State Dept. cancels election meetings with Facebook after “free speech” ruling

arstechnica.com

30 points·generalizations··3 comments

> The injunction doesn't cut off all contact between the Biden administration and social media companies. Doughty's ruling said the government may continue to inform social networks about posts involving criminal activity or criminal conspiracies, national security threats, extortion, criminal efforts to suppress voting, illegal campaign contributions, cyberattacks against election infrastructure, foreign attempts to influence elections, threats to public safety and security, and posts intending to mislead voters about voting requirements and procedures.

This sounds like this injunction does literally nothing. If there was a weird political conspiracy between the White House and social media companies, they could easily couch their complaints as one of these issues. This really obviously reads as a judge trying to make a ruling so broad it can't be overturned for press

Yet they canceled their weekly meetings. So it can be extrapolated from that that whatever they were talking about did not fall into these categories. Most of the disinformation I’ve seen comes from the government. That they are “policing” social media by removing objective truth that might be “misinterpreted” tells you all you need to know.

I feel like them cancelling their meetings is a reasonable response no matter the content. Clearly there's some amount of attention going towards these meetings, and they have a literal court case directly policing what can be discussed. If I were some rando working for Facebook doing communications, I'd cancel that shit until my boss told me what to do. Conspiracy or not, I don't think the cancellation of be used as a strong signal.

Much more likely they'll resume meetings but with transcripts vetted by lawyers

Reply on news.ycombinator.com