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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

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".

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It's kinda interesting how a world like "no tweeting from Texas" might jive with EU laws which want to restrict IO and data storage to just inside the region or country.

Are we about to get more decentralized just because the laws are accidentally forcing us to?

Imagine connecting to EU or Texas Twitter to see what's going on there.

Oh, it’s not accidental.

It’s not accidental. I don’t see how the old “Wild West” era of the internet was ever going to be compatible with any two sovereign nations that had even a minuscule difference of opinion about any of copyright and database rights, privacy, obscenity, hacking, incitement, libel, or anything else that might come broadly under the heading of “free speech”.

The apparent disdain for Texas in this thread is bizarre.

I mean… it’s the state that implemented this law. So we’re not talking about Montana or something here.

I’m a big fan of simply exiting sovereign markets that are not worth it and would like to see corporations do this more frequently

It is very easy for private sector of almost any size to remind sovereigns about overplaying their hand

As a not-Texan, almost all of what I hear about Texas is oil, conservatism, failed power systems during winter, anti-abortion-rights, and using immigrants as political theater by sending them to DC/NY. I don't know that the disdain is unexpected given the political leaning of people working in technology.

You're probably living in a filter bubble. You'd be hearing only the same kind of things about California if you were in a different bubble.

Whataboutisn.

He didn't claim what he heard was true.

He didn't say he doesn't hear things about other states.

Nor did he make a judgment about Texas.

He only offered a possible explanation to the gp

I get most of my national news from NPR. What news am I missing about Texas? I guess I forgot the Uvalde school shooting police response in my list.

I do hear bad things about California - homelessness, drug use, lots of petty theft that doesn't get prosecuted, ridiculously expensive housing, NIMBYs - but that's unrelated.

I'd better not get too involved in this because it's ugly politics nonsense, but it's easy enough to find criticisms of California for its power grid, leftism, pro-abortion-rights (which is obviously seen as a bad thing by many people), and political use of immigrants.

There wouldn't be disdain for Texas if Texas didn't do stupid things.

Would you please stop taking HN threads further into flamewar? It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.

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

Because they are the state that implemented the law while at the same time is actually censoring information. A direct violation of the first amendment. A public library is a public space and the state government is an authority that can impose punishments.

The hypocrisy is insane

"Texas governor calls books ‘pornography’ in latest effort to remove LGBTQ titles from school libraries"

https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/04/us/texas-lgbtq-books-schools/...

I've got nothing against Texas except for this weird law.

I am a Texan, and I think we deserve the disdain in this case - we elected those politicians who want to force the main platforms people use for all sorts of communications to allow themselves to become /pol/.

Actually, they will likely ask for en banc first. This is just a three judge panel

No tweeting from Texas sounds like a great idea! We can expand it to no tweeting from anywhere after we see the effects on Texans. Then I bknow the popular nexts step would be to get rid of FB and Instagram, but I'm in favor of dissolving Pinterest first. It is like charlie and the football everytime I follow a link from an image search looking for something only to notice it was Pinterest right afterwards but before it loads, realizing I am about to be hounded to load an app, then log in, and then be shown that image is no longer part of Pinterest.

Simple. Shut off Texas. You don’t have a right to use social media. I wouldn’t even appeal the decision. Let Texas lie in the bed they made.

If Texas were shut off from social media, would net mental health and productivity of Texans increase?

I say we do the experiment and find out!

My exurban Texan neighbors wouldn't be able to post their dog whistles on the neighborhood FB page. Oh! Woe is me!

Didn't happen with EU's internet laws. Instead, we get cookie banners all over the world. I don't think exiting a market full of money because of ideology is good business.

There's a few sites (e.g. local city news sites) that return 451 status code for EU IP addresses

Sure, but they have no "customers" in the EU. Quite the opposite with these platforms.

This year "Meta" basically said they might have to leave the EU. Some of the reactions were "and good riddance !".

To be fair, it's the USA, starting with the police-state-like Patriot Act, that basically made US companies illegal in the EU...

(I don't remember if there were any revelations in the Snowden scandal about Facebook helping the NSA to spy on EU citizens, companies, governments... IIRC the documents (we got) talked mostly about Google and Microsoft ?)

The obvious byproduct is their happiness and productivity would increase, and other states would swiftly copy them to remain competitive. Then social media would have to respond to that.

Maybe they can finally secede and take Elon with them.

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