Texas Could Push Tech Platforms to Censor Posts About Abortion
wired.com
wired.com
Should platforms start banning material that's not allowed in, let's say Saudi Arabia? Or Iran? In Finland "disturbing religious peace" (basically blasphemy) is illegal, should that be censored on tech platforms if we say so?
IMO it's just easier to pull out of said country/state/region altogether or if they bring enough business you create a separate sandbox just for them (Like Google.cn used to be).
Just the threat of being cut off from just Youtube, Facebook and Instagram _will_ make Texas politicians back off really fucking fast. There are very very few voters who don't use Alphabet and Meta services daily.
The internet has been at the fore for a while as a deeply Western-democratic free speech agent, a way to let people share & find out, to support many view. The authoritarian impulse to control & dictate, the view of the party, the small.minded, the dictatorial ought have no extra sway or swagger here.
This hearkens back directly to JP Barlow's Declaration of Independence Of Cyberspace. Which speaks to the freedom. From shitty tyrannies of the mind & spaces, large & small. Which is almost certainly among the top 10 things most submitted to HN. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Declaration+of+independence+of+cyb...
It's a pity this submission is flagged. This is such at the heart of the online experience, and the threats against it.
Also, is anything known about whether driving away tech immigrants (with their maybe more Californian values) is an intention of some politicians there?
There is just too much interference with its functioning, combine this with the dangers of autonomous AI systems hacking infra, growing government weariness over recent leaks and the growing ease of spreading lies, I can’t see how it can continue.
This is absolutely crazy, but here’s the thing. Because the internet is becoming so centralised and new surveillance tech has emerged, this type of censorship just seems more and more possible. More possible than anytime in history.
In fact no US State has passed laws that will withstand review under the US Constitution restricting use of interstate commerce as its not a State power under the US Constitution but a US Congress power.
Yes, hard to believe but using any internet service is Interstate Commerce only under US Congress power not state power.
There would be no reason to have websites, because it would all just be AI garbage that has been SEOed to hell. No reason to search the web because you just ask an AI on your phone for an answer.
It’s over. Perhaps some community of people will still build traditional websites, but it honestly just feels like they’re LARPing. There’s no reason to build a website over any other piece of content like a video, or images, or a game, or a story.
The crux of your disagreement with what Texas is doing isn’t about the methods. It’s about your substantive disagreement regarding the morality of killing a human fetus.
This is not regulating a medical procedure, it is inserting politics into a medical decision. It has nothing to do with medicine. It is forcing your beliefs on other people. There are valid reasons to regulate abortion, this is obviously not one at all, it will just result in worse health outcomes. And blocking any discussion of what is a legal and scientific procedure in other states is text-book fascist and as un-American as it can get.
Virtually every liberal democracy does the same thing. They just pick a different developmental milestone. There is no scientific reason why Denmark or Germany’s 12-week ban is more justifiable than Texas’s 12-week ban. And those countries insert moral judgments into regulation of other medical procedures, everything from euthanasia to female circumcision.
Your regurgitation of libertarian talking points misses the mark. Virtually every liberal democracy recognizes that society can make judgments about what's right and wrong, and regulate individual conduct based on those judgments. (And outside the U.S., most liberal democracies recognize the right of the government to suppress information that society deems harmful.) None of that is "fascist."
It's not a purely-scientific question. Blackmun got it approximately right in Roe v. Wade.
Blackmun was a libertarian who snuck onto the court during the bad old days when the GOP failed to vet their judicial appointments. As professor Ely wrote: Roe “is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.” Roe was uniquely indefensible, having no basis in constitutional text, long-standing tradition, original intent, international consensus, or public opinion either then or now. Half a century after Roe was authored, most people even in liberal democracies still think you shouldn’t be able to kill a fetus with a face absent risks to the mother’s health.
And at the same time, they forced many women to have abortions.
The big difference between pro-choicers and forced-birthers is that both of those things are offensive to us. The latter is a bigger horror to me, personally, but think for a minute about a young Dutch woman forced to carry the baby of the occupying soldier she wouldn’t dare have said no to - and how she and that baby would have been treated by her village for years after.
The vast majority of liberal democracies are “forced birth” by your standard. Virtually none embrace a “rights”-based approach to abortion. Denmark will force women to give birth after the fetus has a face. Abortion is still technically illegal in the UK and Germany, though there is a defense under certain circumstances in the UK and it’s decriminalized in Germany.
In practice abortion isn’t about whether the state can force a woman to give birth. Almost every country recognizes that it can. In practice it’s about legislative compromise, and moral judgments as to stages of fetal development.
Similarly, access to expensive and elective medical services is a privilege, not a right.
There's a glaring logical error here: Control over one's body does not logically imply not allowing a second body formation, only that it requires consent.
> The autonomy of the child overrides access to abortion since now in pregnancy, there are 2 bodies.
But this sentence is in opposition to bodily autonomy. How does the autonomy of the fetus affect the autonomy of the person carrying them? The fetus is free to do what it wants, just as the woman is.
> Similarly, access to expensive and elective medical services is a privilege, not a right.
I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what a "right" is. It's not just something that you're guaranteed to get, but can also be something that nobody is allowed to ban you from. The second amendment doesn't mean that you can just waltz into a gun store and take what you want, does it?
So now US states are doing it. What do you expect? I should be able to run a website and if you don't want your people to see it, put up your great firewall or get fucked. But we decided to take a different path, where countries can charge companies and people for violating their laws when they've never set foot there and creators have to geoblock. And plenty deriding this move applauded it when it was their ideologies being protected.To those people: help us free the internet again or go cry in a corner about it. This is your fault.
However I am anti-abortion. I used to be pro abortion, I was a hardcore liberal just a few years ago, before covid (still not a Trump supporter, just rabidly apolitical now). And considering what the federal government has been doing censoring the right via tech platforms when it goes against their narratives.. aw shucks I can't get behind censorship.
Sorry Texas.
Sounds like you have drunk deeply of some authoritarian rhetoric