Donald Trump is a user on the platform who agreed to the terms of service like everyone else. Private firms have the right to terminate the account of people who breach those terms, which he has done repeatedly, which is why he should have been banned a long time ago.
If he wants special privileges and communicate as the president he can use the official communication channels.
It seems to be increasingly lost on the US government (and people) that the presidency is an institution, not a person. If Donald Trump starts a barfight in a nightclub he can get arrested like everyone else.
I don't get it, is there a legal obligation for twitter to follow its own terms of service?
This EO seems to be a nothingburger, the courts have already established that the text of 230 creates broad immunity, they aren't going to defer to the FCC about that.
Has the FTC even established that platforms have obligations towards their non-customer users?
It's a nice concept but I'm not sure it would work
I don't doubt the US government could do that to an extent, but how much legal precedent is there for doing it? I find it very hard to believe that Twitter (and arguably many other companies in the sector, and possibly other tech companies too) wouldn't immediately lawyer up and challenge any thing like that. Not least because Twitter could start playing dirty too i.e. lobbying etc.
Government decisions get challenged from inside the government (or own administration as seen from the migrant ban) let alone externally by legal teams with practically unlimited budgets (remember that the church of Scientology successfully "beat" the IRS)
Here comes the real deal government-on-server censorship, not the fake stuff that they’re complaining about.
Censorship platforms, even the “good guys” who only censor occasionally or predictably or “according to law” (or whatever), are all vulnerable to this. The state can threaten them with guns and imprisonment, ultimately, and they have no immediate recourse. The content comes down. Maybe it gets restored later, after the election or war is over. Maybe it doesn’t. Either way, it comes down today. Neither Jack nor Sundar are going to jail to protect your hosting account showing videos of war crimes.
This is an inherent danger in all censorship platforms. Whether you like Jack or not, trusting him not to censor arbitrarily (while Twitter always has the technical capability) is not a reasonable choice for the society-wide message bus.
This failure mode is inherent in these censorship-possible systems, and it must be addressed if we are to maintain publishing that cannot be suppressed by the state during emergencies.
If the state is threatening the operators of a platform with guns, because the supreme leader does not like the things said about him on it, whether or not that platform of choice is censoring arbitrarily has long stopped being the most pressing problem for speech.
They never threaten with guns directly. It’s always “regulation”, which is code for “do what we tell you because if you don’t, then the men with guns will show up and shackle you”.
The guns are implicit. The threat rarely needs to be so direct.
Imagine what happens if Twitter continues to do the legal publishing things that Twitter does on twitter.com, and the state arbitrarily changes the liability protections of the CDA out from under them, and Twitter tells them to piss up a rope.
Next, Twitter’s bank accounts will eventually get looted, and if they opt out of the traditional state-controlled no-burden-of-proof banking system[1] to continue operating and paying staff, you can bet your ass that their resulting shutdown will be at the point of a gun, because payments outside of that system are already illegal without a special license.
That’s the only authority the state ultimately has: the claim to legitimately use violence to enforce the law: the law, as we are about to see, that can be changed arbitrarily by corrupt politician edict.
(The last time I recall him doing so was by an EO that overturned decades-old published and written BATFE interpretations of existing federal law (and assurances related to same) regarding bump stocks. The lawsuit proceeds, but good luck to you while you rot in jail for years if you are in possession of a bump stock (which were legal for decades) in the interim.)
Which enjoys a high degree of unaccountability that other publishers don't have because they don't editorialise the content submitted by users. But if they start, and they started years ago, they should lose that protection.
Twitter's been arbitrarily censoring people for years, myself included (I lost my account of twelve years recently). That's bad, though you can make the argument that they're entitled to do so on their own website. However, that's not at all why this is happening.
Twitter didn't even censor the president, they just added a link below some lies he posted. He's been breaking their TOS habitually for some time and rather than ban him as they would anyone else, they made a special public TOS-exception for "newsworthy" bigwig public figures like him in their rules. The president gets to tweet things that would get you, a non-president, quickly banned from Twitter.[1] He's explicitly whitelisted as exempt from Twitter's usual control over twitter.com.
Now, the federal government is going to actually censor Twitter on his order, simply because they had the audacity to amend information to tweets from an account that they declined to suspend out of courtesy despite it breaking their rules for years.
By the application of this logic, every single web host that disables accounts serving malware or remote access trojans (legal to publish, mind you) is editorializing as well, because they are discriminating arbitrarily against legal content, even if it is UGC.
If you remove section 230 protections for UGC from companies that "editorialize" under this definition, what will happen is that the only hosting companies that will remain in the wake of that are the ones large enough to be "too big to fail" (or friendly enough with the feds) like AWS and Azure and the existing social media giants.
That makes the point-and-click censorship situation much worse, because then the only places you can reliably host are already integrated with the angry despot's military for realtime censorship as we saw demonstrated for us in the case of Wikileaks, and ongoing across the world.
You do not want to live in that world. Already we have companies like Facebook disabling links in comments on Instagram to control the flow of information and attention. I don't want a web where all of our communications flow through 4 companies who can disappear our accounts and 100% of our private or public communications down the memory hole with no audit trail or legal recourse whatsoever.
I don't think you should use Twitter or Facebook anyways if you're concerned about the free flow of information. They censor stuff and try to make walled gardens. I'm not sure what the good alternatives are... I've heard of confederated Twitter and Facebook clones but they all suffer from losing out on network effects.
If 4 companies control the internet, having the government restrain from censoring them doesn't fix the problem. What do you think we should do? I'm at a loss here.
It is most certainly a form of censorship. Similar to a decision to put all "lies" in red. They editorially add a "fact check" addendum to posts that they decide need them.
Labeling and providing context on objective propaganda is not censorship; it's a "use it or lose it" responsibility.
Let's keep the context of this label around the post on mail in votes "would be a free for all on cheating, forgery and the theft of Ballots" in mind. This is attacking democratic constructs with goal of subverting it. There is no ideas to improve the very system that the current steward of our democracy should be owning .. just throwing mud to cement power.
Twitter has to try to provide context to these anti-Democratic government broadcasts or least it loses any notion of private free press. I.e it might as well be state run if it does not have the freedom to structrue the presentation of platform participation.
There's also the inconvenient fact that all of the USPS anti-fraud protections are mostly retroactive and involve special sections of US federal law with big penalties for abusing the mail or committing fraud through it—after the fact.
The US Postal Inspection Service (the mail has their own feds, did you know?) would take well beyond the window of the election results being declared if some criminal decided to take the same blatant measures to defraud an election by mail as they did to defraud the electronic voting systems the last election, which were fraught with actual issues of undefined electronic voting integrity (which, of course, fails unsafe, because you're not going to re-do an election when the numbers don't match). It's entirely plausible that the last US presidential election was stolen electronically and the perpetrators simply got away with it because computer security sucks.[1]
Ultimately, voting is a hard problem, and it's not really solved presently (in person, electronically, or by mail) from a technical/attack perspective. There are so many ways to straightforwardly attack the system right now if you're willing to risk a billion years in jail if you're detected, most of them related to the ways that electronic votes are collected[2] or the ways that votes are transmitted to central tabulation.[3] These systems fail unsafe, even when discrepancies are detected.
(My own personal theory about this is that if election results take too long to become "official", people will lose faith in the process itself, so getting to "done" is in general more important to most involved than getting to "perfectly accurate".)
Vote-by-mail has a different, but also still large and present, attack surface, especially if you (as above) are willing to do Big Deal Federal Crimes Involving The Postal Service to subvert it, which I believe is entirely on the table for the highest office in the land.
I don't care for the president or his tweets, but to call this one in particular anti-democratic might be a stretch, too. The US presidential elections simply are not secure in any meaningful way right now, and switching to mail won't fix (or worsen) that. (I know it's not a popular thing to point out that the US election security emperor has no clothes, but it's unfortunately true.)
It's not antidemocratic to say that it's fairly likely that elections have been, and will continue to be, successfully hacked. (The tweet in question is, of course, using the concept as a weapon to further a specific antidemocratic agenda, but that is another matter entirely.)
> Why does your email has an anti-spam filter again? Isn't that censorship?
Spam Filtering is not censorship because it is acting on my behalf on the emails that I receive. As a private person, I have the right to apply any filters on conversations I am a direct part of.
What I don't have the right is to apply my filters/opinions on others without their consent. Doing this would be censorship.
You may not realize that there is filtering occurring at the infrastructure level that you have no control over. Unless you run your own mail server and somebody sends mail directly to it, bypassing any other parties relays, you are most certainly not in control of all the "filtering" that occurs.
Further, a lot of the major infra providers will shut your sh down if they think you are being a bad citizen(complaints, bounces, etc). Sure, you can find _some_ provider that won't; but DJT can find _some_ blog platform that will post his all his BS without fact checking it as well.
> The executive order would require the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to propose and clarify regulations under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a federal law largely exempting online platforms from legal liability for the material their users post. Such changes could expose tech companies to more lawsuits.
> The order asks the FCC to examine whether actions related to the editing of content by social media companies should potentially lead to the platform forfeiting its protections under section 230.
> It requires the agency to look at whether a social media platform uses deceptive policies to moderate content and if its policies are inconsistent with its terms of service.
Very good. If the biais was in the other direction the leftists would by crying 24/7 about fascism and dictatorship. They are in power in the medias and corporations and they use that position to bully their political opponents, just like they did, more fiercely, in every country they got power (China, Vietnam, Korea, Russia, etc.) A least this time they don’t kill people directly.
Except this "biais" as you call it is pointing out the facts? There are objective facts still in this world, it's right that they fact check any politician
"That is political bullying! You're abusing your powers! This is oppression!"
My god, how insane we've gotten. Obviously I think I have my head screwed on right and can see right from wrong, but this belief about the self is also shared by Trump and every lunatic on Twitter and outside of it.
I guess civilization will die due to the effect noted by Dunning-Kruger.
> The order asks the FCC to examine whether actions related to the editing of content by social media companies should potentially lead to the platform forfeiting its protections under section 230.
Honestly, that part seems very reasonable. If a platform curates or modifies content or promotes it beyond what some system thinks the specific user might like, then yes, the platform should be responsible for that content.
The real question would be, should the platform become responsible for all ontent, or just the content it curates / modifies / promotes?
My opinion is that this should work on a per-content basis, where the platform only becomes legally responsible for a unit of content once it associates itself with it by promoting, modifying, etc. this content. Whether it is realistic to enforce it this way is, of course, another question.
That's a really interesting suggestion I haven't seen before. It makes sense from a completely non legal perspective. If you're halfway between a platform and a publisher, as I believe all these platforms are, then a could compromise on how to solve this massive issue could be that modified, curated, fact checked content (by CNN not an independent fact checker) is what they are responsible for in terms of being a publisher.
With power comes responsibility. If you have the ability to censor/moderate/otherwise modify content, but choose not to do so, then you are tacitly responsible for that content.
You can see the problem if Twitter allows politician A to accuse politician B of eating babies, but getting all high and mighty about politician B doing the same to A.
That's not how the law works. If you don't touch it, even if you have the ability to do it, you remain a PLATFORM not a PUBLISHER.
Any platform has the ability to modify anything on it. Does that make them tacitly responsible for all the content on it? No, that is just silly, and that's the way the law looks at it too.
I think what they meant was not the theoretical ability to modify, but to actually have the systems in place to actually do so, as twitter clearly does.
there's no guarantee a government regulating body wouldn't be politically biased (in this case the FCC) when examining a case.
it looks to me that Trump made the DoJ its leash dog, what would be so hard to make the FCC the same (if it's not already)
And Twitter is not politically biased? At least we vote for government officials. None of us vote for the Twitter mods who censor mainstream political discourse.
I'm an anarchist and most other anarchist-leaning folks I know with Twitter accounts have been banned at one time or another. Turns out intentionally violating platform rules does that. :)
Tankies, though, I don't know whether they tend to get banned.
Most of the big ad companies/social media platforms see their curation of the content flow as a strategic asset because the curation is what lets them drive eyeballs to whatever pays.
So curation independent of the wishes of the user is a central feature, making this sound like platforms would become really responsible for moderating what they publish. Historically this has been seen as completely cray-cray by the platform owners and they've fought it off successfully so far.
So what's wrong with twitter being responsible for the tweets that it drives eyeballs to? If you pay twitter to promote your content, then yes, twitter should be responsible for the legality of this content. This doesn't mean twitter should be responsible for every dumb thing some edgy teenager thinks is socially acceptable to shout out into the world (So long as it doesn't get promoted or endorsed by the platform).
> If you pay twitter to promote your content, then yes, twitter should be responsible for the legality of this content.
Imho that's exactly what Twitter does want to avoid under all circumstances because it would basically make ad-automation more risky.
Google dealing with regulation around advertising for medical products chose a blanket ban for any and all ads on a large range of keywords for some areas, and will only manually allow e.g. the manufacturer of some medication to buy ads. Automatically judging the legality of ads / tweets is too risky, and doing it manually is too costly (and still somewhat risky).
> If an HN admin removes a comment on a post, they've curated that discussion, effectively.
Then they'd be responsible for the comment that got removed; what's the problem with that? It's not like they'd be modifying one word in a sentence and not want to be responsible for the next one.
This kind of thing should obviously work on small data units, like tweets, posts, etc.
If they curate the content, they're responsible for it. If they are then accused of political bias or censorship (as with the case that triggered all this), can they be sued by the commentor whose comment they removed?
Once they've curated a conversation (removing comments) are they responsible for the ones they didn't remove in that conversation as it's implicit approval?
Just as an addendum to this, HN provided a great example. This whole post just dropped off the front page and isn't showing in the top 3 pages of results.
It could very much be argued that they curated the post, and if they're responsible for removing it from the front page , is that a form of censorship...
Social media platforms came from private forums, not publishing and newspapers. Moderation has always been a form of accepted censorship on private forums, and indeed, they cannot exist in every legal form without being able to curate own design and content.
Maybe the question is, how much content can you remove for what reasons until it becomes an endorsement of the remaining content. Removing a specific post for reasons like violating site rules is different than removing hundreds of posts that express some common political opinion. How should that line be drawn? That's complicated, but that doesn't mean there's no good answer.
Maybe the line should be form vs. content; removing a post because of strong language (if the site specifically does not allow it) is different from removing a post because of an expressed idea. There's also a clear difference between presenting something demonstrably false as fact and and questioning the reasoning by which such falsehoods are identified. Both might be expressions of conspiracy theory, but should be protected by a persons freedom to express their opinion, the other is a lie.
Under current rules, on most social media sites, things can be cause for removal without being demonstrably false. What you appear to be suggesting is that only demonstrably false or things like strong language apply.
If you suggest that platforms cannot remove other content, a lot of actions from people like reddit to remove objectionable content are banned, similarly here. Content has been removed from HN for example for "not contributing to the discussion", that's a subjective opinion, but one I'd suggest that site owners are entitled to.
Also when you start getting into very fine grained distinctions (for example have some of the things president trump has said been "demonstrably false" or not?) the chances of a law accurately capturing that requirement in such a way that a massive number of lawsuits are not started are (in my opinion) low.
Opening the door to that kind of lawsuit would seem likely to destroy smaller, less well funded sites, whilst larger players could likely weather the storm.
This is actually much more far reaching. Websites modify user content all the time. For example, if you post link on Twitter, you don't decide thumbnails. Another example, appending an ad or "fact check" link are modifications of user's original content. Technically, if you change your website's theme or design in future, you modified all of user content as well.
Not manually though. If you post a link to Twitter, a bot will do its thing and fetch a thumbnail. They will not do that only for some tweets but not others.
> if you change your website's theme or design in future, you modified all of user content as well
Hardly, but more importantly: you don't modify user content based on the user content in question. If you add a new script that will uppercase the first letter of all Tweets, you're altering user content, but I doubt there will be an argument about editorializing since you're applying it to all content.
> My opinion is that this should work on a per-content basis, where the platform only becomes legally responsible for a unit of content once it associates itself with it by promoting, modifying, etc. this content.
Such ideas are certainly worth discussing, but I don't see how it would work. If the platform is suppressing some items then it is in effect promoting all the items it doesn't suppress, so would be responsible for them. The only way to avoid responsibility would be to present everything to the user, including the most blatant spam, in no particular order. Or you could allow certain kinds of "curation", perhaps, but if the curation is anything other than filtering by application of a published algorithm, then probably the platform would have to take responsibility for anything that doesn't get filtered out. But filtering with a published algorithm wouldn't stop professional spammers.
Here's a random idea: delegate the filtering to lots of separate smaller companies which would be a less juicy target for lawyers and it wouldn't matter if they went bankrupt every now and then.
I guess this was inevitable in the end, it must have come to this, but I just find what twitter did so silly. At least if they'd have used some sort of impartial looking fact checker, or an independent panel, or something, as facebook is doing, perhaps they would have prolonged this for longer.
But calling CNN a fact checker on the president is so inherently stupid, it's asking for trouble. And of course CNN couldn't get their facts right either, so they are blatantly just representing the other side and not "facts".
Perhaps they did it to antagonize him. CNN is probably Trump's least favorite news outlet.
Besides, all news outlets post a bunch of BS under the cover of "analysis", "opinion", and "op-ed" pieces. Those are all carefully crafted to engage a target audience. NYT does it. WAPO does it. CNN. They are all running outrage factories just producing slightly different flavors..
I agree. But twitter and facebook claim to be not be publishers but here they are acting as editors (part of publishing). They can’t be both. What do you feel about that?
I think Twitter would ordinarily just straight up ban users who post blatant untruths about elections.
That’s what they have done in the past and what is a direct reaction to what went down during the last US presidential election.
Since this is the President Twitter feels understandably uncomfortable with just banning that person, so the next best option is to provide context to what they said. Seems reasonable to me.
You can quibble about details, but the basic idea seems sound to me.
You can also quibble about inconsistent enforcement and what not, but as far as I know Twitter is just coming down extremely hard on election disinfo (for understandable reasons), so that’s why they are so on this (and not, say, harassment and hate speech – which to my mind is also a very big problem on Twitter and where I see many failings in Twitter’s insufficient reaction).
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good. So often in these discussions people aim for perfection which in this messy reality is an impossibility. But saying “Well, perfection is impossible, so we will just do nothing.” or even “Well, there are complexities here, so we will just do nothing.” is just lazy cowardice. Or ideologically motivated.
Yes but those details are what has protected twitter until now. If you decide what goes on and not off your platform, then you are a publisher and responsible for what’s on your platform. The law says this.
I am interested in what you think about that, ignoring Trump for a second.
It seems obvious to me that you cannot have a general rule here that covers everything. There is not bright line separation possible, if only because doing that is fucking dangerous for societies.
In that context I’m totally fine with what Twitter did. However, maybe something that looks superficially similar (posting a link to some white supremacist website below a tweet of some politician) might not be.
I know that looks pretty similar but I think that those are the complexities our society has to deal with. Sometimes someone is just wrong and their wrongness is fucking dangerous to society and then it is ok to react.
Again, i don’t disagree. I am asking how you would enforce something like that? Who gets to decide what’s wrong? I certainly hope it’s not Twitter.
My argument is
Twitter is a private company.
While private company should be able to control what happens with their platform, they have increasingly reached a size where they are public utilities.
I believe an elected government (with its own biases) should decide what goes on a published platform than twitter. Because i have no way of questioning Twitter’s decisions. I can question the government and elect a new one. I can’t elect a new Jack Dorsey.
Twitter gets to decide that. And if there’s overreach and abuse the courts get to step in. Seems quite straightforward to me. I have no problem with giving Twitter – also if they are utility-like – some ability to behave all by themselves, though being able to let the courts check on them if need be.
This is the only part I guess we disagree on. I refuse to let a global entity that is not elected or representative of the world in any way be able to control this.
Every court’s jurisdiction only applies within that country.
What if an American court’s order goes against a European one?
What if Twitter moves to a different jurisdiction which has less oversight and buys out the courts? Not probable. But I wouldn’t want a utility to have so much power. Sorry.
I mean, their alternative is to just ban him under their ToS. Which is probably honestly what they should do (and seems a fairly likely outcome of this kerfuffle, if he keeps pushing).
It might have been smart to use someone other than CNN, but I'm not sure there's any fact checker in the world that Trump would have accepted correction from.
It's not Trump that matters in this context, by using a "fact" checker with a known anti-Trump bias they now have left themselves vulnerable to attacks from other people too who can and likely will form a coalition against them.
The gameplan might be to build a direct connection between the vast financial resources of the republican party and their ability to influence online audiences. This has already worked quite well with the Super PACs which amount to unlimited anonymous donations to parties or candidates. This was declared legal based on the 1st amendment in 2010. The same goal could be pursued here: cite 1st amendment and rule by decree that fact-checking violates 1st amendment principles, fight it out up to the supreme court (which is firmly in republican hands) and then write it into law for the foreseeable future. In the meantime, sue social media providers for ridiculous sums if they provide fact-checking prior to the election. Technically, you still have a democracy, albeit one that is no longer united in its perception of reality.
The 1st amendment isn't the issue here. The issue is Facebook pretending to be a publisher when it is in fact much more like a newspaper editor. You don't get to run a private company with unparalleled influence over US politics and not play by the rules of other media companies.
Actually, the issue is that his primary campaign strategy consists of saying completely unsubstantiated bullshit, and that the introduction of any kind of fact checking would fly in it's face.
What rules do newspaper editors have to play by, exactly? Most of the major outlets are 24/7 propaganda machines. Calling any particular politician out on lying is hardly controversial for them, depending on who the politician in question is.
I don't buy this. If Clinton had won, she would have went after Facebook with tough regulations over Russians using that platform to influence the election. Both parties see Twitter and Facebook as a problem because they change the power landscape.
If you want to know what rules newspapers follow, ask a journalist about their laws and ethics rules and ask a lawyer about publisher rules. I can't give legal advice.
That is just two sideism. No other recent administration has behaved in as petty, insecure, and personally vindictive a manner as this one.
Hell, half of the 2016 campaign was about jailing the other candidate. Nobody else in any of the recent races has behaved in such a way. No president since Nixon is so quick to fly off the handle over being called out on what they are saying. If Biden were running on a Jail Trump campaign in 2020 (since it is now politically acceptable to do that sort of thing, I guess), you may have a point that the two sides behave the same way. They don't.
As for journalists - do you seriously think most of the talking heads on Fox News follow journalistic ethics? If you do, I don't think conversation is necessary - because we don't have a common understanding of either the content of Fox programming, or of ethics.
I was calling out the partisan perspective on this ("the federal government only does bad things because Trump is bad"). Call me whatever you want but I don't think the world revolves around Trump. Most people in the federal government just keep doing their jobs as usual and he doesn't have the interest or competence to interfere.
>Hell, half of the 2016 campaign was about jailing the other candidate . . .
That's not what we're talking about. People (who don't actually care about free speech in principle) are saying that this is a free speech violation in principle (legally, it is sound). The FCC might attempt to treat social media companies like newspapers. This is not a big deal. Bad orange man has not censored newspapers. Your tweets are safe.
You think Trump is demanding that Twitter appoint an editor to vet (and maybe fact check) all his tweets before publishing them, like a newspaper editor would?
I sincerely doubt he'd be drafting this order if, say, Joe Biden's tweets were the ones getting fact-check labels added to them. I can see it being a step towards Trump/Republicans using such an order to suppress criticism though; let's say... a Democrat campaign ad that attacks Trump or calls him out.
Either way, the only intention behind this drafted order is entirely self-serving. It's a complete knee-jerk reaction.
> The First Amendment (Amendment I) to the United States Constitution prevents the government from making laws which regulate an establishment of religion, prohibit the free exercise of religion, or abridge the freedom of speech, the freedom of the press, the right to peaceably assemble, or the right to petition the government for redress of grievances.
My point is that the government passing laws because they don't like what's happening on a platform is textbook first amendment. That you can leave the platform has no bearing on the first amendment. The first amendment says "the government CANNOT do this". It doesn't say "it can't do this, unless users can leave".
Believe it or not posting the first amendment isn't a unique message that no one has heard before. I'm not sure why it's relevant here. Of course the government is upset about something. We pass laws to fix problems. If we see no problem, we don't pass a law.
The White House wants the FCC to treat certain social media companies as if they were newspapers. That's it. Do you think there is a first amendment issue with how the government is treating newspapers right now?
> I'm not sure why it's relevant here. Of course the government is upset about something. We pass laws to fix problems. If we see no problem, we don't pass a law.
It's relevant here because the constituion is the highest legal document in the country. Something that republicans selectively forget.
Hold on... do you know what Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is about? Do you know what protections it gives to companies and what happens if you're treated like a publisher?
Admittedly, that is one big issue. But from a purely political angle, Trump is trying to control the narrative to increase chances of re-election. This narrative will have to include undercounted COVID-19 fatalities, and understated economic effects of the failure to contain the pandemic. It cannot work if it is presented side-by-side with best estimates of actual numbers. Suppressing these numbers is the obvious goal here and leveraging money and political power over the legal system are the means.
I don't buy this. Both sides have been calling for regulation ever since Russians used Twitter and Facebook to meddle in the 2016 election. These are unaccountable companies with unparalleled influence on our elections. If they influence which lawmakers get chosen, they should have to follow minimum standards of conduct.
Fact-checking is protected free speech. Introducing fact-checking links are one of many remedies for external meddling that social platforms have done since last election, ie. to combat "fake news". This juvenile reaction from a president is working against the population making informed decisions made up of facts, not manipulative deceptive made-up unsustantiated statements. As the president also tries to suppress voter engagement, one might even conclude the current administration is working as if anti-democratic as well. The intentions seems to be; to work for oneself and fire everyone else.
All social media sites effectively curate content by dictating what is allowed on the platform and what is not, and removing content which doesn't meet those requirements.
This isn't just about facebook and twitter, it's about every site that allows user generated content, reddit, Hacker News, Instagram, heck even Stack Exchange counts, I'd imagine.
I'd argue there's no such thing as "transparent terms of use" that wouldn't be open to legal challenge. Twitter and facebook have terms of use, they're as transparent as any other site in that regard.
Reddit has banned whole sub-reddits and shadowbanned others, Hacker news has human mods who make qualitative decisions to curate conversations on this site.
This hits every forum, every newsgroup, every site that has user generated content.
(A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected;
Moderation does not have to be systematic, transparent, unbiased, or applied fairly.
The combined parts 1 and 2 of the "Protection for “Good Samaritan” blocking and screening of offensive material" mean that you are not responsible for the speech you host, but you can also not be compelled to host speech you choose not to host.
First amendment is the issue, what do you think "publisher" vs "platform" is about? It's about who should be sued for bad speech. What happens if FB is responsible for everything you say? More censorship. What happens if you are responsible for everything you say? Less disclosure.
Right now we have a situation where the platform owner can collect the fruits of popularity, while the platform users experience basically no-liability gossip. More speech, but are we healthier as a society for it? Maybe sometimes the answer isn't always making sure we have more free speech.
Also I'm not sure how lawsuits help out in the world of little people, because only big people can sue, and they only sue big targets.
That is not what I think is the issue. The issue is that Twitter is behaving like an editorial. What Twitter did is effectively singling out a politician for his views without any regard for being unbiased (which is what a platform should be). I don't see Twitter attaching disclaimers to the tweets issued by any other politician or World leader. I can give multiple instances of politicians in my country misusing Twitter to spread propaganda and outright lies. If Twitter wanted to rebut Trump it could have done it by commenting under the Tweet just like everyone else. The moment Twitter assumes an editorial role upon itself it is no longer a platform but a publisher.
> The gameplan might be to build a direct connection between the vast financial resources of the republican party and their ability to influence online audiences
Assuming that there is some "game-plan" is far fetched. If Twitter hadn't done this there wouldn't be a hue and cry in the first place. No one asked Twitter to attach its own opinion to the tweet. It did it on its own volition.
The fact is that Twitter is heavily tilted towards the left. Jack Dorsey is himself a self-declared left-leaning liberal. India has had its fair share of random banning of right-leaning accounts with those accounts not violating any Twitter policy. After hue and cry those accounts are reinstated. Once reinstated, there is no explanation given as to why the account was banned in the first place and why the account was reinstated. And it has happened multiple times!
If you are going to preach about democracy and fair play then first start at home. Else it will just reek of hypocrisy. And people hate hypocrisy more than lies. At least you know when someone is lying. But you never know when someone is being a hypocrite until you dig his/her past!
Instead of digging into the distant past and guessing intentions, one can just fact-check them and make informed decisions at elections based on facts, not self-serving unsubstantiated claims. One needs to use a first filter first.
But how is Twitter qualified as a fact checker/arbiter? Twitter just cannot assume that role onto itself unless it is specifically chosen to be one and has reported itself as one to the relevant authorities. And once it does that, it binds itself to the regulations that govern an arbiter. Will Twitter subject itself to such regulations?
And who decides whether the citations are factual? Does Twitter decide it? If Twitter decides it then isn't it behaving like a Quasi-Judicial body? If it is like one then it is no longer a platform. You cannot call yourself a "platform" and then suddenly decide to change the character of your business and behave like an arbiter. There is a reason why you mention your nature of business while setting up your company. That way the authorities know what regulations will apply to you. If Twitter is behaving like a publisher and the publishing regulations do not apply then you are creating a monster in the process! And for what justification? Just to take on a politician whose term is fixed? Twitter is going to exist even when Trump isn't the President. By allowing Twitter to get away with this you are going to be setting a precedent for other companies to behave in a similar fashion. Then what is the point of rules and regulations? No one will follow it. Every company will decide to modify its nature of business as it sees fit.
However, are providing fact-checking links really being an arbiter when it's just a link to fact-checking sources? You could criticise those sources as biased, but as fact-checking, one would also need to find flaws in the facts-check itself for it to be anything substantial, and not just FUD-raising.
The extra notices could also have been separate posts by Twitter, or any other method/design of informing users. Twitter is mandated to inform or remove possible factual errors in their platform, in order to combat fake news and undue external political influence.
There is no right for anybody to tell blatant lies and to suppress fact-checks as protected by free speech laws. Some of it are not lies and not that exhaggerated, so it's hard to draw solid lines in the sand. Fact-checking seems a reasonable alternative. Mitigations have already been mandated after last election to combat fake news. Twitter being the owner of both platform and expression of content, is the final decisionmaker of their own social media platform, unless violating Constitution, regulation or laws. This expression is probably mostly covered by 1st Amendment and property laws.
> However, are providing fact-checking links really being an arbiter when it's just a link to fact-checking sources?
Everything drastic starts off with a minor tweak. A minor change. These minor changes in a business' character add up to create a monster in the end. And we all know how companies keep changing policies that give them more and more control. We want the exact opposite. These are platforms for a reason. That is the beauty of it. If you want to tamper with people's opinions then you are no longer a platform. You are an editorial. You just cannot use a space you have given to someone to add your own views. There is no two ways about it. Even if they are a private company, they have a public platform that is used by everyone. And with that kind of power comes greater responsibility.
Whether Trump lies or not, the mandate for electing an alternative is always with the People of the United States. But you have no alternative to Twitter when it comes to ease of instant communication with millions of followers. What Twitter has done has a chilling effect. Adding notices now depends on some employee inside Twitter. Today it is Trump, tomorrow it can be someone else. It all depends on that employee's mood/feeling/bias. And as far as fact-checking is concerned we know how easy it is to "manufacture facts". Manufactured facts were used for waging Wars. Some of them on fellow humans. Some others on drugs like Marijuana. And those manufactured facts were never cross checked.
"Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China"
We all knew there was clear evidence of human-to-human transmission because of the lockdown imposed in Wuhan, the number of people falling sick and the rapid construction of hospitals by the Chinese Government. Yet WHO chose to lie. Did Twitter try to fact check this? This tweet is still on the platform. We all know now that it was a lie from the start. This lie put millions to suffer and killed hundreds of thousands of people around the World. Yet Twitter isn't doing anything. Not even attaching a "Fact Check" against that monstrous lie.
> Twitter is mandated to inform or remove possible factual errors in their platform, in order to combat fake news and undue external political influence.
> Mitigations have already been mandated after last election to combat fake news.
Who mandated Twitter to take on this role? The US Government? I haven't come across any law that mandates social media companies to combat fake news/undue external political influence. If you have any reference I would be happy to read more about it.
Good points. We laughed at those "news" from China, though that was a blip against a hurricane of contagion escalation for anybody following regular news stories. USA gov has own Intelligence reports that would be even ahead of the news as well.
Fact-checking is itself freedom of speech. Notices of fact-checking references is freedom of speech as well. Content was not removed in those instances, and a private platform has private rules. A legitimate President must abide by the same Laws of the land as everyone else, and not expect special treatment or to censor speech that fails to please own ears. The latter is dangerously working against the Constitution and 1st Amendment.
Notices of fact-checking can be given as a reply to his Tweet. Just like everyone else. Twitter has its own account to rebut anyone if it wants to. If Twitter starts fact-checking by invading his personal virtual space then why don't I, a regular user, have the same tools available at my disposal? I also have issues with some politicians in my country who tweet nonsense/falsehood and would like to have my opinions attached to their tweet. Is that possible? If not, why not? Okay if that is too much power in the hands of a user then why isn't Twitter applying the same policy to politicians all around the World? Which other politician is Twitter doing the same to? If it is singling out Trump then it is "special treatment" meted out by Twitter to a politician.
Do you see how quickly the cookie crumbles? What Twitter has done has a chilling effect. If it cannot justify on what policy it decided to attach a notice to a politicians tweet it won't stand a chance in convincing that it is just a platform and not a publisher/editorial. Especially if it targets a single politician and the rule was not used for any other politician.
Visiblity of fact-checking is within Twitter's private domain to control. It could be a separate post, shown above everyone else's. It makes little sense to make special laws micro-managing technical designs of private platforms.
That someone blatantly bullies people and lies on such a platform, would get anyone else banned or at least posts moderated. Lying/deception, defamation and "hate" speech is not protected speech. Some of it may even be punishable by Law.
Twitter still has the option to ban the president. This is not censorship either. Prudent moderation is being performed daily on many social platforms.
Maybe it is time to review the power of social media platforms (so I do see your point).
Though, I suspect a prudent review would end unfavourably for bullies, trolls and liars, at the very least for unprotected speech and especially speech violating established Law.
> That someone blatantly bullies people and lies on such a platform, would get anyone else banned or at least posts moderated
Exactly. So Twitter should have shown it has the balls and banned Trump "just like everyone else". It had the policy backing it up. It wouldn't have caused Twitter to be dragged into this controversy of becoming a biased publisher instead of a neutral platform.
> Lying/deception, defamation and "hate" speech is not protected speech. Some of it may even be punishable by Law.
Yes it is. But Twitter is not the Judge, Jury or Executioner. You have the courts for it.
> Twitter still has the option to ban the president. This is not censorship either. Prudent moderation is being performed daily on many social platforms.
Nope. That doesn't cut it. Your hatred for Trump cannot be a justification for misuse of power by Twitter. If Twitter tries to be an arbiter then it loses the ability to call itself a platform. It can either allow/disallow posts. It cannot decide to add to/edit/remove the post in question. This makes it an editorial/publisher and no longer a platform.
You may think both are the same thing. Both are "moderation". Nope. Imagine you are in a debate and you are the "moderator" of the debate. You have these rights: allow the speakers to speak when their turn comes, disallow speakers from speaking about certain topics. If the debate goes South you have every option to stop the debate. You can kick out a speaker if you feel the speaker is not adhering to the rules. All this is valid and is part of "moderation" as the speakers have come on your "platform".
But just because they are on your "platform" does not mean you have acquired rights over them. They are still individual entities. Now imagine if you are a "biased" moderator. You do not like a speakers point and you decide to add to/edit/change it. But you do not want the speaker to stop talking (lest you be accused of bias) so you instead take a sticky note, write down your counter opinion and attach it to the speakers forehead. Would the speaker be okay with that? Now that is invading that speaker's personal space. Just because you are a moderator you do not get to own the speaker or add to/edit/change his words. You can ask the speaker to leave (or ban) which is perfectly within your right. But you cannot have a notice stuck to his opinion. Then you are not a platform. An editorial does precisely that: edits out the bad parts, fixes the language, makes it better for consumption, fact checks, ensures that it isn't held liable for any wrong doings and then and only then will it allow the content to be published.
My guess is: The problem for an American company banning the president would be they now need to establish same rules for everyone, thus banning most modern opportunists and even some loudmouth influencers. Politically, they'd need to ban most politicians, leading next to just outright banning all political speech. Twitter as a private entity is free to do so with their own platform. However, there's no way to avoid a slippery slope if the company's platform policies start getting entangled into politics. Since the company can never "win" this way or avoid suicide, they choose to do what they can as mandated to combat fake news while trying to stay neutral. You can be sure they have an army of legal specialists behind them on this approach.
Btw, calling out a bully and liar to be a bully and a liar, is not "hatred", when it can be so easily documented.
> So Twitter should have shown it has the balls and banned Trump "just like everyone else". It had the policy backing it up. It wouldn't have caused Twitter to be dragged into this controversy of becoming a biased publisher instead of a neutral platform.
It would have caused Twitter to be dragged into a much bigger controversy instead. Which you're right, they probably should, but have so far proven afraid to do so.
It would be very easy for the US in this case. Twitter's entire revenue stream is ad based. All the US has to do is to sanction any US company that is doing business with Twitter. Once the ad money dries up, Twitter would be as good as dead.
IT Companies have limited features to outside the EU countless times, search engines even locally censor search results here in some cases; I can imagine twitter might just do the same and offer a slightly different user experience inside the USA for legal reasons.
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EDIT:
Of course they could also attempt to separate this fact-checking from their platform, for example by having another company build browser-extensions and endorse these extensions in some way. How far they could go with this is beyond my understanding of the legal system of the USA, but I imagine it should be doable to some extent.
> IT Companies have limited features to outside the EU countless times,
This only works if you actually block EU visitors. Otherwise, you still fall under EU jurisdiction if you appear to have or address users from the EU. It would probably affect you similarly if you have users from the US and are located outside of it.
Enforcing fines is another matter, but the US would certainly have no problems there (see Kim Dotcom raid).
Too much of their revenue comes from the US. Big US advertisers would be incredibly skeeved out by advertising to US users via a US jurisdiction dodging middleman.
They could survive just fine as a communication tool but not so much as a business.
If US advertisers are comfortable advertising on TikTok, I can't see any reason why would be skeeved out by a largely American-owned company headquartered in Europe
> The draft order also states that the White House Office of Digital Strategy will re-establish a tool to help citizens report cases of online censorship.
> Called the White House Tech Bias Reporting Tool, it will collect complaints of online censorship and submit them to the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
> It requires the FTC to then “consider taking action”, look into whether complaints violate the law, develop a report describing such complaints and make the report publicly available.
IANAL, but this seems reasonable and similar to what e.g. Germany is already practising: if you assume responsibility of your users' content by verifying/correcting it, you are held liable. For example, portals that collect user reviews and check whether they are complete and correct: https://medien-internet-und-recht.de/volltext.php?mir_dok_id... (German).
It’s not reasonable in context, which is as a temper tantrum resulting from having a fact check posted alongside Trump’s blatant lies. The content wasn’t edited and taking responsibility for the speech of others is absurd.
> There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent. Mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed. The Governor of California is sending Ballots to millions of people, anyone living in the state, no matter who they are or how they got there, will get one. That will be followed up with professionals telling all of these people, many of whom have never even thought of voting before, how, and for whom, to vote. This will be a Rigged Election. No way!
This composed two tweets. It's from an authority figure (granted, one known to be extremely untrustworthy). There are many statements of "fact", or what any reasonable reader would take as assertions of fact.
Sentence one:
> There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent.
This is clearly a statement of fact. It's asserting (and context is important here, because Trump has repeatedly said mail in voting is rife with fraud) that mail-in voting is rife with fraud. Even a charitable interpretation would have to see this as intended to degrade trust in our voting system (to what end?) and discourage voting. If I say "The sun will rise tomorrow", it's a statement of fact, even though it's about the future.
> Mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed.
Again, this is a statement of fact. There is no qualifying clause to make this opinion, such as "I believe", or "I think".
> The Governor of California is sending Ballots to millions of people, anyone living in the state, no matter who they are or how they got there, will get one.
Another statement of fact, this one clearly about the present.
> That will be followed up with professionals telling all of these people, many of whom have never even thought of voting before, how, and for whom, to vote.
Very clever. This has nothing to do with the twitter tagging of his tweet that everyone is talking about.
The tagging incident just accelerated the idea that social media shouldn’t enjoy the cost benefits from being classified as a publisher or a platform depending on how much it costs to answer a legal question poised to them.
This has nothing to do with free speech, so I completely expect the conversation to go completely off the rails.
Section 230 should stay but the definition of re-publisher vs publisher should be narrowed down.
The law should be written such that if you go beyond removing spam and illegal content, and especially if you are editorializing user-submitted content, you are are a publisher, rather than a re-publisher.
This will put large platforms in a situation where they will have to chose whether they maintain neutrality. Each platform can then pick whether to be a publisher or a re-publisher.
Imagine being a part of a party that has been pushing for the destruction of net neutrality, and complain that specific services on the internet are censoring the internet.
Deciding what traffic to allow on the networks is OK but services shouldn’t be allowed to police things on their own platform.
This period of Trump benefiting off unfettered, direct access to the public, and Twitter benefiting off of greater clout through hosting the president is most definitely coming to a conclusion.
In scenario 1, this is a Sabre rattling move, where Trump is hoping that the social media companies will allow his nonsense against the threat of more legal headaches from section 230 complaints and violations. This might happen.
In scenario 2, this backfires phenomenally against the very bullshit that Trump is trying to protect - the goal of section 230 seems to be enforcement of terms of service, and the first action of companies trying to enforce their terms against hate speech and lies will be to block Trump and his entire cohort.
Seems like a risky play, threatening someone with legal action if they don’t destroy you hoping that the threat will get them to stop destroying you.
This might also just the universe conspiring against Trump - he’s plugging OAN and Fox is slowly inching away from him, choosing to break on mask wearing. His Twitter soapbox now carries a bullshit warning on the stuff he says, his other platforms will follow, now that precedent has been set. The Democrats have chosen a nominee white enough to appeal to Trump supporters but black enough to have Obama in his corner. A black man was murdered by a MAGA cop, causing riots and police overreaction. There might not be an avalanche yet, but this is the scene where there’s a slight rumbling sound and everybody looks up at the mountain.
Personally I hope twitter does ban Trump, but not for the same reasons I suspect you do. Not because I believe he has violated a nebulous and subjective "hate speech" policy, not be cause I believe "Trump lies" and all Democrats are pure virtue and sunshine (which is largely the opinion of the twitterverse)
No I hope they do, because Trump will select another platform, and that Platform will see a HUGE boost and hopefully start to crack the foundation of the Silicon Valley social media oligopoly
I want to see a return to Open Protocols, and Federated Communications, not 4 or 5 companies controlling most human communications
On the face of it this seems to be a dangerous step towards the industry being coopted by the lunatic conspiratorial fringes and forced to spread their dangerous nonsense against our will. Not a game I'd be happy to play.
Why does the federal government miss the ball Every. Single. Time?
Twitter censoring conservatives wouldn't be a big deal if Twitter had more competitors. America keeps on saying it's committed to free and open markets. Why doesn't it make one here?
Break up Twitter. Or make them open up their protocols. Or whatever. I don't care. Just promote competition. Enough of these quasi-fascist state regulated oligopolies run and reaped by 1-3 companies while the rest of us stand in the bread lines. It's not the American way, not the democratic way, not the capitalist way, and I'm sick of it.
There's nothing marginalized about the American government, it's the biggest and most powerful government in the world and it has an unfathomably huge budget.
I haven't seen a free market in America in decades.
Free markets can be destroyed by governments or by megacorps, but most often they're destroyed by a collaboration between the two.
> Twitter censoring conservatives wouldn't be a big deal if Twitter had more competitors
How much evidence of this in practice is there (I mean evidence of systemic bias throughout the site beyond what could reasonably be expected with millions and millions of tweets etc.)? The fact the Donald Trump himself tweeted this [1] recently and it's still up, suggests they aren't exactly thorough.
So I would guess that Twitter is internally torn apart on this. I imagine the rank-and-file for the most part despise Trump but as a business Twitter (and its shareholders) are more than happy to be the Propaganda Wing of the Republican Party.
So I imagine an effort to distance themselves from the outright lies of the commander-in-chief was token resistance to this role, probably aimed at mollifying the collective consciences of the employees.
But it's doomed and they've fallen into a trap. Here's how this is going to go:
There is simply no line in the sand you can draw between objective truth and objective lies. What's more, even if you can, propagated lies exist because people want to believe them and they see any effort to disabuse them of their provably false views (eg vaccines cause autism) as biased actors trying to hide the "truth".
Human nature can be ugly at times.
The take on Section 230 is actually an interesting one and I imagine that's going all the way to the Supreme Court if the administration pushes on this. Like you can remove objectionable or illegal content from your platform (in fact you're required to by law) and still maintain safe harbor but where does that end? If you're Google you don't want Youtube filled up with a bunch of racist crap. It's bad for your brand. That content may fall under free speech (from a S230 perspective) and if you decide to remove it for the health of the platform and/or the value of your brand, does safe harbor still apply?
Whatever the case, this administration needs to lose in the next election. Badly. The attack on societal norms and institutitotions is unprecedented and reprehensible and I so would like Trump, McConnell, Ivanka, Jared, Pompeo, Barr and a whole bunch of others to end up in prison after all this is over.
This is what scares me the most: in the Watergate era even Republicans found Nixon's behaviour beyond the pale. I am utterly convinced that if that happened today there'd be a strict party-line vote as the President's party would happily look the other way.
Look no further than the administration's so far successful efforts to block Congressional oversight. At no time in history did any administration think it was totally above the law. Make no mistake: that's what they're doing. Worse, no administration so blatantly engaging in obstruction would've continued to have ~40% of the population support it no matter what. Thanks to decades of gerrymandering in state Houses and voter suppression that 40% almost controls the election by itself as higher-population states are essentially disenfranchises in the modern electoral system.
For the record, I'm against the popular vote deciding the presidential election but that's a whole other topic.
How anyone who can call themselves "Christian" and support this president and his policies is utterly beyond me.
> in the Watergate era even Republicans found Nixon's behaviour beyond the pale. I am utterly convinced that if that happened today there'd be a strict party-line vote as the President's party would happily look the other way.
This already happened. I know it's hard to remember six months ago, but the president* was impeached by the House and was acquitted on a party line vote in the Senate.
My point is that Nixon quit to avoid an inevitable impeachment. Today he wouldn’t have to because he’d get a party line vote. Norms of acceptable conduct have been greatly eroded.
Seems like we're relying now upon the same "bureaucracy" that was detested when someone got what he wanted. Now someone very delusional is butthurt. Good thing twitter can basically do whatever they want - it's a private company, first amendment rights are not in question here. If crazies want to eat their fish tank cleaner, but twitter wouldn't let them post selfies promoting this stupidity, then stupid people need to learn how to create their own company and isolate from reality a little longer like maybe a few more generations. I bet that'll work well...
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 199 ms ] threadTwitter is already giving the president a lot of leeway in what he can say.
If he wants special privileges and communicate as the president he can use the official communication channels.
It seems to be increasingly lost on the US government (and people) that the presidency is an institution, not a person. If Donald Trump starts a barfight in a nightclub he can get arrested like everyone else.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23330463
This EO seems to be a nothingburger, the courts have already established that the text of 230 creates broad immunity, they aren't going to defer to the FCC about that.
Has the FTC even established that platforms have obligations towards their non-customer users?
The ToS will be written to allow discretion; that is why Trump hasn't been banned.
I don't doubt the US government could do that to an extent, but how much legal precedent is there for doing it? I find it very hard to believe that Twitter (and arguably many other companies in the sector, and possibly other tech companies too) wouldn't immediately lawyer up and challenge any thing like that. Not least because Twitter could start playing dirty too i.e. lobbying etc.
Government decisions get challenged from inside the government (or own administration as seen from the migrant ban) let alone externally by legal teams with practically unlimited budgets (remember that the church of Scientology successfully "beat" the IRS)
Censorship platforms, even the “good guys” who only censor occasionally or predictably or “according to law” (or whatever), are all vulnerable to this. The state can threaten them with guns and imprisonment, ultimately, and they have no immediate recourse. The content comes down. Maybe it gets restored later, after the election or war is over. Maybe it doesn’t. Either way, it comes down today. Neither Jack nor Sundar are going to jail to protect your hosting account showing videos of war crimes.
This is an inherent danger in all censorship platforms. Whether you like Jack or not, trusting him not to censor arbitrarily (while Twitter always has the technical capability) is not a reasonable choice for the society-wide message bus.
This failure mode is inherent in these censorship-possible systems, and it must be addressed if we are to maintain publishing that cannot be suppressed by the state during emergencies.
https://sneak.berlin/20200421/normalcy-bias/
The guns are implicit. The threat rarely needs to be so direct.
Imagine what happens if Twitter continues to do the legal publishing things that Twitter does on twitter.com, and the state arbitrarily changes the liability protections of the CDA out from under them, and Twitter tells them to piss up a rope.
Next, Twitter’s bank accounts will eventually get looted, and if they opt out of the traditional state-controlled no-burden-of-proof banking system[1] to continue operating and paying staff, you can bet your ass that their resulting shutdown will be at the point of a gun, because payments outside of that system are already illegal without a special license.
That’s the only authority the state ultimately has: the claim to legitimately use violence to enforce the law: the law, as we are about to see, that can be changed arbitrarily by corrupt politician edict.
(The last time I recall him doing so was by an EO that overturned decades-old published and written BATFE interpretations of existing federal law (and assurances related to same) regarding bump stocks. The lawsuit proceeds, but good luck to you while you rot in jail for years if you are in possession of a bump stock (which were legal for decades) in the interim.)
[1]: https://sneak.berlin/20191119/your-money-isnt-yours/
Twitter didn't even censor the president, they just added a link below some lies he posted. He's been breaking their TOS habitually for some time and rather than ban him as they would anyone else, they made a special public TOS-exception for "newsworthy" bigwig public figures like him in their rules. The president gets to tweet things that would get you, a non-president, quickly banned from Twitter.[1] He's explicitly whitelisted as exempt from Twitter's usual control over twitter.com.
Now, the federal government is going to actually censor Twitter on his order, simply because they had the audacity to amend information to tweets from an account that they declined to suspend out of courtesy despite it breaking their rules for years.
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2018/01...
This is exactly why Twitter is an editor.
> the federal government is going to actually censor Twitter on his order
Wrong. They will instruct the FCC to treat Twitter like a newspaper.
If you remove section 230 protections for UGC from companies that "editorialize" under this definition, what will happen is that the only hosting companies that will remain in the wake of that are the ones large enough to be "too big to fail" (or friendly enough with the feds) like AWS and Azure and the existing social media giants.
That makes the point-and-click censorship situation much worse, because then the only places you can reliably host are already integrated with the angry despot's military for realtime censorship as we saw demonstrated for us in the case of Wikileaks, and ongoing across the world.
You do not want to live in that world. Already we have companies like Facebook disabling links in comments on Instagram to control the flow of information and attention. I don't want a web where all of our communications flow through 4 companies who can disappear our accounts and 100% of our private or public communications down the memory hole with no audit trail or legal recourse whatsoever.
If 4 companies control the internet, having the government restrain from censoring them doesn't fix the problem. What do you think we should do? I'm at a loss here.
Let's keep the context of this label around the post on mail in votes "would be a free for all on cheating, forgery and the theft of Ballots" in mind. This is attacking democratic constructs with goal of subverting it. There is no ideas to improve the very system that the current steward of our democracy should be owning .. just throwing mud to cement power.
Twitter has to try to provide context to these anti-Democratic government broadcasts or least it loses any notion of private free press. I.e it might as well be state run if it does not have the freedom to structrue the presentation of platform participation.
The US Postal Inspection Service (the mail has their own feds, did you know?) would take well beyond the window of the election results being declared if some criminal decided to take the same blatant measures to defraud an election by mail as they did to defraud the electronic voting systems the last election, which were fraught with actual issues of undefined electronic voting integrity (which, of course, fails unsafe, because you're not going to re-do an election when the numbers don't match). It's entirely plausible that the last US presidential election was stolen electronically and the perpetrators simply got away with it because computer security sucks.[1]
Ultimately, voting is a hard problem, and it's not really solved presently (in person, electronically, or by mail) from a technical/attack perspective. There are so many ways to straightforwardly attack the system right now if you're willing to risk a billion years in jail if you're detected, most of them related to the ways that electronic votes are collected[2] or the ways that votes are transmitted to central tabulation.[3] These systems fail unsafe, even when discrepancies are detected.
(My own personal theory about this is that if election results take too long to become "official", people will lose faith in the process itself, so getting to "done" is in general more important to most involved than getting to "perfectly accurate".)
Vote-by-mail has a different, but also still large and present, attack surface, especially if you (as above) are willing to do Big Deal Federal Crimes Involving The Postal Service to subvert it, which I believe is entirely on the table for the highest office in the land.
I don't care for the president or his tweets, but to call this one in particular anti-democratic might be a stretch, too. The US presidential elections simply are not secure in any meaningful way right now, and switching to mail won't fix (or worsen) that. (I know it's not a popular thing to point out that the US election security emperor has no clothes, but it's unfortunately true.)
It's not antidemocratic to say that it's fairly likely that elections have been, and will continue to be, successfully hacked. (The tweet in question is, of course, using the concept as a weapon to further a specific antidemocratic agenda, but that is another matter entirely.)
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/17/17582818/election-softwar...
[2]: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-voting-machine-...
[3]: https://time.com/4599886/detroit-voting-machine-failures-wer...
Finally,
> might as well be state run if it does not have the freedom to structrue the presentation of platform participation.
Totally with you on that one.
Non-censorship platforms: drinking water mixed with sewage
Why does your email has an anti-spam filter again? Isn't that censorship?
Spam Filtering is not censorship because it is acting on my behalf on the emails that I receive. As a private person, I have the right to apply any filters on conversations I am a direct part of.
What I don't have the right is to apply my filters/opinions on others without their consent. Doing this would be censorship.
Further, a lot of the major infra providers will shut your sh down if they think you are being a bad citizen(complaints, bounces, etc). Sure, you can find _some_ provider that won't; but DJT can find _some_ blog platform that will post his all his BS without fact checking it as well.
> The order asks the FCC to examine whether actions related to the editing of content by social media companies should potentially lead to the platform forfeiting its protections under section 230.
> It requires the agency to look at whether a social media platform uses deceptive policies to moderate content and if its policies are inconsistent with its terms of service.
Is there any merit to this?
"The sky is green"
"Actually, the sky is blue"
"That is political bullying! You're abusing your powers! This is oppression!"
My god, how insane we've gotten. Obviously I think I have my head screwed on right and can see right from wrong, but this belief about the self is also shared by Trump and every lunatic on Twitter and outside of it.
I guess civilization will die due to the effect noted by Dunning-Kruger.
Honestly, that part seems very reasonable. If a platform curates or modifies content or promotes it beyond what some system thinks the specific user might like, then yes, the platform should be responsible for that content.
The real question would be, should the platform become responsible for all ontent, or just the content it curates / modifies / promotes?
My opinion is that this should work on a per-content basis, where the platform only becomes legally responsible for a unit of content once it associates itself with it by promoting, modifying, etc. this content. Whether it is realistic to enforce it this way is, of course, another question.
You can see the problem if Twitter allows politician A to accuse politician B of eating babies, but getting all high and mighty about politician B doing the same to A.
Any platform has the ability to modify anything on it. Does that make them tacitly responsible for all the content on it? No, that is just silly, and that's the way the law looks at it too.
However, too many are invested in maximally extreme, literal parsings of every syllable uttered by Donald John.
The Left understood BHO figuratively, the Right, literally.
The Left understands DJT literally, the Right, figuratively.
We might all benefit from a deep breath.
There are many people that believe Twitter is biased in favor of conservatives simply because it allows some conservatives to speak at all...
Tankies, though, I don't know whether they tend to get banned.
So curation independent of the wishes of the user is a central feature, making this sound like platforms would become really responsible for moderating what they publish. Historically this has been seen as completely cray-cray by the platform owners and they've fought it off successfully so far.
Imho that's exactly what Twitter does want to avoid under all circumstances because it would basically make ad-automation more risky.
Google dealing with regulation around advertising for medical products chose a blanket ban for any and all ads on a large range of keywords for some areas, and will only manually allow e.g. the manufacturer of some medication to buy ads. Automatically judging the legality of ads / tweets is too risky, and doing it manually is too costly (and still somewhat risky).
If an HN admin removes a comment on a post, they've curated that discussion, effectively.
Then they'd be responsible for the comment that got removed; what's the problem with that? It's not like they'd be modifying one word in a sentence and not want to be responsible for the next one.
This kind of thing should obviously work on small data units, like tweets, posts, etc.
Once they've curated a conversation (removing comments) are they responsible for the ones they didn't remove in that conversation as it's implicit approval?
It could very much be argued that they curated the post, and if they're responsible for removing it from the front page , is that a form of censorship...
The point I was making is that things that could apply to twitter also apply everywhere there is user generated content.
Maybe the line should be form vs. content; removing a post because of strong language (if the site specifically does not allow it) is different from removing a post because of an expressed idea. There's also a clear difference between presenting something demonstrably false as fact and and questioning the reasoning by which such falsehoods are identified. Both might be expressions of conspiracy theory, but should be protected by a persons freedom to express their opinion, the other is a lie.
If you suggest that platforms cannot remove other content, a lot of actions from people like reddit to remove objectionable content are banned, similarly here. Content has been removed from HN for example for "not contributing to the discussion", that's a subjective opinion, but one I'd suggest that site owners are entitled to.
Also when you start getting into very fine grained distinctions (for example have some of the things president trump has said been "demonstrably false" or not?) the chances of a law accurately capturing that requirement in such a way that a massive number of lawsuits are not started are (in my opinion) low.
Opening the door to that kind of lawsuit would seem likely to destroy smaller, less well funded sites, whilst larger players could likely weather the storm.
Not manually though. If you post a link to Twitter, a bot will do its thing and fetch a thumbnail. They will not do that only for some tweets but not others.
> if you change your website's theme or design in future, you modified all of user content as well
Hardly, but more importantly: you don't modify user content based on the user content in question. If you add a new script that will uppercase the first letter of all Tweets, you're altering user content, but I doubt there will be an argument about editorializing since you're applying it to all content.
Such ideas are certainly worth discussing, but I don't see how it would work. If the platform is suppressing some items then it is in effect promoting all the items it doesn't suppress, so would be responsible for them. The only way to avoid responsibility would be to present everything to the user, including the most blatant spam, in no particular order. Or you could allow certain kinds of "curation", perhaps, but if the curation is anything other than filtering by application of a published algorithm, then probably the platform would have to take responsibility for anything that doesn't get filtered out. But filtering with a published algorithm wouldn't stop professional spammers.
Here's a random idea: delegate the filtering to lots of separate smaller companies which would be a less juicy target for lawyers and it wouldn't matter if they went bankrupt every now and then.
But calling CNN a fact checker on the president is so inherently stupid, it's asking for trouble. And of course CNN couldn't get their facts right either, so they are blatantly just representing the other side and not "facts".
Twitter really could have done a better job here.
Besides, all news outlets post a bunch of BS under the cover of "analysis", "opinion", and "op-ed" pieces. Those are all carefully crafted to engage a target audience. NYT does it. WAPO does it. CNN. They are all running outrage factories just producing slightly different flavors..
That's the point, me thinks
Linking to related media resources makes total sense.
That’s what they have done in the past and what is a direct reaction to what went down during the last US presidential election.
Since this is the President Twitter feels understandably uncomfortable with just banning that person, so the next best option is to provide context to what they said. Seems reasonable to me.
You can quibble about details, but the basic idea seems sound to me.
You can also quibble about inconsistent enforcement and what not, but as far as I know Twitter is just coming down extremely hard on election disinfo (for understandable reasons), so that’s why they are so on this (and not, say, harassment and hate speech – which to my mind is also a very big problem on Twitter and where I see many failings in Twitter’s insufficient reaction).
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good. So often in these discussions people aim for perfection which in this messy reality is an impossibility. But saying “Well, perfection is impossible, so we will just do nothing.” or even “Well, there are complexities here, so we will just do nothing.” is just lazy cowardice. Or ideologically motivated.
I am interested in what you think about that, ignoring Trump for a second.
In that context I’m totally fine with what Twitter did. However, maybe something that looks superficially similar (posting a link to some white supremacist website below a tweet of some politician) might not be.
I know that looks pretty similar but I think that those are the complexities our society has to deal with. Sometimes someone is just wrong and their wrongness is fucking dangerous to society and then it is ok to react.
No bright line, only complexities.
My argument is Twitter is a private company. While private company should be able to control what happens with their platform, they have increasingly reached a size where they are public utilities. I believe an elected government (with its own biases) should decide what goes on a published platform than twitter. Because i have no way of questioning Twitter’s decisions. I can question the government and elect a new one. I can’t elect a new Jack Dorsey.
Every court’s jurisdiction only applies within that country.
What if an American court’s order goes against a European one?
What if Twitter moves to a different jurisdiction which has less oversight and buys out the courts? Not probable. But I wouldn’t want a utility to have so much power. Sorry.
Is there concrete evidence of bias? Being critical isn't the same thing
What rules do newspaper editors have to play by, exactly? Most of the major outlets are 24/7 propaganda machines. Calling any particular politician out on lying is hardly controversial for them, depending on who the politician in question is.
If you want to know what rules newspapers follow, ask a journalist about their laws and ethics rules and ask a lawyer about publisher rules. I can't give legal advice.
Hell, half of the 2016 campaign was about jailing the other candidate. Nobody else in any of the recent races has behaved in such a way. No president since Nixon is so quick to fly off the handle over being called out on what they are saying. If Biden were running on a Jail Trump campaign in 2020 (since it is now politically acceptable to do that sort of thing, I guess), you may have a point that the two sides behave the same way. They don't.
As for journalists - do you seriously think most of the talking heads on Fox News follow journalistic ethics? If you do, I don't think conversation is necessary - because we don't have a common understanding of either the content of Fox programming, or of ethics.
>Hell, half of the 2016 campaign was about jailing the other candidate . . .
That's not what we're talking about. People (who don't actually care about free speech in principle) are saying that this is a free speech violation in principle (legally, it is sound). The FCC might attempt to treat social media companies like newspapers. This is not a big deal. Bad orange man has not censored newspapers. Your tweets are safe.
Is this executive order one of those cases?
I think that is not what Trump is asking for.
Either way, the only intention behind this drafted order is entirely self-serving. It's a complete knee-jerk reaction.
By doing this Twitter is behaving as a publisher. Then why should Twitter not be treated like one?
From wikipedia[1] (my emphasis):
> The First Amendment (Amendment I) to the United States Constitution prevents the government from making laws which regulate an establishment of religion, prohibit the free exercise of religion, or abridge the freedom of speech, the freedom of the press, the right to peaceably assemble, or the right to petition the government for redress of grievances.
Also, called it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23322683
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_...
The White House wants the FCC to treat certain social media companies as if they were newspapers. That's it. Do you think there is a first amendment issue with how the government is treating newspapers right now?
It's relevant here because the constituion is the highest legal document in the country. Something that republicans selectively forget.
>Something that republicans selectively forget
ok... Go tell it to a Republican then.
That's what I just did.
This isn't just about facebook and twitter, it's about every site that allows user generated content, reddit, Hacker News, Instagram, heck even Stack Exchange counts, I'd imagine.
Reddit has banned whole sub-reddits and shadowbanned others, Hacker news has human mods who make qualitative decisions to curate conversations on this site.
This hits every forum, every newsgroup, every site that has user generated content.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230
(A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected;
Moderation does not have to be systematic, transparent, unbiased, or applied fairly.
The combined parts 1 and 2 of the "Protection for “Good Samaritan” blocking and screening of offensive material" mean that you are not responsible for the speech you host, but you can also not be compelled to host speech you choose not to host.
First amendment is the issue, what do you think "publisher" vs "platform" is about? It's about who should be sued for bad speech. What happens if FB is responsible for everything you say? More censorship. What happens if you are responsible for everything you say? Less disclosure.
Right now we have a situation where the platform owner can collect the fruits of popularity, while the platform users experience basically no-liability gossip. More speech, but are we healthier as a society for it? Maybe sometimes the answer isn't always making sure we have more free speech.
Also I'm not sure how lawsuits help out in the world of little people, because only big people can sue, and they only sue big targets.
> The gameplan might be to build a direct connection between the vast financial resources of the republican party and their ability to influence online audiences
Assuming that there is some "game-plan" is far fetched. If Twitter hadn't done this there wouldn't be a hue and cry in the first place. No one asked Twitter to attach its own opinion to the tweet. It did it on its own volition.
The fact is that Twitter is heavily tilted towards the left. Jack Dorsey is himself a self-declared left-leaning liberal. India has had its fair share of random banning of right-leaning accounts with those accounts not violating any Twitter policy. After hue and cry those accounts are reinstated. Once reinstated, there is no explanation given as to why the account was banned in the first place and why the account was reinstated. And it has happened multiple times!
If you are going to preach about democracy and fair play then first start at home. Else it will just reek of hypocrisy. And people hate hypocrisy more than lies. At least you know when someone is lying. But you never know when someone is being a hypocrite until you dig his/her past!
And who decides whether the citations are factual? Does Twitter decide it? If Twitter decides it then isn't it behaving like a Quasi-Judicial body? If it is like one then it is no longer a platform. You cannot call yourself a "platform" and then suddenly decide to change the character of your business and behave like an arbiter. There is a reason why you mention your nature of business while setting up your company. That way the authorities know what regulations will apply to you. If Twitter is behaving like a publisher and the publishing regulations do not apply then you are creating a monster in the process! And for what justification? Just to take on a politician whose term is fixed? Twitter is going to exist even when Trump isn't the President. By allowing Twitter to get away with this you are going to be setting a precedent for other companies to behave in a similar fashion. Then what is the point of rules and regulations? No one will follow it. Every company will decide to modify its nature of business as it sees fit.
However, are providing fact-checking links really being an arbiter when it's just a link to fact-checking sources? You could criticise those sources as biased, but as fact-checking, one would also need to find flaws in the facts-check itself for it to be anything substantial, and not just FUD-raising.
The extra notices could also have been separate posts by Twitter, or any other method/design of informing users. Twitter is mandated to inform or remove possible factual errors in their platform, in order to combat fake news and undue external political influence.
There is no right for anybody to tell blatant lies and to suppress fact-checks as protected by free speech laws. Some of it are not lies and not that exhaggerated, so it's hard to draw solid lines in the sand. Fact-checking seems a reasonable alternative. Mitigations have already been mandated after last election to combat fake news. Twitter being the owner of both platform and expression of content, is the final decisionmaker of their own social media platform, unless violating Constitution, regulation or laws. This expression is probably mostly covered by 1st Amendment and property laws.
Everything drastic starts off with a minor tweak. A minor change. These minor changes in a business' character add up to create a monster in the end. And we all know how companies keep changing policies that give them more and more control. We want the exact opposite. These are platforms for a reason. That is the beauty of it. If you want to tamper with people's opinions then you are no longer a platform. You are an editorial. You just cannot use a space you have given to someone to add your own views. There is no two ways about it. Even if they are a private company, they have a public platform that is used by everyone. And with that kind of power comes greater responsibility.
Whether Trump lies or not, the mandate for electing an alternative is always with the People of the United States. But you have no alternative to Twitter when it comes to ease of instant communication with millions of followers. What Twitter has done has a chilling effect. Adding notices now depends on some employee inside Twitter. Today it is Trump, tomorrow it can be someone else. It all depends on that employee's mood/feeling/bias. And as far as fact-checking is concerned we know how easy it is to "manufacture facts". Manufactured facts were used for waging Wars. Some of them on fellow humans. Some others on drugs like Marijuana. And those manufactured facts were never cross checked.
Some others are even worse. Let us take WHO for instance. What do you say for this: https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152
"Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China"
We all knew there was clear evidence of human-to-human transmission because of the lockdown imposed in Wuhan, the number of people falling sick and the rapid construction of hospitals by the Chinese Government. Yet WHO chose to lie. Did Twitter try to fact check this? This tweet is still on the platform. We all know now that it was a lie from the start. This lie put millions to suffer and killed hundreds of thousands of people around the World. Yet Twitter isn't doing anything. Not even attaching a "Fact Check" against that monstrous lie.
> Twitter is mandated to inform or remove possible factual errors in their platform, in order to combat fake news and undue external political influence. > Mitigations have already been mandated after last election to combat fake news.
Who mandated Twitter to take on this role? The US Government? I haven't come across any law that mandates social media companies to combat fake news/undue external political influence. If you have any reference I would be happy to read more about it.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=no+clear+evidence+who
There was a huge debacle at the time with Facebook CEO visiting different countries' authorities and the Cambridge A. scandal:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=social+media+combat+fake+news+cong...
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=social+media+combat+fake+news
Though active admin moderation on social media, forums and even news sites has a long history before that as well.
Do you see how quickly the cookie crumbles? What Twitter has done has a chilling effect. If it cannot justify on what policy it decided to attach a notice to a politicians tweet it won't stand a chance in convincing that it is just a platform and not a publisher/editorial. Especially if it targets a single politician and the rule was not used for any other politician.
That someone blatantly bullies people and lies on such a platform, would get anyone else banned or at least posts moderated. Lying/deception, defamation and "hate" speech is not protected speech. Some of it may even be punishable by Law.
Twitter still has the option to ban the president. This is not censorship either. Prudent moderation is being performed daily on many social platforms.
Maybe it is time to review the power of social media platforms (so I do see your point).
Though, I suspect a prudent review would end unfavourably for bullies, trolls and liars, at the very least for unprotected speech and especially speech violating established Law.
Exactly. So Twitter should have shown it has the balls and banned Trump "just like everyone else". It had the policy backing it up. It wouldn't have caused Twitter to be dragged into this controversy of becoming a biased publisher instead of a neutral platform.
> Lying/deception, defamation and "hate" speech is not protected speech. Some of it may even be punishable by Law.
Yes it is. But Twitter is not the Judge, Jury or Executioner. You have the courts for it.
> Twitter still has the option to ban the president. This is not censorship either. Prudent moderation is being performed daily on many social platforms.
Nope. That doesn't cut it. Your hatred for Trump cannot be a justification for misuse of power by Twitter. If Twitter tries to be an arbiter then it loses the ability to call itself a platform. It can either allow/disallow posts. It cannot decide to add to/edit/remove the post in question. This makes it an editorial/publisher and no longer a platform.
You may think both are the same thing. Both are "moderation". Nope. Imagine you are in a debate and you are the "moderator" of the debate. You have these rights: allow the speakers to speak when their turn comes, disallow speakers from speaking about certain topics. If the debate goes South you have every option to stop the debate. You can kick out a speaker if you feel the speaker is not adhering to the rules. All this is valid and is part of "moderation" as the speakers have come on your "platform".
But just because they are on your "platform" does not mean you have acquired rights over them. They are still individual entities. Now imagine if you are a "biased" moderator. You do not like a speakers point and you decide to add to/edit/change it. But you do not want the speaker to stop talking (lest you be accused of bias) so you instead take a sticky note, write down your counter opinion and attach it to the speakers forehead. Would the speaker be okay with that? Now that is invading that speaker's personal space. Just because you are a moderator you do not get to own the speaker or add to/edit/change his words. You can ask the speaker to leave (or ban) which is perfectly within your right. But you cannot have a notice stuck to his opinion. Then you are not a platform. An editorial does precisely that: edits out the bad parts, fixes the language, makes it better for consumption, fact checks, ensures that it isn't held liable for any wrong doings and then and only then will it allow the content to be published.
Btw, calling out a bully and liar to be a bully and a liar, is not "hatred", when it can be so easily documented.
It would have caused Twitter to be dragged into a much bigger controversy instead. Which you're right, they probably should, but have so far proven afraid to do so.
I can't imagine it would be easy to regulate a service that isn't really location dependent.
--- EDIT:
Of course they could also attempt to separate this fact-checking from their platform, for example by having another company build browser-extensions and endorse these extensions in some way. How far they could go with this is beyond my understanding of the legal system of the USA, but I imagine it should be doable to some extent.
This only works if you actually block EU visitors. Otherwise, you still fall under EU jurisdiction if you appear to have or address users from the EU. It would probably affect you similarly if you have users from the US and are located outside of it.
Enforcing fines is another matter, but the US would certainly have no problems there (see Kim Dotcom raid).
They could survive just fine as a communication tool but not so much as a business.
> Called the White House Tech Bias Reporting Tool, it will collect complaints of online censorship and submit them to the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
> It requires the FTC to then “consider taking action”, look into whether complaints violate the law, develop a report describing such complaints and make the report publicly available.
Except for the Fact
1. It was on opinion not a statement of fact that needed fact checking
2. Twitter supports directly an opposing opinion
3. The "Fact Check" organizations linked are provably bias and are not fact check organizations
4. The links went to opposing opinion pieces not a statement of fact
> There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent. Mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed. The Governor of California is sending Ballots to millions of people, anyone living in the state, no matter who they are or how they got there, will get one. That will be followed up with professionals telling all of these people, many of whom have never even thought of voting before, how, and for whom, to vote. This will be a Rigged Election. No way!
This composed two tweets. It's from an authority figure (granted, one known to be extremely untrustworthy). There are many statements of "fact", or what any reasonable reader would take as assertions of fact.
Sentence one:
> There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent.
This is clearly a statement of fact. It's asserting (and context is important here, because Trump has repeatedly said mail in voting is rife with fraud) that mail-in voting is rife with fraud. Even a charitable interpretation would have to see this as intended to degrade trust in our voting system (to what end?) and discourage voting. If I say "The sun will rise tomorrow", it's a statement of fact, even though it's about the future.
> Mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed.
Again, this is a statement of fact. There is no qualifying clause to make this opinion, such as "I believe", or "I think".
> The Governor of California is sending Ballots to millions of people, anyone living in the state, no matter who they are or how they got there, will get one.
Another statement of fact, this one clearly about the present.
> That will be followed up with professionals telling all of these people, many of whom have never even thought of voting before, how, and for whom, to vote.
Statement of fact.
> This will be a Rigged Election.
Again, a statement of fact.
That's five lies in 6 sentences.
Now let's look at the Fact Check link - it goes here: https://twitter.com/i/events/1265330601034256384
This is a feed leading to many articles from many sources about the matter in question.
Zero lies in 6 sentences, says I.
https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/politics/nj-naacp-leader-cal...
https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/corruption-allegations...
The tagging incident just accelerated the idea that social media shouldn’t enjoy the cost benefits from being classified as a publisher or a platform depending on how much it costs to answer a legal question poised to them.
This has nothing to do with free speech, so I completely expect the conversation to go completely off the rails.
The law should be written such that if you go beyond removing spam and illegal content, and especially if you are editorializing user-submitted content, you are are a publisher, rather than a re-publisher.
This will put large platforms in a situation where they will have to chose whether they maintain neutrality. Each platform can then pick whether to be a publisher or a re-publisher.
Deciding what traffic to allow on the networks is OK but services shouldn’t be allowed to police things on their own platform.
In scenario 2, this backfires phenomenally against the very bullshit that Trump is trying to protect - the goal of section 230 seems to be enforcement of terms of service, and the first action of companies trying to enforce their terms against hate speech and lies will be to block Trump and his entire cohort.
Seems like a risky play, threatening someone with legal action if they don’t destroy you hoping that the threat will get them to stop destroying you.
This might also just the universe conspiring against Trump - he’s plugging OAN and Fox is slowly inching away from him, choosing to break on mask wearing. His Twitter soapbox now carries a bullshit warning on the stuff he says, his other platforms will follow, now that precedent has been set. The Democrats have chosen a nominee white enough to appeal to Trump supporters but black enough to have Obama in his corner. A black man was murdered by a MAGA cop, causing riots and police overreaction. There might not be an avalanche yet, but this is the scene where there’s a slight rumbling sound and everybody looks up at the mountain.
No I hope they do, because Trump will select another platform, and that Platform will see a HUGE boost and hopefully start to crack the foundation of the Silicon Valley social media oligopoly
I want to see a return to Open Protocols, and Federated Communications, not 4 or 5 companies controlling most human communications
Twitter censoring conservatives wouldn't be a big deal if Twitter had more competitors. America keeps on saying it's committed to free and open markets. Why doesn't it make one here?
Break up Twitter. Or make them open up their protocols. Or whatever. I don't care. Just promote competition. Enough of these quasi-fascist state regulated oligopolies run and reaped by 1-3 companies while the rest of us stand in the bread lines. It's not the American way, not the democratic way, not the capitalist way, and I'm sick of it.
I haven't seen a free market in America in decades.
Free markets can be destroyed by governments or by megacorps, but most often they're destroyed by a collaboration between the two.
Put two and two together and resist.
How much evidence of this in practice is there (I mean evidence of systemic bias throughout the site beyond what could reasonably be expected with millions and millions of tweets etc.)? The fact the Donald Trump himself tweeted this [1] recently and it's still up, suggests they aren't exactly thorough.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/05/28/trump-ret...
So I imagine an effort to distance themselves from the outright lies of the commander-in-chief was token resistance to this role, probably aimed at mollifying the collective consciences of the employees.
But it's doomed and they've fallen into a trap. Here's how this is going to go:
There is simply no line in the sand you can draw between objective truth and objective lies. What's more, even if you can, propagated lies exist because people want to believe them and they see any effort to disabuse them of their provably false views (eg vaccines cause autism) as biased actors trying to hide the "truth".
Human nature can be ugly at times.
The take on Section 230 is actually an interesting one and I imagine that's going all the way to the Supreme Court if the administration pushes on this. Like you can remove objectionable or illegal content from your platform (in fact you're required to by law) and still maintain safe harbor but where does that end? If you're Google you don't want Youtube filled up with a bunch of racist crap. It's bad for your brand. That content may fall under free speech (from a S230 perspective) and if you decide to remove it for the health of the platform and/or the value of your brand, does safe harbor still apply?
Whatever the case, this administration needs to lose in the next election. Badly. The attack on societal norms and institutitotions is unprecedented and reprehensible and I so would like Trump, McConnell, Ivanka, Jared, Pompeo, Barr and a whole bunch of others to end up in prison after all this is over.
This is what scares me the most: in the Watergate era even Republicans found Nixon's behaviour beyond the pale. I am utterly convinced that if that happened today there'd be a strict party-line vote as the President's party would happily look the other way.
Look no further than the administration's so far successful efforts to block Congressional oversight. At no time in history did any administration think it was totally above the law. Make no mistake: that's what they're doing. Worse, no administration so blatantly engaging in obstruction would've continued to have ~40% of the population support it no matter what. Thanks to decades of gerrymandering in state Houses and voter suppression that 40% almost controls the election by itself as higher-population states are essentially disenfranchises in the modern electoral system.
For the record, I'm against the popular vote deciding the presidential election but that's a whole other topic.
How anyone who can call themselves "Christian" and support this president and his policies is utterly beyond me.
This already happened. I know it's hard to remember six months ago, but the president* was impeached by the House and was acquitted on a party line vote in the Senate.