Brendan Carr Makes It Clear That He's Eager to Be America's Top Censor
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I see people flee to bluesky because twitter is too right wing, but given the current composition, it's those fleeing that have the wrong calibration.
It's very concerning when a large chunk of people literally believe a representative slice of the country is intolerable
In contrast, right wingers who complained that Twitter was too liberal for years are basically correct. It was disproportionately liberal for many years.
And lots of state governments counted deaths with COVID as deaths from COVID... what is the point? As long as the data is presented correctly and represented properly, it remains as it is. In the discussion above, there's no reason to disbelieve the data. The collection and meaning is clear.
I like dang's comment on fact-checking where he noted:
> the question, "what are the facts?" is complex enough to already recreate the entire political and ideological contest.
not everything is so unverifiable that the only choice left is to view everything through <candidates> goggles.
There are infinitely many facts, and the choice of which facts to select and how strongly to weigh them is not itself a fact, it's a choice made by humans. When those humans are busy advocating for a political position, you can be sure that this is what's dominating their choice. As I pointed out once before (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25973366), it only takes a little self-honesty to notice oneself doing it.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
This doesn't mean there's no truth or that it's impossible to know what the truth is. It might mean that political passion is too strong a force for the truth-finding process not to be perturbed by it.
what I see this time around is that the pursuit of fact itself is devalued and under attack. you are certainly welcome to toss this belief of mine on whatever pile of unmanageable infinity that gets you by. society is often choosing to devalue facts in my opinion, and often substituting far dodgier "information" in its place.
To me "infinitely many facts" sounds real close to "who knew it could be this complicated" lol
> Dear Senators Klobuchar & Lujan: Now Do You See Why Letting HHS Censor “Misinformation” Is A Terrible Idea?
https://www.techdirt.com/2024/11/20/dear-senators-klobuchar-...
Because facts are at best malleable and at worst disinformation, and what seems about to happen with HHS seems like some seriously dangerous alt-facts.
I'm making a leap in domain here, but also alas, Trump is already about facing on any pretense of things like journalistic shield laws. This government seems so intent on pursuing a very specific narrow interpretation of facts, and doing incredibly bad things to people who have ever said otherwise.
https://www.techdirt.com/2024/11/25/trump-orders-republicans...
> Finally, and perhaps most importantly, private companies making editorial decisions about what content they allow on their own private property is not (and cannot be!) taking away First Amendment rights. The First Amendment restricts the government, not private property owners from making their own editorial decisions.
That's really the whole debate when it comes to social media. Is it ok that they are governed like private property where the owners can make whatever moderation decisions they want or is it more like a modern "public square" where it should be possible to say anything you can shout on the street without being moderated for it.
Personally, I don't know if there's a right answer. Perhaps the best approach is encouraging more competition among social media companies so there are alternatives to the dominant platforms - but the network effects of something like Facebook are very strong even if competitors existed.
Treating social media like a private space is the status quo, but it rubs me the wrong way that there's not really an equivalent of public spaces in the online world.
Edit: I find it weird how many people are happy to defend unchecked corporate power when it comes to this issue. The lack of any guardrails on moderation is why YouTube has slowly transformed into a baby-talk version of itself. Now people talk about "unaliving yourself" and "PDF files" instead of using the normal English words for these concepts.
It's not weird at all. We've already seen some places try to have little or no moderation, and the result isn't pretty: 4chan, and today's Xitter immediately come to mind. Shitty people and trolls take over, driving everyone else out, because who wants to read all that shit constantly?
Leaving the moderation to some corporation might not be ideal (look what happened with Reddit), but it's better than no moderation at all. At least with corporate-run moderation, if we don't like it, we can go somewhere else. What the "free speech absolutionists" are trying to do will just end up ruining ALL online spaces, so we have nowhere to go, except perhaps online spaces entirely operated in foreign countries where they don't subscribe to this idiocy.
That doesn't mean that the horrifying sterile nature of youtube is great. There are acceptable in-betweens, it just won't happen while the internet mostly consists of corporate giants that don't want to spend the money for real moderation.
So public places sucks? I like being able to talk about whatever I want when I walk around with friends, if someone tells me I have to go home to talk about that it would suck.
Since this works in public I don't see why it couldn't work online. All you need is anti harassment policies etc just like in reality, not anti speech.
Have you tried setting up your own blog or do you want to write whatever you want on my blog ?
And in a couple months, you become the Nazi bar, and regular folks start to get weary. And you're either okay with that, or not.
The internet is public by nature.
You can setup your website, blog, mastodon, irc, email newsletter, ftp, news, discord…
Endless possibilities to post whatever you want - why do you want to do it on my blog ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._R...
> That’s fatal to AELP’s argument. According to AELP, the First Amendment allows states to prohibit social media companies from censoring users, because social media websites are “open-access.” But newspapers are also “open-access,” because anyone can buy an advertisement. So, AELP’s argument necessarily implies that the First Amendment also allows states to prohibit newspapers from censoring advertisers.
> Wrong. The Supreme Court explicitly said the opposite in PruneYard itself. And if the First Amendment means anything, it means that the government can’t tell newspapers what to print.
> What’s the real difference between Miami Herald and PruneYard? It’s simple. Newspapers are in the speech business and shopping malls aren’t. The First Amendment says the government can’t force you to share someone else’s speech, but sometimes it can require you to tolerate speech you dislike. And which is social media more like? The business that is in the speech business, or a shopping mall where speech has nothing to do with its business?
[1] https://www.techdirt.com/2024/02/22/social-media-isnt-a-shop...
I’ve never had to read a book I didn’t want to, or watch a movie I didn’t care for, so why is it suddenly every right-wing pundit’s right to have an audience with me? Im sick of being forced to listen to these people
A private corporation like Twitter/X, Facebook, and now Bluesky can implement any moderation policies they want, and it will never violate "free speech" laws. Elon Musk can filter and restrain the speech he doesn't like (mostly liberal speech and external links that he can't monetize) and Zuck can do the same. Bluesky only moderates illegal activity itself like CSAM. All other moderation is done by the community, and each person chooses who to follow, block, or mute who they wish.
The government could enact regulation to limit corporate moderation (debatable, but a given with the current SC) but it would be a very extreme step to restrict the individual from moderating their own timelines on Bluesky.
It's hinted that Carr might try to regulate Bluesky, but the outcome wouldn't match his expectations. You see, Bluesky is an open network. It would be simple for every user to implement their own data server and only communicate on the open network. The government would have no way to control that network outside of radical national firewall filtering like China's Great Firewall.
At what point will it be universally understood that "free speech" is only legally binding when a person is speaking with the government.
While I understand the sentiment, this isn't factually true: from figures I've seen, the US actually spends more per student in pre-college schooling than any other nation.
It's a lot like the US healthcare system: the US spends (much) more per-capita, but gets much worse results overall. The problem isn't the level of funding, but how it's used and who runs it.
Another factor is US education is that the funding is largely from local sources and locally controlled, so if you live in a wealthy county, you might have (relatively) very good schools, while kids in poor counties will have poorly-funded schools. This is mostly a problem unique to the US because it loves keeping power at local levels so much.
aka rent-seeking behavior from entrenched corporations and interests.
Simply not true in the state of California where most of these companies are based.
According to the CA supreme Court, you have a right to free speech on private property that is regularly available for public use.
By that metric all of these companies are blatantly violating the constitution of their home state.
According to both sides of the aisle on the US Supreme Court, a social media site is not a public forum [1].
[1] Supreme Court Signals Loud And Clear That Social Media Sites Are Not Public Forums That Have To Allow All Speech https://www.techdirt.com/2019/06/18/supreme-court-signals-lo...
[1] https://www.techdirt.com/2024/02/22/social-media-isnt-a-shop...
California's constitution would apply to California companies hosting people in their spaces.
It would absolutely apply between California users and Californian companies
> It would absolutely apply between California users and Californian companies
According to the Supremacy Clause, the Constitution of the United States (which includes its own First Amendment) overrides any state constitution.
> Many malls have been forced to allow demonstrators due to it.
The article I linked [1] in my previous comment explains why a shopping mall could be forced to host peaceful demonstrations but a social media site can't be forced to host similar speech:
> As AELP admits, the Supreme Court’s 1974 Miami Herald opinion held that the First Amendment prohibited Florida from requiring a newspaper to print a political candidate’s reply to a critical article. According to AELP, PruneYard distinguished Miami Herald by holding that “open-access laws do not present the same First Amendment concerns as right-to-reply laws.” That is false. The Supreme Court didn’t say anything about open-access laws. It said that Miami Herald “rests on the principle that the State cannot tell a newspaper what it might print.”
> AELP tries to salvage its imaginary distinction between open-access and right-to-reply laws by insisting that “the Miami Herald newspaper did not hold its pages open to all members of the public.” That is also false. Yes, newspapers exercise “editorial discretion” over which articles they print. But newspapers don’t just publish articles, they also publish ads. And they’re generally happy to publish advertisements by anyone willing to pay. AELP insists that “Newspapers are exclusive publications; the public cannot, at any moment, publish their views in the New York Times.” Yes, they can. All they have to do is buy an ad. So, newspapers are, in fact, “open to all members of the public” willing to pay for the privilege. In AELP’s terms, newspapers are and always have been “open-access.”
> That’s fatal to AELP’s argument. According to AELP, the First Amendment allows states to prohibit social media companies from censoring users, because social media websites are “open-access.” But newspapers are also “open-access,” because anyone can buy an advertisement. So, AELP’s argument necessarily implies that the First Amendment also allows states to prohibit newspapers from censoring advertisers.
> Wrong. The Supreme Court explicitly said the opposite in PruneYard itself. And if the First Amendment means anything, it means that the government can’t tell newspapers what to print.
> What’s the real difference between Miami Herald and PruneYard? It’s simple. Newspapers are in the speech business and shopping malls aren’t. The First Amendment says the government can’t force you to share someone else’s speech, but sometimes it can require you to tolerate speech you dislike. And which is social media more like? The business that is in the speech business, or a shopping mall where speech has nothing to do with its business?
[1] https://www.techdirt.com/2024/02/22/social-media-isnt-a-shop...
Bluesky can implement any moderation policies they want, and it will never violate "free speech" laws.
Would that be legal for Bluesky, assuming no coercion from any government actors?
> Would that be legal for Bluesky, assuming no coercion from any government actors?
Under your assumption of no coercion, yes, it would generally be within Bluesky's First Amendment right of association (by which I mean, association to the content, not to the government) for Bluesky to voluntarily remove content from its servers (or refuse to relay content from other servers) brought to its notice by the federal government for no compensation.
There are other ways for governments to meddle that would make specific instances of "call to have any post censored" unconstitutional. If a government official were to secretly pay or otherwise compensate Bluesky for removing posts, then the benefit to the government official of having the posts removed would violate the Emoluments Clause if the official is a member of Congress, might violate a corruption law, and might violate the oath of office if there was one (but I don't know an oath of office has any legal weight). Also, in practice, such a secret payment scheme would create a power imbalance favoring the government official in a way that would make achieving "no coercion" very difficult if not impossible.
That is not what "free speech" means, that is what current US free speech laws does. Free speech itself include all censorship from big organizations, regardless if it is a government or not, the important part is if you have large organized censoring then its against free speech.
So it is totally valid to say you want to protect free speech by limiting the ability for large corporations to censor people.
We all know there is a push to invent some new definition that says jerks must be heard, but if you look at the migration out of Twitter, you can see that a lot of people aren't interested in that new definition.
If you come to Bluesky, your actions dictate your following.
Gee, wonder why they did this? (And the NFL commercial)?
Even the examples in this article fail to come close to making this case. In each one, he's advocating for more speech, for increased access to publishing platforms. No ordinary person would possibly see that as "censorship." He's not seeking to eliminate "speech he dislikes" by making statements against NewsGuard's heavy involvement in social media "disinformation" moderation, he's making the point that moderation on political speech has been unfairly applied in many cases, and that's largely the fault of activist groups that push social networks to censor speech they don't like (and label "disinformation").
The article starts out by accusing the Trump camp of projection, by lauding Carr as a champion of free speech. It's ironic that the author is guilty of that very thing (projecting) by accusing Carr of being not only pro-censorship, but the biggest threat to free speech in the country? Where have you been for the past 15 years? Come on
At the end of the day, the radio spectrum is limited and the licenses ought to be reserved for the channels most popular with the American people.
Platforms losing viewership would naturally qualify for eviction.
Often, they’ll do so hiding behind complex philosophical rationales, but in the end the result is the same.
Pure projection.
The obvious example would be Elon, the "free speech absolutist" whose principles only lasted about a week from taking over Twitter. On a smaller scale, you can see this play out with Reddit mods on individual subreddits for just about anyone on the political spectrum.
I suppose you could generalize my statement to "power corrupts", but the idea is the same.
Right.
> Right.
Okay, when you get 99.999% of the population to agree on the definition of those terms and who they apply to, then sure ... let's take their voices away.
My personal observation over the recent years is that these slurs, and more, are applied to anyone not in a group (which is literally a vocal minority), by that very same group.
What we have now is a very vocal minority that is campaigning as if they have the support of the entire population, and they are calling anyone who doesn't support them some pretty awful names. Those terms of yours (and more, like "nazi") have been so diluted by overuse on the average person that they don't mean anything anymore.
People unsupportive of the current approach to treating gender dysphoria are accused of being awful humans, while those doing the shaming are ignoring that we regard other types of dysphoria as mental issues, not fixable via surgery.
More recently, I've noticed that the L, G and B individuals, that I personally know socially, are actively distancing themselves from the rest of that alphabet soup.
So, yeah, we need some new terms to define what an actual troll is, because now the meaning includes "doesn't support my campaign for $IDEOLOGY".
Those words aren't diluted.
Nazi
A member of the National Socialist German Workers' Party, which controlled Germany from 1933 to 1945 under Adolf Hitler. The body of political and economic doctrines held and put into effect by the Nazis in Germany during that period.
Nazism
Nazism is a form of fascism, with disdain for liberal democracy and the parliamentary system. It incorporates a dictatorship, fervent antisemitism, anti-communism, anti-Slavism, anti-Romani sentiment, scientific racism, white supremacy, social Darwinism, homophobia, ableism, and the use of eugenics into its creed.
Fascism
Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology and movement, characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy. Opposed to anarchism, democracy, pluralism, egalitarianism, liberalism, socialism, and Marxism, fascism is at the far right of the traditional left–right spectrum.
The election was split by 1.7% and the population is very diverse on most issues, and it swings red because we have states with low populations with over-representation. Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, North and South Dakota provide ten senate seats represented by 6 million people (10% of the population would be 34 million), or less than 2%.
Your "99.999%" statement is patently false.
Bluesky does not block or mute people. The users do.
Twitter/X has filtering mechanisms tweaked by Musk to favor his worldview.
Which one is truly enabling free speech, and which one is just a billionaire's hobbyist misinformation platform?
If you come to Bluesky and you're a jerk, you won't find a community that includes people that don't like jerks. You'll only find a community of people that likes jerks. Still open. Still free. No advertisement. No algorithm. You get out of it what you put in.
Kind of like real life.
My point is that I already know what those things are; the people calling others "Nazi" or "Fascist" apparently don't know what those terms mean.
> Your "99.999%" statement is patently false.
How so? It wasn't an assertion, it was a request:
>>> Okay, when you get 99.999% of the population to agree on the definition of those terms and who they apply to, then sure ... let's take their voices away.
Let me re-iterate: If almost half the voters who do not agree with the minority are getting called Nazis or Fascists by that minority (probably less than 10%), then those terms are watered down and meaningless.
There is no silent majority.
You get called a Nazi if you think immigrants or transgenders are the problem and not wealthy billionaires manipulating our national media.
It seems dishonest and, unfortunately, weakens the power of those labels even more.
Isn't that in agreement with what I said? What did you think I meant by "half the voters"
> There is no silent majority.
I never said there was. I said there's a very vocal minority, the phrasing of which I thought clearly indicated that it wasn't 100% Harris voters who were that vocal minority.
> You get called a Nazi if you think immigrants or transgenders are the problem
Well, yeah; that's kinda the problem - that's not what the word "Nazi" meant, but now it's so diluted that it gets applied to fully half the voters, by a tiny minority of people who are very very vocal.
I mean, I stepped into this thread saying that the meaning of "Nazi" has been diluted, and in response you say that people who have a problem with illegal immigration are Nazis?
Are you serious?
If people concerned about illegal immigration are actual Nazis, how the fuck are we to describe people running concentration camps, gas chambers and genocide?
No one remembers that Reagan signed an immigration law that gave 10 million immigrants a path to citizenship.
"Illegal immigration" is never about drugs or crime. It's about brown people "invading" our "white" country. Read anything about Stephen Miller's thoughts and you'll understand he literally wants to "reverse" the trend of minority "growth" in our country ... at ANY cost.
We are a nation of immigrants and undocumented workers have a massive positive impact on our economy. This is a fact.
People come to our country because of what we sell, which is the "land of opportunity" and ruled by laws. And the second someone crosses the border and says, "I'm seeking asylum," they are no longer "illegal". They are simply undocumented.
So, I have serious doubts about anyone saying they're against immigrants and that it's coming from a racist (even minimally) perspective. Racism is a core tenant of Nazism and Fascism.
Once again, I have to point out that you're equivocating "Racist" and "Nazi". If you're going to use the term "Nazi" for all racists, what word do you propose to use for the genocidal, gas-chamber-loving actual Nazis?