Hacker News Reader

Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

I disagree. This seems like a blatant 1A violation by the state:

> AB 587 passed in September 2022, requiring social media platforms to submit a "terms of service report" semi-annually to California's attorney general, providing "a detailed description of content moderation practices used" and "information about whether, and if so how, the social media company defines and moderates" hate speech or racism, extremism or radicalization, disinformation or misinformation, harassment, and foreign political interference. Under the law, social media platforms must also provide information and statistics on any content moderation actions taken in those categories.

All of the things listed, with the exception of foreign political interference, are protected expression. This is the government trying to outsource censorship.

View on HN

The law does not appear to mandate any particular form of expression by Twitter, other than filing paperwork that documents their intended policies. Notably, it doesn't seem to require Twitter to have any particular policies around extremism; only that, if they have such policies, they should be made transparent to the public.

I'm not aware of a legal case in which a private entity has successfully made the "compelled speech" argument against government paperwork; that kind of argument is more typically associated with "the IRS is unconstitutional because it compels me to file taxes"-style legal crankery.

That isn't Twitter/X's argument though.

Their argument is producing the document is forced speech.

That argument is not aligned with any precedent. The government absolutely has the right to compel you to talk about your internal actions.

Your argument is effectively slippery slope falacy given the government is tracking not enforcing action here.

The law doesn't compel any form of moderation though. All it does is require transparency. How is that censorship?

I'm sure the government's interest in what is or isn't censored, or how, is purely academic. That's why they had the report to to the attorney general's office and not the state university.

Pretty nice business you got there. Shame if something were to happen to it.

The reports are to sent to the attorney general who has to make them publicly available to everyone, including the universities.

That being said, the fact remains that you are presenting the law as if it was was you expect the next step to be, which is misleading at best.

Are you just sort of generally objecting to the enforcement of laws and regulations or do you have a specific problem with this one.

How is this different to any other sort of regulation?

I disagree. "X" does those things as part of a profit generating enterprise; if those things affect the greater population then they absolutely should be disclosed. And before someone says "What about Meta? What about Google? What about Youtube?" Yep, them too. They should all disclose the basis of their moderation decisions. Because they're used to steer public opinion. Because it's been demonstrated that they have been used to manipulate public perception to the detriment of groups of people. Because people have died from misinformation.

I find it's important to avoid "is/ought" fallacies. I'm not sure my warning actually applies here -- this seems like a properly complicated legal topic and especially whenever something has a lot of contemporary relevance, there's a lot of unexpected flexibility in which precedents are considered vs. ignored. But it's a good rule of thumb to follow nonetheless.

Which part of the First Amendment says corporations have a right not to disclose how they run their business?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com