by disallowing amplified sound systems).

Your scenario makes no sense. The law isn’t a magic shield you can apply to any thing by just mentioning politics. Your bots could still be banned for abusing the platform or sharing links to malicious sites. The law just means that Twitter can’t ban you specifically for political opinions.

This is already happening basically and twitter aren't banning anyway. (Try mentioning any drug or being 'hacked' or needing an 'essay' written, you'll get a flood of replies in a few minutes.)

You are conflating two things:

1) The right to publish content that is not in line with mainstream politics

2) The right to spam replies against tweets of people you don't follow (directly or indirectly) for the purpsoe of marketing

These two things are largely orthogonal.

free speech is no censorship because of the content of your speech, if you're spamming that isn't really a free speech issue

you can easily prevent that kind of oversized influence by throttling bots, either by volume or frequency of messaging.

This is quite literally already happening

Can't they just ban all mass-botting? That doesn't have anything to do with speech, it's just banning what amounts to spambots.

> Will this apply to bots?

Most likely it'll apply in whatever cases Texas's govt wants. That is, the vague law will be basis for selective enforcement, like GDPR. There's no other way this can work.

I would actually like this. Imagine if online discussion was so visibly bad that no one used it anymore.

Talk to real people. Go outside.

> Users cannot have their speech limited on these platforms

"Will this also apply to [completely unrelated issue]? Bet they didn't think of that."

What?

Users should protect themselves from this. With the expectation that they will, there will be tons of tools available and this scenario will be a nonstarter.

Decentralized defenses against bots will be far more effective than the central planning of information ecosystems we have today. Just watch.

It’s really not this complicated at all, and arguments like this just come across like reaching for a rebuttal.

What these people want is very simple: a clear standard uniformly applied and not done so in a partisan fashion. Everyone is onboard with preventing the scenario you brought up: it’s not killing free speech, it’s stopping egregious spam. This is completely orthogonal to that.

This is about not getting banned for disagreeing with one side’s political ideology. We’ve managed to do that before - even just a decade ago, and manage to do it now on other platforms, all without ridiculous hypotheticals like this one every occurring.

One your last paragraph: yes, you’re 100% exaggerating. This scenario is as reasonable as saying “legal self defense is dangerous because just think of all the bad actors that will murder and call it self defense!”. It’s just nonsense and goes against all evidence.

Well, I know my political opinion is that you should check out my new product, and I'm going to express this political opinion a lot. If necessary I'll include a sentence about a US President.

I'm half serious here. I would love to tell people about a new game I have on Steam (let's say), so I code a WebDriver "tool". It searches out gaming related Tweets and then expresses my political opinion. I have to press enter once for each post it makes. It's not a bot, since it only responds to user input from a genuine Texan. I even do a captcha by hand every once in a while.

I guess it goes back to your excellent quote, nobody know what compliance with this law looks like.

Well the difficult thing is that apparently every day mundane activities can be "political" depending on who is doing them and in what context. Even a character in a show or video game suddenly becomes a political statement (to some people) just by being female, or brown, or gay, etc.

No one knows what pornography is either. But for some reason we've managed to keep going as a society for 60 years after it was declared that "I'll know it when I see it."

The Court talks about this in the decision[0]. It makes a strong argument that striking down the Texas law before it's ever been enforced makes no sense, because all discussions of its benefits or harms are in the hypothetical realm. Quoting from pages 9-10:

First, the judicial power vested in us by Article III does not include the power to veto statutes. And that omission is no accident: The Founders expressly considered giving judges that power, and they decided not to do so. Several delegates at the Constitutional Convention suggested creating a “Council of Revision” consisting of federal judges and the executive. Jonathan F. Mitchell, The Writ-of-Erasure Fallacy, 104 Va. L. Rev. 933, 954 (2018). They wanted to empower this Council to veto Congress’s legislation, subject to congressional override. Ibid. A veto would render the legislation “void.” Ibid. But despite the best efforts of James Wilson and James Madison, the Convention rejected the proposal—three times over. Id. at 957–59. That means we have no power to “strike down,” “void,” or “invalidate” an entire law. See id. at 936 (explaining that “federal courts have no authority to erase a duly enacted law from the statute books” but have only the power “to decline to enforce a statute in a particular case or controversy” and “to enjoin executive officials from taking steps to enforce a statute”); Borden v. United States, 141 S. Ct. 1817, 1835–36 (2021) (Thomas, J., concurring in the judgment) (noting that “[c]ourts have no authority to strike down statutory text” and that “a facial challenge, if successful, has the same effect as nullifying a statute” (quotations omitted)); Kevin C. Walsh, Partial Unconstitutionality, 85 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 738, 756 (2010) (explaining that the Founders did not conceive of judicial review as the power to “strike down” legislation).

Second, the judicial power vested in us by Article III is limited to deciding certain “Cases” and “Controversies.” U.S. Const. art. III, § 2. A federal court “has no jurisdiction to pronounce any statute, either of a state or of the United States, void, because irreconcilable with the constitution, except as it is called upon to adjudge the legal rights of litigants in actual controversies.” Liverpool, N.Y. & Phila. S.S. Co. v. Comm’rs of Emigration, 113 U.S. 33, 39 (1885); accord Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. (1 Cranch) 137, 178 (1803). This limitation on federal jurisdiction to “actual controversies” prevents courts from “ancitipat[ing] a question of constitutional law in advance of the necessity of deciding it.” Liverpool, 113 U.S. at 39; see also Broadrick v. Oklahoma, 413 U.S. 601, 610–11 (1973) (“[U]nder our constitutional system courts are not roving commissions assigned to pass judgment on the validity of the Nation’s laws.”). And it makes pre- enforcement facial challenges a particularly nettlesome affair. Such suits usually do not present “flesh-and-blood legal problems with data relevant and adequate to an informed judgment.” New York v. Ferber, 458 U.S. 747, 768 (1982) (quotation omitted). Instead, they require the court “to consider every conceivable situation which might possibly arise in the application of complex and comprehensive legislation,” forcing courts to deploy the severe power of judicial review “with reference to hypothetical cases.” United States v. Raines, 362 U.S. 17, 21–22 (1960).

Third, federalism. Invalidate-the-law-now, discover-how-it-works- later judging is particularly troublesome when reviewing state laws, as it deprives “state courts [of ] the opportunity to construe a law to avoid constitutional infirmities.” Ferber, 458 U.S. at 768. And “facial challenges threaten to short circuit the democratic process by preventing laws embodying the will of the people from being implemented in a manner consistent with the Constitution.” Wash. State Grange, 552 U.S. at 451. The respect owed to a sovereign State thus demands that we look particularly askance at a litigant who wants unelected federal judges to countermand the State’s democratically accountable policymakers.

[0] https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/21/21-51178-CV1.pd... (PDF)

The decision[0] gives different logic (quoting from page 85):

If a firm’s core business is disseminating others’ speech, then that should weaken, not strengthen, the firm’s argument that it has a First Amendment right to censor that speech. In PruneYard, for example, the shopping mall was open to the public—but for the purpose of shopping, not sharing expression. So it was perhaps tenuous for the State to use the public nature of the mall to justify a speech-hosting requirement. Cf. PruneYard, 447 U.S. at 95 (White, J., concurring in part) (noting that California’s hosting requirement involved communication “about subjects having no connection with the shopping centers’ business”). But here, the Platforms are open to the public for the specific purpose of disseminating the public’s speech. It’s rather odd to say that a business has more rights to discriminate when it’s in the speech business than when it’s in some altogether non-speech business (like shopping or legal education).

A point a lot of commenters here seem to be missing is that it would be perfectly legal under the law to ban all discussion of politics, regardless of viewpoint. The law just says that if you're a site with more than 50 million users, you cannot dictate which political parties your users are allowed to write favorably about and ban users for having opposing viewpoints.

[0] https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/21/21-51178-CV1.pd... (PDF)

> reach millions of people

I think this is the heart of the problem. These social media companies didn't merely build agoras, they built amphitheaters. They build amphitheaters so large that control over the amphitheater makes you a kingmaker. Now they can't let go of that control, because doing so would risk the wrong people using it.

They never should have built amphitheaters this large in the first place. Better if they had built thousands of smaller amphitheaters, or none at all. Stop giving anybody bullhorns that can reach millions of people. Let ideas reach millions of people the natural way. One person tells a few hundred people their ideas, using the un-amplified power of their own voice. If what they say has any sense, each of those hundreds can tell hundreds more, and each of those can tell hundreds more again. That's how one person can reach millions, without the existence of massive kingmaker amphitheaters.

If people want there to be a public square online, lobby the government to build and maintain it. Call it "US GOV Civic Not-Facebook public square". Let your taxes pay for it and enjoy all the awesome freedom it'll bring. Otherwise, stop trying to dictate how a private company runs their own business. You already pay for literal, physical town squares, why not a digital one?

When you can cram 50 million people into your local cafe, come talk to me.

This law is limited to platforms with > 50 million MONTHLY active users.

People talk about 2nd order effects all the time, here's the really interesting part.

These companies will suddenly be incentivized to clearly identify bots as not-real-people due to this law. Imagine how much power this will take away from those with the platform to scale bots.

You can disagree with the specifics, but the spirit is in the right place.

We should stop trying to find comparisons or analogies to other situations. Social media is its own totally unique phenomenon. We need to analyze it from first principles. If we try to draw comparisons to print media, cafes, or whatever, we are just going to confuse ourselves.

I thought that censoring speech in privately owned public spaces was fine. It's only when a government censors speech that the first amendment kicks in.

I do, as it happens, believe it is a problem that Twitter censors so much speech without 'legitimacy'. Not because they censor the wrong things, but because their censorship without legitimacy fuels a persecution complex.

This is mostly a problem because Twitter is so big. And I don't think starting alternative Twitters (like truth social) is a good solution, mostly because it partitions the conversation even more.

i don’t think the crux of the issue is determining how to legislate the priv/publ dichotomy, but rather how can we enable as many people as desire an ability to establish their own chalkboard. legislation as its proceeding is serving to entrench big tech platforms, its disabling the common person from having their own chalkboard with its own moderation preferences. let the market decide. this, in my opinion, is not the place for law. you don’t like how twitter does things? use a different app. it doesn’t exist? build it.

this includes things like legislation determining how to “appropriately” handle user data. it would be very easy to make it too expensive for any one person to “appropriately” handle user data in their webapp, which is my concern with the current twitter drama

MySite.com will crash if a million people try to read it.

BigCorp.com will not.

If you can serve more than two dozen people you're not a home, pub or private property, you are by definition a public square.

> I don't see how the heck my website is a public square but my home or café isn't, this argument sounds self-contradictory.

If it's a website with over 50 million users, and it's designed explicitly as a place for these users to express themselves, then calling it "a public square" seems entirely warranted.

It's not the only reason. Without any moderation, sites would degenerate into cesspools that only cesspool dwellers would want to visit. Few site owners want their properties to be cesspools.

Hugely expensive. Zuck mentioned in the rogan episode they spend roughly $5b annual on "Defense" aka moderation and safety. To put it in perspective, that's roughly in line with what the defense budgets of Switzerland and Mexico.

> The only reason that social media platforms do content moderation is to manage the financial (advertisers), and the political risk.

What about the legal risk of hosting illegal content?

It's been done before. See: the Fairness Doctrine for TV, or common carrier laws for phones.

I imagine they'd have to accept arbitrary submissions first. If you just worked there, probably they'd be forced to put up anything you wrote

no

I can't tell if this is supposed to be taken literally, but I like that it's a sort of self-demonstrating comment.

The decision seems like it makes it easier for bots who pretend to be humans to be protected as a side-effect, but in the same paragraph you suspect people of being bots. Damn bots, they're everywhere! :)

(Full disclaimer: I've actually no strong opinion on the decision. I like freedom of speech, and I also like clean forum spaces free of manufactured consensus. Seems complex to predict the impact.)

Dunno if bots. Commenting when there is ranking votes quickly turns into a cesspool if there is a culture of "downvote to disagree".

They aren't bots. Don't make an accusation like that without a reason for it. (And I also disagree with the Texas law.)

Yet Reddit, that follows this model, still manages to engage in suppression of on-topic viewpoints that moderators and/or Reddit employees disagree with.

It already passed, it's a law on the books in Texas. And now it's been upheld at by both trial and circuit courts.

FWIW: there's one last chance at SCOTUS to undo this, but if that doesn't work out what we're almost certain to see instead of "pre-filtering" is just "No Tweeting from Texas".

I hope the internet returns to this model for like a dozen reasons. Insofar as we can be sure this kind of regulation gets there it should be celebrated imo.

Moderation is double edged sword sadly, you need it else the extremists will do exactly that, interpret the ideas of community in the extreme all while pushing out people that they think are not extreme enough.

But on other side... good luck looking for one. The people that volunteer to have a bunch of power over a community and decide who's allowed to stay and who have to go are usually exactly the type you don't want to moderate anything, or have any power whatsoever over anything.

I've seen few times where self moderation mostly worked but it was due to established culture there and any newcomer that misbehaved was just scolded by the more veteran members and that was usually enough. You can see it on smaller subreddits too.

Sure but it moves the goalposts, away from employees. I think it's better if individual sub-networks selfregulate

No, if this passes, tech companies will just stop operating in Texas outright. It's really as simple as that.

Is there anything to prevent a platform from categorizing content without censoring it?

It’s called living offline.

I wonder if the underlying goal of all this is actually classic authoritarian restriction of freedoms. The big public platforms are much better for spreading progressive ideas than conservative ideas. Maybe this was the underlying reason they wanted to repeal section 230. It wasn’t a misunderstanding it was strategic.

The 1st Amendment applies to aliens. https://pennstatelaw.psu.edu/sites/default/files/Are%20Immig...

I agree. I also think the ‘free to use’ model of most big social media websites undermines competition.

The constitution mostly applies to the US government ("Congress shall make no law" etc).

Also, people speak anonymously in public spaces all the time. I don't have to provide ID to stand on a street corner and shout about politics or Jesus etc...

I like the idea of separating public from private spaces based on charging.

Of course, none of this solves (at least one of the) core issue: if you have moderation, someone has to decide what is moderated, if you don't bad faith actors will lie, troll etc. Either way, real discourse is very difficult to achieve.

Your argument starts with an assertion that I don't think is true

"think if you provide a service that basically creates a free public sphere, "

You don't provide any justification for this

>This doesn't apply to people or busineeses making their own rules

It didn't apply to states either. Yet it now does. When something gets large and powerful enough it becomes a government regardless of how you try and spin it.

so is it ok for a telephone company to cut your line if you support the resistance?

> However one thing that I’m confused is, what about some dangerous stuff like radicalisation which then will produce terrorists or extremist?

It is questionable whether or not censoring such views actually brings any benefit at all. One counterargument would be that people who are censored actually feel empowered to pursue their ideals more strongly, since it reinforces their belief that there is some conspiracy that they're fighting against. I believe that a similar effect has happened during Covid censorship.

On the other hand, censoring everyone else has many negative consequences on a free society, making it less free. One example would be the skewed image of the public opinion. If you go on Reddit, a majority of all (US) political posts seem to be blues. I'm fairly sure that reds are not a minority in the US (since they managed to win the election 2017), yet their public image is being distorted. And Reddit is big enough to actually influence masses' opinions.

The question is just whether or not the global censorship is a reasonable tradeoff. To me, personally, it doesn't seem so.

>what about some dangerous stuff like radicalisation which then will produce terrorists or extremist?

Is this the millennial version of boomers' "3d shooter games create school shooters"? "Tweets with bad words create terrorists"?

I thought this BS (both versions) has been disproved countless times. But here we are and the nu-conservatives (who call themselves liberals) are at it again.

Who's "them"?

The difference is that you can go to other restaurant, but social medias are so big that if you're not on twitter/facebook you might as well not exist in public view.

Of course that does not apply to smaller forums and I think that if we had laws that force social companies to not censor people they don't like (let's face it, that's exactly what they want to do), it should be limited to anything that's actually big, not random joe shmoe forum about mushrooms.

That’s the irony of all this. It’s the “freedom” party interfering with a company’s right to run its own website.

If two or three companies owned 99.9% of the restaurants in the world, then we wouldn't let them reject customers willy-nilly. If we mandated that Facebook and Twitter break up into several federated instances owned by different companies with no entity controlling more than one, like we did with Ma Bell into the Baby Bells, then your argument would apply to them.

> Why shouldn't online businesses be able to reject some of their customers?

If they were advertising it as "a website for everyone except these opinions: ...", your point would have been valid. That's why.

It's my right to be able to hear it.

As Frederick Douglass, a former slave and writer, wisely stated, “To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the right of the hearer as well as those of the speaker. It is just as criminal to rob a man of his right to speak and hear as it would be to rob him of his money.”

Absolutely. But not your right to ensure that nobody can hear.

An ideology that dies without censorship is not a very good one.

Its a persons right to have an opinion, its your right to not listen to it. Its not your right to stop everyone else from having the opportunity to listen to it.

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Attributed to Voltaire but actually from SG Tallentyre 1906.

A more accurate quote for todays crowd may be "I disapprove of what you say, and I will fight to the death to stop others from hearing you say it."

That's easy enough, don't read it, turn off your computer, follow the people saying things you want to hear from, etc... Oh you mean you don't want ANYONE to potentially hear those things, so that you might not accidentally come across a position you don't like? Yeah, that's called being fragile, and the sort of people you will empower if you push for that as policy are those who are more than happy to control the flow of information to their own ends / enrichment.

Regulatory counterweight I think may attribute outsized influence to the regressive state. I can't imagine the abortion ruling is going to have any impact on how California ever conducts itself, e.g. Even in the event of a federal ban California would likely protest and protect women's autonomy.

I had to scroll way too far for this. You're a hero we don't deserve, but desperately need. One of the most infuriating things about the discussions here is the seemingly never ending supply of people with a passionate opinion on the subject of an article they didn't read because of a pay wall. It's likely due to how certain browsers / clients had the ability to hit the free trial by opening each link as a new session, and how that's not working like it used to, so people take what they can get. Thanks for archiving so people can access the original page and not overload the site because some sites sneak edit their content while others can't handle the amount of traffic HN generates. You're doing work in the name of goodness.

So as a free-speech absolutist, would you let anyone walk into a Starbucks and start shouting about anything they wanted? Would it be okay for them to write a manifesto on the chalkboard next to the barista?

Starbucks is a privately owned location and has the right to enforce behavioral standards or kick people out. Social Media is the same. Privately owned and can set their own standards.

The internet has plenty of space for people to post their opinions on their own servers. They are annoyed because if you take away social media, you make it harder for them to get an audience.

As a free-speech absolutist, the basic problem you should have with this is that as precedent, it would lead right into the legislature being able to force the press to publish certain things because not doing so would be 'censorship'.

I've been wondering about a technical solution to this problem for a while now. It seems like a properly distributed social media network would still need moderation... but who is to say everyone has to use the same moderators? What if we distributed the task of content moderation and allowed users to subscribe to a moderation team the same way they subscribe to a friend's updates? In this way, users could tune their own bubble rather than being strictly required to adhere to a centralized set of guidelines.

I'm unclear that this isn't a self referential attempt to redefine the centre rather than a genuinely held view.

> threatening the direct physical harm of someone, or violating a law

The laws already prevent the first by the way, it's called true threat

> At the same time, everyone else should have the tools to filter, block, and mute speech they do not like. If a tweet or a social media post has a certain word or phrase in it that I don’t like, I should be able to mute that and never see it.

Should a coffee shop owner be forced to hear words they don't like? Should the New York Times owner be forced to publish opinions they don't like? Why is Facebook's owner and employees different to a coffee shop owner?

Controlling what content is rendered on a site is speech itself. Government making rules infringes on my right what my software can and can’t display. It would be like the government telling Wikipedia can’t edit their articles.

Full opinions here: https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/21/21-51178-CV1.pd...

Each judge wrote their own opinion. You can see the first two judges are in agreement, the last writes, “ I concur with the judgment in Part IV of the majority’s opinion. I respectfully dissent from the remainder.” So they were 2-1, except for part IV, where they were 3-0. (I am confused about this part as I’ve read each section IV several times and it seems like they disagree here, one side arguing that the platforms are, and they other that they are not, entitled to pre enforcement relief. But IANAL.)

One of the judges issued a partial concurrence and partial dissent.

Not related to the Texas law, but the RNC has already filed FEC complaints accusing the GMail spam filter of censorship. So I imagine a creative Texas lawyer will probably try to make the case you're describing.

https://www.axios.com/2022/06/29/gops-gmail-feud-escalates

I would think that users could be allowed to choose to have a spam filter on their own account--in the same way that I can choose to screen calls on my telephone service--but, if Google unilaterally decides that I am not allowed to receive the call even if I am interested (giving me no way to opt out of their spam filter or allow people I consider not spam), then that could be a problem.

Does it have more than 50m “users” (I guess this means registered accounts)?

I think the actual Texas law states that after your a certain size you’re considered the commons and then yes, you cannot ban people based on beliefs. That doesn’t mean you have to promote them, so you can probably create a “only see if you follow this person” or something.

Free speech online in this context cuts both ways. People are allowed to espouse views online that may lead to "violence", and the people that work and pay to keep online platforms running are allowed to scrub words they don't like from the platform they own. It's absurd that they could be compelled to display the dumb shit some people say.

It will result in way higher moderation, instead of less.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/section-230-good-actua...

There’s political discussion all over hacker news, in the comments.

Hacker News is full of political discussions all the time. In fact politics usually gets some of the most comments.

> …banning or censoring users based on "viewpoint,"…

There are many offenses that are not strictly viewpoint. Unruly behavior could be one of those.

A bit of a stupid question, if political content isn't allowed then what content is there to discriminate on a political basis of?

> Hacker News avoids political discussion

Yet look what we're doing right now.

the Texas law states you can't geofence TX or not operate in the state, which is forcing service.

It also doesn’t say anything about corporations. We strike a balance regardless.

People do not generally lose rights by coming together to do something.

A company is just a group of people.

That's a good goal for sure. The problem is that a private company gets to decide what is fact and what isn't. To me that is a 100 times worse than the problem they are trying to prevent.

> What does "viewpoint" mean?

A trending example might be the viewpoint that British colonisation was an act of "settlement" vs "invasion". On one hand it can be argued that life improved for indigenous populations with the arrival of technology. On the other hand it can be argued those populations suffered and are owed compensation.

Choosing one or the other core viewpoint can lead to polarizing branches, such as celebrating the Queen's death with hateful tweets vs acknowledging the Queen's death with respectful mourning.

Both viewpoints can draw on valid arguments and data. Banning one of those viewpoints is not a good plan. It would be unhealthy for any society to ban a viewpoint because it conflicts with political agendas or the views of the owners of the platform.

>Also, this is a Texas law; if Facebook closed down all of their offices in Texas, presumably they could just ignore it, as then Texas wouldn't have jurisdiction over them?

AFAIK the law specifically forbids that kind of move, somehow ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If a corporation does any business with the government, they have to abide by the same First Amendment strictures as any government agency.

> Corporations are not bound by the restrictions laid out in the first amendment; only the government is.

I think that is no longer the consensus. We have corporations that rival governments now.

Only if the baker makes 50 million active cakes per month.

Racism, sexism, homophobia, capitalism, etc.

They'd have to hit 50 million users first, or whatever arbitrary bar Texas will make so they don't have to.

Does Truth Social take down liberal or anti-Trumpian posts? There are a lot of them, so I believe they don't.

Its not a dog whistle, its just a whistle. Judges have the politics of the politicians who appoint them; why else would the politicians appoint them?

Frankly, it’s extremely naive to assume that judges are apolitical.

What damage though ? Let's consider Covid and The Capitol riot.. In both cases, a$$-hat-ery by the vocal, idiotic minorities, whether it be meeting up to 'storm' the capitol only to get arrested after you realize inside the capitol that 'oh sh*t this doesn't do anything...' or after you die from Covid because you thought the vaccine had chips in it .. What damage is done in those cases ? Ok we lost 1 police officer in DC due to some very controversial-linking to the riot itself (he had like a heart attack). And thousands of people die from not being vaccinated, but the majority of us do not..

I'm just having trouble seeing at least from these two 'disinformation' scenarios.. how damage is really being done to the rest of us, and I know the Covid one will be the far-greater point of contention with the argument not being vaccinated or convincing others to not be is dangerous to you/me .. I get that will be more of an argument..

But I'm just not able to see the 'damage' that really warrants so EASILY going down the path of censorship

What you have described is nothing short of a horror dystopian hell scape. My God, listen to your self man!

> If no keywords were triggered for misinformation, and none of the eyeballs on that post marked it as misinformation or offensive

Keywords? Who decides the keywords? What are you going to do when normal words get a coded meaning. Remember “milk” and the “ok” sign. 4chan is going to have a field day with this! What about the ((( echos ))). You gonna write a regex for potential use of non letter characters?

Marked as misinformation. What, you’re going to ask the ministry of truth for input? Do you think this will achieve anything except build an echo chamber and increase division? The same for offensive. What’s going to happen when all posts by trans people are marked as offensive? Or that doesn’t count cause you’re ok with it. Should we establish a Ministry of Morality, perhaps with a morality police like the saudis to tell us what’s offensive and what’s not?

Everything you wrote is, I don’t even know how to call it. It’s evil. It’s evil, that’s what it is. You have though up an evil system whose only outcome will be oppression, division and resentment.

Please don't take HN threads into political flamewar. Even by the (low) standard of the current thread, your comments here are standing out in a flamey way. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You should try to get out of your filter bubble more often.

Are you doing that “rules for radicals” think where you accuse the other side of doing the exact thing you’re guilty of?

Aight. You now have to repeat every thing i say to your loved ones, as if you were the one saying it.

Would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments? You've been doing it a lot and we ban that sort of account.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

For the downvoters, do you want platform controlled censorship, no censorship at all or something else?

This just moves the goalposts. Should they be determining what is racist and what is “acceptable” speech?

This sounds like a genuinely excellent idea

The alternative is having the government decide whether or not a private company can block a particular person for a particular reason.

Everyone is generally ok with companies blocking content that is irrelevant/off-topic, but there is a very, very large gray area. Do you want the government deciding what is acceptable?

I'm very glad that there are people in the higher ups that are willing to uphold the constitution. I still have cynicism but its good to know that there is a ceiling.

Don't want to alarm any of you but what I'm hearing through the grapevines is that anti-trust lawsuit against the big T companies are coming and they will be the scapegoat once the nasdaq craters (extreme amount of puts purchased by people who are suspected to have advanced insider information).

ex) Microsoft post dot come bubble.

It will create echo chambers of similar views.

> when the FBI is leaning on social media platforms to censor news stories that turn out to be true

I’m impressed with Mark Zuckerberg… everyone was mad at him for blocking that story, yet with a single vague implication that people stretched into something very different, he managed to deflect all of the anger onto the FBI. Very smooth.

Do you filter "spam" from your email inbox?

If so, why?

By your...train of thought. "Censorship of any kind" means that rejecting those leagues of boner pills and overseas wives ready to marry you is rejection of their right to speak freely to you

This wouldn’t be my first choice of examples. Unmoderated swatting forums (as I understand that it was) goes beyond free speech. The first amendment does not protect death threats.

> speech that is legal should be free everywhere.

Yes! This is precisely what should be the standard. Everything that is not explicitly illegal is legal and protected. No corporation should prohibit legal things.

Reddit is highly moderated and censored.

You can't even post facts in /r/conservative without being banned.

Reddit also has a Terms of Service and it has banned hate groups under such terms of service. With a large bias towards far right hate groups because there really is no existence of far left hate groups.

So of course moderation seems biased when your views are hateful to begin with.

Advertisers generally want nothing to do with advertising on low quality networks unless those advertisers are targeting people because they profit from their misery.