The Supreme Court could soon change the internet forever | Hacker News Reader

The Supreme Court could soon change the internet forever

thehill.com

This always goes the same way. The public demands regulation on some category of corporation. Those corporations, strangely enough, agree. "Yes, regulate us, please!" The regulation passes. Hmm, the corporations are still doing what they were doing before. Seems like they were able to find a loophole successfully. Oh and what's this? The smaller competitors are unable to use the loophole effectively, and went out of business? The CEOs of the large corporations clink champagne glasses while their stock skyrockets.

I'm sure this happens but you should give some examples.

Also, many of these kinds of laws have clauses which make them only apply to social media with over a certain number of users (like 1 million or 100 million). These laws create other potential issues (mainly, government being able to control the popular narrative by "regulating" the most popular social media); but niche social medias are so niche (Twitter probably has more users than every small forum combined) that almost nobody is trying to regulate them in this way.

When I was in medical instruments, the large corporation I was with was explicitly pro-regulation precisely because it made entry for others harder.

Not because they thought medical instruments should be regulated for patient safety (though they should). No, as business people, they were focused on the competitive effects.

"If the Supreme Court sides with the 5th Circuit, thereby forcing social media sites to publish or not publish certain types of speech, in effect the government will ironically be trampling on the First Amendment rights of social media companies. "

Uh, the Bill of Rights does not apply to corporations. It applies to humans. I recognize no other entities with rights.

Exactly!

You may not, but the courts have protected the First Amendments rights of 'the press' to have said 'freedom of the press', including publishers and media companies. If that weren't true, the government could freely mandate what publishers could and couldn't print.

What if you replace the word corporation with "small business" ? do you still feel the same way?

There's a significant body of case law establishing that the first amendment constrains government control of corporate speech. the Citizens United case is only the most recent high profile example and arguably the most controversial. Generally, jurists on both the liberal and conservative ends of the spectrum agree that corporate speech is protected in the same way that individual speech is.

> What if you replace the word corporation with "small business" ?

Or the EFF. Or the ACLU. Or a political party.

> Uh, the Bill of Rights does not apply to corporations. It applies to humans. I recognize no other entities with rights.

So, you're saying that this new set of rules can be evaded by people wanting to form social media firms if they get someone to operate it as a sole proprietorship and then build a set of contractual financing, revenue-sharing, and decision-control arrangements around it that approximate (without, for the proprietor, the liability shield) a corporation, since it will then legally be a single human endowed with the rights of a human?

SCOTUS has already brought us to the place where corporations are people with first amendment rights and, moreover, that money (campaign contributions) qualifies as protected speech, hasn’t it? I agree, it’s bonkers.

And yet, in some voodoo-legalistic miracle, corporations excel at evading responsibility for deaths they cause, and avoiding any kind of corporate death penalty. Yup, bonkers. Privatize the gains and socialize the unpleasantness.

> the Bill of Rights does not apply to corporations

This has been debated a hundred thousand times before, so just stating your opinion on the matter as a matter of fact seems to indicate that you weren't aware of this, no?

oh, social media, I thought it was about the internet.

If legislation destroys social media's business models, they'll have nobody but themselves to blame for it - all you had to do was _try_ to be unbiased or even just try not to be blatantly biased, but apparently that was too hard for you to do.

>all you had to do was _try_ to be unbiased or even just try not to be blatantly biased, but apparently that was too hard for you to do.

The funny part is that both sides think they're being oppressed by social media firms. No matter what they do they'll get flak.

Maybe it's not a bad thing to let social media die. Everyone already knows how damaging they are. If people stop using social media, it won't matter what state laws require.

And suddenly ...*poof* Hacker News ... disappears

...causing a productivity boom across the tech industry.

... for about a week.... then with the disappearance of Wikipedia, YouTube, etc... people start debating canceling their internet service.

... then tech stocks crash, and the land values in California plummet to historic lows

... and a lot of former programmers find themselves doing agricultural work in the fields

…what are the downsides then?

you are not suppose to ask here. At least not now.

> a lot of former programmers find themselves doing agricultural work in the fields

Boom, productivity.

Nirvana

Hardware demand outstrips supply as everything grinds down to a halt, buttons that use to respond in 0 seconds get multiple progress bars with accurate percentages calculated by machine learning reporting partialEventProgressStatus back to their respective motherships in real time. Then we finally crack the code and perfect eyeballs on ads and talk about nothing but tokens per conversion.

That's no excuse to allow bad laws to stand unchallenged.

How would you challenge bad laws if the Supreme Court doesn't care about issuing contradicting rulings?

The solution to poor quality information is more speech, not censorship of what a private party deems "incorrect".

The solution to a bad SnR is more noise?

Not that free speech isn't its own issue, but your premise makes no sense in itself.

Your analogy has failed. You assume the increase will come from noise rather than any signal that is being culled.

Not at all...

How many posts on HN are deleted/blocked/not shown? Anytime threads even get close to controversial around here they are wiped because they tend to devolve into flame wars that create even more noise.

Not at all. Someone says something that appears controversial, let others refute it. Controversial is often knee-jerk (or to the benefit of certain ‘stakeholders’) interpreted to be “misinformation” but that is not always the case. People should be allowed on these platforms which now de facto exist as part of The Commons, to present anything. It will stand or fall on its own merit.

And there’s no need to be afraid of incorrect BS leaking into the public sphere. Its lifespan is usually very short. For example, the BS MSM and Elected Official spouted about Israel bombing a hospital only lasted about a day. And that correction ONLY happened because everyone was allowed to speak on it on X. Otherwise it’s a perfect narrative for The West and would have been perpetrated.

NOTE: I am not anti-Israel but my desire for truth trumps anything favorable to anyone, whether they “are on my side” or not.

>let others refute it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood

Sounds good in practice, too bad that bullshit is perfectly capable of using all available entropy in the visible universe killing off the whole idea of letting it run unchecked.

Perfect example of misinformation, citing

Brandolini’s Law, which basically amounts to proof via hand wave,

And The Firehose of Falsehood which relies on correlation as it’s proof, is reinforced not weakened by censorship. Only propagandists and their useful idiots value censorship because it increases the lifespan of their lies.

>Brandolini's law, also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle, is an internet adage coined in 2013 that emphasizes the effort of debunking misinformation, in comparison to the relative ease of creating it in the first place.

Or are you arguing that creating order is more easy than creating entropy? Because I'd like to see the physics behind that one.

Moving the goalposts similarly weakens rather than strengthens your argument.

The truth is rarely revealed via order. It comes into view via messy adversarial processes. Censorship serves only to interfere in that process.

>The truth is rarely revealed via order.

At some point I wonder where exactly you think truth comes from...

The reality of how life works is closer to somewhere in between. 100,000 screaming shit flinging monkeys aren't finding the truth, they are there to maintain the status quo by out yelling everyone else. The authoritarian leader censoring everything but what is approved doesn't care about the truth either.

Again with the goalpost moving here. We're talking about people, not Monkeys. Unless you mean to express that you decide who has valuable speech based on who they are. There are numerous traps along that path. If those so-called "valuable" voices are afraid of those who you deem unworthy challenging their speech, then it is the "valuable" voices that need scrutiny. The "more speech" solution in that case is transparency.

It seems abundantly clear that the 5th circuit is wrong. Again.

I'm out of patience with the continued clutching of pearls re: "misinformation" by the corporate press.

It's to the point that I struggle to remember when the word had any relationship to truth or facts.

This article is incredibly bias

"both sides of the political aisle"

implying there are only 2 political viewpoints. TheHill.com

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