Social Media First Amendment Cases
lawfaremedia.org
lawfaremedia.org
Arguments were heard yesterday. Luckily https://www.npr.org/2024/02/26/1233506273/supreme-court-soci... suggests that the justices were skeptical of the Florida and Texas laws.
Arguments are being heard today. https://www.oyez.org/cases/2023/22-555 links to a current recording.
> TABLE OF CONTENTS [...]
> ARGUMENT ............... 6
> Amici Censor Irrelevant and Inappropriate Speech to Cultivate Healthy Online Communities Built on Common Interests. This Includes Removing Death Threats Aimed at Members of This Court. ........... 9
> Amici Could Be Sued for Censoring Internet Trolls Who Are Calling for the Execution of Supreme Court Justices. ........ 19
> Those Who Are “Censored” by Amici Can Speak Elsewhere. ........... 22
> These laws are not about protecting speech. They’re about politicians ensuring that a favored constituency has access to someone else’s megaphone to spread a message
I was a high school teacher for a long time. When explaining to students how I facilitated discussion in the classroom, I talked with them about the idea of the loudest voice. If you don't moderate a discussion thoughtfully, it will be taken over by the few people with the loudest voices.
We see this same dynamic all the time in online communities. Moderators quiet the loudest voices so everyone else can have a meaningful conversation. These laws are aimed at letting the loudest people shout everyone else down, so the people trying to hold onto power can't be challenged.
I think this is an inaccurate characterization. Over the past 20 years content creators were encouraged to use and invest in building an audience on these platforms based on the tacit understanding that they would behave like content neutral common carriers. If the platform's willingness to abuse this power had been apparent from the start they would never have become so powerful.
People created their own "megaphones" over many years only for the platform to start dictating to them how they can communicate with the audiences they've built, often based on naked political animus. It was a bait and switch - a fraud.
That said, having listened to most of the oral arguments I think SCOTUS will strike down these laws.
The fundamental problem is that the Internet centralizes power in a small number of corporations which then become ripe for capture by powerful interests, whether political, ideological, or commercial.
IMO the ultimate solution is a decentralized Internet like https://freenet.org/ that doesn't require creators to hand over control of their voices to powerful third parties.
That's a strong assertion. Do you have any evidence to back that up?
AIUI, the law governing this (at least in the US -- which is relevant since we're discussing US state laws being challenged in the courts) is the Communications Decency Act of 1996[0], with section 230[1] of that law being the pointy end of the stick WRT these particulars. I would also point out that the above serves as a front-end (in that it allows the courts to reject lawsuits misdirected at platforms, when they should be directed at the source of the speech) to the First Amendment[2].
Please detail where, exactly, any of the above supports the claim that "content creators were encouraged to use and invest in building an audience on these platforms based on the tacit understanding that they would behave like content neutral common carriers."
Perhaps I'm missing something important (which is certainly possible) and I'd appreciate being enlightened. As such, I look forward to your response.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Decency_Act
[1] https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referre...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_...
Edit: Cleaned up prose.
Additional Edit: I'm responding to [3] below as I am apparently rate limited and wanted to make sure I was clear in what I'm trying to say as I am pretty passionate about it:
That's as may be, and I remember it fondly too.
However, it wasn't by government or the law that "content creators were encouraged to use and invest in building an audience on these platforms..."
Rather it was those platforms themselves. It would be easy for me to just say "sucker! you've been rooked!" and leave it at that.
However, I'll (attempt to) respond substantively by saying that the surveillance capitalism[4] business model was still nascent and there were many more options for interpersonal interaction back then.
It was inevitable that after the consolidation of "social" media that advertiser influence (since they're actually the customers -- not you) would be paramount to these platforms.
And that's what drives the moderation/censorship folks are complaining about -- because advertisers don't want to be associated with anything controversial, they just want you to buy their products/services and (the advertisers and the platforms as well as various middlemen) collect (ala [4]) as much information about you as they can to aid in that process.
If these platforms had started out censoring particular political content, they would not have had the same mass adoption, or there may have been more free-speech competitors.
As one of those people in question, it was never unthinkable. Even during the 2000's, it was common to ban people from MSN chatrooms. Before that, it was common to ban people from IRC channels, individual IRC servers, or even entire IRC networks. Did the GNAA have a right to "be platformed" indefinitely wherever they wanted?
Also, the "censorship" in question more often deals with things like insults and other incivility, spamming, death threats, etc. Not mere "political" speech. I doubt many folks were banned from /r/SCOTUS for politely saying "I politically disagree with this ruling". We see via screenshots in the amicus the sort of stuff that was actually moderated.
Indeed, the "censorship" which spawned these laws was the banning of a dude actively calling for violent insurrection against the government, and receiving it, and continuing to encourage it during the violent insurrection. That's the "political speech" the bill authors had in mind when drafting it. It's possible that the "censorship" in question is all that stopped the putsch from succeeding. One can see why fans of said dude and his insurrection were so upset by that.
If someone makes a threat on a person or groups life online, or doing something illegal, then I agree it shouldn’t be allowed. But censorship today goes far beyond that.
The purpose of the platform matters. MSN chats (group chats?) and sub-reddits are smaller places presumably set up by another user for a specific purpose. I have no problem with people being banned/censored for whatever reason from these smaller forums.
I have an issue with censorship when the platform is generic, not dedicated to a particular topic or group, like Twitter, YouTube, or Reddit as a whole. When one or more dominant third party platforms censor the same people, it has an effect similar to that of government censorship.
I also think the censorship will backfire, because by being shut down, it gives power to the ideas being censored. “There must be a reason they are shutting down discussion. They have no real answer to it!”
I agree that online harassment is ugly, but I still believe in absolute free speech on these generic platforms. The best solution to all of this would be to have block lists that people could opt-in or out of. Don’t want to see something? Subscribe to the block list.
I don't see how that justifies the government compelling you or I or IRC chanops or subreddit moderators or Twitter admins to say what the government wants us to say. None of those were used to ban the former president when he was engaging in the "political speech" of inciting a violent insurrection and encouraging it while it was happening.
> If someone makes a threat on a person or groups life online, or doing something illegal, then I agree it shouldn’t be allowed. But censorship today goes far beyond that.
And yet, the speech the government is trying to compel here includes, but is not limited to: insults; slurs; obscenity; spam; inciting violence; inciting insurrection; death threats; and more.
> The purpose of the platform matters
Does it, though? That seems like an arbitrary line drawn to avoid logical inconsistencies. Who defines what the purpose is? Who defines how it matters?
> The best solution to all of this would be to have block lists that people could opt-in or out of. Don’t want to see something? Subscribe to the block list.
Is it, though? This part of the post you replied to, bears repeating:
> Indeed, the "censorship" which spawned these laws was the banning of a dude actively calling for violent insurrection against the government, and receiving it, and continuing to encourage it during. That's the "political speech" the bill authors had in mind when drafting it. It's possible that the "censorship" in question is all that stopped the putsch from succeeding.
Blocklists wouldn't have prevented it. If you or I or Twitter don't want to aid and abet violence and insurrection, the government should not be able to compel us to do so.
> That's a strong assertion. Do you have any evidence to back that up?
I was there, I remember it. I co-founded a pioneering but ultimately unsuccessful online video company around 2006 called Revver that had to deal with moderation issues quite early on, YouTube, Vimeo, Google Video were our competitors. The idea that we would use this power in a politically biased way never occurred to us, it was obvious that it would be unacceptable, it was unconscionable.
And we weren't the exception, we were the norm that included companies like YouTube and Reddit. I think anyone working on a user-generated content startup at that time would tell you the same thing.
In 2006, the internet was probably dominated by western audiences. Now, the user base of any large social media site includes much more of the world, including groups like Hamas, ISIS, etc. and they would absolutely claim their content is political.
After 9/11 radicalization on the Internet was a serious concern - but most people seemed to understand that freedom of speech meant tolerating speech you didn't like.
For example, just a year after 9/11 the New York Times published a letter by Osama bin Laden explaining his views and motivations. That's almost impossible to imagine today (when apparently the NYT will fire a writer for admitting they like Chick-fil-A).
Maybe in the filter bubble of a comp sci student lounge.
You've forgotten how everyone else lost their mind in 2001, and rallied behind a folksy strongman, and his cabal of stooges, useful idiots, and bad Boyars.
Most people at the time seemed to believe that finding and exterminating every terrorist (Alleged or otherwise) the government could get its hands on would be the only way we could remain free. They hate us for our freedom, and all that. Things like the PATRIOT act have support outside the nerd-sphere, and the NSA revelations were a nothingburger to most people, and torturing people in Abu Ghraib and Gitmo, well, they are all guilty anyways.
The only reason those views and motivations get any airtime is so they can be attacked (without opportunity for debate or rebuttal). Had his values and goals had been less comically antithetical to ours, or if he wasn't condemned by his own actions as an irredeemable monster (which further damns anything he has to say), you wouldn't have seen a whiff of them. We only hit those we can beat.
My example of the NYT publishing Osama bin Laden had nothing to do with comp sci student lounges, can you imagine they NYT publishing something like that today? The equivalent might be an op-ed by Vladimir Putin, it wouldn't happen. The views of the legacy media have shifted dramatically on free speech over the past two decades, particularly over the past 8 years.
I personally fall on the "maximal free speech" side of preferences. If an ISIS video isn't calling for imminent lawless action [2], then I don't want YouTube deleting it. But I don't think that YouTube should be legally required to keep hosting an ISIS video that is technically legal under the First Amendment, and I also understand that my preference is unpopular. I'd be surprised if more than 10% of Americans agreed with me when I say that an ISIS member should be able to publish repugnant, bigoted, propagandistic, even violent videos so long as those videos are legal under First Amendment standards.
I personally want minimal filtering on this sort of content because:
1) I'm in no danger of actually being recruited to a terrorist cause.
2) Primary sources, like combat videos from the Syrian civil war (including propaganda videos that compile such clips) can provide more information about ongoing conflicts, combatants, and world events than general purpose news outlets can provide.
I think that most people are against dissemination of this sort of content because point 2 is irrelevant to them (they're not news junkies closely following armed conflicts) and, stochastically speaking, a few people who see terrorist propaganda videos will be persuaded to take up terror. Or maybe it's even less calculating: the reasoning could be as simple as "ISIS has a disgusting ideology, and disgusting ideologies shouldn't get free speech considerations."
The extreme breadth of speech protected under the First Amendment is more than what the median American wants protected, and spans more than what social media companies want to provide hosting for. High minded commitments to free speech like news outlets publishing a letter by Osama bin Laden in 2002 [3] are more notable for their rarity than for exemplifying a general standard of the time.
[1] https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/hearings/jihad-20-social-media-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_to_the_American_People
An online video is almost by definition incapable of being incitement to imminent lawless action. The threshold for this magic phrase is roughly along the lines of leading a mob and saying "there is <member of outgroup>, lynch them." Pretty much anything short of that is constitutionally-protected free speech under the First Amendment, and it's virtually impossible for an internet video to be sufficiently imminent for the purposes of incitement to imminent lawless action.
That is almost literally the opposite of what Brandenburg v Ohio held! (Many people tend to do this: they assume that the phraseology is meant to limit speech along the lines of Schenck v US or Whitney v California, what is now known as the "clear and present danger" standard, which is what Brandenburg v Ohio was explicitly overturning.)
Brandenburg v Ohio held that advocating violent overthrow of the government is free speech, but you need the very direct link between the speech and the illegal actions for the speech to become illegal. The emphasis in "incitement to imminent lawless action" of Brandenburg is meant to be "imminent", and later court cases have generally held that "imminent" is meant to be read in very short timespans.
Empirically speaking, we saw more than a few of these people on January 6th.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/how-democrats-could-...
Have a good one either way! Certainly, no reason to quarrel when, orientation ignored, we're overwhelmingly in similar circumstances.
In any case, there's enough "both sides!!1"-style equivocating on the net, and I'm not really interested in engaging with that sort of low-effort distraction on HN. Have a good one!
Apologies for not documenting the link, and I don't mind if you check it or not. I think it's unfair to say "the game is fixed" is conspiratorial, that is a fair criticism of the system we have when the DNC, and I'm sure the Republicans would be willing, to propose that, as Newsweek reported:
> The most recent court hearing on the case was held on April 25, during which the DNC reportedly argued that the organization's neutrality among Democratic campaigns during the primaries was merely a "political promise," and therefore it had no legal obligations to remain impartial throughout the process.[0]
and Salon:
> The DNC is advancing the argument that any claims to be neutral and fair to all candidates were nothing but “political promises” and are unenforceable by law. They claim that there was no expectation that they would actually be evenhanded in their treatment of Sanders and Clinton. They have made this case despite the fact that many in DNC leadership made claims of fairness when Sanders supporters clamored for accountability during and after the primary.[1]
---
> Based on the 1 cryptic sentence you provided before linking out, I'm guessing the link is similarly unrelated.
Well its an article about how the Democrats may form their own certification interruption if Trump wins and my assumption, which is not a judgement, is that given what I know, you would be more supportive of that than the event you mentioned. I think they're both childish but that doesn't mean you can't appreciate the possibility.
The relation between my comments and the article is that the summer of love, Jan. 6th, and the pandemic brought about previously unseen levels of censorship and propaganda on the internet. The powers that brought these about are apparently above the letter of the law because section 230 protections depend on acting as a common carrier, while the level of interference and integration of former natsec officers into media companies suggests the government is acting unconstitutionally through private companies.
> which is republican government efforts to compel speech in order to make sure the next insurrection is successful.
You say that as if corporations are people and that people cannot be trusted to be the judge of information and decide their own politics, which is a possible political position but not a statement of fact. Certainly corporations can editorialize and manage their content but can they do that and _still_ be protected by Section 230 or are they only protected otherwise?
Now this was a somewhat higher-effort distraction and I hope you have a good one too.
0: https://www.newsweek.com/bernie-sanders-rigged-hillary-clint...
1: https://www.salon.com/2017/05/13/the-dncs-elephant-in-the-ro...
> You say that as if corporations are people
The discussion here is whether republican government officials can compel me to speak because I own or operate a company (corporation or not), or because I volunteer to moderate a subreddit, or because I am an operator of an IRC channel, or otherwise operate some sort of online service on which people can post to each other. Which is what they're trying to do now.
Honestly, I challenge you to stay on topic without mentioning the Democratic party. They aren't the ones who passed this law. Republicans are. False equivalencies like this:
> Democrats may form their own certification interruption
...aren't relevant, especially when we're discussing the violent, deadly insurrection perpetrated by republicans, not a "certification interruption", which seems to be a term coined just now.
Here again, you say:
> The discussion here is whether republican government officials can compel me to speak because I own or operate a company (corporation or not), or because I volunteer to moderate a subreddit, or because I am an operator of an IRC channel, or otherwise operate some sort of online service on which people can post to each other.
But the 5th circuit points out, correctly in my opinion, that circumstantially conveying the message of a user in an open platform with privileges regarding liability is not compelled speech:
> The Fifth Circuit noted in its decision that the First Amendment protects the “‘right to refrain from speaking,’” and publishers cannot be compelled to publish specific articles or viewpoints. Yet the Fifth Circuit did not recognize “editorial discretion”—the right of private organizations to control the dissemination of third-party content—as an independent right. Instead, the Fifth Circuit explained that such discretion arises only where a law compels or restricts the speech of the private party itself—whereas the Texas law concerns not platforms’ own speech, but how platforms treat users' speech.
These platforms benefit from section 230, they can abandon that, accept responsibility as publishers, and do whatever they want outside some other asinine law controlling free expression.
...
I'm struck by how your stance seems to perfectly reflect a belief in guilt by association or representation since you're suggesting that it is as if the message was your own were you to moderate the forum, etc. and disagreeable content was outside your power to prevent.
I think it's a shame that there are so many angry and easily influenced people out there but the root causes aren't the mean words on the internets from other actual humans, as sad as that may also be.
Please especially avoid tit-for-tat spats like this one. They're not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
I know I didn't flag them, but I dont know if they flagged me. I'd be surprised though, given their respectful replying.
Please especially avoid tit-for-tat spats like this one. They're not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Beyond what the other (excellent) comment had to say about this, why does what content creators may have believed mean fuck-all in terms of what these cases are arguing? Nobody would have used Facebook if they thought Facebook would "censor" them?
And besides that, your assertion that it's a bait and switch implies that all these creators would've been able to foster the exact same followings using, what, their own websites? Accounts on different social networks? Dubious at best. A lot of the aforementioned creators benefited strongly from the network effects of those platforms and the algorithms bringing their content to new followers. It's likely if they didn't grow up on whichever platform they picked, they wouldn't have grown at all.
I didn't say it did, I acknowledged that SCOTUS would probably rule against the TX and FL laws. I'm talking about the broader context.
> Nobody would have used Facebook if they thought Facebook would "censor" them?
I think if people knew then what they know now about how these platforms would behave starting around 2015 they would have had a much more difficult time achieving their dominant positions, there would have been far more skepticism.
Of course it's hard to prove a counterfactual but that's my view having been a small part of it.
Maybe. The polarization of the country has increased significantly since the covid era.
Plus most of this censorship discourse really only occurs at the edges. 99% of my meatspace social network cares about seeing puppy vidoes or whatever Taylor Swift has to say. Exactly zero of them have any expectation that their posts will ever be censored because they don't post anything oppositional.
I think that, even with censorship, void a real alternative competitor, the networks would have grown all the same. The only difference is maybe TruthSocial or Rumble would have spun off a few years earlier.
Maybe it's changed. I haven't touched Freenet since...I think 2010? I just remember seeing index pages with links to tons of sites on Freenet, and a considerable number of them were links to CSAM.
Nope. Deleted that. Ain't gonna be a part of that.
In any case, the original Freenet was never going to be a general-purpose replacement for today's centralized services as it can only handle static content. For the past few years we've been working on a sequel to Freenet that is much more general-purpose, you can learn about it at https://freenet.org/. While the original Freenet was analagous to a decentralized hard drive, the new Freenet is like a decentralized computer.
As part of it we're building a decentralized reputation system (based on a "web of trust") to address illegal/offensive/objectionable content.
On a more serious note - part of me really wants to know, and a much larger part of me doesn't.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percutaneous_transhepatic_chol...
For those wondering, the initialism relates to extreme child abuse. And now I too get to wish I hadn't looked.
edit: Or at least, if I was responsible for running IC, we would all be on the list with appropriate tags. Thankfully, I am not.
In short, the problem is that there is no universally agreed-upon definition of "problematic" content. No matter what definition you think is reasonable for moderation, there will both be people who complain that it is too permissive and people who complain that it is too restrictive. At a large enough scale, people on both extremes of the spectrum will be complaining about your moderation policies--and at very large scales, there will be politicians to listen to them!
With the new Freenet, we're using a decentralized moderation system that lets users control what they see or don't see, based on sensible defaults. This builds on a concept from the original Freenet called web-of-trust[1]. I believe this method, combined with the fact that centralized censorship is impossible in the new Freenet due to its lack of centralized control, offers a strong alternative.
[1] https://github.com/hyphanet/plugin-WebOfTrust/blob/master/de...
https://getaether.net/docs/faq/voting_and_elections/
In essence, you can either curate all content yourself, or you can upvote other people's curation for a given community. The curators who are voted for by the majority of a community effectively become the default moderators for it, but any member can explicitly opt out of curation by any given moderator.
I got banned from my city's subreddit for making a mild criticism about crime once. Now I'm shut off from events, networking, etc.
I'm from the southeast, which is a conservative area of the country. The internet I grew up on had thicker skin, wasn't trigger happy with banning, and because of that I was exposed to ideas and perspectives that I wouldn't have ordinarily been in contact with. People didn't have a disgruntled disposition that immediately banned opposing views on sight, so I was able to soak in so much information.
Expressly because of this, I was able to change my shape from a conservative kid into a well-rounded moderate. I don't think I could replicate this experience easily on today's internet. People are divided into factions and are quick to mute and ban those they disagree with. (The rage-centric algorithms also heighten confrontational language and showdowns, but that's another issue.)
Censorship almost always leads to imbalanced power dynamics and gatekeeping. It's become a tit-for-tat tool of retaliation and playing "gotcha". People enjoy digitally flicking each other off by banning them. It's super fucked.
Filtering is important, but we should have protocols for that where individuals have complete control and discretion. I don't know how that's supposed to work on platforms that are wholly controlled by profit-seeking corporations, but maybe legislation can craft a way forward.
I really hope we don't dive deeper into the censorship rabbit hole. It genuinely terrifies me more than any other issue facing humanity.
The mistake I made as a kid was in believing people wanted things like intellectual freedom and to contemplate things they don't agree as to potentially grow and learn something new.
People don't want that at all. I think we can see that largely, people want to be told what to think and then demonize those that think differently for entertainment. That is basically what defines our culture in 2024.
This is just the start of this new culture too. There is so much room left to run when you still have people who remember what things were like at the start of the internet.
What is gen alpha going to save the culture? I think that will be a really comical thought in 15-20 years.
We are still pretty close to the surface. Maybe I won't because of old age but as a society we are going way deeper.
But this is rather the point. What you need is a wall between hosting and discovery.
Alice has some rather controversial things to say, Bob wants to hear about them and Caren doesn't. So Bob and Caren should be using different filtering systems that they can choose for themselves. What shouldn't happen is that Alice gets banned from the internet or shadow banned on a dominant platform with a network effect just because Caren doesn't like her, because Caren should only be deciding for Caren and not Bob.
This doesn't mean Caren has to design her own filtering system. She can use someone else's. But she should have a choice in which one to use, independent of the underlying platform, and so should Bob.
Right now we tie the filtering system to the thing with the network effect and then have Zuckerberg or Musk deciding for everybody when it should be everybody deciding for themselves.
There can be one filter that only blocks spam and scams, another that blocks conservatives, another that blocks spam, scams and celebrity gossip, another that only shows technical content etc. You open the config options and pick one, like you choose an ad blocker or a radio station. If you don't like it you pick a different one. It shouldn't be that hard.
And if the answer is "AI", then who trains it and with what data?
Whoever makes it? The entire premise is that anybody could make one, however they want, and people could choose the one that works best for them. Go create one that operates by manual curation if you want to.
But here's an answer to this one:
> And if the answer is "AI", then who trains it and with what data?
You do. On a network where votes/ratings are public, make a filter that looks at how you vote, compares it to other users to find the users with the most similar tastes, and then shows you the things that they liked. Occasionally it shows you something generally popular or vaguely controversial at random to see if you like it and if you do it shows you more.
This isn't even modern "AI", it's old school machine learning and statistics. And it works pretty well until bots figure out how to game it, and then you have to come up with a way to detect the bots, and it becomes a cat and mouse game.
Which is why we need the evolutionary pressure on the other side. Have lots of different filter algorithms made by different people so the bots have to hit multiple targets at once, and users can pick the ones that are most effective at excluding them and don't get stuck with a crappy one they can't change because it's tied to the network itself.
> Bob wants to open up his feed and see all the content he likes from Alice and Dave and Erin and Frank. If Alice goes somewhere else, Bob can follow her, but then Dave and Erin and Frank are still on the old site, and maybe Bob doesn't want to give that up, but the others don't even know that Alice exists and have no incentive to move.
Why is it objectionable to you for Bob to have the ability to sort his feed differently than you?
This is objectively false. The forums run by a tinpot dictator who excludes too many things that people want to see have zero users, not the most users. Many of the most popular forums became popular before they had any kind of strong moderation and only adopted it after they already had a lot of users. HN is one of the rare examples where the moderation was present from the beginning, a major reason it works is that it's a specialized site that doesn't target general audiences, and it's "popular" but not half as popular as 4chan.
As a general rule people don't like spam, but if the place where their friends are has some spam, they're going to stay there while complaining about the spam. And, of course, they hate it when somebody excludes something that they want. But that might not get them to leave either, because network effects are powerful, even when they hate it. Twitter users have been calling it "the hellsite" for many years while continuing to be Twitter users.
Which is why large general-purpose platforms need different algorithms for different people -- because different people want different things.
Filtering content is a needed, but ultimately losing proposition (time and resource is one thing, accuracy is another).
Having the source choose which megaphone they'll use and have communities surrounding those probably works better for everyone. It's only an issue when Caren's goal is to have Alice silenced in the first place.
Which is where the network effect becomes an issue.
Bob wants to open up his feed and see all the content he likes from Alice and Dave and Erin and Frank. If Alice goes somewhere else, Bob can follow her, but then Dave and Erin and Frank are still on the old site, and maybe Bob doesn't want to give that up, but the others don't even know that Alice exists and have no incentive to move.
> It's only an issue when Caren's goal is to have Alice silenced in the first place.
That can be a problem, but what if it's just that Carol doesn't want Alice in her feed? If everyone can choose their own algorithm then she can choose one that doesn't show Alice and Bob chooses one that does. If everyone on the same site gets the same algorithm then Carol starts agitating for one that doesn't show Alice and now there's problems.
They simply work more effectively.
More specifically - having all actors in the same ecology ensures more opportunities for interaction.
Platforms are synonymous with a standard way to connect to nodes on their network.
I’m increasingly certain that (to some extent) platforms would be more effective if treated as public goods.
At the same time the idea of a public good platform is far too close to big brother.
Case in point - the great firewall of China.
The same thing does not necessarily happen on social media, at least not in the same way. Two people can talk and post at the same time without preventing each other from communicating to their audience. And you can filter obnoxious users should you wish to do so.
But if the platform bans people or deletes posts because they discuss things they disagree with politically, you prevent the audience from accessing content they might find interesting. In this case the moderation is trying to shutdown the debate not really facilitating it.
You need moderation, but the big platform have clearly shown that they have trouble resisting the temptation of abusing it.
Except it's not a megaphone because, as another commenter reminded HN in a recent thread about "federation" protocols, the internet is not a broadcast medium. (It's still point-to-point that's being used to spread the message.)
Yeah, you're not for censoring people, you're just for "moderating the loudest people". It definitely isn't censorship that you want to remove the voices of people you disagree with, definitely not censorship, you just want "the loudest voices moderated". Keep telling yourself that.
But I guess a bunch of people that full of themselves are full enough of themselves to think that SCOTUS is going to care about an amicus written by a bunch of anonymous Internet people. Sure, they moderate death threats, but they also moderate away anything they might have to disagree with. And then pull stunts on the order of "I'll reinstate your account if you write a 500-word essay on why you're wrong."
I would argue that the reason these subreddits are successful, has little to do with the moderation, most successful subreddits are simply successful because they have good real estate. They were simply the first to snatch up the common nouns "law" and "SCOTUS".
They write:
> Under the challenged laws, removal of such a scintillating contribution to legal discourse would require amici to provide HateSpeechLuvr with an individualized explanation for the removal, and expose amici to the risk of legal action by the state, or, more dangerously, private actors (like Mr. Luvr).
Do the challenged laws actually apply to Reddit moderators, as opposed to Reddit the corporation? I don't think on a plain reading they actually do. Both the Florida and Texas laws apply to actions by "social media platforms". Reddit itself is a "social media platform", but I don't think an individual volunteer Reddit moderator is – so I don't think this law would apply directly to them. In any event, were SCOTUS to uphold these laws, they could make clear the scope of their application in upholding them, such that private individuals such as volunteer Reddit moderators were clearly excluded from it.
And the "scintillating contribution" it is talking about is a single sentence with no meaningful content, just an extremely defamatory insult which includes the n-word. Even if SCOTUS upholds these laws, I doubt any attempt to challenge the moderation of that specific contribution is going to succeed in the courts.
This is the crux of so much happening on the internet right now. Users treat our largest providers like google like public resources similar to roads, and governments want to treat our largest forums like twitter and facebook like government entities beholden to the same rules they are.
Neither is true, and to me it points to the massive impact our largest companies have been able to achieve. It seems larger than what the law has words for.
I don't know what the answer is.
What is generally accepted as thoughtful in one world region, will likely not be considered to be generally thoughtful in another world region
Furthermore, the concept of "thoughtfulness" may not exist in some world regions -in fact, it may be a concept in a minority of world regions
Should these thoughtful regulations (whatever they may be) only apply to denizens of a certain region or regions, or everybody in the world?
What is your point? Iran is free to tell Google to take a hike if Google censors their calls to violence. Germany is free to tell id software to remove the swastikas or hit the road.
This isn't hard. Don't pretend it is.
Funny. What is a thoughtful regulation that would satisfy 50%+1 (democracy, yay!) of the 350 million Americans that the (or, any) government supposedly represents - or however many foolish enough of those 350 million citizens choose to actively participate in federal-level politics?
I'm willing to bet that it would be even harder to find any meaningful majority (50%+1) of citizens who are satisfied with such legislation in the second group I mentioned earlier
dc: not a US person
Where Poe's and Godwin's laws intersect.
Just because, as Chaya Raichik complained the other day, that she should be able to say what she wants because "there's no law against lying," doesn't mean that platforms have to necessarily allow harmful bullshit either.
But if I step out of my shoes and look at Trump for instance, does he have a legitimate grievance for being kicked off of Twitter if he actually _did_ think that he fairly won the election and was deplatformed because he tried to speak about it?
If Twitter at the time was as powerful as a government in regulating speech ... should it have to follow the same rules? If the playing field for social media was more level, it wouldn't be an issue. He can just go to another provider and have his speech.
Still, re-reading what you said I have to agree that the end goal should be people understanding that Google and Facebook (and Twitter) are not benign or neutral and never will be.
Well, one obvious option would be the government making its own competitors to Twitter/Youtube/et al.
Yes yes, I realize there's a bunch of issues there, like how the government would REALLY have to permit virtually any kind of speech, or general technical incompetence from government agencies in running such a site. But it could be done, there's nothing actually stopping it.
I actually think a government-run Twitter could work okay and be accepted by people IF they didn't do any kind of algorithmic recommendations, sorting, or even have a search function at all. You could see tweets/content that you got to via external link, you could go onto that person's page to see a chronological list of things they've said, they could have a manually created profile page that links to others, but no curation of any kind by the platform itself. The home page would be mostly blank, or maybe only have a list of official government accounts or something.
I'm very sympathetic to this argument. Seems fair to me.
But then Cloudflare, and any host big enough to withstand DDoS attacks, is strongly pressured by seemingly most people on the Web and in the US, to kick "bad websites" by "bad people" off their platform. So we can't just let bad people have their own website which we don't visit? I kinda wish we could. If most people hate that bad people can have public websites, just say that this is the best we can do, at least they're not on your parent's facebook/twitter.
It's reasonable in an abstract sense to think that it's a good thing if CF offers those Bad People services like that based on philosophical goals or political alignment, but it's very distinct from 'having a public website'.
AFAIK it's still possible for anybody to put up a linux box with nginx on it and put any content they want there, other than the fact that a lot of consumer ISPs don't allow you to run servers anymore. But that's a different problem and cloudflare can't fix it.
This is somewhat tongue-in-cheek on my part, to be clear, but this raises an interesting point about whether orchestrating a DDoS attack is a form of free speech. I'm inclined to say "yes" more than "no."
(You could draw a parallel, for example, to counter-protestors who try to drown out Westboro Baptst Church picketers by holding up their own signs....)
The most technically rigorous difference is that a protest and counter-protest are aimed at the same audience, whereas a DDoS is aimed at the first "speaker".
Less rigorously but more practically, a "message" intended to cause technical malfunction is not "speech" and we all know it. It's even less "speech" than an extortion threat, which is already not protected. The "parallel" would be feeding the Westboro Baptists cognitohazards and crying "free speech" when they go insane and you get prosecuted.
I'd say even "malfunction" is a stretch. DDoS isn't hacking.
You can't deny that one of the functions of a server is to reply to good-faith requests, and that a DDoS intentionally degrades that function. What is that if not causing malfunction? You're looking for nuance where there is none.
(And yes, it's a weird analogy. It was the closest I could come up with on short notice, and I think that's illustrative of the dangers of analogic reasoning. FWIW yours fails on the same audience/targeting aspect as the first one.)
That person's mailman might not be pleased, but all the mail is conveyed through legitimate channels and legitimate means...
Drowning someone out by being much louder and drowning someone out by packet flood have the same audience: other people that would receive the message.
> What is that if not causing malfunction?
We can use a narrow definition of malfunction, or a wide definition.
If we use a narrow definition, then making the server malfunction is always an attack on the speaker. But a DDoS does not cause a malfunction under a narrow definition.
If we use a wide definition that includes DDoS, then only some ways of causing a malfunction are an attack on the speaker. Yelling at someone is perfectly good counter-protesting, even though it degrades their ability to make a speech.
"causing malfunction -> attacking the speaker" and "DDoS -> causing malfunction" are not both valid at the same time for the same definition of malfunction.
If you had a server on a shared medium or a half-duplex connection then DDoS would be exactly the same as shouting over someone. The shouting is aimed at the audience and gets in the way of the server's signal.
Putting the server on a full-duplex connection changes the technical details but it doesn't have any meaningful effect on what happens. The purpose is not to break anything, the purpose is to cause so much extra signal that the server can't get its own signal out. Just like a counter-protest.
The thing being intentionally degraded is the connection. Not the "speaker". Or if it's a higher level DDoS then it's usually the DDoS clients filling the queue. Which is also a pretty normal counter-protest thing, getting in the way and taking up all the close audience space.
A counter-protest is primarily trying to overwhelm someone else's speech, not to tell people anything. But it still gets classified as speech.
Is there a crucial difference I'm missing here?
But usually a DDoS is done by one person. That's not analogous to counter-protesting.
You run the water to a town and the town now owns it. If it didn't, the town regulates it to the point you're essentially owned by the town, and the result is the same.
> Any qualified vulnerable public interest site can seek participation in Project Galileo. Examples of participants include, but are not limited to, minority rights organizations, human rights organizations, independent media outlets, arts groups, and democracy protection programs.
The place I work for qualifies, and it has kept us afloat. It's another example where they change the landscape for a group they select (I'm just super glad they did).
But, right now, they have kicked off well under one website per year. That is not a threat to free speech.
That would also solve a lot of other issues of network effect and disproportionate reach IHMO.
100 million users looked very low to me, but is basically a third of the US population.
I think my gut feeling is that a private network with that much of a reach is an issue in the first place, whatever positions we hold (just assume that network is eventually bought by your worse nightmare).
Social media as we know it not existing beyond that line doesn't sound outlandish to me (ideally it becomes the same as our real public spaces: they're so limited that nothing much happens on them except when the cops run in and loudly arrest streakers. Otherwise it just disappears).
The idealistic view is to let users decide, yet we're in a situation where there's nowhere left acting as a public space.
Current owner might be giving me the finger those, but that's a rule in place.
The set of things advertisers will accept is wildly different than the set of things we accept because they believe that their brand is being associated with whatever content is on the platform.
I don't understand how this can be true. If I have a bunch of hooligans handing out pamphlets to everyone that enters my private shopping mall such that the content on the pamphlets is actively deturing shoppers from conducting business in my privately owned establishment, I have a very compelling interest in the "expressive" content of the pamphlet.
Aside, this is akin to forcing my business to allow people to sling racial insults at shoppers with no recourse like kicking them out.
> Appellees are high school students who sought to solicit support for their opposition to a United Nations resolution against "Zionism." On a Saturday afternoon they set up a card table in a corner of PruneYard's central courtyard. They distributed pamphlets and asked passersby to sign petitions, which were to be sent to the President and Members of Congress. Their activity was peaceful and orderly, and, so far as the record indicates, was not objected to by PruneYard's patrons.
There's other similar passages, but broadly: no one except the owner appeared to complain, which makes arguments about disruption difficult to see. They weren't actually annoying any patrons. If individual shops felt compelled to leave, or patrons complained, the situation would be different.
To your case, imagine a mall that takes half of the city center, is an integral part of everyone's life and was permitted on the ground that it would be a true "third place" for the residents to hang out, which is why it includes structures and areas dedicated to community events and such.
That kind of mall can't be ran like a pure private business that has no accountability outside of its shareholders. There's a balance to strike of course, but if the hooligans have most residents' support, allowing them in would be a decent choice.
https://www.npr.org/2021/04/05/984440891/justice-clarence-th...
I think they'd come together and create a certifying authority for authentic users with traceability. More compliance. Better filtering/admin tools for users.
Forcing users to certify and authenticate themselves would drive a lot of users away and thus devastate advertising revenue. And many users will happily post offensive content using their real identities.
What I mean is, you can have a members only club that is not a common carrier. For instance a member of the hypthetical video snippet network SnipWit can communicate only to other SnipWits. This means that SnipWit is not a common carrier. They are obviously private, as you can only communicate to other members. Worse yet, there is obviously consideration required prior to use, which means they would be able to add even more draconian terms to their membership requirements.
I'll give a hypothetical. CostCo is members only. You're not a member, you can't get groceries there. Full stop. It doesn't matter if it's the only grocer in your area, you'll have to drive to find a Kroger. And to illustrate what I mean by the ability to take things further, CostCo could add racial exclusivity requirements to their membership clauses. Blacks would then be barred from shopping there like they are barred from certain country clubs. And it would be totally legal and well within the rights of CostCo, those country clubs, or the hypothetical SnipWit. Why? Because these are all private organizations and members only.
I guess what I mean is, a lot of people talk about Common Carrier being the solution while forgetting about the private/public aspect and distinction at play in those regulations. We normally entice organizations to become common carriers by offering them goodies on the other side of that. Like indemnifications for instance. But what happens when you have organizations that are already fat, happy and growing like weeds under their "private with membership" umbrella? What do you offer them? It's a tough problem. There's a lot of people and shareholders making a lot of money in the current model. Those people will almost certainly vote their shares against becoming a common carrier unless there is more upside in it for them somehow.
https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/good-question-why-can...
That you would have continue to host and serve whatever content I publish? Even if your userbase only interacts with my content to hide it?
That seems... hard to argue. The rules are often about speech. HN, for example, has rules about being kind, avoiding flamebait, not sneering, avoiding ideological battle, accusations of astroturfing; the list of restrictions on speech is quite extensive. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
But generally speaking it is not ideologically moderated.
Which makes it feel light.
Mods here lie, and allow government shills and others to astro turf.
What a joke and ill be silenced.
I've been downvoted to hell, but not banned or censored.
You can't read child porn, or have sex with minors.
If an anyone is dictating something else to you, I'm unaware of it.
So social media platforms are no longer able to censor any content posted to their sites (outside of specific cases), but are also liable for what users post to their platform?
If I was a conspiracy theorist I'd say these actions are specifically to make social media itself inhospitable in a legal sense. What company wants to take the risk of not being able to moderate user-generated content but are also legally responsible for that same content?
What about Reddit? If I post a story in r/AITAH that the other person discovers, this opens Reddit up to a possible libel lawsuit if the other person thinks I'm not being truthful. Do you think that's a risk that Reddit's legal department will let them take? I highly doubt it. Do you think unpaid volunteer mods want to be legally liable if they remove a post for violating guidelines?
Let's go another level deeper, your neighborhood's Nextdoor forum. If Susan from down the road starts saying I slept with her husband to bad mouth me on the app, I could not just sue Susan for libel, but I can also include Nextdoor in the lawsuit. Do you think Nextdoor's legal team will allow that? Again, nope. But Nextdoor wouldn't be able to remove Susan's post because it would be "silencing her freedom of speech". So instead, Nextdoor takes the logical legal decision to completely remove any user-generated posts, effectively killing their product.
And another level deeper, some random classic car forum with maybe 100 users per month. What do they do? I think you get the hint.
This isn't just going to affect social media platforms. This will affect all platforms that allow users to post in any capacity, text, photos, videos, links, etc.
Your presence here is your answer. Why are you here if social media doesn't provide any value?
You'd have to be braindead to not understand the immense value social media has added to society. But like all things, social media has it's negative aspects. But just because social media isn't perfect, doesn't mean it has no value. As I said, your presence here is proof of that.
Their presence here does not indicate they value their time here in a net-positive way. It offers no proof whatsoever.
They could be addicted. FOMO could drive them to compulsively check the site. It might be their only social interaction at all during the workday. This might be the only group of people on the internet with similar interests.
None of those things would necessarily make it a net-good thing, if it also has negative repercussions that outweight the benefits. Many drugs, legal and illegal, are fairly harmful. Sometimes the benefits are worth the negatives. Sometimes they are very firmly not. Much of the anti-social-media position is about social media being addicting and net-harmful.
I personally don't see the immense value that you see. I've seen some value for some specific sites for some short, specific times. My grandma could interact with some of her grandkids for a short while on Facebook, for instance. Of course, she (or we) used to just pick up the phone, which is what happens now too. I've seen some cool projects on HN I'd otherwise likely never have seen. Otherwise I'm drawing a blank.
Lets see shall we.
> None of those things would necessarily make it a net-good thing
Who is talking 'net' here? The commenter simply questioned whether social media added any value to society. To deny social media has provided any value to society is as braindead as denying that fossil fuels added value to society. Now whether the negatives outweight the positives ( aka net value ) is an entirely different question.
> My grandma could interact with some of her grandkids for a short while on Facebook, for instance. Of course, she (or we) used to just pick up the phone, which is what happens now too. I've seen some cool projects on HN I'd otherwise likely never have seen.
Oh so it does provide value. So you are agreeing with me then?
> Otherwise I'm drawing a blank.
You aren't braindead. You are disingenuous. So you never asked for or search for information on reddit, hn, stackoverflow, etc. You never found solutions to problems on tiktok, youtube, etc? You don't know anyone who found a job via hn, linkedin, etc? Bought or sold stuff on facebook, etc?
If you believe that the negatives of social media outweigh the positives of social media, then fine. That's your opinion. But to cavalierly dismiss or deny that social media provides value to society is being disingenuous at best or braindead at worst. Or more likely agenda driven nonsense.
Your comment reminds me of this excellent monty python clip: What have the romans done for us?
So what? And I mean that quite seriously.
To clarify, I despise the big social media platforms and refuse to use them even if that inconveniences me (and occasionally it does). At the same time, those platforms have the same free speech rights that I do, and curtailment of their free speech (and property) rights (in this case, the right not to publish/amplify the speech of others) also curtails my free speech (and property) rights.
And since I want to protect my own rights, I support the right of those rapacious scumbags to moderate/censor on their own private property.
So, for example if libel against you wasn't caught by a particular filter then that's not bias against you, and so they are not party to the libel (unless you can show the filter was specifically designed to fail to catch libels against you).
So what? You're taking it as a given that "if a website moderates content in a way I don't like, the government must step in and force them to do moderation in a different way I do like"; I don't accept that premise at all, it's quite totalitarian in both concept and real-world execution.
It's all politics and it always was. Claiming one is "common sense" and one is "political" misses what "political" means.
I think S230 set a pretty good tone in biasing in favor of the right of the service owner to set the tone over-and-above within the constraints of the law (for a simple practical reason: if you don't give them that right, they'll just stop providing the service). But that does mean that when your provider decides that, say, debating the humanity of trans folks is no longer acceptable, we toe the line there or we start our own service.
If a friend invited me to their house I can start calling their wife a fat cow and tell them how ugly I think their children are. It doesn't mean they have to put up with it or accept that sort of speech on their private property. That doesn't mean he censored me or inhibited my freedom of speech.
For me, it's an issue of scale. Your friend is a single person (or family). Twitter is a gigantic, faceless corporation (okay, Elon Musk makes it less faceless, but you know what I mean) that tries to cater to everyone—in effect, it tries to be a commons. Can we consider it one? Should we? Should we make a law that says once a social media company gets to a certain size, it can't censor anything anymore if that content is legal?
I'm generally against additional regulation. I don't think, for instance, a small pro-life forum should be forced to allow pro-choice people to spew vitriol, nor vice versa. I'm hesitant to say the same for a giant company like Twitter or Facebook. There, I think it might be more appropriate to have comprehensive filtering and self-moderation tools vs. shutting people out completely (assuming their behavior is legal).
My statements, while I myself do not necessarily agree with them, are what I view as possible when operating within the current legal framework our government has built for these private companies.
To me, if the government wants to hold a private company to the standard of a public service, then that private company must fully, legally, and entirely become (somewhat) a public service. I view that as becoming a service similar to the United States Post Office.
It's allowed to continue to operate as a company but has to comply with government regulations (whatever those may be). That also means that its goal is not profit generation. It can still charge users for certain services if it wishes but is no longer able to sell user data, and it must remain revenue-neutral.
But the solution to this problem is not to force those private service providers to be hands-off, but to make sure that none of them are big enough that it matters. Which the political forces that are pushing for these laws won't do, because their political economy boils down to "capitalism good, anti-monopoly bad", and that inevitably leads to the present state of affairs in practice.
Let me be very clear about how the law would work sans CDA 230: any time someone does not like what you are saying, they can sue the platform you host it on to get you censored. The only platforms resistant to this would be ones full to bursting with spam. This is already really bad. If you want a partial repeal, i.e. one where platforms are still allowed to "protect minors from child predators", I'm not sure that'll pass muster at SCOTUS. Selectively removing speech protections based on content is a no-go.
Furthermore, platforms being able to take down political speech they disagree with is not a "loophole". That's just what moderation is. The whole point of a moderator is to silence the loudest voices, so that others may speak.
If you want to allow the kind of private censorship S230 was intended to protect, and stay within the First Amendment, S230 is what you get.
I see nothing wrong with that. Social media has done nothing but harm its users, and people that know its users (or: everybody)
Nothing? I don't think it's that cut and dry. While there has been harm, no doubt, there has been a lot of positives too (maintaining connections, thoughtful conversations, etc).
Social media is such a big part of modern communications, that arguing against it is like arguing against telephone lines or the printing press. There's a lot to criticise the owner companies for, including how social media can harm people and infamously promote and accelerate genocide, such as Facebook is accused of having done in Myanmar. But the same accusations can be levied against any means of communication and publishing technology.
I think we have to reorient ourselves on what counts as social media. It's not just Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. It's forums like Hacker News, it's comment sections on your favorite blogs you frequent. It's the products available on Etsy or a small creator's personal Shopify store.
Free speech isn't just about photos and text, it covers all forms of expression.
The Democrats hate Section 230 as much as the republicans.
“The idea that it’s a tech company is that Section 230 should be revoked, immediately should be revoked, number one. For Zuckerberg and other platforms. It should be revoked because it is not merely an internet company. It is propagating falsehoods they know to be false.” - Joe Biden
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/09/08/white-house-renews-...
https://slate.com/technology/2021/03/section-230-reform-legi...
It's not a mystery. Look what happened when sesta/fosta became law. Craigslist had to dump their entire personal section for fear they miss a single ill intentioned post.
The consequence of 230 removal is only to destroy the ability for people to interact with one another publicly online unless one of them (or the platform) is willing to take on liability for the interaction.
If what GP describes comes true, they won't be anymore.
Private, p2p communication would be fine, but anything publicly consumable would present a liability risk for libel, slander, etc.
Where am I miscalculating?
In Australia, our high court ruled that companies are liable for comments posted on their social media pages[0].
It's had massive chilling effects on the ability to engage in discourse. Comments sections are almost always disabled on content produced by Australian media corporations.
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/sep/08/high-court-rul...
If I self-host my own site and my estranged conspiracy theorist uncle posts something I don't agree with on my site and I remove it, will these laws make me liable for infringing on his freedom of speech? To my knowledge, there is no definition of what social media is or what companies/people/sites/technologies do these laws apply to.
Well, nuts to that. I can and will censor whatever I and my users decide we don’t want to see. The people we censor are free to download and install their own copies and make their own moderation decisions based on their own community norms.
It’s ridiculous that we’re being held to the same standard as Facebook and X. And if that means these laws shouldn’t then apply to Facebook and X, then so be it. I’m not willing to give up my own 1st amendment rights to punish someone else.
Is Elon Musk liberal? What about Paul Graham, Larry Ellison or Peter Thiel?
There is an enormous difference in the politics of rank and file employees at most tech companies and the founders/executives/management. This is true of nearly every industry. If you think the biases of regular tech workers matter more than the biases of the management and leadership of these companies — or fail to make a distinction — then you will probably come to a different conclusion about the biases of the industry as a whole.
Interesting take. So the platforms, as entities, want them some first amendment speech rights. And of course, it's all been about the terrorists. Thank you Google, Facebook and others, for keep us safe from those villains.
Ironically, if they had not taken steps as egregious and suspending the account of the current president of the US these laws would never have been considered by FL or TX.
I happen to think the Porsche Cayenne is an ugly midlife-crisis-mobile driven by assholes. Should the Porsche Owners Club phpBB forum be permitted to censor my speech, when I want to share my opinion that Cayenne owners can suck a fat one?
In 2002 the answer would be obvious - it's no problem if they censor me, there's like 1000 other forums I can go to.
Are things really so different these days?
More than that, forcing someone else to spread your speech when they don't want to is a DIRECT violation of their first amendment right, of the "government forcing you to say things" kind.
You cannot make "free speech is an ideal" without breaking someone else's free speech.
Yes, hugely different. No-one joins the Porsche Owners Club because they want to hear what the US President says about national policy. If the Porsche Owners' Club kicks you out, it doesn't really affect your life - official/important announcements aren't posted there, you're not going to get asked about your membership in a job interview. These huge platforms explicitly aspired to be the town square of the internet, not a private members' club; they need to accept the responsibility that comes with that.
If anyone wants to delete spam or kick people off their own servers, why should they be denied?
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/publisher-or-platform-...
If any post in this discussion called for it, this one does[0][1].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25697823 (9 January, 2021 -- 439 points, 304 comments)
[1] https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referre...
the plot twist is how the figurative judge presiding over this contest is the literal will to the power of dictating how people ought to think
It doesn't infringe one's free speech rights if a paper (or media service) refrains from transiting one's opinion to their readers. Start one's own press.
but you divert the focus towards the technicalities of specific rights
further, this is not about "press", social media is different enough from "the press" that it should be treated accordingly
Remove those protections and the rule doesn't become "Everyone gets to say whatever on Twitter;" they become "Twitter can tell everyone to pound sand, can lie, can commit fraud, can pretend to be other people and edit your messages in transit," etc. Without the law, it's might-makes-right and the corporations definitely control the wires and the databases.
I argue that forcing the corporations to transit bits of various users infringes upon their rights more than the law traditionally demands (and morality requires, since the existence of a corporation doesn't immediately infringe anyone else's right to start their own website).
> social media is different enough from "the press" that it should be treated accordingly
How so?
network effects
That being said, these bills are very, very bad ideas. Let's be clear: no broadcasting medium can work without some mechanism to censor spammers. And this role has to be specialized (rhymes with 'centralized') because nobody wants to spend most of their day online just manually selecting spam to be blocked. If these laws are upheld I can see companies moving to block Texans and Floridians to protect the rest of their country from their legally mandated political spam.
Let's also appreciate that a good chunk of the speech conservatives want to 'protect' is political speech explicitly calling for things prohibited by the 1st Amendment. Shit like banning an entire religion. I personally don't think that should be allowed, though I doubt this particular court's 6-3 conservative majority would go along with censoring the censors.
What was the intent of Section 230?
Part of the text reads:
(3)to encourage the development of technologies which maximize user control over what information is received by individuals, families, and schools who use the Internet and other interactive computer services;