Supreme Court Poised to Reconsider Key Tenets of Online Speech
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Sure. But Twitter Facebook and Youtube are not just three out of thousands of online platforms. They are a near monopoly that openly polices the political speech of Americans. They can either be monopolistic or censor political speech but supporting them doing both is just opposing what it means to be an American.
The Supreme Court allows it with Citizens United. Also, this idea of the minority wealthy controlling politics falls in line with the Supreme Court: it's appointed, not elected, judges can decide how to interpret a Constitutional document that has long-lasting personal impact to millions of people.
On a business perspective, CEOs make these decisions every day. Consider Rupert Murdoch and his influence on Fox News?
I fail to see how your stance of allowing billionaires to make arbitrary decisions for millions to be "a mockery of our values as Americans".
The supreme court has been a massive back door for billionaires to override the democratic process since the 1789 constitution took effect. America had already existed for over 150 year at that point and the principles of freedom of political speech stem from the existing people and culture not the flawed 1789 constitution.
No, I'm highlighting the hypocrisy of the claim of "American values", showing how private billionaire control exists in many political influencing aspects besides social media-- and yet now how ironic it is that the SCOTUS (who are non-elected and non-accountable) is interested in reviewing the legality of such a thing.
https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/news/releases/paxton-st...
Then the ruling party of Congress could possibly influence what is or is not allowed on all platforms, perhaps even influencing future political elections?
I vaccilate on how bad I think the social networks are. Personally I think the calls for them being political moderators is highly overrated. But most importantly, it is the very laws in question that would allow other networks the right & capability to host their own platforms as they see fit.
Social media is in no way the equivalent to the postal service or the telephone. You'd have to be insane to start a new postal competing national & internationally capable postal service or telephone company, the costs are astronomical. Social networks are literally started by random folks with a hobby, such as Mastadon.
There is nothing keeping us to the social networks we have. These views that thengovernment has a right to step in & tell them what kind of speech to allow & disallow is an insane & delusional twist, goose-stepping rapidly towards insanity, and the justifications for this begging, to be guaranteed right of reach by the government anywhere & everywhere, is madcap. Absolutely not. This is a sad game of political griping gone off the rails.
Media is not neutral, it has biases, and site holders have a right to make sites that express their bias. That it happens to be used by the public is immaterial, so long as the public has a choice to use it or not. I see nothing limiting what networks we travel, for the internet is a series of tubes.
Except for platform providers, such as AWS deplatforming customers, duopoly app stores doing the same, and even core infrastructure providers like cloudflare making editorial decisions.
There's a real problem here, and I don't know what the solution is.
I believe in the right of private companies to refuse service.
However, the Orwellian silencing of dissenting opinions from qualified health care professionals during covid illustrated in the most stark way possible, that the public has an interest in free expression on the internet.
I have no idea how that's achieved though, or how you balance the rights of all parties.
I guess that's why we hire congress critters - to figure all that out.
Whatever they come up with will inevitably make a lot of people unhappy, though.
You do not have a right to use the most effective means of communication that is owned, created, and operated by a private entity. The government should not be obligated to provide an industry scale PA system for whatever protest you want.
It's more complex than it seems.
[1] https://www.commlawblog.com/2019/06/articles/broadcast/supre...
The pretense that Public Access TV is "the best analogy to the internet we can think about with modern technology" seems absurd. Broadcast television has programming, must select what to show during the air, an enormous constraint, and Public Access TV makes use this limited spectrum and scheduling. Trying to use it to model what we should compel of random private service providers seems absurd beyond measure to me, & wholly unapplicable.
I present some arguments in my own reply to this parent, talking about what essential internet services are. So far, we have seen no instances of people who have been denied access to internet transit carriers, to my knowledge. AWS might kick you off, but that's a very high level service. If you literally can't get your couple of hosts connected, that becomes more an issue, but that doesn't seem to be an real issue so far.
We've been shown recently that both the government and pharmaceutical companies have used these gatekeepers to stifle speech.
I disagreed with it in the 80's when it was the right-wing acting as the morality police for TV and radio, and I disagree with it now that it's the left wing (weirdly?) acting to stifle speech and wholeheartedly embracing cancel culture.
If the active suppression of speech of qualified health care professionals by pharmaceutical companies in partnership with a few tech companies and the government doesn't give you pause, I'm not sure what will.
Maybe when they suppress something you believe in?
These platforms have been working for themselves to figure out what to do, what speech is too toxic to associate with. Examples like Bob Iger walking away from a potential Twitter acquisition because so much unhinged activity happened there is a pretty unsurprising example of how fraught these things are. That they have some communications with people who have a political background is not, contrary to what the Musk-Stream Media would say, at all scary or intimidating or bad. It's still seemed to be totally Twitters ball on what to allow.
Society as a whole was resistant to many noise messages. It's hard to have tolerance for those with reasonable complaints, when so many of loudest & most vocal anti-mainstream voices seem like trolls & monsters & crazies. Trying to navigate what anti-vaccine stuff to allow or not is a hard job I don't envy. And I think a huge part of the public finds many controversial things to be ridiculously unappealing & doesn't want to deal with it at all, and it helps the networks & conforms to desires & expectations, makes us feel like we don't necessarily have to wade through shit, every time we log-on.
I want to just muse a bit though, because while I think the current axe grinding is facetiously bad, I can see things getting worse & do want to at least recognize some threats where I feel like the government might really have a role in mandating service.
Right now I'm at two cases, both of which I can see from different angles & feel differently about.
1. The idea of social media platforms that would filter (or, heavens, modify) conversations between consenting DM'ing folk scares me a bit, and this is absolutely an active situation in the authoritarian countries of the world and it doesn't sit well and right now I feel like some kind of democratic principles have a compelling stake even against private companies (& especially against the government itself, but that's whole nother enchilada).
2. Literally no one being willing to peer/transit you. When CloudFlare or AWS says no to KiwiFarms or Stormfront, I have zero sympathy. These are service providers. They ought not have their name tainted by affiliation, association with folks they don't want to host. I'm fine with that, because those are not critical services to getting or being online: they are convenient service providers, but fundamentally, being on the internet is just having some computers in a rack, and having interconnect and peerage and transit so people can talk to your servers. This is a much lower-level bar.
If we start getting to the place where setting up your own servers starts to become impossible (which so far has never been a real circumstance), I start to get alarmed. But also... transit is a service. Being in a data-center with an Internet Exchange (IX) (or having fiber to an IX switch in such a place) is a service. A much much lower level service though.
Yet there's only a matter of degrees between CloudFlare refusing service & these fundamental internet connectivities saying: no, we refuse service. Democracy's/government's ability to navigate what is an essential connectivity service- which must necessarily to a high degree be content neutral- with higher-order providers is a key struggle that I see as enormously difficult. Which is to say, I do think there is a very real case for Hurricane Electric, I do think there is a case for Layer7 to be government mandated essential service providers, who don't get to pick who they carry. And there must be some kind of not-totally-unreasonable rate charged. There has to be some Postal Service of the internet, be it public or private. Someone who is content neutral, private or the government itself as a provider of last resort; but to me, it is extremely low layer of essential services that must be broadly available.
And that itself opens up the reciprocal can of worms. There's definitely some kind of line somewhere we shut off essential services. It'd be interesting to know some case law about who the post office or other public utilities can claim exception to giving service, where they say, no, you're a proven problem, you're on your own, we no longer will help you.
There is interesting situations I want to consider. Just, absolutely nothing remotely interesting whatsoever to me about any of the current whining aggrieved political man-children of politics who bitch & moan & whine & are completely f-ing off their rocker wrong.
So far, cyberspace has done an admiral job of navigating challenges & I have no complaints, even if I think
I have absolutely 0 issue with people being "deplatformed" for pushing very obvious messages of hate. These providers have rules you must follow or you get banned. Literally no different than any business with a physical presence.
The exact same thing would happen outside the internet if some idiot decided to grab a megaphone and take up a prime location in your local town to push their hate. In fact in that instance they might actually ended up being arrested.
This really isn't that hard to understand.
Then you aren't thinking critically. It's incredibly complex.
Here, simple question then. Define "obvious messages of hate".
I know some people who define that as disagreeing with same sex marriage.
I know people who define it as supporting Israel.
I've also heard CRT and discussion of white privilege described as hateful.
But I'm certain you can do it in a way that effectively balances society's interest in free expression with the interest of all parties to be protected from reputational harm, while protecting the rights of private citizens, owners of businesses and taking into consideration hundreds of years of legal precedent and Constitutional protections.
So it's easy, right? Super simple. Everyone that's grappling with these issues and balancing limits on free expression must be pretty dumb, I guess.
Including the framers and most Supreme Court justices that have been trying to figure it out for hundreds of years [1], I suppose.
[1] https://constitutionallawreporter.com/amendment-01/freedom-s...
They're not stopping you from any speech. No one, including older news papers, radio channels, tv stations, etc., ever had to let anyone promote anything. You have no right to someone else's property for the tradeoff they don't have right to yours.
If anything, the social media startups gave vastly more people more voice than any previous medium. For example, we're chatting right now, something we'd not have done in any previous medium.
>must be regulated the same politically-neutral way those public and privately owned communications services are
be careful what you ask for - they might end up regulated like over the air TV or radio, where plenty of things expressible online are completely forbidden.
If telephone calls or mail content were public, you'd get a lot more stuff banned there too.
This is totally false in every sense. Try kicking out every African American customer from your restaurant. The Feds will bury your ass in lawsuits if not trumped up hate crime charges.
> be careful what you wish for
Why does everything you say sound more like a threat than a real argument? We can have different laws for the internet and telephone. Who are you saying would punish Americans by restricting speech further if we demanded more of it?
I miss when conservative meant “let’s not spend so much money” instead of “I hate a lot of people and want to be as offensive as possible”
> This is totally false in every sense.
Every sense huh? Seems that's a bit overstated. Your rights to others property is extremely limited, and your example of a protected group does not apply to most groups. I can kick out everyone with last name starting with "A", anyone over 5'6", all left handed people, kids, blue eyed people, in fact, the majority of groups I can think of are perfectly bannable from all sorts of properties.
Very few groups (9 under Federal Law, maybe 10 if newer Genetic Material laws end up fitting) have special exemptions as a class to prevent this. It is in no way a concept that applies to any group except protected classes. These classes are given extra rights that do not apply to everyone.
And it does apply to my property. I can kick out all of any group from my house or car. Because they have no rights to that property.
Example: You certainly can be kicked out of bars for being an asshole. Source: I’m an asshole.
“public square” isn't a term with a specific definition in US law, its a common-language term occasionally referenced in illustrating the logic of legal decisions, but not always with the same precise meaning.
Public forum is a term with specific legal meaning in First Amendment law, but it refers to a space used for official government business open to the public, not just a place open to the public. The latter is more like a public accomodation (but that is mostly relevant to anti-discrimination law.)
https://definitions.uslegal.com/p/public-place/
Rather than public square:
https://nclplaw.org/area-of-law/rights-of-expression-in-the-...
Generally a public space doesn’t mean you can do anything you want in it, and the owner can restrict speech they deem offensive in their space and expel you. They can not block entry though without reasonable cause, and specifically not on protected statuses.
A public square is publicly managed space and the government can not restrict your speech on it but can restrict your conduct. The bar is very high for the government on a public space (although in practice the modern militarized police does what it pleases). They can also restrict the time and duration of your activity and speech if it’s somehow disruptive to the normal function of the space.
I would say social media is much more like a public space than a public square. It is not a sidewalk maintained by the public. It is not actually a public institution in any way whatsoever (publicly traded equity doesn’t make something a public entity).
As such, they can put up a “no shirt, no shoes, no racists, no service” and kick you out of their place of business.
As to social media companies, they too have free speech rights. In the Supreme Court ruling Reno v. ACLU, the judges ruled unanimously that the Internet is a free speech zone, deserving of at least as much First Amendment protection as that afforded to books, newspapers and magazines. As such, your rights to post your beliefs ends exactly where another entity begins.
Edit: for an additional example of this concern in the other direction - when a company or person or government tracks the movements of 10s of its citizens who are under active investigation, that's not seen as much of a problem. It's a numbers issue. When the same can track tens of thousands or hundreds of millions, suddenly it's a human rights issue around privacy.
Or (as is more likely) if those sites started restricting who could post things?
Actual freedom requires some restraint. Every "american" freedom recognises this from speech to religion to arms.
And that's without asking why a few billionaires who inherited major newspapers should be allowed to decide instead...
It's a governmental restriction, not a company, employer, parent, or societal restriction.
Note the First Amendment prohibits Congress from passing a law restricting the free speech of the press. Social media companies are more like press than anything else - and the courts give them the same first amendments you have. They do not have to post your content if they don't like it, in the same manner you don't have to let them put yard signs on your property expressing things you dislike.
>Letting billionaires decide what is “misinformation” is not.
They're not stopping you from free speech. They're not letting you post anything you like on their property. You can speak all you want, you can organize, make flyers, start competing companies.
And billionaires are certainly not some monolithic group - for any one piece of information or misinformation there's plenty of billionaires on all sides of it.
The social media you refer to is abstractly the internet in general, and while your cause is considered toxic to business you may have a hard time finding a ready made platform with hundreds of billions of dollars invested in it for your spew, but you will always be able to find a way to host an endpoint and distribute your content. But no one is obligated to amplify it for you, especially not for profit enterprises who are creating a branded experience for their customers.
You don't. However those platforms have other users, and do not exist without money, which means either you pay a fee to use them or advertisers pay. Advertisers don't want to pay if idiots are going to post crap. They are businesses that don't exist with control over content. If one could work otherwise, then one would, but over and over groups that try implode and learn why there are nuances and tradeoffs. Watching Musk tank twitter is a perfect example of how he cannot come close to getting it right.
I don't understand how people think they have a right and expect others to foot the resulting bill for them.
>Freedom of political speech is not a law or constitutional amendment.
It absolutely is a law, with boundaries defined by law.
>Its a fundamental cultural value of Americans.
Precisely because we have had it as a law for a long time. Other cultures vary, with some more free to the point Americans would lose their mid with prudish abandon to much more restrictive. None are inherently, magically, absolutely right. There are tradeoffs, and cultures are the result of people living in one pattern for a long time.
Property rights in the US are also laws and cultural. Why right do you have to post stuff on others property? Little to none. The First Amendment is not the only right people have after all.
And you fail to address that the First Amendment also prohibits Congress from preventing press free speech, which laws have adjusted to include things that did not exist when the Founders added the Amendments.
>Im sick of people trying to kill it off in all but name by paradoxically citing the limitations of that amendment.
They're not. You have more ability to reach more people with more opinions than mankind has ever had. How many people before social media had the ability to get millions of followers?
You can post nearly anything on a website you make, which is easy to do. You can then gather followers and a platform. No one owes you that platform. The ability to reach others has never been so easy.
The censorship machine is large and high-volume.
https://imageio.forbes.com/specials-images/imageserve/5ee020...
Of course, that is right now. When people find out it's a free for all, the trolls will descend. And on many networks like facebook, it's much easier to censor 1 neo nazi than 100 fake news victims so when we stop, that nazi will likely post more than the 100 others put together.
Many more people want to see nudity than want to read nazi rants.
YouTube uses some algorithm that has all kinds of levers that YouTube controls, not the users.
[1]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
See, e.g., <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10448419> & <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23929687>
[1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/21/21-1333/247780/202...
I don't even see how that's relevant. When I open youtube, I'm requesting recommendations. It's like a search, except I'm not searching for anything on a specific topic, but just for things that will interest me.
(Some search engines, like HN's, allow an empty search, which in HN's case just shows all posts sorted by score[1]. Think of recommendations as a personalized empty search.)
Unfortunately things have been stepped up a notch recently and Tier 1 ISPs are now engaged in site blocking themselves. Even if you run all of your own server, these ISPs can prevent customers from connecting to your web site. Only around 5 Tier 1 ISPs control access to all of the internet.
This was the situation Net Neutrality was designed to prevent, ironically gutted by Republicans in 2016.
Aside from the obvious point that all sites from day one had something similar to a "recommendation" algo, can you sue someone for recommending something that turns out bad? If the NYT recommends a restaurant and I go and get food poisoning, are they liable for that?
Section 230 increases free speech by limiting the liability of the platforms. I have a hard time seeing how that could be unconstitutional.
That case is not about whether section 230 is constitutional, it's about how it should be interpreted.
Section 230 is absolutely clear that the social media companies are allowed to censor as much as they want. It's the express purpose of the section to allow "censorship" without incurring liability for those things you fail to censor.
The idea that by recommending or curating content the website owner loses the right to censor (that 230 explicitly provides) feels like a huge stretch to me.
So the case becomes pretty narrow: Whether a) the action of YouTube promoting content is protected by 230 or b) promoting content is only protected by normal free speech rules including the 1st Amendment.
Section 230 decreases free speech because platforms are able to curate their content and shut down certain voices.
Between this and your other comment above, you seem very confused as to what Section 230 actually says. I think you need to do some more reading about it before posting comments here.
Unnecessary. I am aware. It allows you to moderate yet still be treated as a neutral non-moderated purveyor of information.
If it doesn't have anything to do with curation (publisher) vs firehose then what does this mean:
> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker
What is a publisher and why do they need to say this? What distinction is there? Were they treated as a publisher before Section 230?