“This week a federal appeals court, ruling in a case brought by conservative activists against social media companies, affirmed that private websites are not public spaces and social media companies don't have First Amendment obligations.
Any truly strong limits to Section 230 would almost certainly require action by Congress.”
> affirmed that private websites are not public spaces and social media companies don't have First Amendment obligations
FWIW this is only thematically related, the order concerns the distinction between immune or non-immune activities under Section 230.
If you publish something defamatory on your blog, and you operate it, you may be liable. Section 230 is there to say that if a website merely retransmits your publication, it is not liable for it, so if you publish that same defamatory statement on Facebook, Facebook is not then liable.
However, the argument with the executive order is that if you exercise a level of deliberate control over the content beyond some threshold, or you augment expression (like Twitter did the other day, adding links to contrary opinion pieces next to the President's opinion), you effectively become a publisher of that content.
It's not a completely ridiculous idea either. Consider how diverse the expressions published to Twitter are; at some point it's not that different to choose not to publish some expression, than to express the complement of that expression yourself.
One potential outcome here -- social media platforms start _more actively_ banning users to prevent potential liability issues, thus fracturing the market. Highly doubt it will work out that way, but it would be nice (well, maybe...).
That would be a spectacular outcome, especially for anyone who likes ActivityPub and blogs, and wants to see them get a fresh shot of juice.
I'm just glad the prevailing call isn't to delete Section 230 altogether, which I think would cause a bit of pandemonium (though maybe that would be a social good as well, and maybe Section 230 was the mistake that made the social media monster).
That would be a spectacular outcome, especially for anyone who likes ActivityPub and blogs, and wants to see them get a fresh shot of juice.
Wouldn't this harm any of these activities, aside from situations where people are directly hosting their own content, because anyone hosting could be held liable for what gets posted?
That's the rub. The fantasy seems great initially for the prospect of breaking up the far too large (in my opinion) social media behemoths but maybe also ruins things for all the potential little guys as well.
Hopefully it will lead to what happened on reddit: the worst go off to a competitor which then fails to gain mainstream attention (e.g. Voat, Gab, etc). While they’ll be in an echo-chamber (which isn’t a good thing at all), at least they won’t ruin other communities.
The problem there is that these sites have become echo-chambers, where they breed extremism. These kinds of ideologies (E.G. Nazism) need to be exposed to the light, like a bacteria, in order to be shamed and debunked.
This is a nice theory but are there any instances of Nazis being converted to normies because someone told them they were wrong on the internet?
Instead what seems to happen is that normies get pulled into Nazi content because the recommendation algorithms on these sites see heated discussions as engagement and try to feed it.
The only study I'm aware of on that is on Youtube's recommendation algorithm, which found the opposite is true - it tends to steer people away from radicalization.
Doesn’t that just lead to an echo chamber on the site they left also? When Trump supporters were banned from the political subreddits, they formed /r/The_Donald. And it’s an anti-Trump-criticism, anti-anything-left-leaning echo chamber. But that left /r/politics to become a left leaning echo chamber itself. Now, one can’t have a civil discussion about anything because /r/politics will ban anything saying Trump did anything remotely good, and /r/The_Donald will ban anything remotely critical of Trump.
This is a false equivalence - r/politics is not the left leaving equivalent of r/The_Donald. Trump supporters weren't broadly banned from political subreddits, just the ones that broke the rules did, like everyone else. r/politics is a left leaning echo chamber, yes, but you won't get banned for being pro Trump (just downvoted). On the other hand, you will get banned from r/The_Donald or r/conservative for being anti-Trump.
Before S230 that was the case: Executing any editorial control risked you being concluded to be the publisher.
Online providers said this is bullshit, we want be able to remove garbage -- lies, obscene material, defamation, etc. If moderating makes us publishers over everything on our site and legally liable, we can't do that. Make us immune so we can clean up the worst of things, and you can still always go after the actual sources.
So I think it only makes sense to the extent that the world before S230 also made sense. But that's a world where sites like twitter probably couldn't have come into being.
Without S230 the law is bizarre because it treated running a public venue as equivalently of being a publisher for everything that happened in it. It would be like if I ran a shopping mall and some member of the public came in and started calling you a paedophile that you could sue the mall simply because at other times I removed other people who were urinating on the walls.
On the other hand, there must be a limit on the amount of "moderation" you're allowed to perform before becoming a publisher. If you start labelling content as misleading (but don't remove it) or even if you privilege certain content instead of another (for example, you privilege social media posts advertising a product because it increases your revenue) then you could be considered a publisher.
Let's put in another way: publishers used to produce content (as in select, solicit, remunerate) to further their interests (financial, but sometimes also political, or cultural). Now the big social networks don't need to produce the content, but they can tap into such an enormous amount of it that they can limit themselves to shaping it. Promote certain posts, reduce the visibility of others. The overall effect is the same. You could probably make Facebook or Twitter in a great cultural publications just by tweaking the algorithm that determines the visibility of the posts.
> On the other hand, there must be a limit on the amount of "moderation" you're allowed to perform before becoming a publisher.
That isn't clear to me at all. The publisher is essentially the author from a liability perspective.
I do agree (see my other post in this thread) that there are serious concerns about the moderation power of the operators of these massive online public forums. But that doesn't make treating them as the author from a liability perspective the right tool for dealing with that.
Particularly because in most specific cases where their moderation power might be misused there is no question of liability. Imagine a site where everyone was always honest and nice, but the operator ruthlessly censored all posts by Georgists and S230 didn't exist. Okay, they'd be liable for their users posts-- but so what? There is nothing there for anyone to sue over. The Georgists would still be totally silenced.
> That isn't clear to me at all. The publisher is essentially the author from a liability perspective.
In a newspaper that selectively chooses to print some letters from readers, would the author be the publisher or the newspaper? That's an example of extreme moderation ("out of the 1000 letters we received this week, we will print this one") while Twitter is likely closer to the other extreme ("out of these 1000 Tweets, we'll hide/delete this one").
IMO it's when you start curating and suggesting in complex ways rather than simple "most popular having (user-provided) tag X" ways. Throw in other stuff like monetizability but denying that to some creators, and IMO Youtube is way over the line and the rest aren't far behind, because they can't resist using their position to manipulate what the user sees—there's too much money in it.
Is this similar to how the phone company operates? As long as they just transmit your voice to the other party they can't be prosecuted for anything you say. But, as soon as they start listening in and commenting on your words they have to listen to everyone's conversations and comment on all the words. Obviously phone companies don't want to be responsible for everyone's words so they don't comment on anyone's words.
The parallel would be Twitter commenting on a tweet. As long as they just pass the tweet on to other people, without commenting on it, then they aren't responsible for it's content. But as soon as they say "hey, this might be false information" about a specific tweet then they are responsible for the content of all tweets.
Its an interesting thought experiment to assess in what ways Twitter is a "private website".
It really is a public web space that is operated by a private company, but I can't help but feel that the nuances and similarities of what Twitter really is and what responsibility they truly hold in society is above the courts comprehension.
Do you have the right to stand in your community's biggest mall screaming racist things or does the property owner/operator have the right to remove you from the premise?
To play devil's advocate, you can't do that in a public park either. You can be arrested for disturbing the peace or some such. So I'm not sure it's necessarily about private vs public.
I'm not aware of it being illegal to stand on a soapbox and say racist things in a public park. If you're screaming at the top of your lungs, sure, maybe?
Well, yeah, I suppose it depends how loud you're screaming. I was imagining someone shouting as loud as possible, which you'd definitely get stopped for in many places.
Aren't you just talking about the volume then? You could be screaming the most wholesome things about unicorns and rainbows and still be loud enough to be a public nuisance, and loud enough that authorities will have the right to ask you to pipe down.
In America, no matter how big of a community mall, management can always remove you for good reasons (using racial slurs, even at normal volume), silly reasons (they didn't like the color of your hat), or no reason at all, as long as it's not for a prohibited reason (because of your race). Whereas authorities cannot remove you from a public square for no reason or silly reasons, only for good reasons specifically identified by law (like public nuisance).
> Whereas authorities cannot remove you from a public square for no reason or silly reasons, only for good reasons specifically identified by law (like public nuisance).
It depends if you are reported and what for. American authorities have prosecutorial discretion, so they can choose to overlook the "wholesome things shouter", but may choose to charge the "racist shouter" with a vaguely defined law like "disturbing the peace". There are enough laws like "disturbing the peace", "trespassing", and "obscenity" which are largely subjective.
And this is where the courts are also going to need to do some work to decide what exactly is "disturbing the peace". What if someone says that wearing a red hat is "disturbing the peace"? What if someone says wearing an "I'm with her" shirt is disturbing the peace? Who decides when simply displaying a political view is disturbing the peace?
The left can attempt to immediately equate everything to the right of Obama with Hitler.
The right can attempt to immediately equate everything to the left of Reagan with Stalin and Mao.
Who is going to sort this out? Both sides might think they're being perfectly reasonable about their characterization of the other side. And if a judge on one side agrees with them, the alternative viewpoint becomes criminal hate speech. This is very dangerous.
You actually can do this in on public property; see for example the Westboro Baptist Church, which funded itself in part by winning lawsuits against government entities that tried to stop them.
But the rules for many public spaces and all private spaces are fundamentally different because they get to define who can use the property and in what capacity, or face trespassing charges.
I don't see banning a user from social media sites very different from exercising trespassing laws. Should Republicans be sheltered from trespass laws just because the owner of the property might not be a Republican?
Perhaps the best way for social media websites to avoid being is to more clearly define what content violates their ToS. I suspect most people don't read the ToS and certainly don't know how every company chooses to enforce their ToS with enough detail, and that's almost certainly the confusion when social media users complain about persecution.
The President can only play in the mall fountain or whatever if the mall management says he can. If they want to boot him they can. The president is not a king.
You know well that it's not how it works in real life. Everyone would be afraid of repercussions to their business, kind of like the article we are currently discussing.
The Pruneyard decision [1] though did conclude that the sidewalks (even privately owned walkways) outside a business were quasi-public spaces analogous to public squares.
About your specific question, I would say "standing INSIDE the mall screaming" (screaming anything) would be more similar to posting large amounts of text on someone else's personal Twitter feed.
Whereas simply having your own personal Twitter and saying things that someone doesn't like would be more like standing on the walkway outside a business.
Also, I read the draft of Trump's order posted on HN last night, and it doesn't say that lewd or obscene content can't be removed. If you start using the N word or posting pornography, I think that's still legitimate for companies to remove.
The problem is that the idea of "hate speech" is being weaponized. If someone simply wears a MAGA hat, that's being called "threatening" or "racist". If someone expresses economically protectionist views, they're called "racist" even though protectionism was used centuries ago to protect European countries from other European countries and has nothing to do with "race".
The right could similarly weaponize the idea of "hate speech" by saying that any time anyone mentions any kind of social program spending, that's "threatening" because that's akin to "communism, which has killed hundreds of millions of people".
Now, plenty of conservatives do say they're concerned about the slippery slope, but they don't immediately equate "we should give housing to the homeless" with "put the rich in the gulags", the way the vocal far left equates "maybe we should reduce taxes a bit" with "they're racists who want poor minority people to starve to death".
Note that under Pruneyard and Lloyd the limited purpose invitation standard and focus does not apply to private spaces. Thus it matters whether the land is private or public, not the purpose for which the public is invited to enter. The "limited purpose" test examines public or quasi public facilities (i.e., joint public-private parnerships), like airports, to determine whether they would be considered public forums for free speech purposes. (See Hari Krishna vs Lee)
Additionally, public sidewalks in front of stores are considered public areas because of the public easement to use the sidewalk. A private sidewalk is not a public area for free speech purposes (see Lloyd).
If Twitter wants to become a publisher they can edit or curate their content to their heart's content.
Web publishers do not need any special protection from well established jurisprudence governing other publishers. It made some sense in the early days when it was unclear how things would turn out, now those protections should be rolled backed or adjusted.
Pruneyard v. Robins says the private owner of the mall can kick you out. But note that state laws may provide state-level free speech rights separately from the First Amendment (and several states have such laws).
In contrast, a public space like a public park is subject to free speech requirements, which is why the Westboro church can scream vile racist things from a playground.
>It really is a public web space that is operated by a private company
No, it isn't, any more than a store is a public space because it has windows the public can see into. You have to sign up for a Twitter account and accept their terms of service to post on the site. It's a private platform run by a private company for its own private business interests.
Twitter has over 300 million monthly active users. That is roughly equal to the entire population of the United States. You can't see any reason why they shouldn't be allowed to have total control over political discourse with no accountability? No reason at all?
You have to pay the old telephone company and it's a lot more private communication than Twitter. Yet they had common carrier statis, which is how we should want ISPs regulated. Where twitter and friends fit simply hasn't been defined yet.
The argument falls apart at the ISP level - why does the UN consider internet a human right, but not, specifically, access to Twitter? It may seem like there's no distinction at all but it is there and it is important.
If I have the right to every website then how about password-protected ones. Do I then have the right to demand that Apple give me access to everyone's iCloud website ?
When my Twitter account was suspended recently after 12 years, I also lost access to my DM history, including usernames which I had not memorized.
For some of my friends, Twitter was the only contact information I had for them. I have now totally lost the ability to communicate with those friends in the midst of a global emergency, even if I make a new account (which itself would be subject to immediate termination at any time), because I don’t know their usernames.
A few of the closest ones fortunately noticed my absence without prompting, went to my profile, saw it suspended, went to my website (I presume it helped that my username, @sneakdotberlin, describes my website address), and emailed me. As for the busier or less attentive friends? No word yet. :(
You can’t export your data or do “data takeout” from a suspended account, sadly, and you can’t view your DM history either inbound or outbound.
EDIT: Also, I do need Twitter (and a high follower count) to meaningfully interact with my bank or my airline’s (or Google’s) customer service department. The 1-800-i’m-a-schnook line doesn’t seem to get things done.
That example seems like something you can fix yourself by keeping offline backups of content that you need (general gd practice for all digital content).
More impactful would be access to any accounts which you only have access to with Twitter/Facebook/Google/etc federated login (like OAuth). It's very significant if you can't access your email/cloud/DNS accounts if you make a gray area ToS-violating comment/video on YouTube.
>> Forget Twitter, and substitute “gmail deliverability”? Without that, you cannot run a business.
I was going to say it's not really about access but censorship. Using gmail as an example is nice because I do appreciate their spam filtering which spammers might consider a form of censorship (lack of deliverability). And yet I'm against platforms like twitter censoring things. The spam situation quickly leads into another set of arguments with me about traceability.
I imagine this is because you haven’t been bitten by missing critical emails due to gmail’s overzealous spam filtering.
This has happened to me multiple times. Most people would likely never notice the opportunities they missed as a result of such.
I’m talking about real live false positives, on important messages from real live human beings.
Additionally, gmail spam folders even well run, nonspam, properly configured and secured mailservers AFAICT simply for not being part of the wider deliverability cartel.
Yeah, I don't disagree with their actions in this case -- if anything, they didn't phrase it strongly enough. ("Get the facts about voting by mail," as opposed to "Caution: this Tweet is unadulterated horseshit.")
But I also think that the more Twitter is used to disintermediate political communication, the more it starts to look like a vital public utility. It's tough to say where the line will or should be drawn. I don't envy Jack Dorsey's position, that's for sure.
As far as making a law that prohibits politicians from lying to the public, I don't see a way to write a law like that without making the situation even worse.
> "Caution: this Tweet is unadulterated horseshit."
Except it's not. Trump is right here; most of the confirmed voter fraud is on mail-in and absentee ballots, despite being less used than in-person in the past decades. Switching everyone to mail-in will cause a sharp uptick in voter fraud.
I hear this from friends who are Limbaugh fans, but I'd like to see some other source. Many people on the Left seem to think this whole "voter fraud" concern is a fig leaf for denying minorities their voting rights. When I've listened and asked follow-up questions, the Left's narrative seems more plausible.
Spot-checking and using search for counts, most are manipulation of mail-in or absentee ballots (many being a bunch of ballots by a single person), with the next highest looking like individual people voting who didn't realize they were ineligible.
OK, now where's the .PDF of individual confirmed cases of in-person vote fraud versus vote-by-mail fraud? We can't compare fractions by their numerators, you know.
The document itself admits that it is "only a sampling," which, in the absence of further methodological detail, should raise their hairs on the back of your neck.
Nobody ever said that vote-by-mail is fraud proof, only that it's good enough. Which it indisputably is, at least as implemented here in Washington state.
Well.. How about another case I just learned of today? 'Cause it kinda doesn't seem like we're even at "good enough":
> “Invalidate the election. Let’s do it again,” said Rev. Kenneth Clayton said amid reports more that 20 percent of all ballots were disqualified, some in connection with voter fraud allegations.
[..]
> In addition to apparent problems with the vote count in Paterson, NBC New York has shown video of ballots left out in building lobbies, of one voter handling many ballots, and reported on postal workers reporting finding hundreds of ballots at a time stuffed in mailboxes in Paterson – and even in a neighboring town, Haledon.
'Data' isn't the plural of 'anecdote.' What are the actual statistics? Do we even have access to statistics that haven't been cherry-picked by the Heritage Foundation, the DNC, or another interested party?
One good aspect of the vote-by-mail system we use here in WA is that the voter retains a code they can use to verify that their ballot has been counted. There is an auditable paper trail at every step that's accessible to all parties - the voter, the election officials, and the candidate. That's more than you get with many in-person voting systems, especially those involving closed-source machines made by companies with questionable ethics and engineering practices.
Yes, I'm sure it's possible to build a vote-by-mail system that is more prone to corruption than in-person voting. But the point is, it's not necessary.
These don't seem like vast criminal conspiracies. Also, if they can successfully prosecute little cases like these....what's the problem?
"Carlos Lopez and his wife, Luz Lopez, registered to vote and voted on three separate occasions (2004, 2006, and 2007) in Hartford, where they own a furniture store, while actually living in Farmington." (Fittingly, this story is included twice: once with each spouse first).
"In 2009, Lillian Cummings Stevenson agreed to a consent order after the State Elections Enforcement Commission found her guilty of illegally signing and submitting two absentee ballot request forms on behalf of her sons, who were living in Europe. She was given a $200 fine."
"James Bryant, Jr. admitted to improperly assisting voters in completing their absentee ballots in the 2005 Americus mayoral election...."
My understanding is that he supported the concerns about fraud with a specific lie (maybe more than one) about how the state authorities are sending out ballots to everyone, whereas they are only sending them to registered voters.
This could, and presumably is intended to, mislead people on both sides of the political spectrum.
Assuming for the sake of argument that someone could be trying to promote a fundamental truth using lies, it doesn't make it sane to trust or acquiesce as a result of lies.
Maybe in our brave new world, disbelieving in something because it is supported with lies is an example of an ad hominem fallacy?
> Except it's not. Trump is right here; most of the confirmed voter fraud is on mail-in and absentee ballots,
Thomas Bayes is screaming in his grave, something about cancer diagnoses...
Actually I don't know if that's even true. And almost all the significant cases of any kind of election fraud aren't about ballots at all. It's stuff like voting in the wrong jurisdiction, or count fraud, or registration fraud.
Please cite me where you got the info that most election crime is from remote voting. That info doesn't exist.
What does exist is the facts in the WaPo article that twitter linked, which show that effectively zero mail-in ballot fraud is happening.
> They didn't remove his message. They merely pointed out it was misinforming the public.
Why should a private company have this power? I don't think that people who run a successful website automatically are qualified to fact check the president and insert blurbs directly in his messages. That needs to be regulated some way.
This tool is not regulated, they could use it to cause harm. It doesn't matter if it was used for good this one time.
And no, them being a private company doesn't matter. Currently they have a lot of power thanks to them having a lot of important users, and now that they are starting to use that power we need to quickly come up with regulations for it.
Your tone is as if they were editing his message. I don't believe they were doing that in a way that would create any confusion as to what he wrote, were they?
It doesn't matter, they didn't post a message like everyone else instead they made an official statement using their own privileged way. It is fine to do it on this message, I don't see the harm, but if this continues and people gets used to that blurb then Twitter will definitely start misusing it sooner or later. I don't think that companies should have this kind of power to influence public discourse, I might not agree with Trump but I really think that we need to limit the power big tech companies have.
That's actually kind of funny right there. Politically, internet access is being championed as a fundamental human right (I.e. being classified as a need).
Yet we still have people trying to define what activity on the Net constitutes the necessity that access is supposed to fulfill.
I understand where you're coming from though. I just wanted to point out the amusing dichotomy that stood out in my head.
Right to access the internet is much more important for allowing someone to interact with the government through their various websites and to access sources of information that allow people learn and to fully exercise their rights.
As much as Twitter is important, it's not nearly as important.
If you have followers on a twitter you have already built then it is just as important, especially if you have 20 million followers you stand to lose if twitter just decides they don't like you. For many it is your job, your livelihood, and your outlet to the world. For people and companies it may be the only way to reach out for collaboration with someone who you do not have a phone number yet and a twitter follower count is often used as a indicator that you are who you say you are, a filter of sorts. Since you can't go and meet every stranger in person elsewhere it is a requirement to have. Some people may not use twitter or only follow and never tweet but a lot of people use it as a necessity for communication, their personal well being, and businesses. Like it or not Twitter is worth billions for a reason and that reason is it provides a necessity for many that they cannot get elsewhere. The sheer size of Twitter already self-perpetuates their monopoly over that method of communication. It doesn't matter that you can go to Facebook if Twitter bans you. Take another industry for example such as TV. Disney bought Fox but was forced to sell Fox Sports because otherwise Disney would have had close to a monopoly on sports content as it already owned ESPN. Note it was not TV, it was only sports, a sub section of TV where they were deemed to have too much control. The internet monopolies just haven't had to face a determination of what is and isn't a subsection of social media but to be sure they are monopolies of public discourse.
I think that’s a simplistic view. No one is arguing Twitter is comparable to a store with a display window. The reality is that Tweets are broadcasted to billions of people. It’s a new reality. It’s a newspaper where anyone and everyone is authoring anything, including presidents, and with the roll of a die, the message is amplified to a multiple of the expected audience.
Twitter may technically be a private platform run by a private company, but the issue not one of semantics, it’s about ethics and morals and how we compose a society with mighty power imbalances, fortified by new tech.
Newspapers hire and pay people to write for them and exercise editorial control on everything that's published.
That's very different from, say, a public restroom where people write on the walls. The owner of the restroom is not responsible for what people write on their walls.
It would be, if the owner began editorializing the content, because the point at which they get involved, they lose neutrality, and therefore Section 230 immunity protection.
And that's totally fair, because the hired the person, vouched for them, submitted them to editorial scrutiny an, still, decided to publish defamatory content.
Newspapers do that because they are liable for what they publish. Twitter is not liable for what it publishes. Why should it not be liable? The answer is because they are just providing a platform and others are publishing. But the moment they use their platform to modify and censor what people publish, then they should probably be liable, right?
> But the moment they use their platform to modify and censor what people publish, then they should probably be liable, right?
They've always done some editing and removal of certain content.
In this particular case, was anything modified or censored though? It seems more like Trump had his say, and Twitter had theirs. Is Trump saying that Twitter can't also express themselves on their platform?
but newspapers aren't required to express support for particular political candidates or viewpoints. That can get into trouble for publishing libel, ie maliciously presenting false statements as fact, but the criteria for what constitutes libel are very narrow. A newspaper can certainly publish an opinion like 'Politician X is a fool whose proposal should be ignored.'
> But the moment they use their platform to modify and censor what people publish, then they should probably be liable, right?
There are degrees to moderation, but not to liability. This black or white approach doesn't seem appropriate. They should be liable in a degree proportional to the moderation they introduce.
Twitter isn't liable for illegal content posted by their users, as long as they take it down in time and make good faith efforts to keep it from being posted in the first place. If they weren't free from liability then a service like Twitter would need heavy human moderation and be extremely expensive to operate - perhaps it wouldn't exist at all.
That's the only reason this non-liability exists. It has nothing to do with moderation or censorship. Twitter, as any other web property, have the right to curate their platform and make it pleasant for their other users. It's their personal property.
If someone uploads their library of child porn encoded to base64 split across tons of tweets, do you want Twitter to have a choice between removing that content and continuing to operate?
We have 3 options here:
1. No moderation allowed whatsoever on a site without a court order. That obviously leads to a terrible, toxic community with lots of reprehensible content that the average person wouldn't want to participate in.
2. A good faith effort at moderation. This allows the most reprehensible, highest-impact content to be removed and allows users to participate in the moderation process.
3. No content can be published without moderation, on any site anywhere. Want to post a Facebook status? Have fun paying $20 for the privilege of waiting 48 hours for a human to review it.
All of this is irrelevant though, because this executive order is not targeted at censorship. It's targeted at a private individual who voluntarily, for free, passed on a message from one person to many other people and decided to tell them "this seems fishy, you might want to read up on it."
Why have a Supreme Court or even normal Judges if Laws are only allowed to be this binary? Why not option 4 you are allowed to censor if you give reason and the reason is in your TOS. But you are for example not allowed to Edit (Fact Check), Censor or manipulate Votes of your political opponents, or loose your libel protections.
There exist many more options and law is notorious for having grey zones where the complexity of context, and intent and outcomes.
In the specific example of child porn, would removing it be protected speech and a copyrightable work? To my knowledge, no, it is not.
However telling someone "this seems fishy, you might want to read up on it.", attached to someone else copyrighted work, is to me speech. It is also a copyrightable work if its original enough. It could also be a defined as a derivative work if it includes major copyrightable elements of the original, which in this context is likely.
The difference between removing child porn and creating derivative work is one that I don't think courts will have a problem to distinguish between. Both may end up being described as moderation, but the outcome, intent and context is very different.
Twitter is actually required by law to remove child porn, not being forced to keep it up, that would be insane. This isn't a call for no moderation, it is a call for a neutral platform when companies are on the verge of monopolies. They are definitely monopolize your followers, switching platforms is not even a choice. You can work you're entire life building a channel and audience on social media site and they can take it away in a heartbeat and you don't even get a chance to let your followers know what happened, e-mail them even, let them know where they can find you going forward. That's not the worst part, the worst part is they can and do do it without any reason whatsoever, it could be just because someone at the company dislikes what you said. Again this is not about moderation, this is about companies that were built off of being a neutral platform that cannot be sued for liability, like a phone company but are now using their monopoly over your follower's information to hold over you and control what you say. If anything what really needs to be in legislation is rights to notify followers where else they can find you if you are banned or censored.
>it’s about ethics and morals and how we compose a society with mighty power imbalances, fortified by new tech.
But that's not what this is really about.
This is about the President being angry that Twitter fact checked him and using executive power to create a chilling effect against any platform doing so in the future. It's about fears of a nonexistent conspiracy controlling the media becoming the basis for authoritarian laws meant to stamp out that menace - a phenomenon which never goes well, historically. It's about Americans hating "the left" so much that they'll support an obvious violation of the First Amendment as long as it silences their ideological enemies.
> This is about the President being angry that Twitter fact checked him and using executive power to create a chilling effect against any platform doing so in the future.
That is the impetus in this case, but that doesn't mean it doesn't border on questions we've been slowly grappling with for some time now, nor does it mean we have to ignore that question.
> the basis for authoritarian laws meant to stamp out that menace
I'm not sure it's authoritarian to remove their liability protections, is it? In a sense, I think it's an interesting question, if you're willing to editorialize content on behalf of your users why should you get safe-harbor protection? You clearly are willing to put the man power and technology into it, shouldn't you then be liable for content posted on your site?
> It's about Americans hating "the left" so much that they'll support an obvious violation of the First Amendment as long as it silences their ideological enemies.
What's the obvious First Amendment violation here? If you act as a conduit for certain types of speech, you're liable for that speech. We're just bringing "content neutral providers" into the same realm that everyone else already was.
>I'm not sure it's authoritarian to remove their liability protections, is it?
If the intent is to punish critics and suppress the speech of party opponents, then yes. Any authoritarian can justify their actions in abstract and general terms, but context matters.
>nor does it mean we have to ignore that question.
We don't have to ignore it, but we also don't have to accept an autocrat's temper tantrum by fiat as an answer.
>What's the obvious First Amendment violation here?
The purpose of the First Amendment is to prevent the government from infringing freedom of speech - the President is attempting to use government power to infringe freedom of speech, to do exactly what the First Amendment was created to prevent.
Granted, the First Amendment only explicitly applies to Congress, but I feel like if states can be accused of violating it (as they often were regarding quarantine and shelter-at-home orders) then the President can as well.
> If the intent is to punish critics and suppress the speech of party opponents, then yes. Any authoritarian can justify their actions in abstract and general terms, but context matters.
This is literally what Twitter has been doing. Trump's order puts an end to it.
> We don't have to ignore it, but we also don't have to accept an autocrat's temper tantrum by fiat as an answer.
Exactly why Twitter needs to be stripped of their 230 protections.
> The purpose of the First Amendment is to prevent the government from infringing freedom of speech - the President is attempting to use government power to infringe freedom of speech, to do exactly what the First Amendment was created to prevent.
This is the government upholding free speech. Twitter's policies and their selective enforcement of such run directly contrary to the underlying tenets of free speech. This holds Twitter accountable for their "un-American" practices.
Although it may be hard to see through the vitriolic debates currently raging, this will be a net win for the internet. This will encourage decentralisation in so far as there is now a soft power cap on these big tech companies.
> This is literally what Twitter has been doing. Trump's order puts an end to it.
Debatable, on both points. There have been studies[1] that show that accounts are banned, but it's not necessarily because they are conservative accounts or conservative content. In a civil or criminal case, causation must be established. In this case, the president is making it very much more expensive for certain companies to defend themselves.
This EO is more likely to hurt YouTube than Twitter because it has the ability to get the Federal Government to no longer approve grants to Google subsidiaries and for government agencies to stop advertising with them.
> to be stripped of their 203 protections.
You mean The Communications Decency Act, Section 230?
> Twitter's policies and their selective enforcement of such run directly contrary to the underlying tenets of free speech.
That's interesting. Government law enforcers and prosecutors have the ability to use prosecutorial discretion. Are you saying that the government should be able to select who they prosecute, but that private organizations should not be allowed discretion to enforce their own contracts?
If ISPs (where content in a pipe is pretty close to comparable to Common Carrier standards) can't be held up to the standards of Net Neutrality, how can social media companies (where content is much more subjective to interpret as violations of their contract)?
> this will be a net win for the internet
That remains to be seen. I can see it being another tool where the executive branch gets to unilaterally change the definition of which internet companies get protections, not leveling the playing field.
> This will encourage decentralisation in so far as there is now a soft power cap on these big tech companies.
More likely there will be some obvious "unintended consequences" similar to what happened after Trump signed the FOSTA bill in 2018[2] (hint: multiple dating sites, including Craigslist sections, closed up shop). It will very likely increase the cost of being a user-generated content host to the point that only a very select few companies would do it and they will all require arbitration clauses in the ToS to avoid extremely expensive litigation of the CDA230 rules. I expect a handful of forums and lots of news comments sections to close due to this "free speech" Executive Order.
>thats an interestating take, considering trump is trying to stop the selective editorialization of individuals covered by the first amendment.
Again, the first amendment protects those individuals from being censored by the government. Twitter is not bound by the first amendment. They're allowed to editorialize content. They're allowed to curate, moderate, deplatform and ban people.
However, Twitter is also protected by the first amendment, and Trump's executive order is an attempt to erode those protections.
>are we really taking twitters side of this because we hate trump so much?
No. I believe in the right of platforms to censor content as an extension of their own freedom of speech and association, because that still leaves the internet itself free. If one objects to Twitter's behavior, one can always find a new platform or create one. However, when the government attempts to assert censorship over the entire network, that reduces freedom for everyone.
The executive order is not touching the protections of the first amendment. The courts are still to protect them for that as always.
The order regards the additional protections of section 230 which even protect twitter for content that is not protected by the first amendment. Trump is essentially trying to say if Twitter takes sides by fact-checking some tweets, then they are also responsible for all the other "facts" they allow to be posted on their platform without fact-checking. And by the way the courts are still perfectly capable of deciding in favor of twitter regarding blame for all those other posts too. Twitter just won't be shielded by a special law from such decisions.
Anyone who replies to you is guilty of selective editorialization of an individual covered by the first amendment. Except me. I'm not expressing an opinion. It seems unwise in an age like this.
So by your understanding of the First Amendment, if you had a blog with a comment section, I could come by and post spam, or troll and harass other users and you have no right to stop me?
Are you required to let me organize a protest in your front yard? Do property rights not matter anymore?
Trump is the head of the government. In his role, he is attempting to control private enterprise (and failing). It is laughable that you think him a victim given that he has the full force of the federal government at his beck and call. The fact that he has cried like a child about this is embarrassing, petulant, and disgusting.
The talk is about rolling back special privileges that platforms get. Privileges that you and I don't have. If you publish something illegal then you bear the consequences. If a user on Twitter does it then Twitter doesn't bear the consequences, but the user does instead. Doesn't this mean it's the user that's expressing speech rather than Twitter?
> If you publish something illegal then you bear the consequences.
So let's look at today. You have a tweet from a conservative group that "concludes" that the only way forward for America is violent action, up to and including murder of political opponents. "The only good Democrat is a dead Democrat".
To me, it seems that there is a plausible argument to be made that this group is inciting violence.
And then Trump re-tweeted it, with the additional commentary, "Thanks, Cowboys of America!".
If we want to compare "consequences of speech and platforms", then on one hand we have hand-wringing about "Twitter _annotated_ a tweet with links to resources about the substance of that tweet", versus "group hints at violent oppression of political opponents, and is given the thumbs up by political leader".
I was going to say "I know which one I find more problematic", but lest someone attempt a slippery slope retort, I'll be more clear: I find only one of these actions at all problematic (and it's not annotation of tweets).
If you act as a conduit for certain types of speech, you're liable for that speech.
There's some merit to that position, but things like adding a fact check (which you might or might not agree with) do not incur any sort of civil or criminal liability. You make good points, but we should also engage with the reality that the president and his supporters are demanding a quality of representation/protection for their political views that they don't have any particular entitlement to, and for which no mechanism currently exists in law; it seems (going by the general tenor of their arguments over the last few years) like they want to bring back the 'Fairness Doctrine' that obtained for broadcast media up to the Reagan era to create some protected space for their viewpoint.
> You clearly are willing to put the man power and technology into it, shouldn't you then be liable for content posted on your site?
Power and technology can't curate content to the level where you are safe from lawsuits. What you're saying is that if they are willing to do a bit of moderation they should do total moderation.
2. What was drafted last summer was legislation. Legislation that would likely not stand up to political or legal resistance. This is an executive order to make an end-run around all that "bureaucracy".
> has little to do with the recent twitter news.
This fails the plausibility test. This came hot on the heels of this incident, Trump _said_ it was related to this incident, and that he'd be doing this as result, and the last several years are packed with a multitude of examples of exactly that: Trump knee-jerking an angry response (words, actions, both) to those who he deems to have slighted him.
I think you're overestimating the number of users. Hardly anyone I know uses Twitter. It may be a big thing for you but it's largely irrelevant for others. It's an opt-in service
The reality is that Tweets are broadcasted to billions of people.
No, they're not. You have to visit the Twitter website or otherwise pull the data from some source to get tweets.
it’s about ethics and morals and how we compose a society with mighty power imbalances, fortified by new tech.
It's technically trivial to create your own Twitter. There are indeed plenty of competitors to Twitter. Twitter has no moral or ethical obligation to carry lies. Indeed, the opposite is true: because of their market position, they should be ethically and morally obligated to prevent lies from being spread through their platform because they have the greatest reach.
>No, they're not. You have to visit the Twitter website or otherwise pull the data from some source to get tweets.
Would you make this same argument when it comes to privacy? Technically it's your computer sending your data to Google/Facebook, therefore you are giving them permission to use your data, because you're so generously providing it to them. Technically this is true and any real privacy solution would have to address this point, but it's clearly not what is done in legislation.
When you send your data to Google or Facebook by explicitly providing that data, you are giving them permission to use that data for purposes of providing the service for which the data is granted. This is true everywhere, even in the EU.
If you're asking whether that upload would grant Googlebook broader rights to use your data, then the answer is yes in the US because there are no laws currently restricting such use, but no in Europe because EU law says permission must be explicitly granted for other uses.
> No, it isn't, any more than a store is a public space because it has windows the public can see into.
It is absolutely the case in the USA that private properties which are open to the public are regulated as "places of public accommodation" under, notably, the Civil Rights Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act. That includes privately-owned hotels, schools, restaurants, retail, and more.
You're correct that this is directly analogous to a privately-owned website that is primarily geared toward accommodating the general public (like Twitter), but it makes the opposite point of what you intended.
The difference is that stores and malls invite the public in for a limited non-protected purpose - shopping or other commercial activity.
Twitter invites the public in to exercise free speech, which in a public space would be protected. This invites an analysis that Twitter may be a quasi-public space that offers some 1st Amd. protections.
One way of looking at it is that the internet is the public space, and twitter is a very large private building in that space. Trump can start his own blog any time he wants, hosted on his own site, and be in the unrestricted public space.
It's further complicated by the people who sued Trump for blocking them. They won, he had to unblock them.
Considering they could log out (or open a private tab) and view the content, obviously it wasn't access to the information that was fundamental but the act of the President taking a step to reduce someone's access.
With that in mind, does the host have the authority to take the same action? Why or why not?
This is not a 1st Amendment issue - after all Trump blocking someone doesn't limit their ability to tweet him or at all - but it's a really weird spot of free speech vs private property vs public forum vs public access vs.. ?
As a government official, you cannot take action to try to impede someone's access to your official statements. That is independent of the platform, and independent of how much work someone has to do to still access the information.
But a private company can take action to impede everyone’s access to an official’s statements if they “suppress” those statements... that would mean Twitter has to allow anything any public official, at least in the US, broadcasts via that medium...
This fundamental question has already been addressed by the courts many times.
The answer is yes to your first question. A private company is not required to make available "Official Statements" (whatever that means) using its own resources. The government (in the US at least) must pay for publication and dissemination of "Official Statements."
Fantastic, despite looking, I hadn't found a decision along those lines. Can you give me a case to read? Just the name, I'm happy to do the research myself. Thanks in advance!
And to be clear, I've read the DOJ position asserting that "Trump's tweets are official government statements" (linked in this thread) but wasn't aware of court rulings.
Please don't imply gamblor956 is just making things up. That's inappropriate. I'm looking forward to reading one of the many cases. It's always good to understand a) what the law says and b) how it's interpreted. They're rarely 1:1.
The answers you want are the first search result in Google and Bing for first amendment and compelled speech and are covered by the Wikipedia page on the First Amendment.
The Rumsfield case is literally on point: the government cannot force a private party to present government speech. I don't know how much more on point than they can be.
Twitter is not a legally recognized method of presenting Official Statements, as a matter of law (which sets forth the prescribed methods for making Official Statements). They have no responsibilities to present Official Statements, which means they can "impede" access to those statements on their platform all they like, in whatever manner that takes, from simply deleting such posts to providing fact checks to outright editorializing against the official statements.
As noted, I suspect this is not a 1st Amendment issue as the "speech" is present regardless and you have organizations, not necessarily people.
I don't understand what you're trying to say. This is definitely a First Amendment issue...even the White House acknowledges that this is a First Amendment issue. This order is entirely about trying to violate Twitter's First Amendment rights as a private non-governmental organization.
> Twitter is not a legally recognized method of presenting Official Statements
The Trump DOJ disagrees. Further, the ruling that he had to unblock people on Twitter established exactly that. He had to unblock people because he's making statements about government policy.
Therefore, them muting/hiding/blocking him is impeding access to official government statements.
Further, once they mute/hide/block some of his tweets, they're presenting some but not all.
They would probably be safer to allow all or none. This middle ground is editorial control over government statements which is a bizarre middle ground.. imagine a major announcement or policy change not being reported? Or actively being quashed?
Twitter isn't suppressing Trump's tweets. They're still publishing them...along with a notice that the statements in those tweets are lies, with links to sources documenting the falsity of those statements and the true state of reality (i.e., that mail-in voting is not unconstitutional).
But when Trump tweets, are those official statements? (IANAL, and I don't know. I can see why they might be considered to be so, and I can see why they wouldn't.)
Twitter is not a monopoly therefore every web site would be considered a public web space.
And so if I run a knitting forum I am not allowed to restrict people who want to turn it into a pornography one. And how would it work for spam. This could end up in a situation where a large spammer could force websites to not remove spam.
It sounds unworkable and over the top just to protect some people who aren't even having their rights impeded.
Twitter is not equivalent to some obscure knitting forum. It is huge. So huge that it gets quoted in nearly every mainstream media article. Twitter matters to political discourse, knitting doesn't.
The owners of printing presses have even more power, but the government does not mandate open access to those machines for dispensing speech. Unfettered access to twitter is not akin to free speech.
Twitter is essentially a big public square the results of which end up getting printed by mainstream press. Publishers are also under more legal restrictions than Twitter is.
Newspapers are publishers, and are subject to rules and regulations for being publishers.
Twitter would not be mandate to open up access to everyone. Instead, the proposed legal changes would merely treat them as publishers, if they act like publishers, and therefore twitter would not have liability protections anymore.
So as soon as they make any kind of restriction on the use of their platform they become publishers? That's quite a stretch. That would have the same effect: it would require them to provide unfettered access for anyone, for any purpose.
Twitter matters to political discourse, knitting doesn't.
Doesn't matter. Twitter is a privately owned platform not a public one.
SCOTUS has already said that simply being open to the public does not make a business a public platform, see Pruneyard v Robins, applying this reasoning to privately-owned malls.
And yes, that makes all the difference, since SCOTUS has repeatedly held that publicly owned spaces like public parks and main streets are subject to first amendment requirements.
Except it's not nearly as simple as you make out here.
In Packingham v. North Carolina (2017) SCOTUS described social media websites as similar to a public square and ruled that the state couldn't block access to them in an overly broad manner.
Being open to the public does change how a business is regulated (see the ADA and Civil Rights Act among others) even if it doesn't make it a "public platform" specifically. However, a reasonable case can be made that Twitter has _intentionally_ positioned themselves as a public platform and so the case you cite could be argued not to apply.
Alternatively, Twitter could be argued to be editorializing. If that were the case, presumably they wouldn't really be a public platform but rather a publisher. But if that's the case, shouldn't they be held liable for all the nonsense that people post there?
The situation isn't clear at all even though many people on both sides of the debate frequently claim that it is.
That's not at all what Packingham says. That ruling was about a sex offender's right to access a website on which he could engage in first amendment activities without government restriction. It was not about whether a social media website was a public platform or whether the websites had to allow the appellant access. Moreover, many of the activities identified in the ruling also apply to private malls...which the courts have already ruled several times are not public forums for first amendment purposes (Lloyd and Pruneyard).
Being open to the public does change how a business is regulated (see the ADA and Civil Rights Act among others) even if it doesn't make it a "public platform" specifically
This is true. A statute of Congress can place restrictions on businesses. Last I checked, the President is not a member of Congress, and cannot unilaterally override congressional laws.
Moreover, SCOTUS cases have ruled that privately owned facilities are not subject to the "limited purpose" test. It doesn't matter that they've held themselves open to the public, it matters that they're privately owned. (See Lloyd and Pruneyard, explicitly addressing this point.)
You keep citing cases regarding private malls. I previously pointed out that a reasonable argument can be made as to why that precedent should not apply. I don't claim to know what the outcome of such an argument would be in court, only that it is a reasonable one to make under the circumstances (and thus the situation is fairly complicated).
> Last I checked, the President is not a member of Congress, and cannot unilaterally override congressional laws.
I never claimed this? I said only that the current situation was not as simple as you made out. (I would also note that the president appears to be targeting Section 230 protections which is quite a different beast.)
> That's not at all what Packingham says.
Except... it is. In their ruling the court _directly_ compares social media to other venues for public gathering. I'm not claiming that they explicitly rule it to be one way or the other (they don't), but they do repeatedly make direct comparisons that would appear to lean that way.
Except... it is. In their ruling the court _directly_ compares social media to other venues for public gathering. I'm not claiming that they explicitly rule it to be one way or the other (they don't), but they do repeatedly make direct comparisons that would appear to lean that way.
Except the text of the case itself literally does not do that. You need to read the actual text and not just the summary. Importantly, every time in the case they reference a "social media" website and a form of expression that could occur in a public forum, it is with respect to how the appellant would use that website--to freely express himself under his own first Amendment rights, and they contrast that with the government's attempt to restrict that expression. And as I pointed out, these activities were expressly addressed in the mall cases I cited, in which the courts said it didn't matter that such activities could occur in a mall, what mattered was that the malls were privately owned facilities. (And that is why I keep bringing the cases up--because malls are the closest analog to Twitter. They let people come in and at the time of these cases had millions of customers/visitors annually--on a relative basis, they were more a part of American life back then than Twitter is now.)
I would also note that the president appears to be targeting Section 230 protections which is quite a different beast.
The Section 230 protected are provided by congressional law, so it's not a different beast. The President does not have the power to target section 230 protections. The executive agencies could arguably make rules to change those protections, if they adhere to the administrative rulemaking process and their rules do not contradict the express text or purpose of the law.
I previously pointed out that a reasonable argument can be made as to why that precedent should not apply.
No, you didn't. The ADA (1990) and Civil Rights Act (1964), are older unrelated laws governing different issues. The CDA was passed in 1996, and so jurisprudence and the law itself already incorporated existing understandings of both of those laws...as well as the SCOTUS cases addressing the exact points you raised in your comment (i.e., the mall cases you keep dismissing). The CDA was written in a world where private facilities were not public forums as a result of multiple SCOTUS decisions saying they weren't. And the law reflects that.
A number of serious misunderstandings seem to have developed in our back and forth here and I'm not sure it's worth writing a wall of text to clarify them. Perhaps I didn't previously word things as clearly as would have been ideal.
> > I previously pointed out ...
> No, you didn't. The ADA ...
That isn't what I was referring to. I initially noted that Twitter has very clearly and intentionally positioned themselves as what I can only think to describe as a public platform. Private malls simply do not do that. They are also so many orders of magnitude larger than any private mall that I fail to see a relevant comparison there. It is my understanding that factors such as intentions and size of influence are important in cases like this. I make no claim as to how that argument would go in court, only that it seems like a reasonable one to put forward.
> You need to read the actual text and not just the summary.
I was very careful to clarify that the court did not explicitly rule on that. When the majority opinion goes out of its way to bring such an issue up and makes direct comparisons, I think it is reasonable to assume that they would be open to entertaining such a line of argument. If they thought it was ridiculous then why did they bring it up and go on about it to such an extent?
I initially noted that Twitter has very clearly and intentionally positioned themselves as what I can only think to describe as a public platform. Private malls simply do not do that.
You need to actually read the private mall cases, since the malls actually held themselves out to be replacements for the public square, i.e., to replace Main St and the public park where people used to freely meet and discuss stuff. There is a reason these cases are so important to First Amendment jurisprudence.
The point of the private mall cases is that it doesn't matter if they hold themselves out to be replacements for the traditional public forum, because they're not actually a public forum--they're still just privately owned venues that can withdraw their openness to public expression at any time as a matter of their own first amendment rights.
Twitter is just the new private mall. It may hold itself up to be a public platform, but as a private entity, it can revoke that presentation at any time as a matter of its own first amendment rights.
It is my understanding that factors such as intentions and size of influence are important in cases like this
You would be wrong. This has never been relevant to first amendment cases. Moreover, at the time of the private mall cases, the malls had significantly more customers on an absolute and proportional basis (out of the US population at the time) than Twitter does today in the US.
When the majority opinion goes out of its way to bring such an issue up and makes direct comparisons, I think it is reasonable to assume that they would be open to entertaining such a line of argument.
The ruling does not "go out of its way" to compare social media platforms to public forums. In mentions "public forum" only once, offhand, as one of the ways that social media could be used by the appellant whose civil rights were being violated when the government tried to bar him from using social media. And even then, under the lineage of the private mall cases, it's irrelevant because private websites are still private websites with their own first amendment rights to control the speech that appears on their websites.
There is a large gap between the Twitter user base and the number of visitors in a mall. Are you saying that quantity doesn't matter, we should uphold the principle on its own? I think the more people use a platform, the more society needs to regulate it to its benefit.
Yes. On a relative basis for decades malls were a larger part of American life than Twitter is or ever was. The fraction of people that actually use Twitter is extremely small once you leave SV and Hollywood.
Currently. Might not be long after this change to Section 230 enforcement.
> Twitter matters to political discourse, knitting doesn't.
I don't follow this logic. There are substitutes for Twitter, even banned users can view publicly posted content on Twitter, and the CDA Section 230 has nothing to do with "political discourse" -- it describes all content.
I'm also fascinated that you used the word "political" and not "policy". All things "political" could vanish tomorrow and the world would be better off. Not being able to discuss policy issues/ideas would be tragic.
It easy to make it workable, just claim that general-purpose platforms beyond a certain use size become public forums where freedom of speech must be protected.
If an online forum wants to curate speech it should be treated as a publisher. Or, perhaps develop some legal regime that recognizes that smaller forums can be restrict to certain topics, but not viewpoints if they want to retain their immunity against defamation.
Why do you think Twitter is a public space. Your use of twitter is governed by agreeing to its T&C’s. You agree to them when signing up and violating them will result in bans.
It would be surprising, but not irrational if courts construe Twitter as a quasi-public forum. Or, on the other hand, if Twitter continues to exercise viewpoint discrimination, it would be reasonable for them to be construed as a publisher and accept the liability that comes along with it.
Then perhaps let us debate that in a reasoned and considered manner, rather than an executive order that Trump himself describe as a lashing out at Twitter.
The executive order signed today is far too detailed and far too nuanced to support the idea that its cause for existence is Trump being upset at Twitter a few days ago. This has been being prepared for a long time.
You underestimate the productivity of some underlings and lawyers pulling an all-nighter.
It's also not Day 1 of "Trump being upset at Twitter for much the same reasons", so no doubt there's been a plan. But ascribing the timing of this EO to "just a coincidence" stretches credulity, to me.
I'd agree that the Twitter Kerfluffle is what surfaced it, but keep in mind that this has been on the radar since at least last year[1] (actually earlier[2]).
The timing of this release is hardly coincidental, but it's been on the minds of the politicians for long enough that this reads to me more like an opportune time to push something forward that's been brewing for a while, rather than an off-the-cuff reaction.
The weird thing is that, a year ago, if you asked me where "private companies should be able to make their own decisions about what content they publish" falls on the spectrum, I would have considered it to be right of center.
I guess it comes down to whether these justices are ideologically "right-leaning", or just Republican partisans.
From my observations left leaning means apply liberal criteria to decisions. Right leaning means adhere to the Constitution and law of the United States of America.
You can twist the Constitution in both directions.
You could say that the value of free speech is so important to society that it is codified on the Constitution. These companies that become big enough platforms should respect that value.
You could also say that the Constitution provides free speech protections to everyone. These companies should benefit from those same protections, thus the government shouldn't be able to interfere what these companies publish.
I defy anyone to write a rule with any kind of specificity for the first case.
User count? Great, while the user count is < N the platform is moderated and popular. As soon as the user count exceeds N it's instantly a cesspool of spam and porn. Then what, it bleeds users and drifts back into the first category again? They're going to write subjective distinctions on the content of the speech into the law to differentiate between spam, porn, porn-spam, and political speech?
It doesn't work! If it could work, please, anyone who reads this comment: Many of us are programmers here, propose a rule that doesn't fall apart.
The second interpretation is at least consistent, even if it does protect corporations.
If Twitter is the devil just leave Twitter, no one has to use it. Gab exists. We have no legal right to access the people who are on Twitter.
That is odd as it means there is no left and right debate. A society choose. Law is what the society agreed. And you said the us society you in, unlike Eu say, are right leaning.
Whilst it might be, but is the left in us is already right (like Obama use Romey Insuranve not single payer). Or are we in mix economy some are left some are right. Or left right actually many different things like large and small Gov,liberty, ownership, ...
Or is there something like open source which is beyond left and right but community, not gov vs market etc.
And how did you get to that conclusion? I mean the "right" has been failing to adhere to the Constitution since like forever. The Constitution does not allow restrictions on abortion, but it was affirmed by Supreme Court by Republican majority. The Constitution does not allow warrantless spying on American citizens, but it was affirmed by Supreme Court under a Republican majority. The Constitution does not say that I am free to pollute your lands with my toxic coal smoke spewing smoke stacks without paying for the damage caused, yet our Supreme Court under a Republican majority has decided it does.
From my perspective, left-meaning means having a close association with reality and pragmatism, and right-leaning means do and say anything to make the rich richer.
Hello, 5-month-old account. Please take the time to substantiate your assertions. For example, I assert that you're observations are ridiculous and here is some empirical evidence on which I base my assertion:
"There were only three areas in which Rehnquist showed any interest in enforcing the constitutional guarantee of free expression: in cases involving advertising, religious expression and campaign finance regulation. Rehnquist was 2.6 times more likely to invalidate laws restricting commercial advertising than laws restricting political or artistic expression. He voted to invalidate campaign finance legislation 67 percent of the time, and he voted to invalidate restrictions on religious expression 100 percent of the time. Indeed, in non-unanimous decisions, Rehnquist was 14.7 times more likely to vote to invalidate a law restricting commercial advertising, campaign expenditures, or religious expression than one involving any other aspect of 'the freedom of speech, or of the press.'"[1]
Since when is protecting the private property rights of corporations a "left" issue? This is a constitutional issue, and the fact that any court ruling that GOP voters disagree with is now a "left" issue tells you everything you need to know about how far civil discourse in this country has fallen.
You can call the right hypocrites for doing a 180 on corporate property rights and demanding a 21st century fairness doctrine.. but didn't the left do a 180 as well?
Part of them did. Because tribalism. But i think you should differentiate between socialists and liberals, the "left" is broader than the "right" right now. I don't think any liberal wants to nationalize a company like twitter.
Some may want to break true monopolies maybe, but twitter?
Anyway i was convinced by a conservative that big media companies should be partially nationalized (for gov oversight), still i don't think twitter is a big enough natural monopoly to warrant that.
It has been framed that way by Trump, and it's not exactly subtle. People have also been intimidated into thinking that pointing out Trump's propaganda makes them seem biased.
The case was about a government trying to restrict a sex offender from accessing web sites where he could engage in first amendment activities like commenting. The court ruled that they could not, absent a sufficient showing that the restrictions on the appellant's internet usage were necessary to prevent the sex offender from re-offending.
In fact the express language of the ruling states that social media sites are a means for accessing the public square, not that these sites are the public square. Moreover, these dicta statements (i.e., non-binding commentary) are a direct reference to the first amendment mall cases, which similarly involved activities that could occur in a public square. The mall cases held that private malls could ban speech because they were private facilities, thus they were not public squares even though the public could (and frequently did) engage in traditional public square activities in the mall.
TLDR: the private-public distinction matters for First Amendment law. The First Amendment only applies to public properties and public agencies, not private properties or persons.
I don't think that section 230 is about First Amendment. I thought it was about whether a company can be shielded from law suit on the content published on the company's website. That is, how to classify a company as a platform or as a publisher.
First amendment is the issue as we're contemplating who should be liable for the consequences of bad speech. If FB is liable than FB is incentivized to censor risky people; if I'm liable then I might watch what I say on Yelp or Wikipedia.
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, such as empirical claims about businesses.
Anyone who is hated broadly by the internet, whether just or unjust, would like FB to be liable no matter what is right or wrong, because holding hundreds of tiny individuals accountable for tiny wrongs over the web is a losing battle.
I think the parent comment recognizes that but is saying there is "basically" no-liability because it is so impractical to sue a random internet commenters one by one.
For sure, if you are Elon Musk and you claim on your twitter account that a world renowned diver is a pedophile, you might suffer real consequences.
But if someone posts on my restaurant's yelp page a totally fabricated negative review, what are my options? Even let's say I have video or other evidence that disproves their assertion (unlikely), I will need to quantity the harm that this particular internet comment did to my business, which is in most cases nearly impossible. And all for what? A median wage worker isn't going to be able to cover my lawyers fee's (assuming I can prove malicious intent) before going into bankruptcy.
What businesses really want is to be able to sue Yelp itself for libel. They want to say: "Yelp, you didn't quality control your comments, these reviews are being fabricated. After my 5 star rating dropped to 1, my business’s income plummeted, now pay up."
I don't think it would be a good idea if our laws worked like that, but as the parent points out, the current situation is that the platforms are more or less immune to libel, and suing random internet commenters for libel makes no sense.
People have successfully pursued defamation cases for posts to Facebook and other social media platforms.
Section 230 shields Facebook from liability for these posts, not the users. And Facebook generally responds to subpoenas from a court for IP address data that can be used to identify a the user behind a libelous post...
So what if I say that your restaurant serves old chicken and gives food poisoning? What if too many users each take a tiny stab, repeating the false empirical claim they heard?
The restaurant can sue all of the other users for libel, and if it's a coordinated effort or the apparent facts behind each libelous act are sufficiently similar, they can get them joined into a class action imposing joint and several liability imposed on the named defendants (i.e. the few they are able to reasonably identify), meaning that it is now the named defendants' responsibility to find the other users if they want to avoid paying the full damages out of their own pockets.
Believe it or not, all of these hypothetical that techies keep bringing up on HN in this thread as if they were magical logical bullets have long been addressed by courts and/or legislators.
> Believe it or not, all of these hypothetical that techies keep bringing up on HN in this thread as if they were magical logical bullets have long been addressed by courts and/or legislators.
Are you sure you're not engaging in some magical thinking when you imagine Yelp users enjoined as a defendant class? When is the last high profile case where something like this happened?
Repealing section 230 would make twitter liable for publishing trump’s libelous murder accusations and incitement to violence. They’d be forced to ban him.
I’m curious how that would turn out? What would happen if Trump was banned? While I’m against censorship, banning someone for not following your “code of conduct” is well within your rights.
Without any attempt to weigh in on political sides, this debate made me think of an interesting "hack" to act as a publisher while enjoying the protections of a platform:
1. Start a website where users are able to write arbitrary articles.
2. Have a bot systematically spam your site with all possible articles (suitably limited so as to make this technically doable).
3. Systematically weed out all the articles which are NOT equal to the articles you actually wanted to publish.
Voila, now you've published all and only the articles you wanted, and yet you're just an innocent platform, not a publisher!
If your site is sufficiently widely used, you can even cut out step 2 and replace it with organic human beings.
The law isn't really hackable in the same way a machine is, because the law isn't interpreted by a machine, it is interpreted by a court, which would take all of the above into account when applying the law.
Bingo. At least if anyone could figure out that you were doing it (including, e.g. discovery finding emails where you discuss it) any could would happily see right through it.
That's not so much of a "hack", more like "fraud with enough extra steps to make it difficult to prosecute".
That doesn't mean that it wouldn't work. Adult websites have been accused of something similar: as the version goes, they'll take your (illegally published) video down on request, no questions asked, but "someone" will upload it again later.
I've never heard of anyone being prosecuted for this, though, which means that either it isn't true, or it is and your plan would work just fine.
devil's advocate: why doesn't Twitter fact check everyone? Twitter is picking sides on a comment made by a user so they should be held liable for that content
Twitter isn't a public right. He chooses to use their platform so they choose to annotate his lies. I don't see how this executive order would even change exactly what started the whole thing.
I don't think the executive action targets the fact check label on Trump's tweet specifically. I think Twitter did something that really pissed Trump off and Trump is using Section 230 as leverage and a way to extend the narrative of "Twitter is plotting against me so don't believe everything you read."
This is neither here nor there but I have considered my self a republican for the last 28 years of my life. This president's actions make me feel physically ill.
> People have a right to communicate, if a few platforms have the power to block all communication maybe they should be.
Hm.... I don't see how Twitter is preventing anyone from the right to communicate, nor do I sense that Twitter has the power, even if it worked with the next 3 largest social media platforms, to "block all communications." Last I checked, the internet would still exist if Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin shut down.
Either they're a public utility or they have control (and thus should have some degree of liability) for what is transmitted/published on their platform. They can't eat their cake and have it too!
Platforms have removed harmful content, for example terrorist propaganda or child pornography with 230 protections intact and governments appeared to welcome it so I think you can actually have your cake and eat it too, or at least you could until you fact checked Republicans I suppose
Platforms both enjoy first amendment protection to moderate their platforms as they see fit as well as protection from liability under 230. They are not mutually exclusive, and platforms have been moderating their content for decades. In fact most online communities could not even function if they had no right to moderate.
Expressing an opinion , no matter how unsavory, is not
Therefore systematically editioralizing of the latter constitutes control which means you own all content on your site ... Including the aforementioned criminal content
They _are_ liable for many things published on their platform. And they are also allowed to moderate content in whatever way they want. I don't see a problem as you are free to go start your own platform and presumably it would be popular if this many people have a problem with the existing censorship.
This honestly seems to be the model that Republicans have been pining for all along, they just don't like that they or their supporters are falling victim to its design.
I think the obvious answer is limited manpower. It makes logical sense to prioritize fact checking efforts on a tweet viewed by a million people above a tweet viewed by 10 people.
Public figures speak with authority - and like it or not, most of the world’s population has an underdeveloped ability to think critically (it isn’t taught in schools because it “undermines parental authority”, apparently: https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/vo26x/texas_gop_w... ).
One could argue the one lie by a public figure, given a large enough following, can translate into a lie repeated a billion times by main street users. It's certainly less probable when the lie is sourced in the other direction.
If I remember correctly, there was never any conclusive proof that voting fraud happened with the insecure Diebold voting machines in 2004.[1]
Those machines stored voting tallies on unencrypted compact flash cards, and there were massive other flaws in their security. But those machines were so insecure, that it would be difficult to prove fraud even happened if it had occurred.
Twitter chose a the wrong tweet to fact check. They are now asserting that a black-box mail voting system that has never been tried on this scale is secure, and we should just stop asking questions.
If I said that I was skeptical of the outcome of the elections that were conducted with voting machines made by Dick Cheney's company, in swing states, running Windows 98, am I going to be fact checked?
I'm really amazed at amount of trust people on HN are putting in mail in ballots.
Voting by mail can be done securely, but there are major problems with the current proposals. Just because Trump said it doesn't mean it is not true. My understanding is that the current proposals do not meet international requirements of transparency to qualify as truly fair.
Has it just been decided by Twitter now that the truth is that mail in ballots are 100% secure and anyone questioning our election integrity is just spreading dangerous misinformation? Seriously?
It seems like a really open-ended thing to fact check.
I wish we had asked more questions about election integrity before 2016. I think it is better that we have a robust discussion about this NOW, before the election.
The most important thing about elections is that they be trustworthy by the majority of the population. Without sufficient transparency and oversight, actual security is meaningless. The Computerphile did a two great videos about the dangers of electronic voting:
It seems like mail in ballots re-create the same problems with electronic voting, except that we are just adding an extra layer to it.
But, I know that countries like Germany and Switzerland have instituted some fairly robust means of securing mail in voting -- none of which we are considering. Simple things, like having the affidavit be on the same piece of paper as the ballot, and having ensuring chain of custody of the ballots by only having postal workers pick them up directly from voters.
Are we allowed to express our concerns about this? I for one do not want to make things worse this time around. Is the discussion about this really ending because Twitter decreed it so?
Visibility is a good metric to use when targeting false information. If an account with 0 followers is sputtering garbage, not much harm is done. But if an account with millions of followers is sputtering garbage, maybe it's more worth the effort.
Beyond that, YouTube has been heavily moderating content on covid. They display labels very similar to the ones Twitter is under fire for now. The only fundemental distinction is everybody agrees the virus is a plague.
Because for lesser mortals, Twitter just bans people who violate their terms of service. The President is "too big to ban," but violates the TOS. This was a "compromise" solution, which obviously is not going to work.
I've grown to hate Twitter's complicity in... whatever the hell we should call the political world we live in right now, but right now I'm just amused. Because I'd like to think the people who created Twitter or are working there probably have a conscience and Anti-Trump leanings, but they've let him get away so much that they are now part of the scum they probably despise.
You know how people can be reserved in the real world but say the weirdest shit on Twitter? Honestly, Trump is such a coward, I think without Twitter he wouldn't have dared spit the venom he's been spitting left and right, because he would've had to go in front of a lectern to be heard instead.
For normal (high profile) people engaging in this sort of thing, they'd just delete their accounts. A while back, presumably due to questions over Trump, they said they weren't going to delete world leader accounts, but they might fact-check harmful lies.
This is the point that most people seem to be missing and this is where Jack Dorsey seemingly made a huge mistake. I don't know if he did it on purpose to force his company to do something he knows should be done, but he doesn't have the will to see it through, or if it was just a really bad decision.
Yes, it is. Mankind's amassed knowledge of physics, chemistry, and astronomy has lots of evidence to demonstrate why that would not happen, and when it probably will. That can be compared to the evidence you have to show for your claim, which is nothing.
But that's entirely his point. Facts can be backed up by evidence. As you rightly pointed out, he can provide no evidence as proof of his wild prediction. We can make predictions based on scientific facts, but a prediction itself is not a fact.
It certainly seems that mail-in voting is more easily corrupted than going in person and showing ID and voting in secret.
There are tradeoffs with accessibility, of course, but it seems depressingly easy to sell a mail-in ballot to someone else or to be verifiably coerced by a boss or family member into voting a certain way.
All-in-all Trump tweets worse, dangerous lies on a daily basis so it's bizarre they're pushing back now on this.
If we're just thinking of ways voting can be corrupted, in-person voting can be coerced too. Boss forces you to take a photo of your ballot as you vote in the booth, etc.
In reality, several states have had mail voting for years- Oregon for decades- without coercion being a problem. Millions of votes cast without the problem you suggest. It's not a problem, despite using our imaginations to come up with ways it can be.
> Boss forces you to take a photo of your ballot as you vote in the booth, etc.
You can take a picture of the ballot with your boss's choice but then spoil it and get another one.
> several states have had mail voting for years without coercion being a problem
How do you know this? How could anyone know if a wife voted the same way as her husband because she wanted to or because he just filled out both mail-in ballots himself?
There are differences in scale too; It's hard to steal a ballot, for example, when only 1% of the population is voting by mail. It's easy when 60% of mailboxes have a ballot in them on the same day.
Finally even if it hasn't been a problem so far, it is not a "fact" that it cannot and will not be a problem in the future.
> Finally even if it hasn't been a problem so far, it is not a "fact" that it cannot and will not be a problem in the future.
Twitter said no such thing, however. Twitter's annotation simply noted that Trump's claim was "unsubstantiated". They did not make an assertion of the inverse of Trump's claim.
> How could anyone know if a wife voted the same way as her husband because she wanted to or because he just filled out both mail-in ballots himself?
This could be easily said about in-person ballots too. 8 states require photo ID, and many people will be covering their faces when they vote in-person anyway.
Twitter can fact check him behind door all they want. As long as Twitter does not alter the published content of specific users by adding editorial annotations, they deserve the Section 230 protection. As soon as they modified or editorialized user content, they are a publisher. Media publishing companies don’t have Section 230 protection.
You’re barking up the wrong tree. I wrote “democratic,” thought it looked wrong as it seemed more the adjective of “Democracy” rather than “member of the Democratic Party,” didn’t want to look it up on my phone because I cannot multitask for the life of me on my iPhone, and there you go.
Anyway, you do realize that the very fact that I was linking to "here's what someone in a position to challenge or at least refuse to enforce this inanity" implies that I'm scarcely trying to side with the party backing the trigger-happy president, right?
Why not refer to her by name? Her press statement was in this morning’s FCC Daily Digest so it is not a horrible thing to say that Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel made a statement. Here’s her original statement as released: https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-364605A1.pdf
Because a) most people don’t know her by name b) her name is not my reason for recommending the article but rather the combination of her part affiliation and position, and c) I’m on my phone and it makes referencing articles a pita.
Seems counter productive to the President's intent. If platforms can be held liable for user posts, that will give them a strong incentive to remove anything at all that might even come close to giving them legal liability. So sure, maybe changing the law (or asking the FCC to reinterpret its strictures) would "get back" at the companies President Trump thinks are doing something wrong to him, but the net results would be severe limitations on what he could say on all platforms.
The President can call a press conference at any moment that will get coverage from pretty much every national media outlet, especially any outlet likely to be frequented by his supporters. Presidents will never be without a method to communicate with their supporters.
The idea is that it would be impossible for Twitter to remove every single Tweet that's libelous, threatening, etc., and so the only way to avoid being sued is to not remove _anything_. That ends up being a policy that is favorable to people who want to spread disinformation.
It would probably results in a mass exodus of discussion on the internet as every single platform from Twitter to niche forums on obscure topics suddenly were not allowed to perform any sort of moderation without incurring legal liability. Thus the decision to abandon the discussion venue or watch it descent into something resembling the toxic cesspools seen in places like 8chan.
Some days I just have trouble getting out of bed, he is over 70 years old I'm just fascinated with his agile work and energy to fight anything that comes against him. His choices are debatable abut That is definitely some form of leadership.
> "Currently, social media giants like Twitter received unprecedented viability shield based on the theory that they are a neutral platform, which they are not," Trump said in the Oval Office. "We are fed up with it. It is unfair, and it's been very unfair."
What examples of this unfairness are being referred to? I never understand why journalist don't press harder and follow up with obvious questions. Same with "many people are saying" style statements.
Why do they not keep pushing back with "you haven't answered my question" though? If it's so easy to ignore hard question, why doesn't everyone just do this to avoid criticism from the press?
Because then they don't get invited back to the next press conference, and they get fired, because their spineless employers want their journalists to be present at press conferences. Meanwhile, the press conference room can always be filled with sympathetic media reps.
> If it's so easy to ignore hard question, why doesn't everyone just do this to avoid criticism from the press?
Have you seen how this administration has been running press conferences? It's not an entirely unprecedented trainwreck (when any administration is in scandal mode, it behaves in such a fashion), but it is unprecedented for how frequently it has had to operate in scandal mode.
Its supporters, of course, point to this sort of thing as an example of the bad liberal media bias that is being mean to the greatest man in the history of this country. The WHPS of the week could spend every single conference reading from a phonebook, and it still wouldn't change anyone's mind on anything.
The premise is also false - the shield from [liability] applies regardless of the political affiliation, motivation, or actions of the platform. He's trying to convince people that Twitter had some kind of duty to remain neutral, but they really don't. Twitter would have just as strong of a case under current law if they came out and said "yep, no conservative viewpoints allowed here."
At least it'd be clear if they said so, nothing worse than the current situation where they think it but won't say it because it'd be bad for business.
I mean, I even disagree that there's major 'anti-conservative' bias at all.
Some prominent conservatives have been banned from the platform, like Alex Jones, but it wasn't due to their views on Keynesian economics, it was for spreading outright lies about Sandy Hook.
Diving deeper into almost any of the examples that people dig up as 'anti-conservative bias' reveals trolling, hateful attacks, or other bad behavior, completely independent of the author's political views, and earnestly deserving of removal.
Exactly, for some reason people will throw out toxic lies, racism, conspiracy theories, etc. and then act like those are just their 'political views'. I hope we aren't at a turning point where conspiracy theories and suppression of journalism is a 'political viewpoint'.
My counter argument to yours is that Twitter has a major anti-progressive bias. This can be shown by the number of people that have been banned due to responding against racism.
Since you're not a progressive, you can't counter my claim as there's no way you would know about any anti-progressive bias.
I'm implying that twitter favor non-conservative viewpoints, tolerate them because obviously it's good for business, but do whatever they can, without getting caught, to favor more liberal viewpoints.
Curious to see if there's evidence for this. I am not sure how one would go about measuring this - but perhaps it would help if you elaborate on how this favoritism manifests in the way Twitter operates. Is there anything like that or is this based more on your personal feelings on the matter?
I have 2 accounts, one that I use for politics and news, conservative leaning, WSJ, Thomas Sowell, Peter Robinson (Uncommon Knowledge), Kimberley Strassel... that brand of conservatism, not talking about the crazy alt-right shit here which I don't follow, and a second account that I use for my work with only software dev stuffs and mainstream/more neutral media, Reuters etc, nothing that could brand me as conservative.
On my political & news account I'm always getting recommendations for CNN and other left-leaning commentators and media (no recommendation for other conservative outlets) at the top of my recommendation list, or some kind of outrageous claim that a right leaning person would have done, for example, right now got:
"Kellyanne Conway compares voting in person to waiting in line for cupcakes".
Another one: "Trump makes unsubstantiated claim that mail-in ballots will lead to voter fraud"
I also got "Don Lemon" on "Trending".
That's the kind of recommendation I'm not getting on my work account, where it's mixed between news (without any outrageous/divise claims unless there's really something crazy that happened that day) and other subjects targeted to my interests.
Is it a scientific proof, no, but once you spend enough time comparing with multiple accounts like that you can see a pretty clear pattern on how they try to influence, and it's not subtle even.
Just not true at all, there's tons of conservatives on twitter not having any problem at all. - Trump's problem, and that of his allies, is that they talk bullshit all the time. It is lies, half-truths, threats of violence and insults all day every day.
Yeah, this seems more about an attempt to compel speech (require companies to publish falsehoods that are convenient or desirable for current political leadership), than an ostensible attempt at "freedom of speech" or "neutrality".
> What examples of this unfairness are being referred to? I never understand why journalist don't press harder and follow up with obvious questions. Same with "many people are saying" style statements.
This is long overdue. Social media companies grew their networks without censorship, but when they got sufficient monopoly and network power started censoring generally only in one direction.
Here's how it breaks down for this particular case. People are afraid to vote because they don't want to get COVID-19 while standing in line waiting at the polls. So states are letting people vote by mail. The problem with that is that Republicans tend to lose elections when everyone who is allowed to vote votes. So Trump, in an attempt to win the election, is sowing seeds of discontent with regards to mail-in ballots, claiming that fraud will be widespread. The goal is to get people to pressure states to not allow voting by mail, thus suppressing votes from people scared about COVID-19 (which tend to be poorer people that can't afford a $200,000 hospital stay), and thus leading to a Trump reelection. Twitter has stepped in to say "hey, voting by mail is not a new thing and there wasn't really a lot of fraud".
That is not censoring a conservative viewpoint. It's just giving people some facts. Here's Trump's opinion, here's some data, make your own decision.
I am sure that if Joe Biden started tweeting random conspiracy theories, Twitter would fact check those. But he doesn't, so we don't get to see that in action. Just because a conservative person in power tends to lie and start conspiracy theories on social media, doesn't mean the platform is biased against conservatives. It just means that they're not going to publish falsehoods without a little asterisk.
I don't think there is legal basis for Trump's order, but Twitter is wading into murky territory with their actions.
Twitter's "fact check" singles out a specific Trump tweet. It's clearly a human intervention by Twitter staff, not user generated content. The subject of Trump's tweet was a political dispute, and while Trump certainly had false statements in his tweet, that's basically par for the course on Twitter.
This raises a bunch of questions. Why is Twitter singling out Trump for his false statements? If AOC or Bernie Sanders make false or misleading statements about economics (which they frequently do), will those also receive fact checks and warning labels?
We have seen this also with the coronavirus breakout. Medium and other publishers removed posts based that were sanguine data analysis (nothing inflammatory) because they were against the prevailing media sentiment. For example this Medium post [1] was removed based on its content. It did not contain anything inflammatory, violent, or otherwise unsavory. Medium just didn't like what it said.
At what point does Twitter or Medium cease to be a neutral discussion platform, and become more like a publisher that pushes a specific narrative (like Fox News, the New York Times, CNN, etc.). They are certainly within their rights do curate/moderate their platform, but if this continues, we need to start thinking of these companies less like user driven platforms, and more like opinionated publishers.
> Why is Twitter singling out Trump for his false statements?
They aren't. They've labeled other tweets before.
> If AOC or Bernie Sanders make false or misleading statements about economics (which they frequently do), will those also receive fact checks and warning labels?
Economics is quite different than election interference, so I'm not sure that Twitter would make any "fact check" statements when it comes to economics.
The idea of "facts" in economics can't extend very far beyond metics and other numbers, as most of the rest is up to vigorous theoretical, political debate. If this original poster is so keen on fact checking the "economics" of a certain political sides, it seems likely that they are not concerned with actual facts but rather deeply held theoretical and political beliefs that they have elevated to "fact" status.
It does make a lot of sense to fact check the most viewed tweets first, doesn’t it? If you want to stop the spread of misinformation through your platform, you don’t start with the tweets of a rural politician with 8 followers.
Unsurprising that this is being downvoted. Any call out of far left views specifically gets that treatment.
Does anyone who is downvoting this want to provide counter arguments or reasons this content shouldn’t be viewed by others? It all seems very reasonable and well thought out to me.
At what point does Twitter or Medium cease to be a neutral discussion platform, and become more like a publisher that pushes a specific narrative (like Fox News, the New York Times, CNN, etc.).
What does "neutral discussion platform" even mean? My understanding is that Fox News, New York Times, CNN, etc, all benefit from protections against what users post in places like comments sections, etc.
This whole "neutrality" aspect seems like a talking point meant to attack social media platforms from a strawman perspective of "Only 'neutral' platforms are allowed protections from liability" that doesn't seem to actually be related to the law itself.
I don't think there is legal basis for Trump's order, but Twitter is wading into murky territory with their actions.
I wouldn't consider basic moderation activities as "murky territory".
“Neutrality” seems pretty obvious: don’t assume as the platform that you are able to tell “facts” more accurately than those participating and thus take no stance on the truth of the statements made by participants. It’s comical to think that anyone has the ability to be the arbiter of truth and specifically in this case, the truthiness of the statement is completely unverifiable as it’s a forecast.
“Neutrality” seems pretty obvious: don’t assume as the platform that you are able to tell “facts” more accurately than those participating and thus take no stance on the truth of the statements made by participants.
You aren't describing "neutrality" you are describing "feigning ignorance". And even if this could be considered "neutral" why is that something to push for (not just on Twitter but on every private business/platform/etc in existence) and what does this have to do with the law in question?
It is exactly describing neutrality on truthiness. There literally is no other definition. You take no side on truth.
I wouldn’t, nor have I seen anyone, suggest that this is something to push for on every private business/platform/etc in existence. The point to be made is twofold:
1) Have the large social media platforms developed into general spheres of public discourse and thus have become central to ongoing function of public life? If so, then ANY active control over the narratives allowed on the platforms if is of critical concern to the function of Democracy.
2) Separate from point #1 which is broader than Section 230, is whether or not control over the narratives allowed on the platforms is equivalent to editorial moderation at publishers, changing them from being governed by Section 230?
To be clear, I don’t know the answers to either of these questions. But I sure as shit know that I would prefer major realms of public discourse to be free of some bull shit “arbiter of truth” controlling the presentation of people’s thoughts in them.
Again, this entire mess is because they chose not to enforce their own TOS when it comes to the President's account. Twitter is trying to control the damage, and opted for something that doesn't solve the problem, infuriated the President, and will result in greater problems going forward.
Twitter ceased to become a platform when they changed the content of The President's tweet. They literally editorialized his content. That act made them a publisher.
They also cut off the corners on his profile picture, listed a bunch of replies from users in a particular order (almost definitely not curated by humans, but it _could_ be?), reserve the right to make those replies more or less visible in relation to the tweet, added some widgets which make it very easy to report (and hide) an abusive tweet... The content he provided is a <=280 character string. It is reproduced verbatim.
This is a pretty rational argument. Where does one draw the line with "fact checks". I don't like Trump at all. Which is why I don't like seeing "My political tribe disagrees with you" down votes. Shouldn't we be better than that? In general the HN crowd tends to be for free speech and less with platforms censoring or restricting people. Now yes Trump says downright false things all the time, and IMO is a dangerous person. But let's take him out of the equation and look at this objectively.
As much as there ever really were "small government republicans" there certainly aren't any today. "Owning the libs" is the only reason the current batch of conservatives gets out of bed in the morning.
We should call what it is. They working to make the lives of other US citizens as miserable as they can. Whoever does this is working against their own country. This is unpatriotic.
"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
Absolutely. To get a slice of that thinking. Here's Rush Limbaugh:
(backstory: Trump has been repeatedly peddling an absolutely baseless claim that his TV critic Joe Scarborough murdered his employee couple of decades back. Her husband is now pleading that Trump is causing irreparable damage to their family). Anyway, here's Limbaugh:
“The thing here is when you get to Trump and his conspiracy theories, he does it in a really clever way,” he proclaimed. “And this is where people don’t get the subtlety of Trump because they don’t think he has the ability to be subtle. Trump never says that he believes these conspiracy theories that he touts. He’s simply passing them on.”
Asked by his producer whether he thinks “Trump cares whether Scarborough murdered anybody or not,” Limbaugh replied that the president doesn’t care but is tweeting about it “because it’s out there.”
“So Trump is just throwing gasoline on a fire here, and he’s having fun watching the flames—and he’s having fun watching these holier-than-thou leftist journalists react like their moral sensibilities have been forever rocked and can never recover,” he concluded.
I have always championed the right to free expression, whether that is an individual hosting content or a company deciding what content it wants to host and how to display it. The government should play no part in either case.
I’m not personally concerned with the rights of private businesses as much as I’m concerned about the unintended consequences of expanding government power.
And yes, that is a new position for me. These past few years have been quite the education about the downsides of federal power as a liberal.
I’ve been over this before. Unless if you’re going to eliminate the ability for Twitter to moderate any protected speech, then this is an expansion of government power. This would give someone in the government the ability to determine what protected speech is immune from Twitter moderation, and what protected speech is not. This is a massive expansion of government power, and turns a two tier speech system (protected or not) into a three tier one.
There is already protected speech. You can say whatever you want as long as its not libel, treason, direct threats, etc.
Twitter has a TOC that is not strictly based on protected speech. They ban people / censor people all the time who violate their TOC but do not violate the law.
Also, it is not going to be certain speech that is protected but certain companies. Its possible Twitter would not have protection but Facebook could.
The core premise of the arguments being raised is that Twitter is being politically biased (citation needed), and that something should be done to make Twitter politically neutral since Twitter is such an important faux public square.
The problem is enforcement. How exactly will we make Twitter be politically neutral? There are two basic ways: you either eliminate Twitter’s ability to moderate at all, or someone has to define what speech is immune from moderation in the name of political neutrality.
The former is disastrous for the quality of these platforms. All kinds of anti-social and unpleasant behavior is protected speech, as is pornography and violent material. I think we can all agree that Twitter is within its rights to say “no porn here”, so we don’t want to set the bar at protected speech.
If we decide that twitter can moderate some but not all protected speech, then someone must legally define what protected speech is immune from moderation, and what protected speech is not. This represents an expansion of government power, as you’re giving the government the power to decide what types of protected speech is more important than other types of protected speech.
I think you are making a poor argument. Somebody could take your exact argument and say that you cannot have anti-discrimination laws for hiring or renting.
We would also handle abuses / accusations of abuses in the same way as anti discrimination laws.
I think what conservatives tend to see are a few examples where there appears to be bias. Liberals say something that violates the TOC and it doesn't get censored or when it does it takes longer for it to be censored. When a conservative says the same thing it get censored much faster.
For example an Asian who is liberal saying "white people are bs" is perfectly acceptable but a black conservative person saying "Jewish people are bs" with explicit notice that it is a parody of the first is not acceptable.
There are many examples where this happens but most publicly know cases appears to be against conservative.
This is of course possibly anecdotal but its understandable to come to the conclusion when Jack Dorsey admitted that most of the moderators are liberal.
Its hard to know if there is actual bias since people who don't have a large following don't make the news when they are censored.
I think a way to solve this would be:
1. Have more people with a variety of views on the moderation team.
2. Require multiple people to accept that something should be censored. Ideally people with different views.
3. Have a moderation log that allows watch groups review if they want.
I am not sure if Twitter could ask for political views prior to hiring a moderator so that could be an issue.
> Somebody could take your exact argument and say that you cannot have anti-discrimination laws for hiring or renting.
Only if you’re willing to argue that speech and race are the same thing, or that access to Twitter and housing are the same thing.
You can try this argument, just don’t expect it to persuade many people.
> I think what conservatives tend to see are a few examples where there appears to be bias.
You can spend your whole day trying to prove that Twitter is biased, and you will have completely ignored my actual point. You don’t need to prove that Twitter is biased, you need to prove that Twitter’s supposed biases justifies the government regulating protected speech.
I genuinely couldn’t care less if Twitter is biased if you don’t meet that second, higher bar. Use a different platform, petition twitter, complain here, just don’t ask the government to regulate speech.
> I get what your saying now.
Given that you did not address my core concern, I do not believe this.
>The draft order also requires the Attorney General to establish a working group including state attorneys general that will examine the enforcement of state laws that prohibit online platforms from engaging in unfair and deceptive acts.
>The working group will also monitor or create watch-lists of users based on their interactions with content or other users.[1]
I'm sure there are plenty of "small government" and libertarian-leaning folks who are now in favor of government watch lists based off who and what US citizens interact with on social media.
Removing a law isn’t the same as reducing governmental power. In this case removing 230 would make what goes on Twitter mostly a matter for the courts, which would be a massive increase in the governments ability to police speech.
The power and scope of the third branch shouldn’t be ignored, and “conservative” in the judicial sense is usually about reducing the scope of life that’s subject to the court’s control.
This isn't about moderation, or removing tweets or banning people. Twitter changed the content of The President's tweet. When they edited his content, they became a publisher. Had simply removed it, I think they'd still be ok, but when they changed the content, they risked losing their protections under Section 230.
You are incorrect, they did not edit his tweet, they editorialized it. Completely different, and also covered under section 230, and confirmed in court decisions up to the 9th circuit court.
I'm not a republican, but people on this site might have a hard time making the distinction, so here's my take:
1. These protections shouldn't be necessary in the first place. The first amendment should make most copyright enforcement, libel suits, etc. illegal. Of course, that's not the world we live in.
2. Freedom of association (being able to turn people away from your business) is absolutely a fundamental right, but I have zero sympathy for progressives when they get screwed on this, because they've done more than anyone in US history to eliminate freedom of association. They made this bed, now they have to lie in it. When you give the government the power to force people to work with parties they don't want to, obviously that's going to turn around and bite you in the ass at some point when you lose control of the institutions that decide how you're allowed to choose who you work with.
So, on net, this sucks and I wish it was very different, but I have no sympathy whatsoever for the people who brought this upon themselves.
Ok. My normal account is apolitical and I don't know if I would call myself a Republican, more of a conservative maybe.
Regardless, for me this goes back to the Covington Catholic incident. Nick Sandmann sued the Washington Post, NBC, and CNN for defamation and settled. He had a pretty strong case. I think being able to sue for defamation is reasonable and not necessarily indicative of big government support.
But Twitter can't be sued but that was where the videos of him were posted and it was where a Twitter mob formed and peopled doxed him and started to call for Nick's head. I remember seeing it all happen in real time on Friday on Twitter. By Sunday the news outlets were running with it.
At that time, Twitter wasn't flagging content as misleading however, they were banning harmful rhetoric. I guess to me that sort of activity that happened in January 2019 is harmful rhetoric. The ability to let an angry mob defame someone like that and even threaten someone is something Twitter should take responsibility for. Every other publishing platform is held to those standards. If Twitter is profiting from the use which may include activities like defaming someone, then it makes sense that victims are entitled to some compensation from them in addition to any users. Although I appreciate there are fine legal arguments to be made here.
And for the record, it seems like fairly normal discourse on Twitter to expose people with personal information for specifically being racist, misogynist, etc. without any evidence required and people usually condone this. This definitely can be damaging and I think people who are victims of this justly ought to be able to recover losses. Twitter doesn't seem to have much interest in stopping it like they do other forms of harmful speech so I think victims ought to be able to get justice and that has nothing to do with Trump's tweeting habits.
You can already sue them. For example, if Fox runs a segment claiming that you (gulli1010) are a murderer, you can sue them for slander (with or without this executive order).
If someone tweets that you are a murderer, you can't sue Twitter (or rather, if you do, Twitter will be protected by Section 230).
However, suppose Twitter announces the following policy: "Any tweet which calls someone a murderer, shall be deleted, unless the alleged murderer is gulli1010". Should you be allowed to sue Twitter then? That's a more nuanced question. And what if the above policy isn't an official policy but is a de facto policy?
People should look into the Seth Rich lawsuit and Ed Butowsky. Trump forgets his crowd is the one who constantly panders conspiracy theories like PizzaGate and QAnon. This will effectively take them down entirely.
Yes, but at the cost of the entire platform. I’d doubt that Twitter could sustain being endlessly sued over user posts. They’d die the death of a thousand cuts. And a lot of conservatives would be perfectly happy with that.
No one side has a monopoly on conspiracy theories. The Russia collusion was something spun for years by the networks where people under oath said one thing privately and another publicly.
I'm not sure if you mean this seriously, or in an exasperated but joking manner.
If you are serious, it's because Trump has done more for the legitimacy and usage of Twitter than any engineer, businessperson, or celebrity other than Dorsey & cofounders.
To be clear: Twitter may take a tough official stance against Trump, but behind closed doors he is the MVP.
Twitter stock 2013-2020 [1] vs. S&P 500 [2] supports your claim. My take is its a combination of political divisiveness in the US alongside larger influences (i.e. Trump) inflating audiences / ad. revenue.
That made my curious about what Twitter accounts have the most followers. The top 10 are [1]:
1. Barack Obama, 118 million.
2. Justin Bieber, 111.
3. Katy Perry, 108.
4. Rihanna, 96.
5. Taylor Swift, 86.
6. Christiano Ronoldy, 84.
7. Lady Gaga, 81.
8. Donald Trump, 80.
9. Ellen DeGeneres, 80.
10. Ariana Grande, 74.
The next highest politican is Indian Prime Minister Modi, at #17 with 57 million. The Office of the Prime Minister of India is at #42, with 35 million. Obama, Trump, and Modi are the only politicians in the top 50.
The only individuals in the top 50 who are not those three or entertainers (counting athletes as entertainers) are Bill Gates at #22 with 50 million and Elon Musk at 47 with 34 million.
Obama has a huge advantage over Trump and Modi. When you make a new account, Twitter normally suggests following Obama. That gets him followers for zero effort. On the other hand, new accounts that immediately follow a bunch of people like Trump get hit with random annoying account restrictions that might cause a person to hesitate or even delete their account.
Followers are largely irrelevant, here. Trump's tweets are cited on a weekly basis by hundreds of publications globally. More people view trump tweets not-on-Twitter than on the platform.
Obama has 118M followers, whereas Trump's tweets have reach on the magnitude of billions of people. Had Obama been a Tweeter-In-Chief like Trump while he was president, his tweets would've had a similar reach.
Follow numbers matter little, if at all. In fact follower numbers are a rounding error in this context. Trump's tweet's reach is on the order of billions of people; hundreds of news organizations cite his tweets on a weekly (sometimes daily) basis, and orders of magnitude more bloggers do so as well.
It's absolutely true, but people may not like to acknowledge that.
> Trump's tweet's reach is on the order of billions of people
I think you vastly overestimate the number of extremely online politics people who pay close attention to Trump's tweets. People use Twitter to follow their friends and celebrities, not because of Trump. Only a minuscule fraction of the attention that Twitter receives is attributable to him.
Jack Dorsey has responded to this question multiple times in several places-- I heard him address it in the Making Sense podcast by Sam Harris some time in the past year. He seemed to show a firm grasp of the nuances involved.
Here is a quote from him: "Blocking a world leader from Twitter or removing their controversial Tweets would hide important information people should be able to see and debate,” [...] “It would also not silence that leader, but it would certainly hamper necessary discussion around their words and actions.”
He apparently feels there will be wider discussion from all parts of the political spectrum if things are left as they are. Should Trump move to a platform where he has more control over the format, it might just make it easier for him to suppress or obfuscate dissent.
I don't know if Dorsey is making the right call here, but he has clearly thought about it a lot, and discussed those thoughts publicly.
Twitter is in a very winning situation. Before Trump took office and started tweeting a lot, the relevance of Twitter was often up for debate. Now they're a place where people get the latest updates from a world leader. That's great for Twitter.
> I don't know if Dorsey is making the right call here, but he has clearly thought about it a lot, and discussed those thoughts publicly.
Similarly, I'm conflicted. I understand Jack's argument, but I'm not sure he's making the right call here. It is highly unlikely Trump could build a platform or co-opt one that has the reach of Twitter. And arguably, the terms of service should apply equally to everyone on the platform. Trump has engaged in hate speech and targeted his followers against individuals in a way that probably destroyed their lives (death threats, etc.). IMHO, Twitter should enforce their TOS against all users in a fair and equal way, regardless of whether they are POTUS or a normal citizen.
> It is highly unlikely Trump could build a platform or co-opt one that has the reach of Twitter.
Thought experiment: if instead of posting on Twitter, he sent an e-mail to a few thousand journalists?
I never use or consume Twitter, but I see screen captures of things Twitter posts all the time.
Granted: one big thing this approach misses is the back and forth. I gather Trump re-tweets quite a bit of stuff, and responds to others. I guess that could be simulated via e-mail.
My point is that as far as his ability to be heard, I don't think Twitter is necessary.
How that wouldn't be replicated in a matter of weeks? He can just start posting on donaltjtrump.ru and people will check it. They can throw together a notification app.
Dorsey is right to want to encourage broader discussion across the political spectrum on topics. But the current fact-checking approach is flawed as it requires human judgment, which is hobbled by people's biases and potential lack of topical expertise.
A better approach may be to offer a resource page that shows every news article on the topic, with guidelines on political leaning, how credible each article is etc so that readers can exercise their critical thinking to figure out what to believe. For example: https://story.thefactual.com/news/story/239362-Social-Media shows 285 related articles.
Disclosure: above page is from my startup, The Factual.
Can you cite exactly how Twitter isn't ensuring that bias + topical expertise are being disregarded in their fact checking routines...? They generally have in-house people + partner companies doing it.
Your entire post just reads like an advertisement for your project, which a number have tried and hit the limits of effectiveness on.
The page you linked doesn't contain explanation at all, what is a very important part of fact checking (if it can be automated, it can be tricked). It should probably contain a mix of automatic links with multiple independent human fact checkings that explain why a side should be picked over the other.
>But the current fact-checking approach is flawed as it requires human judgment, which is hobbled by people's biases and potential lack of topical expertise.
This is a true statement.
>A better approach may be to offer a resource page that shows every news article on the topic, with guidelines on political leaning
...seems to just introduce another level of bias. Every "media bias" website touts "objective analysis" while in the FAQ they admit to relying on a panel that they assure you is 100% objective. How do you guarantee that these ratings are not "flawed as it requires human judgment, which is hobbled by people's biases and potential lack of topical expertise"? See: allsides.com[1] and Media Bias Fact Check [2].
Looking at your employee page, you seem to have exactly zero employees with any significant background in journalism. What "topical expertise" does Factual provide that a layperson doesn't have? How do you minimize human judgement?
This reads to me as "You shouldn't use Facebook because you're the product, not the customer, which leads to bad incentive alignment. Use Twitter instead."
He keeps it only because of his current title. I would not be the least bit surprised if he loses it the second another person is elected president. He will definitely lose it once another person is inaugurated.
Why do you say that Trump will definitely lose it once another person is inaugurated, but only maybe when another person is elected president? Honest question.
Edit: I know election and inauguration are separate, I was wondering about the significance of this to Twitter.
Because Donald Trump has repeatedly demonstrated his willingness to use his power as head of the executive branch to retaliate against his political opponents.
Remember how he got impeached for doing exactly this?
Honestly, this is now their best response. If Twitter is going to be held responsible for the content posted by its users, then banning someone like Trump who constantly uses the platform to lie, harass, defame, and threaten is a no brainer.
Ignoring the mechanical-legal aspects of what Section 230 already does, the discourse on this has been a shining example of logically inconsistent philosophy.
The Citizens United v. FEC decision indicates that corporations have free speech rights similar to those of individuals. Logically, if you agree with that part of the decision, then you should also agree that the government can't punish Twitter for doing this, and vice versa.
Yet very few people seem to hold either of those combinations of views. There are a few principled civil libertarians who are fine with both super-PACs and what Twitter did here. There are a few principled fair campaign advocates who think it's theoretically permissible, if inadvisable, for the government to stop what Twitter did here.
Most people seem to take one of the inconsistent positions.
This tension comes from the fact that there don't exist any "traditional public forum" online. All venues online are private spaces, yet some act as extremely convincing replicas of public spaces.
While I don't agree with this weird S230 opposition, the general sentiment that people expect to have a similar protection for free speech that they enjoy in our public squares, street corners, libraries and parks in the online alternatives to these things... isn't really a crazy one.
It's also a tenshion that exists in offline form. Increasingly there are gigantic public "downtown" areas which are privately owned (on land taken from the public through eminent domain then sold to developers), where people's free speech is heavily curtailed.
The general idea that just because the physical manifestation (or legal structure) behind our traditional public spaces is changing our effective right to free speech shouldn't change seems like a reasonable idea to me.
Also the general idea that twitter itself should automatically be free from regulation in how it restricts others due to its own free speech seems extremely specious to me. Twitter is a business, it operates to make money. While businesses have free speech right, commercial operations have a strictly lower level of rights in many areas. Twitter has only refrained from banning the president, who regularly and flagrantly violates their rules, because he makes them money. If twitter consisted primarily of its owners speech no one would visit it. It is effectively a place of public accommodation and its value stems entirely from the public's use of it. We traditionally impose significant regulation on how private businesses that serve the public operate, including extensive rules ensuring equality of access and against discrimination.
This executive order seems pretty foolish overall. But a law that set a threshold where a service like twitter become a "public forum"-- places where the public use is the whole point-- and they had to meet a much higher standard when they wanted to silence people or ideas (beyond "our AI picked you at random, tough luck") and had provide effective modes of redress might be important to preserving people's effective freedom of speech in the long run.
> The Citizens United v. FEC decision indicates that corporations have free speech rights similar to those of individuals
Individuals have the freedom of speech, but the can also be sued for liable for the things they say. Twitter can't be sued, because they are "re-transmitting" information. That's why Elon was sued for his "pedo guy" tweet and not twitter. Am I missing something here?
It seems like it makes corporations more like people in that if they curate content [in some vaguely biased way] then they can be held liable for that act. Because by doing that they are exercising their freedom of speech.
I think an interesting question is what will become the threshold for acceptable curation. Is it just illegal content, ex. CP. It seems like this has the potential for more legislation defining speech.
Wait, if this was somehow enforceable wouldn’t the order make Twitter liable for trump posting misinformation essentially making them legally required to censor or flag him?
I think it may actually be a way to empower companies to gain more access to information. If the companies are responsible, then they will want to sue the users for violations and personally identify them. A side effect is that they will have some government agency deciding what is acceptable or not. Much like China.
> If the companies are responsible, then they will want to sue the users for violations and personally identify them
I think you're drastically overestimating the profitability of a single twitter user.
They have hundreds of millions of active users. It would probably be far easier and more cost effective to ban every user that causes them any amount of grief, than to investigate and potentially sue them.
They already ban users. This change would fine companies that ban racists and conspiracy theorist because some conservative claimed oppression of free speech.
What's surprising is how often I encounter fellow Americans mistakenly asserting the first amendment extends beyond government and into the private sector.
It's like they've never even been to a movie theater where they need to shut the hell up or leave.
And here we have a US president signing an executive order in response to being moderated on a website after years of arguably excessive tolerance of his b.s.
I'm not sure how much more embarrassed I can get for my country.
Because 'free speech' is literally _all they know_ about the subject. If they did look it up, they would literally see the very first words of the first amendment: "Congress shall make no law (...)".
Literally about the legislative branch. Every other consequence of the First Amendment comes from that. Other laws can be more specific and may grant more rights, but this just specifies what the government can't take away.
Apologies if this is a stupid question; I'm a foreigner so I can't understand freedom like Americans do.
But if the first words are "Congress shall make no law", does that mean that the President and his executive orders are not bound by the First Amendment?
The president has no authority over this subject matter except that given him by congress.
This executive order is a directive to the FTC and FCC, which are both bodies created by congressional law.
As a result, neither has power to violate the first amendment since by virtue of being created by congress, they are subject to the literal reading of “Congress shall make no law”.
For what it’s worth - the 14th amendment passed after the civil war has been read to extend the protections of the bill of rights beyond their literal sense anyway.
Technically yes, other branches are not bound by the first amendment.
By the spirit of the law, no. A lot of historical laws and constitutional writings were to limit power of the government in general. When the constitution was actually written, the executive was just a puppet with military commander powers. But over the centuries there has been power creep into the executive.
Such battles end up in supreme court and the court decides ultimately what interpretation would hold up. The current supreme court is republican/right wing leaning which often ignores the spirit of the law FWIW.
FCC, FTC etc were created by legislative branch to make governing specific areas more streamlined, they are still bound by whatever legislative branch is bound.
> FCC, FTC etc were created by legislative branch to make governing specific areas more streamlined, they are still bound by whatever legislative branch is bound.
I would recommend reading up on historical executive orders held judicial review and how they impacted operations of 3-letter organizations
That's because these companies function in a way that is between the private and public sectors, and are getting more so. There are plenty of precedents for this, e.g. utilities, and the way we generally address such gray areas is regulation. It's interesting in this case that the side that usually calls for regulation is citing the arguments of the side that's usually against it, and vice versa. (Corollary: no one actually has any principles about this. People care only about their side and pivot like a weathervane depending on its interests. Is there even a single example to the contrary? That would truly be a mutant.)
Social media are the broadcasters of this age. I see no reason why they should be exempt from the same rules and regulations as old school broadcasters.
Comcast pays to carry CNBC and Fox content. They can freely decline to pay the content providers what they wish and drop their content. It is not an uncommon occurrence.
Fox and NBC cannot provide air time for one political campaign and deny air time for an opposing political campaign. Twitter is more like Fox and NBC rather than Comcast.
Twitter is nothing like Fox and NBC, unless they've managed to pick up a broadcast license without anyone noticing.
Fox and NBC are only required to provide political campaigns equal access because of their licenses to exclusive use of portions of the public spectrum.
Cable channels like CNN and Fox News don't use this spectrum, and thus don't have the same requirement. Twitter is more like a cable channel than a broadcast station.
The legacy OTA broadcasters were granted exclusive licenses to large chunks of a scarce natural resource (RF spectrum). Their public service obligations are essentially their payments on those licenses. Cable channels are under no obligation to carry news programming, for example, and are allowed to swear.
I don't think it holds up to say that because the internet is not a scare natural resource, rules have to be updated as situations evolve in multiple areas.
>The legacy OTA broadcasters were granted exclusive licenses to large chunks of a scarce natural resource (RF spectrum). Their public service obligations are essentially their payments on those licenses.
This seems like pretty strong implications of cause and effect. Doing something as a payment in return of a service (license).
If you want to apply a rule like "speech must be a net positive for society according to me" in the general case, the rule you need to update is the first amendment. It's specifically because of that spectrum gift that the government can be so aggressive about public good with OTA broadcasters. Speech doesn't come under government control just because it has a large audience or is culturally important.
> What's surprising is how often I encounter fellow Americans mistakenly asserting the first amendment extends beyond government and into the private sector.
It's a confusion between the First Amendment and the principle of free expression, which is kinda forgivable given how closely they are related.
Not at all, they're directly at odds in this case. The President using presidential authority to restrict what twitter can say on their own platform is directly violating the first amendment to restrict twitter's free expression.
You can argue that twitter is also restricting others' free expression, but that is their right, while the government preventing twitter from doing so is a 1A violation.
It would be as simple as you write if social media companies would take responsibility for the publishing rights for what they publish, but they don't. For a long time they are picking and choosing the laws they want to abide by.
> It would be as simple as you write if social media companies would take responsibility for the publishing rights for what they publish
What do social media companies "publish"? In this case, the only thing twitter published was a link to information about mail-in voting[0]. That's it. They did so in the context of a tweet. So at worst, twitter would be liable for any illegal content in either President Trump's original tweet, or in the content I linked at [0]. That is what current US law says.
To change that would require an act of congress or a supreme court ruling. The court is unlikely to rule in favor of Trump[1], as the conservative justices favor businesses rights. So that leaves a new law/amendment to the existing law. That would need to pass the house, which seems unlikely as well.
Twitter is publishing everything any person tweets. Those 2 comments are nothing compared to the power of selectively blocking/publishing users tweets (which communication companies are not allowed to do), but at the same time not be responsible for copyright violations (which other types of media companies are).
Are you familiar with section 230? Which says that under current US law, twitter is not a publisher of the tweets it hosts. It would require an act of congress to change that.
Not to pile on but really do read it. I see how you get to the White House's position but it's a stretch. There don't seem to be any condions tacked on. They don't publish other people's tweats. I think they could maybe be held liable for illegally removing tweats. The protection afforded for filtering does seem dependent on the motivation but I'm not aware of any laws restricting what content they're allowed to remove and again in this case they didn't remove anything
I was working at Google in 2007, and the type of filtering we had was very different from what Google does right now.
We had automated filtering of word lists that took down sites, that were hate words / porn related for protecting children.
Right now I'm paying monthly for Youtube Premium, but I see that the people I'm watching have to be extremely careful to not say a swear word by chance, or even say the name of the COVID-19 virus, because they are scared of losing their revenue stream. I don't see this as fair, because Youtube got so popular _because_ it was allowed to publish anything without being responsible for copyright violations. It would be great for them to do fact checking as long as they are politically consistent.
In EU at least we have the GDPR that limits companies from using our data however they want to, but in the US at this point they need some kind of counterbalance.
Hum, also a YouTube premium subscriber. I think I see the demonization issue as somewhat separate. It's the result of negative news driving advertisers to fear their ads will be places adjacent to content they disagree with leading to negative publicity right? YouTube's options seemed to be either create tools for ad buyers to better manage the political palatability of the content their ads were placed next to or have the big spenders abandon them.
Regardless I wasn't comment on the morality of what big tech companies were doing only the legality. Nothing in https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230 suggests to me that the protections are in anyway contingent on not removing certain content and certainty nothing suggests its contingent on not publishing content yourself in different contexts.
You can't separate demonetization from the question of publishing. Traditional media uses ads revenue for compensating content creators, but at the same time has a responsability for having copyright for every content they publish. Also just by the decision of demonetizing Alphabet gets farther from being just a communications medium earning money from helping the spread of information and getting to be a decider of what those users can communicate with eachother (Joe Rogan is a great recent example).
When a new law is being created, often it is created _because_ something legal, but immoral is being done by a person/company.
Also the law you refer to is a law inside the U.S., but Alphabet earns more than 50% of revenue (and most views) outside US. It was doing illegal business in the EU multiple times on grand scale and was given fines for it.
The fatal mistake which will cost the FAANGs billions is in becoming editors rather than facilitators by appending links to Twitter users posts. This doesn't scale (will all posts not edited/ appended to/rubber stamped by Twitter be considered 'true?) and also blows out the already stretched meaning of Section 230. This opens the door to much greater regulation of BigTech internationally.
'Section 230 says that "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider" (47 U.S.C. § 230). In other words, online intermediaries that host or republish speech are protected against a range of laws that might otherwise be used to hold them legally responsible for what others say and do. The protected intermediaries include not only regular Internet Service Providers (ISPs), but also a range of "interactive computer service providers," including basically any online service that publishes third-party content. Though there are important exceptions for certain criminal and intellectual property-based claims, CDA 230 creates a broad protection that has allowed innovation and free speech online to flourish'.
Well... if you really want to get into it. Twitter can’t “fact check” the original statement. Because it was a prediction.
It hasn’t happened yet. It’s unlikely to be mass scale fraud, of course, but it’s a future event.
It’s his opinion / prediction. As wrong as it is, that isn’t something they should “fact check”.
Twitter picked a really bad tweet to make a stand on. Like it or not, they chose to editorialize someone else’s content, that’s a publisher.
They didn’t have to “break a law” to now be liable for other content they “publish”. That’s all the EO is, that Section 230 doesn’t apply to publishers.
I’m gonna nitpick, but they didn’t editorialize it. They posted their view in the form of a reply. Editorialization would mean changing what he wrote. Literally the root word of “editorialization” is edit.
Allowed to? Depends how you view publisher vs platform.
They are a private company and can do as they like... but if they’re going to “take ownership” of information on their service they are breaking the spirit of neutral carriers and Section 230.
This seems like an odd hill to die on. Surely they could have fact checked 100 different Trump tweets with actual misinformation and not just his concerns/prediction.
I am of the opinion they wanted to do this for awhile, planned it out poorly, and pulled the trigger at the wrong tweet.
> breaking the spirit of neutral carriers and Section 230
Section 230 has nothing to do with neutral carriers. Section 230 does not mention, imply, or otherwise suggest that there is such thing as a "carrier", much less that one need be "neutral".
Here's what it says:
> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider
> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of 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; or
There's a bunch more, but it's all fluff or irrelevant. There are no relevant obligations (there is one obligation that the law has, it relates to kid-friendly modes in websites).
Note that there is no categorization as "publisher" or "platform". You are protected from certain kinds of content. The New York Times, who clearly publishes their own content, still has Section 230 protections for comments made in the comment box on their articles, because that content is not made by the NYT, but by another individual.
Under section 230, you can only lose protection on a specific piece of content if you are deemed to be the publisher of that specific piece of content. So the worst thing that can happen to twitter here is that they are determined to be the publisher of Trump's tweet for the purposes of things like libel and copyright lawsuits.
Given that, can you explain what spirit of the law is violated, and what spirit of "neutral carriers" (do you mean common carriers?) is related or to this?
Ok, that’s fair. Editorialize isn’t exactly right - except - it’s not just a reply. It’s altering the format to include a new entry that no one else could make. I suppose in my mind that’s how I would view an editor redlining something.
> It’s his opinion / prediction. As wrong as it is, that isn’t something they should “fact check”.
"I believe that if we allow people to leave their homes, everyone will die of Covid-19". Narrator: "There is no evidence that everyone will die of Covid-19, in fact there is plenty of evidence that everyone will not die of Covid-19".
At which point you claim that the original statement, because it included opinion, could not be fact checked, even though presenting sources that counter the priors required for the claims to make sense is a completely reasonable thing to do.
What exactly would be the public benefit of social media companies taking responsibility for user content? As far as I can see this framework does a fair job of making the same remedies available, just against the authors instead of the social media companies.
They will be able to silence those views they don't like and promote the ones they do. It will become readily apparent which side of the fence a social media company is on.
If I own Google and refuse to index and show in search results anything from Huffington Post, CNN, Washington Post is that okay? It is not! Technically, Google is a private entity and can do whatever it wants.
Once a company becomes too big like Twitter, Google, Facebook, they have a moral obligation to stay neutral.
Interesting how opinions expressing a viewpoint that differs from the hive mind gets down-voted.
Violating SEO rules is bad and these sites should be removed that can be understood.
Is it good for the democracy if Google removes all results from new sites it doesn't agree with? It should remain neutral as much as possible and not tamper with its search results.
> They are just using Trump's tweet to promote their own point of view.
Correction: they're using their own service to promote their own point of view.
I honestly think there are real issues with the public means of communication being privately owned by a smallish number of entities, but it does free expression no good to make the fight about letting lies, disinformation, and other forms of untruth to flow unimpeded.
I would argue that Google has an obligation to be transparent, they do not have an obligation to be neutral. As you state, they are a private entity and can do whatever they want.
If news providers and other knowledge providers are allowed to curate what data they present then I don't think it's reasonable to demand that Google be held to a higher standard. Further, literally nothing is stopping you from creating your own knowledge aggregator if you feel that Google is doing a bad job of displaying pertinent data.
I'm a big proponent of free speech, and have read a bit on the arguments against Big Tech censorship. One of the arguments against Google being able to selectively censor political content, despite being a private company, is that they could be classified as an essential service. I'm obviously getting information from sources opposed to Google's censorship, so I don't know if the wider legal community agrees with that view, but it's worth considering.
Another argument is that they have legal protections as content providers. However, the same protections don't apply to content publishers. If their censorship places them in the publisher category, they could open themselves to lawsuits. YouTube is an example that usually comes up. If a user uploads an illegal video, YouTube has protections against lawsuits. As a publisher, they would have more liability for the content they host.
Talking as an outsider, what's really weird to me is how the things Trump clearly says or does on a whim result in serious, deep debate in all the media and public forums.
He goes "I will build a wall spanning a continent to stop mexicans" and you see deep debate about how effective it would be, the price, the logistics of it... it's clearly a dumb idea, why does everyone pretend it's not and engage in deep consideration of it?
Now I'm seeing the same thing. Extensive debates about public opinion, the first amendment and the difficulties of moderating a service with millions of subscribers, when it is painfully obvious that the only reasoning by the president is "they messed with me so I'm going to get revenge".
The American Presidency is a storied and historic office, not just a job but a symbol of the nation, of its civic and cultural identity, so it has been difficult for a lot of people to come to terms with it being occupied by someone who is quite so openly and vocally a gibbering idiot. Hence the need to pretend that these pronouncements represent proposals into which serious thought and effort has been invested, rather than the momentary whims of a bloviating narcissist.
> it's clearly a dumb idea, why does everyone pretend it's not and engage in deep consideration of it?
I've learned that Trump is an incredibly dull instrument, but the points he raises (when you get past the verbal diarrhea) tend to be things that some significant fraction of his "base" care about or that are not actually novel policy ideas. "The wall" as he describes it is dumb. But it has existed in some form since the 1990s (albeit only segments) and the way he describes it is a simple symbol for people that tend not to know how to "solve" problems related to (illegal?) immigration.
Most average people don't care about policy details so they don't know how to argue them to "win the argument". Trump gives them a sports team to cheer for and simple slogans to shout so they feel like they are participating.
> when it is painfully obvious that the only reasoning by the president is "they messed with me so I'm going to get revenge".
The problems that Trump has with social media companies go back far more than 2 days and a fact checking link. His Attorney Generals (both Barr and Sessions) have been working with Republican state Attorneys General for years to craft a response to what they see is "liberal Silicon Valley techies banning (or shadowbanning or remonetizing or ...) conservative voices". Trump doesn't see a downside to taking this action.
The interesting thing is that there are far more than just political American conservatives that want to see regulation of {YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc}. Elizabeth Warren wrote a detailed essay on medium.com about why they should be more strictly regulated. A crazy YouTuber from San Diego got so pissed at YouTube for banning her account or demonetizing her channel that she drove up to San Bruno (not sure exactly which city/location) and shot up the building. There are quite a few stories of vague ToS being enforced in a not-so-predictable manner which leaves end users with banned accounts (which may be the nexus to more important accounts like email accounts).
I think a lot of people blindly follow Trump because they also hate who he hates. Trump is a divider, and his supporters feel empowered by agreeing with whatever he says.
"The wall" was an issue long before Trump, as is section 230 for social media. So what may seem like childish tantrums, are in reality diversion and deception tactics in order to drum up thirst for reviving underlying political issues. Since there is already a somewhat stifled political debate, the diversion works on all levels, every single time, to spread FUD, disruption, renewed outrage, discordance and confusion.
Additionally, the intervention Twitter seems to have chosen here wasn’t actually to silence the user (who happens to be the current President), but to mark/annotate with a fact check label, which is essentially responding to speech with more speech. That’s entirely compatible with even far-reaching 1A readings and robust philosophical perspectives on it.
And in fact, Twitter’s civil leadership policy has been allowing such users (including Trump) extra leeway.
The fact that Trump is mad about this shows that what he’s concerned about isn’t his own freedoms of speech are being impinged on, but that his freedom from accountability in discourse might be threatened.
Exactly this and I'm surprised that I had to scroll this far down to find this comment.
Extract this scenario out into meat space. Imagine if a town was running a bulletin board where anyone could post town news and a citizen posted a flyer talking about town crime statistics that were wrong. A town employee noticed and posted an addendum identified as being from the town right next to the flyer saying "actually the real data is X". Should town employees not be allowed to do that?
Why does the US government exist? The only reason is to protect the rights of the citizens.
Once upon a time, the rights of citizens only protected them from the federal government's actions. States could (and did) infringe on these rights. Corporations were much less powerful at this time, so were not much of a concern.
We ended up fighting a war over this, and one result was the 14th amendment, which binds the states to also protect these important rights.
Now a days, corporations are powerful enough to infringe these rights. We've dealt with this in the past when "trust busting" was more of a thing. There is established precedent for not allowing monopolies to infringe on people's rights.
There's nothing special about the "private sector" that allows big corporations to infringe people's rights without due process.
I’m sad to see this downvoted. I’m not entirely sure I agree with your point, as I think the gulf between “profit-seeking corporation” and “democratically-elected government” is a lot wider than the one we jumped between Federal and state government for the 14th. That said, I like that this line of thinking made me question some assumptions I didn’t know I was even making before.
You do not have a right to use Twitter. Currently, in the US, you do not even have a right to use the Internet. Twitter and ISPs may decide not to service you. As it pertains to Internet services specifically, these services are also allowed to moderate content that you post. You are not guaranteed a right for them to host your speech and show it to the world.
If you have an issue with how Twitter, FaceBook, YouTube, et al. moderate content, you are completely free to create your own Internet service which you may moderate as you see fit.
The US government exists to insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, and promote the general welfare. The government is not interested in protecting the rights of citizens. Instead, it is the rights of citizens which are meant to protect us from the government. Other laws may dictate how businesses are allowed operate but the first amendment absolutely does not apply to private businesses.
During the civil rights era, private businesses infringed on people's rights with state government backing. People with the wrong skin color were forbidden from being in certain restaurants or sitting in certain seats, etc.
These were private companies infringing on rights.
Again, you are conflating rights granted by the constitution with legislation that dictates how businesses must operate. Racial discrimination in public accommodations, like those that you mentioned, was outlawed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964[1]. In that case, those private companies were explicitly breaking federal law. Rights granted in the constitution are separate and are only intended to protect citizens from the government.
The constitution does not grant rights It merely enumerates some of the rights we have.
The civil rights act did not make up any rights - it created law to enable enforcement and protection of rights people already had, but which were being infringed - both by states and by private businesses.
The social media monopolies are infringing on our rights. There may not as yet be a legal remedy for that, but it seems likely that there will be, as in many ways these companies are more powerful and wield more influence over people than governments do.
I think that you have a general misunderstanding on what a "right" is in the eyes of the law[1]. Furthermore, you appear to also have a misunderstanding of the differences between natural rights and legal rights[2].
> The social media monopolies are infringing on our rights
The right to free speech is not a natural right; nor does it apply to anything but freedom from government persecution on the basis of speech. Freedom of speech is a right that is granted by the constitution and has been further defined by case law over the past 250 years. The Supreme Court has pointed out that private companies are not subject to protections enumerated in the constitution, which, again, only apply to the government[3].
> I'm not sure how much more embarrassed I can get for my country.
Every election season, I’ve said, “These are some of the worst candidates I’ve ever seen. I’m not sure how much lower the bar can get.” And then it gets lower.
I submit one of the reasons our candidates are so bad is that our discourse refuses to hold them to account. Instead of taking a position and punishing bad acts, we excuse them by telling ourselves the other side "would have been" just as bad. So the lesson successful candidates take away is that they don't need to adhere to principles, because their voters will find some mental excuse (like you just did!) to vote for them anyway.
If you don't want this to happen you can't vote for the administration (not "candidates") who did it. Nothing changes until someone starts losing elections. But my guess is you aren't willing to go that far, because of something about Biden.
>I'm not sure how much more embarrassed I can get for my country.
I honestly used to be proud to be an American. Now I am so ashamed that when I travel (or back in the days when I traveled) I lie and say I'm a Canadian.
I used to be proud of our flag and would display it. Now (past 3 years) it has morphed into a symbol of hate and oppression. When I see armed 'protestors' terrorizing a state legislature and waving the flag, then the flag is no longer a symbol of freedom but of intimidation.
Given the wildness of that particular dark corner of our history, I'm looking forward to reading about the history we're living through now. Hopefully after some emotional remove, like in another ten years.
>What's surprising is how often I encounter fellow Americans mistakenly asserting the first amendment extends beyond government and into the private sector.
I've only ever heard people complaining that people misunderstand the first amendment. I've yet to see someone say they believe the first amendment governs and protects against private censorship.
However, I constantly see people conflating the concept of free speech and the first amendment. Free speech is an ideological principle, not a law.
If you read the first section of the EO it is clear that they are attempting to make an argument that Twitter, by moderating/curating/screening, is no longer protected by section 230, as defined by the famous 90s court cases regarding prodigy, aol, and compuserve. [0] [1]
Spurious argument or not you are mischaracterizing the situation.
I'd be curious to hear real lawyers weigh in on this, but... that sounds pretty dubious to me. Executive orders aren't laws, they don't get interpreted by courts in general and they absolutely don't override existing case law! I mean, who cares what the executive branch says about section 230? We know what congress wrote, and we know how the judiciary has interpreted it, because we've already had that fight.
It seems like an executive order is more of a guideline on how they interpret the law. He mentions that congress would need to make changes to the law for it to have teeth. He also said there will be lawsuits on the way.
I suspect it is futile to persuade y-combinator's types that your own dreams of amassing wealth and power might be biasing your views on this matter.
It's really unfortunate that appeals to morality are brushed aside because your neediness for wealth and power and status is so overwhelming.
It is exactly the same phenomenon at work within the Chinese Communist Party.
Your desire to use technology to push others beneath you and oppress them is no different than that of the CCP.
The only difference between you and them, is that the population you seek to dominate has not been beaten into submission with generations of violence.
The American people cherish their freedom and are heavily armed and they hate you as much as the people of China hate the CCP.
I wish these conflicts could be resolved peacefully.
But, unfortunately, they cannot.
If you want a civil war, you will get one.
You are on the wrong side of history.
You will lose!
I'd be pretty disturbed if an ISP all of a sudden prevented me from contacting wikipedia, or throttled my access to competitors. The ISP is private, but it's not really in the spirit of freedom to do so.
Similarly, if an airline said they won't sell me a ticket because I'm going to a rally for a particular politician. Or if the post office (or fedex) wouldn't carry my letter to the editor because they disagree with my opinion. Or if I couldn't get basic banking, insurance, or other business services because my legal business is politically unpopular.
There also is some legal murkiness because a federal judge ruled that Trump couldn't block people on Twitter[1].
His motivations may be personal but they laid out the reasons for doing it pretty clearly. 230 was being too broadly interpreted, can anyone on either side of the aisle dispute that fact?
I think there are two issues at hand here.
The first is related to section 230 of the Communication Decency Act. This section provides a legal shield to companies that act as an intermediary by hosting comments. This legal shield is effective even if the intermediary moderates the comments and provides editorials. The executive action is saying if you are providing editorials, you are no longer just an intermediary and should be held accountable for what your users post. In other words, if you fact check your users posts you are responsible if hate speech or misinformation or child pornography are shared on your platform. I think 2 reasonable people could debate the pros and cons of this.
The second issue at hand is the catalyst for this change. Jack Dorsey picked a fight with a giant orange toddler. For some reason the American people entrusted this giant orange toddler with the full authority of the executive branch of the United States of America. The orange toddler decided throw a fit and use this power that is meant to better the American public to retaliate against this personal attack. This second issue is the one that makes me sad to be a registered Republican and an American.
> movie theater where they need to shut the hell up or leave.
This has nothing to do with anything. The 1A has always been understood as a freedom of content, not form. Noise ordinances and rules are constitutional.
The heart of this discussion is not the freedom of speech, it's the the ability to say whatever you want without consequence.
What Twitter wants, though selective undocumented "curating" of its platform, is the ability to slander, intimidate, harass, terrorize and verbally abuse whomever they don't like, without actually being drug infront of a jury and tried for crimes.
Telco's wanted the same government exemption that USPS had; someone mailed a letter with a bomb, they can't be held responsable. This was something the courts were likely to give them anyway.
Intentionally promoting a user's post containing a manifesto about assassinating a standing president is no different than USPS mailing millions of manifesto letters to people. One mechanism is simply more automated.
At the risk of this being downvoted to oblivion, why doesn't he think that Twitter, a privately run company, has the right to fact-check claims made on their site? Even if there were some secret evil liberal agenda on Twitter, which there absolutely is not, why aren't they allowed to do that exactly? Is he planning on holding Fox News to the same standard and make them put less racism apologia on their network?
I'm sorry but you have a fundamentally flawed model for how Trump (and many in the GOP) think about the world.
You're operating under a principle that says that people are essential equal in terms of rights and that there is a moral obligation to consistency. The old Golden Rule, and everything. Under that framework, it's stupid to punch someone in the face unless you also want to get punched in the face, because your principle of equivalence says that you should be prepared to receive anything you give.
But these people have an entirely different model. There is no right and wrong. No fairness, no consistency. It is simply a model of power. If you have the power to do a thing, you can do a thing. And if others don't have enough power to do the same back to you, their loss.
You wouldn't get irate that the Earth pulls the moon out of its orbit more than the moon affects the Earth. It's not "unfair" that the Earth has more mass. It is simply a fact, and that fact determines how those planetary bodies act.
The mentality of authoritarians is the same with respect to power. The universe has granted power to some and not others, and the only moral code is to use what you have to do what you can get away with.
It's confusing, because these people often use words like "right" and "fair", but they are using them purely as tools of power for the effect using the words has on others, and not under any actual belief in them. My kids when they were toddlers would cry "not fair" any time they didn't get their way, because they learned that claiming something was unfair was sometimes an effective strategy to sway parents. It's the same thing.
I hate the term "these people" some of "these people" meet some of your criteria but not all. You would likely place me in the category of "these people" because I believe social media favors the left side of arguments. I believe in a fair an open internet, let ideas be shared and stop censoring. Every group is a hypocrite, but everyone feels justified in their hypocrisy. It would go a long way if we stopped dividing each other up into camps.
Not to put words in the parent comment's mouth, but I would guess he mans "these people" = leaders of the Republic party, primarily Trump and McConnell. Many other Republican leaders and I assume most conservative voters still have morals, right and wrong, etc, but it's those two at the top and a handful of others in power that have made the Republic party's actions amoral and power-centric.
Pots ok. But is McConnell is elected among equals. He can be removed? The rest of republican leaders, party and voters to them (and pots) cannot be totally spare. At least not in the next cycle. If they are both re-elected (McConnell is “re-elected” everyday in a sense).
I agree with this, free enterprise is amazing. A company should be free to set the standards of the service they provide. But I also believe that Standard Oil needed to be broken up and Microsoft needed to be reined in. I believe we all feel the need to exercise some degree of oversight on these giant corporations. Not long ago there was a lot of discussion about Hobby Lobby and its fight against some of the healthcare regulations passed by President Obama. Issues are always more nuanced than the internet makes them appear. I believe there is plenty of divisiveness on both sides, it doesn't take much to find examples of both. That is kind of my point, we are feeding a monster and don't seem to realize it.
> I hate the term "these people" some of "these people" meet some of your criteria but not all.
I used "these people" to refer to the people that are not like the ones I described in my first paragraph. There are certainly those on the left and right who are decent, moral people. Would it have helped if instead of "these people" I'd said "people not like that?" Those are basically equivalent in terms of what I intended to say.
> You would likely place me in the category of "these people" because I believe social media favors the left side of arguments.
No, I think you're jumping to a conclusion that I was referring to conservatives or those on the right as a whole but nowhere in my text did I do that. I said "Trump (and many in the GOP)". I didn't make any mention of the right. There are many conservatives and people on the right who are not Republicans and I explicitly noted that there are Republicans for whom my claim doesn't apply.
I can understand being sensitive to this issue since it's hard being a conservative in progressive circles these days, but I don't think it's reasonable to construe that my comment applied to you.
> I believe in a fair an open internet, let ideas be shared and stop censoring.
I didn't state any opinion for or against what Twitter did or how Trump reacted.
The Right used to abhor postmodernism, and were properly mocked by the Left whenever they whinged about it.
Now the Right have embraced postmodernism, and the Left have no idea how to respond.
TV news corporations know how to respond, and they've done the same thing for five years now. They keep him (or his empty lectern) on TV as much as they possibly can. Ratings gold!
Well, is Verizon allowed to use packet injection to "fact check" a website you view over their internet connection?
Because seems to be presenting themselves as a neutral platform, which they have shown themselves to not be.
EDIT:
Just to clarify, obviously Twitter is not presenting themselves to users as a neutral platform. But for legal purposes, they are cloaking themselves in the same privileged status as a phone company, when they clearly are not.
A) Twitter has never presented itself as a neutral platform. They've banned white supremacists, dangerous conspiracy nuts like Alex Jones, and even left-leaning people like Destiny when he joked about how he was going to bomb Comcast.
B) Verizon (Comcast, Spectrum, etc...) are closer to something like a utility. I wouldn't be supportive of a water or electricity company not providing services to people I disagree with. Twitter is not a utility, it's a glorified fortune-cookie-sharing site. It's a not a "right", and there's no reason that you should feel entitled to it.
Twitter is _the_ place where political discourse happens not just _a_ place where it happens. It's an unfortunate state of affairs that they happen to be a private company with a bias.
That still doesn't make it _the_ place for political discourse. Reddit gets quoted quite often. Tons of politicians do AMA on Reddit and Facebook. Just because Trump is on Twitter doesn't make it special.
That's not how these kinds of "facts" work. If someone tried to use this during some kind of proceeding the court will determine this. (Using a jury or not, expert witnesses or not, doesn't matter.)
Usually fact checking "services" like snopes.com, politifact, or WaPo with the pinocchio heads, have a consistent model about what they are willing to touch, how they approach it, and how they determine factualness, etc.
Just throwing out that Twitter is or isn't _the_ platform makes no sense.
> Because seems to be presenting themselves as a neutral platform
Eh? Twitter bans accounts _all the time_. It hides stuff from search, and hides potentially explicit content behind an "are you sure you want to see this?" It is in no way a neutral platform. Fact-checking world leaders was originally conceived by twitter as an alternative to just banning them when they get dangerous.
> Eh? Twitter bans accounts _all the time_. It hides stuff from search, and hides potentially explicit content behind an "are you sure you want to see this?"
Right, so why are they trying to claim that they are a neutral platform then, for legal purposes, when they very clearly are not one??
Twitter responds to any lawsuits by claiming that they are a neutral disinterested platform, when they very clearly are not. They enjoy the same legal protections as the phone company, when they obviously are not at all the same!
> Right, so why are they trying to claim that they are a neutral platform then, for legal purposes, when they very clearly are not one??
Where are they claiming that? There's no such requirement under the CDA (if there was, then any website with a stated political or other stance and a comments section would be in serious trouble).
> Twitter responds to any lawsuits by claiming that they are a neutral disinterested platform, when they very clearly are not.
Examples of this?
> They enjoy the same legal protections as the phone company
Legally they can probably get away with it, since it has happened with other ISPs. The technical reason this doesn't happen is due to your connection a website being encrypted.
> But for legal purposes, they are cloaking themselves in the same privileged status as a phone company
Hum I don't think that could possibly be true. What leads you to think this? Phone companies existed before Section 230 and as far as I know their behavior didn't change. Have you read Section 230? It definitely reads like it was passed to give entities like Twitter more power to delete objectionable content and it definitely doesn't read to me like it obligates them to be neutral.
The order does not say that they don't have the right to fact check. It simply says that they don't have the right to fact check and enjoy section 230 immunity.
> FoxNews.com and FoxBusiness.com do use moderation in an effort to maintain a safe and respectful environment in our online community. If your comment or username includes vulgar, racist, threatening, or otherwise offensive language, it will be removed.
It's disingenuous to compare political speech to, for example, copy/pasting the N word a dozen times. It seems reasonable for a "neutral" platform to allow "moderation" of the latter, but perhaps not the former.
> Where have Fox News editorialised (sic) users content?
not
> Where have Fox News editorialised (sic) users political speech?
so my reply should in no way construe my opinion of what is or is not political speech.
Now that we've established that Fox News does in fact editorialize user content, we can move on to the original question of whether or not they should now
> be liable for suit for anything posted by commenters to their online articles
Sorry, you don't just get to decide what is a larger point in some discussion.
The law is capable of distinguishing between ideas, including whether content is good-faith speech or trolling. Pretending the two are the same and that a law could not possibly allow for a platform to moderate the latter without sacrificing its "neutrality" seems unreasonable.
I think it is a valid question that could be scrutinized in court, but there is no need to be obtuse about the fact that these are different categories of speech that the law could treat differently specifically with regard to how it would categorize ("neutrality" of) a platform on the internet, not whether or not the speech is entirely forbidden period.
> Sorry, you don't just get to decide what is a larger point in some discussion.
The whole point was the editing of comments. You keep going back and forth between 'political speech' being the same or different, but you hallucinated that as having anything to do with the discussion.
> these are different categories of speech
Maybe to the government, not to whether a website is a publisher or a platform. Protected political speech and criticism of the government has nothing to do with the topic at hand, no matter how many times you keep trying to inject it.
> You keep going back and forth between 'political speech' being the same or different, but you hallucinated that as having anything to do with the discussion.
I definitely never varied my own view on this. You most likely misinterpreted my first comment and the quote ">", or worse, you're being intentionally dishonest.
In any case, go read the EO. Right now, your opinion amounts to, "Trump bad, therefore removing a comment that spams racial slurs is the same as editorializing a comment that states a political opinion."
> removing a comment that spams racial slurs is the same as editorializing a comment that states a political opinion
This is an appeal to emotion attempting to twist the position of those who oppose this EO, but, hopefully, that won't fly in a court of law. We shall see.
Under section 230, Fox News is not liable to suit if someone not affiliated with Fox posts illegal content on their comments on their website.
They are liable to suit if Fox News employees post illegal content on their website.
Twitter has the exact same treatment under the law today. It’s not liable for suit when Trump tweets lies about Joe Scarborough. But if @jack or @TwitterSafety tweeted the same lies, it could be sued in court for libel and section 230 would not be a defense.
Fox and twitter are already equal in eyes of the law today.
That's wrong. They have the right to fact check. They simply might not have section 230 immunity with respect to the fact check because that is self-generated content.
They still enjoy immunity with respect to user-posted content, because that is part of the explicit language of the statute and a Presidential Order can't override statutory language.
It wouldn't be China. In China there is truth, truth and only truth. The truth approved by government. US turns not into China, but into Russia, where there is no truth, only lies. Literally. Because the only way to categorize all sayings into truth and lies is to pick some political side and stick to it. One cannot believe to any authority: politicians, scientists, journalists, government officials... they are all lying. Some probably are not, but you have no ways to find out who is.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 414 ms ] thread“This week a federal appeals court, ruling in a case brought by conservative activists against social media companies, affirmed that private websites are not public spaces and social media companies don't have First Amendment obligations.
Any truly strong limits to Section 230 would almost certainly require action by Congress.”
FWIW this is only thematically related, the order concerns the distinction between immune or non-immune activities under Section 230.
If you publish something defamatory on your blog, and you operate it, you may be liable. Section 230 is there to say that if a website merely retransmits your publication, it is not liable for it, so if you publish that same defamatory statement on Facebook, Facebook is not then liable.
However, the argument with the executive order is that if you exercise a level of deliberate control over the content beyond some threshold, or you augment expression (like Twitter did the other day, adding links to contrary opinion pieces next to the President's opinion), you effectively become a publisher of that content.
It's not a completely ridiculous idea either. Consider how diverse the expressions published to Twitter are; at some point it's not that different to choose not to publish some expression, than to express the complement of that expression yourself.
I'm just glad the prevailing call isn't to delete Section 230 altogether, which I think would cause a bit of pandemonium (though maybe that would be a social good as well, and maybe Section 230 was the mistake that made the social media monster).
Wouldn't this harm any of these activities, aside from situations where people are directly hosting their own content, because anyone hosting could be held liable for what gets posted?
Or, HN :)
Instead what seems to happen is that normies get pulled into Nazi content because the recommendation algorithms on these sites see heated discussions as engagement and try to feed it.
If I go to a bar and there's some guy screaming about his Nazi ideology and the owners don't kick him out, I'm going to just move on.
If some social media platform is full of trolls and hatred and such... people are just going to go away. It becomes a 'race to the bottom'.
Before S230 that was the case: Executing any editorial control risked you being concluded to be the publisher.
Online providers said this is bullshit, we want be able to remove garbage -- lies, obscene material, defamation, etc. If moderating makes us publishers over everything on our site and legally liable, we can't do that. Make us immune so we can clean up the worst of things, and you can still always go after the actual sources.
So I think it only makes sense to the extent that the world before S230 also made sense. But that's a world where sites like twitter probably couldn't have come into being.
Without S230 the law is bizarre because it treated running a public venue as equivalently of being a publisher for everything that happened in it. It would be like if I ran a shopping mall and some member of the public came in and started calling you a paedophile that you could sue the mall simply because at other times I removed other people who were urinating on the walls.
Let's put in another way: publishers used to produce content (as in select, solicit, remunerate) to further their interests (financial, but sometimes also political, or cultural). Now the big social networks don't need to produce the content, but they can tap into such an enormous amount of it that they can limit themselves to shaping it. Promote certain posts, reduce the visibility of others. The overall effect is the same. You could probably make Facebook or Twitter in a great cultural publications just by tweaking the algorithm that determines the visibility of the posts.
That isn't clear to me at all. The publisher is essentially the author from a liability perspective.
I do agree (see my other post in this thread) that there are serious concerns about the moderation power of the operators of these massive online public forums. But that doesn't make treating them as the author from a liability perspective the right tool for dealing with that.
Particularly because in most specific cases where their moderation power might be misused there is no question of liability. Imagine a site where everyone was always honest and nice, but the operator ruthlessly censored all posts by Georgists and S230 didn't exist. Okay, they'd be liable for their users posts-- but so what? There is nothing there for anyone to sue over. The Georgists would still be totally silenced.
In a newspaper that selectively chooses to print some letters from readers, would the author be the publisher or the newspaper? That's an example of extreme moderation ("out of the 1000 letters we received this week, we will print this one") while Twitter is likely closer to the other extreme ("out of these 1000 Tweets, we'll hide/delete this one").
The parallel would be Twitter commenting on a tweet. As long as they just pass the tweet on to other people, without commenting on it, then they aren't responsible for it's content. But as soon as they say "hey, this might be false information" about a specific tweet then they are responsible for the content of all tweets.
It really is a public web space that is operated by a private company, but I can't help but feel that the nuances and similarities of what Twitter really is and what responsibility they truly hold in society is above the courts comprehension.
In America, no matter how big of a community mall, management can always remove you for good reasons (using racial slurs, even at normal volume), silly reasons (they didn't like the color of your hat), or no reason at all, as long as it's not for a prohibited reason (because of your race). Whereas authorities cannot remove you from a public square for no reason or silly reasons, only for good reasons specifically identified by law (like public nuisance).
It depends if you are reported and what for. American authorities have prosecutorial discretion, so they can choose to overlook the "wholesome things shouter", but may choose to charge the "racist shouter" with a vaguely defined law like "disturbing the peace". There are enough laws like "disturbing the peace", "trespassing", and "obscenity" which are largely subjective.
The left can attempt to immediately equate everything to the right of Obama with Hitler.
The right can attempt to immediately equate everything to the left of Reagan with Stalin and Mao.
Who is going to sort this out? Both sides might think they're being perfectly reasonable about their characterization of the other side. And if a judge on one side agrees with them, the alternative viewpoint becomes criminal hate speech. This is very dangerous.
I don't see banning a user from social media sites very different from exercising trespassing laws. Should Republicans be sheltered from trespass laws just because the owner of the property might not be a Republican?
Perhaps the best way for social media websites to avoid being is to more clearly define what content violates their ToS. I suspect most people don't read the ToS and certainly don't know how every company chooses to enforce their ToS with enough detail, and that's almost certainly the confusion when social media users complain about persecution.
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/447/74
About your specific question, I would say "standing INSIDE the mall screaming" (screaming anything) would be more similar to posting large amounts of text on someone else's personal Twitter feed.
Whereas simply having your own personal Twitter and saying things that someone doesn't like would be more like standing on the walkway outside a business.
Also, I read the draft of Trump's order posted on HN last night, and it doesn't say that lewd or obscene content can't be removed. If you start using the N word or posting pornography, I think that's still legitimate for companies to remove.
The problem is that the idea of "hate speech" is being weaponized. If someone simply wears a MAGA hat, that's being called "threatening" or "racist". If someone expresses economically protectionist views, they're called "racist" even though protectionism was used centuries ago to protect European countries from other European countries and has nothing to do with "race".
The right could similarly weaponize the idea of "hate speech" by saying that any time anyone mentions any kind of social program spending, that's "threatening" because that's akin to "communism, which has killed hundreds of millions of people".
Now, plenty of conservatives do say they're concerned about the slippery slope, but they don't immediately equate "we should give housing to the homeless" with "put the rich in the gulags", the way the vocal far left equates "maybe we should reduce taxes a bit" with "they're racists who want poor minority people to starve to death".
edit: deleted - the link did not support my claim.
Additionally, public sidewalks in front of stores are considered public areas because of the public easement to use the sidewalk. A private sidewalk is not a public area for free speech purposes (see Lloyd).
[edit: fixed Logan to Lloyd]
Web publishers do not need any special protection from well established jurisprudence governing other publishers. It made some sense in the early days when it was unclear how things would turn out, now those protections should be rolled backed or adjusted.
In contrast, a public space like a public park is subject to free speech requirements, which is why the Westboro church can scream vile racist things from a playground.
No, it isn't, any more than a store is a public space because it has windows the public can see into. You have to sign up for a Twitter account and accept their terms of service to post on the site. It's a private platform run by a private company for its own private business interests.
If I have the right to every website then how about password-protected ones. Do I then have the right to demand that Apple give me access to everyone's iCloud website ?
You don't need Twitter.
For some of my friends, Twitter was the only contact information I had for them. I have now totally lost the ability to communicate with those friends in the midst of a global emergency, even if I make a new account (which itself would be subject to immediate termination at any time), because I don’t know their usernames.
A few of the closest ones fortunately noticed my absence without prompting, went to my profile, saw it suspended, went to my website (I presume it helped that my username, @sneakdotberlin, describes my website address), and emailed me. As for the busier or less attentive friends? No word yet. :(
You can’t export your data or do “data takeout” from a suspended account, sadly, and you can’t view your DM history either inbound or outbound.
EDIT: Also, I do need Twitter (and a high follower count) to meaningfully interact with my bank or my airline’s (or Google’s) customer service department. The 1-800-i’m-a-schnook line doesn’t seem to get things done.
This is a big problem.
More impactful would be access to any accounts which you only have access to with Twitter/Facebook/Google/etc federated login (like OAuth). It's very significant if you can't access your email/cloud/DNS accounts if you make a gray area ToS-violating comment/video on YouTube.
https://stiobhart.net/2020-03-18-twittergdpr/
I was going to say it's not really about access but censorship. Using gmail as an example is nice because I do appreciate their spam filtering which spammers might consider a form of censorship (lack of deliverability). And yet I'm against platforms like twitter censoring things. The spam situation quickly leads into another set of arguments with me about traceability.
This has happened to me multiple times. Most people would likely never notice the opportunities they missed as a result of such.
I’m talking about real live false positives, on important messages from real live human beings.
Additionally, gmail spam folders even well run, nonspam, properly configured and secured mailservers AFAICT simply for not being part of the wider deliverability cartel.
Speaking of which, shouldn't we make it a crime to lie or substantially mislead the public while holding public office?
But I also think that the more Twitter is used to disintermediate political communication, the more it starts to look like a vital public utility. It's tough to say where the line will or should be drawn. I don't envy Jack Dorsey's position, that's for sure.
As far as making a law that prohibits politicians from lying to the public, I don't see a way to write a law like that without making the situation even worse.
Except it's not. Trump is right here; most of the confirmed voter fraud is on mail-in and absentee ballots, despite being less used than in-person in the past decades. Switching everyone to mail-in will cause a sharp uptick in voter fraud.
Spot-checking and using search for counts, most are manipulation of mail-in or absentee ballots (many being a bunch of ballots by a single person), with the next highest looking like individual people voting who didn't realize they were ineligible.
The document itself admits that it is "only a sampling," which, in the absence of further methodological detail, should raise their hairs on the back of your neck.
Nobody ever said that vote-by-mail is fraud proof, only that it's good enough. Which it indisputably is, at least as implemented here in Washington state.
Well.. How about another case I just learned of today? 'Cause it kinda doesn't seem like we're even at "good enough":
> “Invalidate the election. Let’s do it again,” said Rev. Kenneth Clayton said amid reports more that 20 percent of all ballots were disqualified, some in connection with voter fraud allegations.
[..]
> In addition to apparent problems with the vote count in Paterson, NBC New York has shown video of ballots left out in building lobbies, of one voter handling many ballots, and reported on postal workers reporting finding hundreds of ballots at a time stuffed in mailboxes in Paterson – and even in a neighboring town, Haledon.
https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/politics/nj-naacp-leader-cal...
One good aspect of the vote-by-mail system we use here in WA is that the voter retains a code they can use to verify that their ballot has been counted. There is an auditable paper trail at every step that's accessible to all parties - the voter, the election officials, and the candidate. That's more than you get with many in-person voting systems, especially those involving closed-source machines made by companies with questionable ethics and engineering practices.
Yes, I'm sure it's possible to build a vote-by-mail system that is more prone to corruption than in-person voting. But the point is, it's not necessary.
"Carlos Lopez and his wife, Luz Lopez, registered to vote and voted on three separate occasions (2004, 2006, and 2007) in Hartford, where they own a furniture store, while actually living in Farmington." (Fittingly, this story is included twice: once with each spouse first).
"In 2009, Lillian Cummings Stevenson agreed to a consent order after the State Elections Enforcement Commission found her guilty of illegally signing and submitting two absentee ballot request forms on behalf of her sons, who were living in Europe. She was given a $200 fine."
"James Bryant, Jr. admitted to improperly assisting voters in completing their absentee ballots in the 2005 Americus mayoral election...."
This could, and presumably is intended to, mislead people on both sides of the political spectrum.
Assuming for the sake of argument that someone could be trying to promote a fundamental truth using lies, it doesn't make it sane to trust or acquiesce as a result of lies.
Maybe in our brave new world, disbelieving in something because it is supported with lies is an example of an ad hominem fallacy?
Thomas Bayes is screaming in his grave, something about cancer diagnoses...
Actually I don't know if that's even true. And almost all the significant cases of any kind of election fraud aren't about ballots at all. It's stuff like voting in the wrong jurisdiction, or count fraud, or registration fraud.
Please cite me where you got the info that most election crime is from remote voting. That info doesn't exist.
What does exist is the facts in the WaPo article that twitter linked, which show that effectively zero mail-in ballot fraud is happening.
Why should a private company have this power? I don't think that people who run a successful website automatically are qualified to fact check the president and insert blurbs directly in his messages. That needs to be regulated some way.
And no, them being a private company doesn't matter. Currently they have a lot of power thanks to them having a lot of important users, and now that they are starting to use that power we need to quickly come up with regulations for it.
Yet we still have people trying to define what activity on the Net constitutes the necessity that access is supposed to fulfill.
I understand where you're coming from though. I just wanted to point out the amusing dichotomy that stood out in my head.
As much as Twitter is important, it's not nearly as important.
Twitter may technically be a private platform run by a private company, but the issue not one of semantics, it’s about ethics and morals and how we compose a society with mighty power imbalances, fortified by new tech.
They don't allow libellous, defamatory, salacious or inappropriate comments for example.
So it sounds 'new tech' hasn't really changed anything.
That's very different from, say, a public restroom where people write on the walls. The owner of the restroom is not responsible for what people write on their walls.
Newspapers also have zero obligation to convey the words of the President, and by frequently contextualise them.
Absolutely. And they don't say "we're just a platform transporting information", they restrict what they publish.
> They don't allow libellous, defamatory, salacious or inappropriate comments for example.
They do. And they get sued for it, and they can lose, see Gawker. Precisely because they are not like Twitter.
They've always done some editing and removal of certain content.
In this particular case, was anything modified or censored though? It seems more like Trump had his say, and Twitter had theirs. Is Trump saying that Twitter can't also express themselves on their platform?
There are degrees to moderation, but not to liability. This black or white approach doesn't seem appropriate. They should be liable in a degree proportional to the moderation they introduce.
Twitter isn't liable for illegal content posted by their users, as long as they take it down in time and make good faith efforts to keep it from being posted in the first place. If they weren't free from liability then a service like Twitter would need heavy human moderation and be extremely expensive to operate - perhaps it wouldn't exist at all.
That's the only reason this non-liability exists. It has nothing to do with moderation or censorship. Twitter, as any other web property, have the right to curate their platform and make it pleasant for their other users. It's their personal property.
If someone uploads their library of child porn encoded to base64 split across tons of tweets, do you want Twitter to have a choice between removing that content and continuing to operate?
We have 3 options here:
1. No moderation allowed whatsoever on a site without a court order. That obviously leads to a terrible, toxic community with lots of reprehensible content that the average person wouldn't want to participate in.
2. A good faith effort at moderation. This allows the most reprehensible, highest-impact content to be removed and allows users to participate in the moderation process.
3. No content can be published without moderation, on any site anywhere. Want to post a Facebook status? Have fun paying $20 for the privilege of waiting 48 hours for a human to review it.
All of this is irrelevant though, because this executive order is not targeted at censorship. It's targeted at a private individual who voluntarily, for free, passed on a message from one person to many other people and decided to tell them "this seems fishy, you might want to read up on it."
In the specific example of child porn, would removing it be protected speech and a copyrightable work? To my knowledge, no, it is not.
However telling someone "this seems fishy, you might want to read up on it.", attached to someone else copyrighted work, is to me speech. It is also a copyrightable work if its original enough. It could also be a defined as a derivative work if it includes major copyrightable elements of the original, which in this context is likely.
The difference between removing child porn and creating derivative work is one that I don't think courts will have a problem to distinguish between. Both may end up being described as moderation, but the outcome, intent and context is very different.
But that's not what this is really about.
This is about the President being angry that Twitter fact checked him and using executive power to create a chilling effect against any platform doing so in the future. It's about fears of a nonexistent conspiracy controlling the media becoming the basis for authoritarian laws meant to stamp out that menace - a phenomenon which never goes well, historically. It's about Americans hating "the left" so much that they'll support an obvious violation of the First Amendment as long as it silences their ideological enemies.
That is the impetus in this case, but that doesn't mean it doesn't border on questions we've been slowly grappling with for some time now, nor does it mean we have to ignore that question.
> the basis for authoritarian laws meant to stamp out that menace
I'm not sure it's authoritarian to remove their liability protections, is it? In a sense, I think it's an interesting question, if you're willing to editorialize content on behalf of your users why should you get safe-harbor protection? You clearly are willing to put the man power and technology into it, shouldn't you then be liable for content posted on your site?
> It's about Americans hating "the left" so much that they'll support an obvious violation of the First Amendment as long as it silences their ideological enemies.
What's the obvious First Amendment violation here? If you act as a conduit for certain types of speech, you're liable for that speech. We're just bringing "content neutral providers" into the same realm that everyone else already was.
If the intent is to punish critics and suppress the speech of party opponents, then yes. Any authoritarian can justify their actions in abstract and general terms, but context matters.
>nor does it mean we have to ignore that question.
We don't have to ignore it, but we also don't have to accept an autocrat's temper tantrum by fiat as an answer.
>What's the obvious First Amendment violation here?
The purpose of the First Amendment is to prevent the government from infringing freedom of speech - the President is attempting to use government power to infringe freedom of speech, to do exactly what the First Amendment was created to prevent.
Granted, the First Amendment only explicitly applies to Congress, but I feel like if states can be accused of violating it (as they often were regarding quarantine and shelter-at-home orders) then the President can as well.
This is literally what Twitter has been doing. Trump's order puts an end to it.
> We don't have to ignore it, but we also don't have to accept an autocrat's temper tantrum by fiat as an answer.
Exactly why Twitter needs to be stripped of their 230 protections.
> The purpose of the First Amendment is to prevent the government from infringing freedom of speech - the President is attempting to use government power to infringe freedom of speech, to do exactly what the First Amendment was created to prevent.
This is the government upholding free speech. Twitter's policies and their selective enforcement of such run directly contrary to the underlying tenets of free speech. This holds Twitter accountable for their "un-American" practices.
Although it may be hard to see through the vitriolic debates currently raging, this will be a net win for the internet. This will encourage decentralisation in so far as there is now a soft power cap on these big tech companies.
Debatable, on both points. There have been studies[1] that show that accounts are banned, but it's not necessarily because they are conservative accounts or conservative content. In a civil or criminal case, causation must be established. In this case, the president is making it very much more expensive for certain companies to defend themselves.
This EO is more likely to hurt YouTube than Twitter because it has the ability to get the Federal Government to no longer approve grants to Google subsidiaries and for government agencies to stop advertising with them.
> to be stripped of their 203 protections.
You mean The Communications Decency Act, Section 230?
> Twitter's policies and their selective enforcement of such run directly contrary to the underlying tenets of free speech.
That's interesting. Government law enforcers and prosecutors have the ability to use prosecutorial discretion. Are you saying that the government should be able to select who they prosecute, but that private organizations should not be allowed discretion to enforce their own contracts?
If ISPs (where content in a pipe is pretty close to comparable to Common Carrier standards) can't be held up to the standards of Net Neutrality, how can social media companies (where content is much more subjective to interpret as violations of their contract)?
> this will be a net win for the internet
That remains to be seen. I can see it being another tool where the executive branch gets to unilaterally change the definition of which internet companies get protections, not leveling the playing field.
> This will encourage decentralisation in so far as there is now a soft power cap on these big tech companies.
More likely there will be some obvious "unintended consequences" similar to what happened after Trump signed the FOSTA bill in 2018[2] (hint: multiple dating sites, including Craigslist sections, closed up shop). It will very likely increase the cost of being a user-generated content host to the point that only a very select few companies would do it and they will all require arbitration clauses in the ToS to avoid extremely expensive litigation of the CDA230 rules. I expect a handful of forums and lots of news comments sections to close due to this "free speech" Executive Order.
[1] https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/platform-bias.php
[2] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/03/23/596460672...
thats an interestating take, considering trump is trying to stop the selective editorialization of individuals covered by the first amendment.
are we really taking twitters side of this because we hate trump so much?
Again, the first amendment protects those individuals from being censored by the government. Twitter is not bound by the first amendment. They're allowed to editorialize content. They're allowed to curate, moderate, deplatform and ban people.
However, Twitter is also protected by the first amendment, and Trump's executive order is an attempt to erode those protections.
>are we really taking twitters side of this because we hate trump so much?
No. I believe in the right of platforms to censor content as an extension of their own freedom of speech and association, because that still leaves the internet itself free. If one objects to Twitter's behavior, one can always find a new platform or create one. However, when the government attempts to assert censorship over the entire network, that reduces freedom for everyone.
The order regards the additional protections of section 230 which even protect twitter for content that is not protected by the first amendment. Trump is essentially trying to say if Twitter takes sides by fact-checking some tweets, then they are also responsible for all the other "facts" they allow to be posted on their platform without fact-checking. And by the way the courts are still perfectly capable of deciding in favor of twitter regarding blame for all those other posts too. Twitter just won't be shielded by a special law from such decisions.
Are you required to let me organize a protest in your front yard? Do property rights not matter anymore?
You absolutely do. The same protection that applies to Twitter applies to a personal blog that allows comments, or any site that allows users to post.
So let's look at today. You have a tweet from a conservative group that "concludes" that the only way forward for America is violent action, up to and including murder of political opponents. "The only good Democrat is a dead Democrat".
To me, it seems that there is a plausible argument to be made that this group is inciting violence.
And then Trump re-tweeted it, with the additional commentary, "Thanks, Cowboys of America!".
If we want to compare "consequences of speech and platforms", then on one hand we have hand-wringing about "Twitter _annotated_ a tweet with links to resources about the substance of that tweet", versus "group hints at violent oppression of political opponents, and is given the thumbs up by political leader".
I was going to say "I know which one I find more problematic", but lest someone attempt a slippery slope retort, I'll be more clear: I find only one of these actions at all problematic (and it's not annotation of tweets).
There's some merit to that position, but things like adding a fact check (which you might or might not agree with) do not incur any sort of civil or criminal liability. You make good points, but we should also engage with the reality that the president and his supporters are demanding a quality of representation/protection for their political views that they don't have any particular entitlement to, and for which no mechanism currently exists in law; it seems (going by the general tenor of their arguments over the last few years) like they want to bring back the 'Fairness Doctrine' that obtained for broadcast media up to the Reagan era to create some protected space for their viewpoint.
The way I interpreted it, your parent comment was arguing the opposite of the way you framed it.
It's a long run-on sentence, but the `;` is meant to be interpreted as "start a new sentence that is related to the previous one"
Power and technology can't curate content to the level where you are safe from lawsuits. What you're saying is that if they are willing to do a bit of moderation they should do total moderation.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/28/politics/trump-twitter-social.... > consistent with a draft order whose text CNN first reported last summer
2. What was drafted last summer was legislation. Legislation that would likely not stand up to political or legal resistance. This is an executive order to make an end-run around all that "bureaucracy".
> has little to do with the recent twitter news.
This fails the plausibility test. This came hot on the heels of this incident, Trump _said_ it was related to this incident, and that he'd be doing this as result, and the last several years are packed with a multitude of examples of exactly that: Trump knee-jerking an angry response (words, actions, both) to those who he deems to have slighted him.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/28/politics/trump-twitter-social...
And no it wasn’t legislation it was a draft of an executive order from last summer as mentioned in this article.
No, they're not. You have to visit the Twitter website or otherwise pull the data from some source to get tweets.
it’s about ethics and morals and how we compose a society with mighty power imbalances, fortified by new tech.
It's technically trivial to create your own Twitter. There are indeed plenty of competitors to Twitter. Twitter has no moral or ethical obligation to carry lies. Indeed, the opposite is true: because of their market position, they should be ethically and morally obligated to prevent lies from being spread through their platform because they have the greatest reach.
Would you make this same argument when it comes to privacy? Technically it's your computer sending your data to Google/Facebook, therefore you are giving them permission to use your data, because you're so generously providing it to them. Technically this is true and any real privacy solution would have to address this point, but it's clearly not what is done in legislation.
When you send your data to Google or Facebook by explicitly providing that data, you are giving them permission to use that data for purposes of providing the service for which the data is granted. This is true everywhere, even in the EU.
If you're asking whether that upload would grant Googlebook broader rights to use your data, then the answer is yes in the US because there are no laws currently restricting such use, but no in Europe because EU law says permission must be explicitly granted for other uses.
It is absolutely the case in the USA that private properties which are open to the public are regulated as "places of public accommodation" under, notably, the Civil Rights Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act. That includes privately-owned hotels, schools, restaurants, retail, and more.
You're correct that this is directly analogous to a privately-owned website that is primarily geared toward accommodating the general public (like Twitter), but it makes the opposite point of what you intended.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_accommodations_in_the_U...
Twitter invites the public in to exercise free speech, which in a public space would be protected. This invites an analysis that Twitter may be a quasi-public space that offers some 1st Amd. protections.
Considering they could log out (or open a private tab) and view the content, obviously it wasn't access to the information that was fundamental but the act of the President taking a step to reduce someone's access.
With that in mind, does the host have the authority to take the same action? Why or why not?
This is not a 1st Amendment issue - after all Trump blocking someone doesn't limit their ability to tweet him or at all - but it's a really weird spot of free speech vs private property vs public forum vs public access vs.. ?
Does a private company have the authority to impede access to Official Statements? If so, under what conditions? If no, is it "never"?
The answer is yes to your first question. A private company is not required to make available "Official Statements" (whatever that means) using its own resources. The government (in the US at least) must pay for publication and dissemination of "Official Statements."
And to be clear, I've read the DOJ position asserting that "Trump's tweets are official government statements" (linked in this thread) but wasn't aware of court rulings.
https://www.indiewire.com/2020/04/cnn-msnbc-not-airing-trump...
There are more.
The answers you want are the first search result in Google and Bing for first amendment and compelled speech and are covered by the Wikipedia page on the First Amendment.
Does a private company have the authority to impede access to Official Statements? If so, under what conditions? If no, is it "never"?
As noted, I suspect this is not a 1st Amendment issue as the "speech" is present regardless and you have organizations, not necessarily people.
Twitter is not a legally recognized method of presenting Official Statements, as a matter of law (which sets forth the prescribed methods for making Official Statements). They have no responsibilities to present Official Statements, which means they can "impede" access to those statements on their platform all they like, in whatever manner that takes, from simply deleting such posts to providing fact checks to outright editorializing against the official statements.
As noted, I suspect this is not a 1st Amendment issue as the "speech" is present regardless and you have organizations, not necessarily people.
I don't understand what you're trying to say. This is definitely a First Amendment issue...even the White House acknowledges that this is a First Amendment issue. This order is entirely about trying to violate Twitter's First Amendment rights as a private non-governmental organization.
The Trump DOJ disagrees. Further, the ruling that he had to unblock people on Twitter established exactly that. He had to unblock people because he's making statements about government policy.
Therefore, them muting/hiding/blocking him is impeding access to official government statements.
Further, once they mute/hide/block some of his tweets, they're presenting some but not all.
They would probably be safer to allow all or none. This middle ground is editorial control over government statements which is a bizarre middle ground.. imagine a major announcement or policy change not being reported? Or actively being quashed?
Yes, that is their right to control how their website works.
> that would mean Twitter has to allow anything any public official, at least in the US, broadcasts via that medium...
No, they are not part of the US government, and they are not required to host official US government statements.
[0]: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=are+tru...
https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/government_says_trum...
And so if I run a knitting forum I am not allowed to restrict people who want to turn it into a pornography one. And how would it work for spam. This could end up in a situation where a large spammer could force websites to not remove spam.
It sounds unworkable and over the top just to protect some people who aren't even having their rights impeded.
Twitter would not be mandate to open up access to everyone. Instead, the proposed legal changes would merely treat them as publishers, if they act like publishers, and therefore twitter would not have liability protections anymore.
If they don't like the section 230 laws, that already exist, then they should go lobby Congress to change it or something.
But right now, if you act as a publisher, then you lose certain protections. That's how that law works.
Doesn't matter. Twitter is a privately owned platform not a public one.
SCOTUS has already said that simply being open to the public does not make a business a public platform, see Pruneyard v Robins, applying this reasoning to privately-owned malls.
And yes, that makes all the difference, since SCOTUS has repeatedly held that publicly owned spaces like public parks and main streets are subject to first amendment requirements.
In Packingham v. North Carolina (2017) SCOTUS described social media websites as similar to a public square and ruled that the state couldn't block access to them in an overly broad manner.
Being open to the public does change how a business is regulated (see the ADA and Civil Rights Act among others) even if it doesn't make it a "public platform" specifically. However, a reasonable case can be made that Twitter has _intentionally_ positioned themselves as a public platform and so the case you cite could be argued not to apply.
Alternatively, Twitter could be argued to be editorializing. If that were the case, presumably they wouldn't really be a public platform but rather a publisher. But if that's the case, shouldn't they be held liable for all the nonsense that people post there?
The situation isn't clear at all even though many people on both sides of the debate frequently claim that it is.
Being open to the public does change how a business is regulated (see the ADA and Civil Rights Act among others) even if it doesn't make it a "public platform" specifically
This is true. A statute of Congress can place restrictions on businesses. Last I checked, the President is not a member of Congress, and cannot unilaterally override congressional laws.
Moreover, SCOTUS cases have ruled that privately owned facilities are not subject to the "limited purpose" test. It doesn't matter that they've held themselves open to the public, it matters that they're privately owned. (See Lloyd and Pruneyard, explicitly addressing this point.)
> Last I checked, the President is not a member of Congress, and cannot unilaterally override congressional laws.
I never claimed this? I said only that the current situation was not as simple as you made out. (I would also note that the president appears to be targeting Section 230 protections which is quite a different beast.)
> That's not at all what Packingham says.
Except... it is. In their ruling the court _directly_ compares social media to other venues for public gathering. I'm not claiming that they explicitly rule it to be one way or the other (they don't), but they do repeatedly make direct comparisons that would appear to lean that way.
Except the text of the case itself literally does not do that. You need to read the actual text and not just the summary. Importantly, every time in the case they reference a "social media" website and a form of expression that could occur in a public forum, it is with respect to how the appellant would use that website--to freely express himself under his own first Amendment rights, and they contrast that with the government's attempt to restrict that expression. And as I pointed out, these activities were expressly addressed in the mall cases I cited, in which the courts said it didn't matter that such activities could occur in a mall, what mattered was that the malls were privately owned facilities. (And that is why I keep bringing the cases up--because malls are the closest analog to Twitter. They let people come in and at the time of these cases had millions of customers/visitors annually--on a relative basis, they were more a part of American life back then than Twitter is now.)
I would also note that the president appears to be targeting Section 230 protections which is quite a different beast.
The Section 230 protected are provided by congressional law, so it's not a different beast. The President does not have the power to target section 230 protections. The executive agencies could arguably make rules to change those protections, if they adhere to the administrative rulemaking process and their rules do not contradict the express text or purpose of the law.
I previously pointed out that a reasonable argument can be made as to why that precedent should not apply.
No, you didn't. The ADA (1990) and Civil Rights Act (1964), are older unrelated laws governing different issues. The CDA was passed in 1996, and so jurisprudence and the law itself already incorporated existing understandings of both of those laws...as well as the SCOTUS cases addressing the exact points you raised in your comment (i.e., the mall cases you keep dismissing). The CDA was written in a world where private facilities were not public forums as a result of multiple SCOTUS decisions saying they weren't. And the law reflects that.
> > I previously pointed out ...
> No, you didn't. The ADA ...
That isn't what I was referring to. I initially noted that Twitter has very clearly and intentionally positioned themselves as what I can only think to describe as a public platform. Private malls simply do not do that. They are also so many orders of magnitude larger than any private mall that I fail to see a relevant comparison there. It is my understanding that factors such as intentions and size of influence are important in cases like this. I make no claim as to how that argument would go in court, only that it seems like a reasonable one to put forward.
> You need to read the actual text and not just the summary.
I was very careful to clarify that the court did not explicitly rule on that. When the majority opinion goes out of its way to bring such an issue up and makes direct comparisons, I think it is reasonable to assume that they would be open to entertaining such a line of argument. If they thought it was ridiculous then why did they bring it up and go on about it to such an extent?
You need to actually read the private mall cases, since the malls actually held themselves out to be replacements for the public square, i.e., to replace Main St and the public park where people used to freely meet and discuss stuff. There is a reason these cases are so important to First Amendment jurisprudence.
The point of the private mall cases is that it doesn't matter if they hold themselves out to be replacements for the traditional public forum, because they're not actually a public forum--they're still just privately owned venues that can withdraw their openness to public expression at any time as a matter of their own first amendment rights.
Twitter is just the new private mall. It may hold itself up to be a public platform, but as a private entity, it can revoke that presentation at any time as a matter of its own first amendment rights.
It is my understanding that factors such as intentions and size of influence are important in cases like this
You would be wrong. This has never been relevant to first amendment cases. Moreover, at the time of the private mall cases, the malls had significantly more customers on an absolute and proportional basis (out of the US population at the time) than Twitter does today in the US.
When the majority opinion goes out of its way to bring such an issue up and makes direct comparisons, I think it is reasonable to assume that they would be open to entertaining such a line of argument.
The ruling does not "go out of its way" to compare social media platforms to public forums. In mentions "public forum" only once, offhand, as one of the ways that social media could be used by the appellant whose civil rights were being violated when the government tried to bar him from using social media. And even then, under the lineage of the private mall cases, it's irrelevant because private websites are still private websites with their own first amendment rights to control the speech that appears on their websites.
Currently. Might not be long after this change to Section 230 enforcement.
> Twitter matters to political discourse, knitting doesn't.
I don't follow this logic. There are substitutes for Twitter, even banned users can view publicly posted content on Twitter, and the CDA Section 230 has nothing to do with "political discourse" -- it describes all content.
I'm also fascinated that you used the word "political" and not "policy". All things "political" could vanish tomorrow and the world would be better off. Not being able to discuss policy issues/ideas would be tragic.
It easy to make it workable, just claim that general-purpose platforms beyond a certain use size become public forums where freedom of speech must be protected.
If an online forum wants to curate speech it should be treated as a publisher. Or, perhaps develop some legal regime that recognizes that smaller forums can be restrict to certain topics, but not viewpoints if they want to retain their immunity against defamation.
edit: deleted some nonsense that I got wrong
It's also not Day 1 of "Trump being upset at Twitter for much the same reasons", so no doubt there's been a plan. But ascribing the timing of this EO to "just a coincidence" stretches credulity, to me.
The timing of this release is hardly coincidental, but it's been on the minds of the politicians for long enough that this reads to me more like an opportune time to push something forward that's been brewing for a while, rather than an off-the-cuff reaction.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/15/us/donald-trump-twitter-f...
[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/26/us/politics/twitter-shado...
The Supreme Court may eventually take one of these cases and come to a different conclusion.
I guess it comes down to whether these justices are ideologically "right-leaning", or just Republican partisans.
And where does the Constitution say that a corporation spending money is speech?
You could say that the value of free speech is so important to society that it is codified on the Constitution. These companies that become big enough platforms should respect that value.
You could also say that the Constitution provides free speech protections to everyone. These companies should benefit from those same protections, thus the government shouldn't be able to interfere what these companies publish.
User count? Great, while the user count is < N the platform is moderated and popular. As soon as the user count exceeds N it's instantly a cesspool of spam and porn. Then what, it bleeds users and drifts back into the first category again? They're going to write subjective distinctions on the content of the speech into the law to differentiate between spam, porn, porn-spam, and political speech?
It doesn't work! If it could work, please, anyone who reads this comment: Many of us are programmers here, propose a rule that doesn't fall apart.
The second interpretation is at least consistent, even if it does protect corporations.
If Twitter is the devil just leave Twitter, no one has to use it. Gab exists. We have no legal right to access the people who are on Twitter.
Legislation has an easy out here: "you'll know it when you see it." Courts would decide and they already need to decide on these distinctions.
>If Twitter is the devil just leave Twitter, no one has to use it. Gab exists. We have no legal right to access the people who are on Twitter.
There's also no reason why the government has to give special protections to Twitter and other sites like it.
Whilst it might be, but is the left in us is already right (like Obama use Romey Insuranve not single payer). Or are we in mix economy some are left some are right. Or left right actually many different things like large and small Gov,liberty, ownership, ...
Or is there something like open source which is beyond left and right but community, not gov vs market etc.
From my perspective, left-meaning means having a close association with reality and pragmatism, and right-leaning means do and say anything to make the rich richer.
"There were only three areas in which Rehnquist showed any interest in enforcing the constitutional guarantee of free expression: in cases involving advertising, religious expression and campaign finance regulation. Rehnquist was 2.6 times more likely to invalidate laws restricting commercial advertising than laws restricting political or artistic expression. He voted to invalidate campaign finance legislation 67 percent of the time, and he voted to invalidate restrictions on religious expression 100 percent of the time. Indeed, in non-unanimous decisions, Rehnquist was 14.7 times more likely to vote to invalidate a law restricting commercial advertising, campaign expenditures, or religious expression than one involving any other aspect of 'the freedom of speech, or of the press.'"[1]
[1] https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2005-09-06-050906...
You can call the right hypocrites for doing a 180 on corporate property rights and demanding a 21st century fairness doctrine.. but didn't the left do a 180 as well?
Some may want to break true monopolies maybe, but twitter?
Anyway i was convinced by a conservative that big media companies should be partially nationalized (for gov oversight), still i don't think twitter is a big enough natural monopoly to warrant that.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/16pdf/15-1194_08l1.pdf
The case was about a government trying to restrict a sex offender from accessing web sites where he could engage in first amendment activities like commenting. The court ruled that they could not, absent a sufficient showing that the restrictions on the appellant's internet usage were necessary to prevent the sex offender from re-offending.
In fact the express language of the ruling states that social media sites are a means for accessing the public square, not that these sites are the public square. Moreover, these dicta statements (i.e., non-binding commentary) are a direct reference to the first amendment mall cases, which similarly involved activities that could occur in a public square. The mall cases held that private malls could ban speech because they were private facilities, thus they were not public squares even though the public could (and frequently did) engage in traditional public square activities in the mall.
TLDR: the private-public distinction matters for First Amendment law. The First Amendment only applies to public properties and public agencies, not private properties or persons.
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, such as empirical claims about businesses.
Anyone who is hated broadly by the internet, whether just or unjust, would like FB to be liable no matter what is right or wrong, because holding hundreds of tiny individuals accountable for tiny wrongs over the web is a losing battle.
Not true. You can be sued for Libel on Twitter and Facebook [1].
https://slate.com/technology/2012/11/libel-on-twitter-you-ca...
For sure, if you are Elon Musk and you claim on your twitter account that a world renowned diver is a pedophile, you might suffer real consequences.
But if someone posts on my restaurant's yelp page a totally fabricated negative review, what are my options? Even let's say I have video or other evidence that disproves their assertion (unlikely), I will need to quantity the harm that this particular internet comment did to my business, which is in most cases nearly impossible. And all for what? A median wage worker isn't going to be able to cover my lawyers fee's (assuming I can prove malicious intent) before going into bankruptcy.
What businesses really want is to be able to sue Yelp itself for libel. They want to say: "Yelp, you didn't quality control your comments, these reviews are being fabricated. After my 5 star rating dropped to 1, my business’s income plummeted, now pay up."
I don't think it would be a good idea if our laws worked like that, but as the parent points out, the current situation is that the platforms are more or less immune to libel, and suing random internet commenters for libel makes no sense.
Section 230 shields Facebook from liability for these posts, not the users. And Facebook generally responds to subpoenas from a court for IP address data that can be used to identify a the user behind a libelous post...
The restaurant can sue all of the other users for libel, and if it's a coordinated effort or the apparent facts behind each libelous act are sufficiently similar, they can get them joined into a class action imposing joint and several liability imposed on the named defendants (i.e. the few they are able to reasonably identify), meaning that it is now the named defendants' responsibility to find the other users if they want to avoid paying the full damages out of their own pockets.
Believe it or not, all of these hypothetical that techies keep bringing up on HN in this thread as if they were magical logical bullets have long been addressed by courts and/or legislators.
Are you sure you're not engaging in some magical thinking when you imagine Yelp users enjoined as a defendant class? When is the last high profile case where something like this happened?
Perhaps this will end the same way codifying the word “Marriage” in the Defense of Marriage Act did. Nothing like Federalizing a word.
1. Start a website where users are able to write arbitrary articles.
2. Have a bot systematically spam your site with all possible articles (suitably limited so as to make this technically doable).
3. Systematically weed out all the articles which are NOT equal to the articles you actually wanted to publish.
Voila, now you've published all and only the articles you wanted, and yet you're just an innocent platform, not a publisher!
If your site is sufficiently widely used, you can even cut out step 2 and replace it with organic human beings.
That doesn't mean that it wouldn't work. Adult websites have been accused of something similar: as the version goes, they'll take your (illegally published) video down on request, no questions asked, but "someone" will upload it again later.
I've never heard of anyone being prosecuted for this, though, which means that either it isn't true, or it is and your plan would work just fine.
Demonstrate that users on Twitter aren't bots. Otherwise I don't see a difference here.
(Cause I'm about to drink a gallon of bleach and eat 2 lbs of raw garlic to ward off Covid as per a tweet's instruction ;) (joking) )
This is neither here nor there but I have considered my self a republican for the last 28 years of my life. This president's actions make me feel physically ill.
Hm.... I don't see how Twitter is preventing anyone from the right to communicate, nor do I sense that Twitter has the power, even if it worked with the next 3 largest social media platforms, to "block all communications." Last I checked, the internet would still exist if Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin shut down.
Platforms both enjoy first amendment protection to moderate their platforms as they see fit as well as protection from liability under 230. They are not mutually exclusive, and platforms have been moderating their content for decades. In fact most online communities could not even function if they had no right to moderate.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/04/no-section-230-does-no...
Terrorism and child porn are criminal activities.
Expressing an opinion , no matter how unsavory, is not
Therefore systematically editioralizing of the latter constitutes control which means you own all content on your site ... Including the aforementioned criminal content
This honestly seems to be the model that Republicans have been pining for all along, they just don't like that they or their supporters are falling victim to its design.
Yet no one dares to answer this straightforward question.
Is twitter a public utility, or are they an editor?
They are behaving like an editor. Therefore they should lose their public utility S230 exception.
Its as simple as that
Lets fact check "God exists".
Easy, it's the same answer as the opposite assertion:
Undetermined. This statement is not agreed upon and is an ongoing subject of debate among both experts and in popular culture.
Also, they are fact checking other people - for example, they've fact checked Chinese politicians tweeting propaganda about COVID starting in the US.
They fact check everyone who represents more than 10% of their total traffic.
It just so happens that only one of those people tweets information that needs fact checking.
Same for Venezuelan dito.
Those machines stored voting tallies on unencrypted compact flash cards, and there were massive other flaws in their security. But those machines were so insecure, that it would be difficult to prove fraud even happened if it had occurred.
Twitter chose a the wrong tweet to fact check. They are now asserting that a black-box mail voting system that has never been tried on this scale is secure, and we should just stop asking questions.
If I said that I was skeptical of the outcome of the elections that were conducted with voting machines made by Dick Cheney's company, in swing states, running Windows 98, am I going to be fact checked?
I'm really amazed at amount of trust people on HN are putting in mail in ballots.
Voting by mail can be done securely, but there are major problems with the current proposals. Just because Trump said it doesn't mean it is not true. My understanding is that the current proposals do not meet international requirements of transparency to qualify as truly fair.
[1]: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2004/03/diebolds-politi...
It seems like a really open-ended thing to fact check.
I wish we had asked more questions about election integrity before 2016. I think it is better that we have a robust discussion about this NOW, before the election.
The most important thing about elections is that they be trustworthy by the majority of the population. Without sufficient transparency and oversight, actual security is meaningless. The Computerphile did a two great videos about the dangers of electronic voting:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs
It seems like mail in ballots re-create the same problems with electronic voting, except that we are just adding an extra layer to it.
But, I know that countries like Germany and Switzerland have instituted some fairly robust means of securing mail in voting -- none of which we are considering. Simple things, like having the affidavit be on the same piece of paper as the ballot, and having ensuring chain of custody of the ballots by only having postal workers pick them up directly from voters.
Are we allowed to express our concerns about this? I for one do not want to make things worse this time around. Is the discussion about this really ending because Twitter decreed it so?
I'd say fact-checking your top-50 users is a good idea, for statements which are completely and unarguably false beyond all doubt.
Beyond that, YouTube has been heavily moderating content on covid. They display labels very similar to the ones Twitter is under fire for now. The only fundemental distinction is everybody agrees the virus is a plague.
Here's the tweet: https://twitter.com/zlj517/status/1238111898828066823?s=20
You know how people can be reserved in the real world but say the weirdest shit on Twitter? Honestly, Trump is such a coward, I think without Twitter he wouldn't have dared spit the venom he's been spitting left and right, because he would've had to go in front of a lectern to be heard instead.
They're fact checking more than just Trump:
https://twitter.com/icecube/status/1265623592764534784
https://twitter.com/zlj517/status/1238269193427906560
Fact: The sun will rise at 5:50am in San Francisco tomorrow.
False: The sun will rise at 10:00am in San Francisco tomorrow.
There are tradeoffs with accessibility, of course, but it seems depressingly easy to sell a mail-in ballot to someone else or to be verifiably coerced by a boss or family member into voting a certain way.
All-in-all Trump tweets worse, dangerous lies on a daily basis so it's bizarre they're pushing back now on this.
In reality, several states have had mail voting for years- Oregon for decades- without coercion being a problem. Millions of votes cast without the problem you suggest. It's not a problem, despite using our imaginations to come up with ways it can be.
You can take a picture of the ballot with your boss's choice but then spoil it and get another one.
> several states have had mail voting for years without coercion being a problem
How do you know this? How could anyone know if a wife voted the same way as her husband because she wanted to or because he just filled out both mail-in ballots himself?
There are differences in scale too; It's hard to steal a ballot, for example, when only 1% of the population is voting by mail. It's easy when 60% of mailboxes have a ballot in them on the same day.
Finally even if it hasn't been a problem so far, it is not a "fact" that it cannot and will not be a problem in the future.
Twitter said no such thing, however. Twitter's annotation simply noted that Trump's claim was "unsubstantiated". They did not make an assertion of the inverse of Trump's claim.
> How could anyone know if a wife voted the same way as her husband because she wanted to or because he just filled out both mail-in ballots himself?
This could be easily said about in-person ballots too. 8 states require photo ID, and many people will be covering their faces when they vote in-person anyway.
Edit: I find it funny someone claiming it was due to fact checking downvotes me because I fact checked them.
> consistent with a draft order whose text CNN first reported last summer
From 5 days ago: https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/23/21268433/president-trump-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democrat_Party_(epithet)
Anyway, you do realize that the very fact that I was linking to "here's what someone in a position to challenge or at least refuse to enforce this inanity" implies that I'm scarcely trying to side with the party backing the trigger-happy president, right?
Is it such a big deal that I didn’t use her name?
What examples of this unfairness are being referred to? I never understand why journalist don't press harder and follow up with obvious questions. Same with "many people are saying" style statements.
> If it's so easy to ignore hard question, why doesn't everyone just do this to avoid criticism from the press?
Have you seen how this administration has been running press conferences? It's not an entirely unprecedented trainwreck (when any administration is in scandal mode, it behaves in such a fashion), but it is unprecedented for how frequently it has had to operate in scandal mode.
Its supporters, of course, point to this sort of thing as an example of the bad liberal media bias that is being mean to the greatest man in the history of this country. The WHPS of the week could spend every single conference reading from a phonebook, and it still wouldn't change anyone's mind on anything.
The premise is also false - the shield from [liability] applies regardless of the political affiliation, motivation, or actions of the platform. He's trying to convince people that Twitter had some kind of duty to remain neutral, but they really don't. Twitter would have just as strong of a case under current law if they came out and said "yep, no conservative viewpoints allowed here."
At least it'd be clear if they said so, nothing worse than the current situation where they think it but won't say it because it'd be bad for business.
Some prominent conservatives have been banned from the platform, like Alex Jones, but it wasn't due to their views on Keynesian economics, it was for spreading outright lies about Sandy Hook.
Diving deeper into almost any of the examples that people dig up as 'anti-conservative bias' reveals trolling, hateful attacks, or other bad behavior, completely independent of the author's political views, and earnestly deserving of removal.
Are you a conservative yourself?
I'm gonna take a guess that you are not so how would you know?
It's a real question, no trick.
Since you're not a progressive, you can't counter my claim as there's no way you would know about any anti-progressive bias.
Now I can tell you as a conservative, because I experience it every day.
Here's an example:
I have 2 accounts, one that I use for politics and news, conservative leaning, WSJ, Thomas Sowell, Peter Robinson (Uncommon Knowledge), Kimberley Strassel... that brand of conservatism, not talking about the crazy alt-right shit here which I don't follow, and a second account that I use for my work with only software dev stuffs and mainstream/more neutral media, Reuters etc, nothing that could brand me as conservative.
On my political & news account I'm always getting recommendations for CNN and other left-leaning commentators and media (no recommendation for other conservative outlets) at the top of my recommendation list, or some kind of outrageous claim that a right leaning person would have done, for example, right now got:
"Kellyanne Conway compares voting in person to waiting in line for cupcakes".
Another one: "Trump makes unsubstantiated claim that mail-in ballots will lead to voter fraud"
I also got "Don Lemon" on "Trending".
That's the kind of recommendation I'm not getting on my work account, where it's mixed between news (without any outrageous/divise claims unless there's really something crazy that happened that day) and other subjects targeted to my interests.
Is it a scientific proof, no, but once you spend enough time comparing with multiple accounts like that you can see a pretty clear pattern on how they try to influence, and it's not subtle even.
The "unfairness" is a fact check that got attached to a couple of his tweets: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/12652558351245393....
Journalists do press him for details, but they get answers like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNlSRd2w5IA.
Do you think it's really a coincidence that the side that promotes racism, xenophobia, homophobia, etc is the side getting 'censored'?
Seems like a natural result to me.
That is not censoring a conservative viewpoint. It's just giving people some facts. Here's Trump's opinion, here's some data, make your own decision.
I am sure that if Joe Biden started tweeting random conspiracy theories, Twitter would fact check those. But he doesn't, so we don't get to see that in action. Just because a conservative person in power tends to lie and start conspiracy theories on social media, doesn't mean the platform is biased against conservatives. It just means that they're not going to publish falsehoods without a little asterisk.
Twitter's "fact check" singles out a specific Trump tweet. It's clearly a human intervention by Twitter staff, not user generated content. The subject of Trump's tweet was a political dispute, and while Trump certainly had false statements in his tweet, that's basically par for the course on Twitter.
This raises a bunch of questions. Why is Twitter singling out Trump for his false statements? If AOC or Bernie Sanders make false or misleading statements about economics (which they frequently do), will those also receive fact checks and warning labels?
We have seen this also with the coronavirus breakout. Medium and other publishers removed posts based that were sanguine data analysis (nothing inflammatory) because they were against the prevailing media sentiment. For example this Medium post [1] was removed based on its content. It did not contain anything inflammatory, violent, or otherwise unsavory. Medium just didn't like what it said.
At what point does Twitter or Medium cease to be a neutral discussion platform, and become more like a publisher that pushes a specific narrative (like Fox News, the New York Times, CNN, etc.). They are certainly within their rights do curate/moderate their platform, but if this continues, we need to start thinking of these companies less like user driven platforms, and more like opinionated publishers.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200321144004/https:/medium.com...
They aren't. They've labeled other tweets before.
> If AOC or Bernie Sanders make false or misleading statements about economics (which they frequently do), will those also receive fact checks and warning labels?
Presumably, yes.
The idea of "facts" in economics can't extend very far beyond metics and other numbers, as most of the rest is up to vigorous theoretical, political debate. If this original poster is so keen on fact checking the "economics" of a certain political sides, it seems likely that they are not concerned with actual facts but rather deeply held theoretical and political beliefs that they have elevated to "fact" status.
Does anyone who is downvoting this want to provide counter arguments or reasons this content shouldn’t be viewed by others? It all seems very reasonable and well thought out to me.
What does "neutral discussion platform" even mean? My understanding is that Fox News, New York Times, CNN, etc, all benefit from protections against what users post in places like comments sections, etc.
This whole "neutrality" aspect seems like a talking point meant to attack social media platforms from a strawman perspective of "Only 'neutral' platforms are allowed protections from liability" that doesn't seem to actually be related to the law itself.
I don't think there is legal basis for Trump's order, but Twitter is wading into murky territory with their actions.
I wouldn't consider basic moderation activities as "murky territory".
BTW, don’t think voter fraud with mail in votes is possible? Think again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCrae_Dowless
The GOP knows it’s an issue better than anyone since they leverage it heavily.
You aren't describing "neutrality" you are describing "feigning ignorance". And even if this could be considered "neutral" why is that something to push for (not just on Twitter but on every private business/platform/etc in existence) and what does this have to do with the law in question?
I wouldn’t, nor have I seen anyone, suggest that this is something to push for on every private business/platform/etc in existence. The point to be made is twofold:
1) Have the large social media platforms developed into general spheres of public discourse and thus have become central to ongoing function of public life? If so, then ANY active control over the narratives allowed on the platforms if is of critical concern to the function of Democracy.
2) Separate from point #1 which is broader than Section 230, is whether or not control over the narratives allowed on the platforms is equivalent to editorial moderation at publishers, changing them from being governed by Section 230?
To be clear, I don’t know the answers to either of these questions. But I sure as shit know that I would prefer major realms of public discourse to be free of some bull shit “arbiter of truth” controlling the presentation of people’s thoughts in them.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/nratv-dan-bongino-my-life-is-...
We should call what it is. They working to make the lives of other US citizens as miserable as they can. Whoever does this is working against their own country. This is unpatriotic.
--Frank Wilhoit
The main tool that populism leverages is anger. It is true on both sides of the political spectrum.
(backstory: Trump has been repeatedly peddling an absolutely baseless claim that his TV critic Joe Scarborough murdered his employee couple of decades back. Her husband is now pleading that Trump is causing irreparable damage to their family). Anyway, here's Limbaugh:
“The thing here is when you get to Trump and his conspiracy theories, he does it in a really clever way,” he proclaimed. “And this is where people don’t get the subtlety of Trump because they don’t think he has the ability to be subtle. Trump never says that he believes these conspiracy theories that he touts. He’s simply passing them on.”
Asked by his producer whether he thinks “Trump cares whether Scarborough murdered anybody or not,” Limbaugh replied that the president doesn’t care but is tweeting about it “because it’s out there.”
“So Trump is just throwing gasoline on a fire here, and he’s having fun watching the flames—and he’s having fun watching these holier-than-thou leftist journalists react like their moral sensibilities have been forever rocked and can never recover,” he concluded.
It's about how to attack the vilified 'other side'. As long as Trump does that, he does no wrong with his supporters.
No longer a society discussing its management. More a cultural civil war. A country divided, weakened.
But to be fair, I've seen a lot of supposed progressives on Twitter suddenly finding themselves very concerned with the rights of private businesses.
Not much wrong with using the tools available to accomplish a goal. The end game is moral and the means aren't that immoral at all.
And yes, that is a new position for me. These past few years have been quite the education about the downsides of federal power as a liberal.
The only thing both sides agree on is that they don't have anywhere near enough input in your life.
That means it is not about expanding government power but removing protections that the government granted to corporations.
There is already protected speech. You can say whatever you want as long as its not libel, treason, direct threats, etc.
Twitter has a TOC that is not strictly based on protected speech. They ban people / censor people all the time who violate their TOC but do not violate the law.
Also, it is not going to be certain speech that is protected but certain companies. Its possible Twitter would not have protection but Facebook could.
The problem is enforcement. How exactly will we make Twitter be politically neutral? There are two basic ways: you either eliminate Twitter’s ability to moderate at all, or someone has to define what speech is immune from moderation in the name of political neutrality.
The former is disastrous for the quality of these platforms. All kinds of anti-social and unpleasant behavior is protected speech, as is pornography and violent material. I think we can all agree that Twitter is within its rights to say “no porn here”, so we don’t want to set the bar at protected speech.
If we decide that twitter can moderate some but not all protected speech, then someone must legally define what protected speech is immune from moderation, and what protected speech is not. This represents an expansion of government power, as you’re giving the government the power to decide what types of protected speech is more important than other types of protected speech.
I think you are making a poor argument. Somebody could take your exact argument and say that you cannot have anti-discrimination laws for hiring or renting.
We would also handle abuses / accusations of abuses in the same way as anti discrimination laws.
I think what conservatives tend to see are a few examples where there appears to be bias. Liberals say something that violates the TOC and it doesn't get censored or when it does it takes longer for it to be censored. When a conservative says the same thing it get censored much faster.
For example an Asian who is liberal saying "white people are bs" is perfectly acceptable but a black conservative person saying "Jewish people are bs" with explicit notice that it is a parody of the first is not acceptable.
There are many examples where this happens but most publicly know cases appears to be against conservative.
This is of course possibly anecdotal but its understandable to come to the conclusion when Jack Dorsey admitted that most of the moderators are liberal.
Its hard to know if there is actual bias since people who don't have a large following don't make the news when they are censored.
I think a way to solve this would be:
1. Have more people with a variety of views on the moderation team.
2. Require multiple people to accept that something should be censored. Ideally people with different views.
3. Have a moderation log that allows watch groups review if they want.
I am not sure if Twitter could ask for political views prior to hiring a moderator so that could be an issue.
Only if you’re willing to argue that speech and race are the same thing, or that access to Twitter and housing are the same thing.
You can try this argument, just don’t expect it to persuade many people.
> I think what conservatives tend to see are a few examples where there appears to be bias.
You can spend your whole day trying to prove that Twitter is biased, and you will have completely ignored my actual point. You don’t need to prove that Twitter is biased, you need to prove that Twitter’s supposed biases justifies the government regulating protected speech.
I genuinely couldn’t care less if Twitter is biased if you don’t meet that second, higher bar. Use a different platform, petition twitter, complain here, just don’t ask the government to regulate speech.
> I get what your saying now.
Given that you did not address my core concern, I do not believe this.
>The working group will also monitor or create watch-lists of users based on their interactions with content or other users.[1]
I'm sure there are plenty of "small government" and libertarian-leaning folks who are now in favor of government watch lists based off who and what US citizens interact with on social media.
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/article/twitter-trump-executive-orde...
The power and scope of the third branch shouldn’t be ignored, and “conservative” in the judicial sense is usually about reducing the scope of life that’s subject to the court’s control.
The government should only be as large as the entities threatening it's citizens rights.
The scale of "small" is relative, especially when dealing with large multinational corporations.
1. These protections shouldn't be necessary in the first place. The first amendment should make most copyright enforcement, libel suits, etc. illegal. Of course, that's not the world we live in.
2. Freedom of association (being able to turn people away from your business) is absolutely a fundamental right, but I have zero sympathy for progressives when they get screwed on this, because they've done more than anyone in US history to eliminate freedom of association. They made this bed, now they have to lie in it. When you give the government the power to force people to work with parties they don't want to, obviously that's going to turn around and bite you in the ass at some point when you lose control of the institutions that decide how you're allowed to choose who you work with.
So, on net, this sucks and I wish it was very different, but I have no sympathy whatsoever for the people who brought this upon themselves.
Regardless, for me this goes back to the Covington Catholic incident. Nick Sandmann sued the Washington Post, NBC, and CNN for defamation and settled. He had a pretty strong case. I think being able to sue for defamation is reasonable and not necessarily indicative of big government support.
But Twitter can't be sued but that was where the videos of him were posted and it was where a Twitter mob formed and peopled doxed him and started to call for Nick's head. I remember seeing it all happen in real time on Friday on Twitter. By Sunday the news outlets were running with it.
At that time, Twitter wasn't flagging content as misleading however, they were banning harmful rhetoric. I guess to me that sort of activity that happened in January 2019 is harmful rhetoric. The ability to let an angry mob defame someone like that and even threaten someone is something Twitter should take responsibility for. Every other publishing platform is held to those standards. If Twitter is profiting from the use which may include activities like defaming someone, then it makes sense that victims are entitled to some compensation from them in addition to any users. Although I appreciate there are fine legal arguments to be made here.
And for the record, it seems like fairly normal discourse on Twitter to expose people with personal information for specifically being racist, misogynist, etc. without any evidence required and people usually condone this. This definitely can be damaging and I think people who are victims of this justly ought to be able to recover losses. Twitter doesn't seem to have much interest in stopping it like they do other forms of harmful speech so I think victims ought to be able to get justice and that has nothing to do with Trump's tweeting habits.
Is this not similar to the approach and actions of other large State actors out there that hold a lot of authoritative power?
From a 3rd country's perspective, really, all authoritative countries look the same in their policies barring nuances.
If someone tweets that you are a murderer, you can't sue Twitter (or rather, if you do, Twitter will be protected by Section 230).
However, suppose Twitter announces the following policy: "Any tweet which calls someone a murderer, shall be deleted, unless the alleged murderer is gulli1010". Should you be allowed to sue Twitter then? That's a more nuanced question. And what if the above policy isn't an official policy but is a de facto policy?
If you are serious, it's because Trump has done more for the legitimacy and usage of Twitter than any engineer, businessperson, or celebrity other than Dorsey & cofounders.
To be clear: Twitter may take a tough official stance against Trump, but behind closed doors he is the MVP.
[1]:https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TWTR/twitter/stock...
[2]: https://www.macrotrends.net/2488/sp500-10-year-daily-chart
I saw it posted somewhere that because 80m people follow Trump, he sways the monthly actives... but there are others with more followers than Trump.
I don't think there is enough evidence of his impact to the stock price.
edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-followed_Twitter_...
1. Barack Obama, 118 million.
2. Justin Bieber, 111.
3. Katy Perry, 108.
4. Rihanna, 96.
5. Taylor Swift, 86.
6. Christiano Ronoldy, 84.
7. Lady Gaga, 81.
8. Donald Trump, 80.
9. Ellen DeGeneres, 80.
10. Ariana Grande, 74.
The next highest politican is Indian Prime Minister Modi, at #17 with 57 million. The Office of the Prime Minister of India is at #42, with 35 million. Obama, Trump, and Modi are the only politicians in the top 50.
The only individuals in the top 50 who are not those three or entertainers (counting athletes as entertainers) are Bill Gates at #22 with 50 million and Elon Musk at 47 with 34 million.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-followed_Twitter_...
Obama has 118M followers, whereas Trump's tweets have reach on the magnitude of billions of people. Had Obama been a Tweeter-In-Chief like Trump while he was president, his tweets would've had a similar reach.
Follow numbers matter little, if at all. In fact follower numbers are a rounding error in this context. Trump's tweet's reach is on the order of billions of people; hundreds of news organizations cite his tweets on a weekly (sometimes daily) basis, and orders of magnitude more bloggers do so as well.
It's absolutely true, but people may not like to acknowledge that.
I think you vastly overestimate the number of extremely online politics people who pay close attention to Trump's tweets. People use Twitter to follow their friends and celebrities, not because of Trump. Only a minuscule fraction of the attention that Twitter receives is attributable to him.
Here is a quote from him: "Blocking a world leader from Twitter or removing their controversial Tweets would hide important information people should be able to see and debate,” [...] “It would also not silence that leader, but it would certainly hamper necessary discussion around their words and actions.”
He apparently feels there will be wider discussion from all parts of the political spectrum if things are left as they are. Should Trump move to a platform where he has more control over the format, it might just make it easier for him to suppress or obfuscate dissent.
I don't know if Dorsey is making the right call here, but he has clearly thought about it a lot, and discussed those thoughts publicly.
If Twitter did ban his account, what about other equally bad but smaller accounts? How many can they ban?
It seems like Twitter is in a lose-lose situation here.
Twitter bans many other equally bad ... and many other much less bad accounts.
Similarly, I'm conflicted. I understand Jack's argument, but I'm not sure he's making the right call here. It is highly unlikely Trump could build a platform or co-opt one that has the reach of Twitter. And arguably, the terms of service should apply equally to everyone on the platform. Trump has engaged in hate speech and targeted his followers against individuals in a way that probably destroyed their lives (death threats, etc.). IMHO, Twitter should enforce their TOS against all users in a fair and equal way, regardless of whether they are POTUS or a normal citizen.
Thought experiment: if instead of posting on Twitter, he sent an e-mail to a few thousand journalists?
I never use or consume Twitter, but I see screen captures of things Twitter posts all the time.
Granted: one big thing this approach misses is the back and forth. I gather Trump re-tweets quite a bit of stuff, and responds to others. I guess that could be simulated via e-mail.
My point is that as far as his ability to be heard, I don't think Twitter is necessary.
Twitter gives him direct access to his electorate, which is extremely valuable.
A better approach may be to offer a resource page that shows every news article on the topic, with guidelines on political leaning, how credible each article is etc so that readers can exercise their critical thinking to figure out what to believe. For example: https://story.thefactual.com/news/story/239362-Social-Media shows 285 related articles.
Disclosure: above page is from my startup, The Factual.
Your entire post just reads like an advertisement for your project, which a number have tried and hit the limits of effectiveness on.
This is a true statement.
>A better approach may be to offer a resource page that shows every news article on the topic, with guidelines on political leaning
...seems to just introduce another level of bias. Every "media bias" website touts "objective analysis" while in the FAQ they admit to relying on a panel that they assure you is 100% objective. How do you guarantee that these ratings are not "flawed as it requires human judgment, which is hobbled by people's biases and potential lack of topical expertise"? See: allsides.com[1] and Media Bias Fact Check [2].
Looking at your employee page, you seem to have exactly zero employees with any significant background in journalism. What "topical expertise" does Factual provide that a layperson doesn't have? How do you minimize human judgement?
This reads to me as "You shouldn't use Facebook because you're the product, not the customer, which leads to bad incentive alignment. Use Twitter instead."
[1] https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-rating-method... [2] https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/methodology/
Edit: I know election and inauguration are separate, I was wondering about the significance of this to Twitter.
Remember how he got impeached for doing exactly this?
This should be a well-known fact but some people still don't accept it, 4 years after he was elected (will 8 years do the trick?)
The Citizens United v. FEC decision indicates that corporations have free speech rights similar to those of individuals. Logically, if you agree with that part of the decision, then you should also agree that the government can't punish Twitter for doing this, and vice versa.
Yet very few people seem to hold either of those combinations of views. There are a few principled civil libertarians who are fine with both super-PACs and what Twitter did here. There are a few principled fair campaign advocates who think it's theoretically permissible, if inadvisable, for the government to stop what Twitter did here.
Most people seem to take one of the inconsistent positions.
While I don't agree with this weird S230 opposition, the general sentiment that people expect to have a similar protection for free speech that they enjoy in our public squares, street corners, libraries and parks in the online alternatives to these things... isn't really a crazy one.
It's also a tenshion that exists in offline form. Increasingly there are gigantic public "downtown" areas which are privately owned (on land taken from the public through eminent domain then sold to developers), where people's free speech is heavily curtailed.
The general idea that just because the physical manifestation (or legal structure) behind our traditional public spaces is changing our effective right to free speech shouldn't change seems like a reasonable idea to me.
Also the general idea that twitter itself should automatically be free from regulation in how it restricts others due to its own free speech seems extremely specious to me. Twitter is a business, it operates to make money. While businesses have free speech right, commercial operations have a strictly lower level of rights in many areas. Twitter has only refrained from banning the president, who regularly and flagrantly violates their rules, because he makes them money. If twitter consisted primarily of its owners speech no one would visit it. It is effectively a place of public accommodation and its value stems entirely from the public's use of it. We traditionally impose significant regulation on how private businesses that serve the public operate, including extensive rules ensuring equality of access and against discrimination.
This executive order seems pretty foolish overall. But a law that set a threshold where a service like twitter become a "public forum"-- places where the public use is the whole point-- and they had to meet a much higher standard when they wanted to silence people or ideas (beyond "our AI picked you at random, tough luck") and had provide effective modes of redress might be important to preserving people's effective freedom of speech in the long run.
Individuals have the freedom of speech, but the can also be sued for liable for the things they say. Twitter can't be sued, because they are "re-transmitting" information. That's why Elon was sued for his "pedo guy" tweet and not twitter. Am I missing something here?
It seems like it makes corporations more like people in that if they curate content [in some vaguely biased way] then they can be held liable for that act. Because by doing that they are exercising their freedom of speech.
I think an interesting question is what will become the threshold for acceptable curation. Is it just illegal content, ex. CP. It seems like this has the potential for more legislation defining speech.
I think you're drastically overestimating the profitability of a single twitter user.
They have hundreds of millions of active users. It would probably be far easier and more cost effective to ban every user that causes them any amount of grief, than to investigate and potentially sue them.
Fraud and libel come close, but there are important requirements in both cases beyond truth value.
It's like they've never even been to a movie theater where they need to shut the hell up or leave.
And here we have a US president signing an executive order in response to being moderated on a web site after years of arguably excessive tolerance of his b.s.
I'm not sure how much more embarrassed I can get for my country.
The first amendment is there from preventing the government from controlling the speech. Exactly what Trump is doing to Twitter right now.
Because 'free speech' is literally _all they know_ about the subject. If they did look it up, they would literally see the very first words of the first amendment: "Congress shall make no law (...)".
Literally about the legislative branch. Every other consequence of the First Amendment comes from that. Other laws can be more specific and may grant more rights, but this just specifies what the government can't take away.
The Bill of Rights has also been extended to apply state governments, based on the 14th Amendment:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporation_of_the_Bill_of_R...
But if the first words are "Congress shall make no law", does that mean that the President and his executive orders are not bound by the First Amendment?
This executive order is a directive to the FTC and FCC, which are both bodies created by congressional law.
As a result, neither has power to violate the first amendment since by virtue of being created by congress, they are subject to the literal reading of “Congress shall make no law”.
For what it’s worth - the 14th amendment passed after the civil war has been read to extend the protections of the bill of rights beyond their literal sense anyway.
By the spirit of the law, no. A lot of historical laws and constitutional writings were to limit power of the government in general. When the constitution was actually written, the executive was just a puppet with military commander powers. But over the centuries there has been power creep into the executive.
Such battles end up in supreme court and the court decides ultimately what interpretation would hold up. The current supreme court is republican/right wing leaning which often ignores the spirit of the law FWIW.
legislative branch - writes the law
judicial branch - interprets the law
executive branch - executes the law
FCC, FTC etc were created by legislative branch to make governing specific areas more streamlined, they are still bound by whatever legislative branch is bound.
I would recommend reading up on historical executive orders held judicial review and how they impacted operations of 3-letter organizations
The great irony is that the same people will happily quote "... shall not be abridged" when it comes to the next Amendment.
Just wait until tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that...
Comcast can't block CNBC or Fox and at the same time nobody assumes that Comcast is responsible for view expressed on the networks it carries
Cable channels regularly get dropped from lineups due to disputes over fees. Here’s a recent example of NBC in threat of being dropped. https://www.pressherald.com/2019/10/02/spectrum-may-drop-nbc... Edit: that link has a paywall, but here’s another discussing cable channels being dropped https://www.post-gazette.com/ae/tv-radio/2016/02/14/TV-Q-A-D...
There’s no general right to force cable providers to have your cable channel.
Fox and NBC cannot provide air time for one political campaign and deny air time for an opposing political campaign. Twitter is more like Fox and NBC rather than Comcast.
Fox and NBC are only required to provide political campaigns equal access because of their licenses to exclusive use of portions of the public spectrum.
Cable channels like CNN and Fox News don't use this spectrum, and thus don't have the same requirement. Twitter is more like a cable channel than a broadcast station.
This seems like pretty strong implications of cause and effect. Doing something as a payment in return of a service (license).
the word "essentially" and my a-priori knowledge that OTA broadcasters have to also pay cash-money for the license and have other obligations.
I see the scares-resource as one of the many factors for OTA classifications different from webApp.
Fixes for this issue have to cover many legacy and many new complex factors
It's a confusion between the First Amendment and the principle of free expression, which is kinda forgivable given how closely they are related.
You can argue that twitter is also restricting others' free expression, but that is their right, while the government preventing twitter from doing so is a 1A violation.
What do social media companies "publish"? In this case, the only thing twitter published was a link to information about mail-in voting[0]. That's it. They did so in the context of a tweet. So at worst, twitter would be liable for any illegal content in either President Trump's original tweet, or in the content I linked at [0]. That is what current US law says.
To change that would require an act of congress or a supreme court ruling. The court is unlikely to rule in favor of Trump[1], as the conservative justices favor businesses rights. So that leaves a new law/amendment to the existing law. That would need to pass the house, which seems unlikely as well.
[0]: https://twitter.com/i/events/1265330601034256384
[1]: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200528/01321044592/two-t...
We had automated filtering of word lists that took down sites, that were hate words / porn related for protecting children.
Right now I'm paying monthly for Youtube Premium, but I see that the people I'm watching have to be extremely careful to not say a swear word by chance, or even say the name of the COVID-19 virus, because they are scared of losing their revenue stream. I don't see this as fair, because Youtube got so popular _because_ it was allowed to publish anything without being responsible for copyright violations. It would be great for them to do fact checking as long as they are politically consistent.
In EU at least we have the GDPR that limits companies from using our data however they want to, but in the US at this point they need some kind of counterbalance.
Regardless I wasn't comment on the morality of what big tech companies were doing only the legality. Nothing in https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230 suggests to me that the protections are in anyway contingent on not removing certain content and certainty nothing suggests its contingent on not publishing content yourself in different contexts.
When a new law is being created, often it is created _because_ something legal, but immoral is being done by a person/company.
Also the law you refer to is a law inside the U.S., but Alphabet earns more than 50% of revenue (and most views) outside US. It was doing illegal business in the EU multiple times on grand scale and was given fines for it.
'Section 230 says that "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider" (47 U.S.C. § 230). In other words, online intermediaries that host or republish speech are protected against a range of laws that might otherwise be used to hold them legally responsible for what others say and do. The protected intermediaries include not only regular Internet Service Providers (ISPs), but also a range of "interactive computer service providers," including basically any online service that publishes third-party content. Though there are important exceptions for certain criminal and intellectual property-based claims, CDA 230 creates a broad protection that has allowed innovation and free speech online to flourish'.
https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230
Well... if you really want to get into it. Twitter can’t “fact check” the original statement. Because it was a prediction.
It hasn’t happened yet. It’s unlikely to be mass scale fraud, of course, but it’s a future event.
It’s his opinion / prediction. As wrong as it is, that isn’t something they should “fact check”.
Twitter picked a really bad tweet to make a stand on. Like it or not, they chose to editorialize someone else’s content, that’s a publisher.
They didn’t have to “break a law” to now be liable for other content they “publish”. That’s all the EO is, that Section 230 doesn’t apply to publishers.
They are a private company and can do as they like... but if they’re going to “take ownership” of information on their service they are breaking the spirit of neutral carriers and Section 230.
This seems like an odd hill to die on. Surely they could have fact checked 100 different Trump tweets with actual misinformation and not just his concerns/prediction.
I am of the opinion they wanted to do this for awhile, planned it out poorly, and pulled the trigger at the wrong tweet.
Section 230 has nothing to do with neutral carriers. Section 230 does not mention, imply, or otherwise suggest that there is such thing as a "carrier", much less that one need be "neutral".
Here's what it says:
> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider
> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of 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; or
There's a bunch more, but it's all fluff or irrelevant. There are no relevant obligations (there is one obligation that the law has, it relates to kid-friendly modes in websites).
Note that there is no categorization as "publisher" or "platform". You are protected from certain kinds of content. The New York Times, who clearly publishes their own content, still has Section 230 protections for comments made in the comment box on their articles, because that content is not made by the NYT, but by another individual.
Under section 230, you can only lose protection on a specific piece of content if you are deemed to be the publisher of that specific piece of content. So the worst thing that can happen to twitter here is that they are determined to be the publisher of Trump's tweet for the purposes of things like libel and copyright lawsuits.
Given that, can you explain what spirit of the law is violated, and what spirit of "neutral carriers" (do you mean common carriers?) is related or to this?
"I believe that if we allow people to leave their homes, everyone will die of Covid-19". Narrator: "There is no evidence that everyone will die of Covid-19, in fact there is plenty of evidence that everyone will not die of Covid-19".
At which point you claim that the original statement, because it included opinion, could not be fact checked, even though presenting sources that counter the priors required for the claims to make sense is a completely reasonable thing to do.
Once a company becomes too big like Twitter, Google, Facebook, they have a moral obligation to stay neutral.
Interesting how opinions expressing a viewpoint that differs from the hive mind gets down-voted.
This happens. Frequently.
Replace "Huff post et al" with "Tiananmen Square" and search while inside China.
Specific to the US, the 1st amendment prevents the restriction of speech by government, which in some cases overlaps into private enterprise.
numerous examples when google removes apps from their appstore.
even numerous examples when they are abusing search and prioritise their own products instead of competitors.
same for amazon.
corporate interests are not moral, dont forget that.
Is it good for the democracy if Google removes all results from new sites it doesn't agree with? It should remain neutral as much as possible and not tamper with its search results.
Correction: they're using their own service to promote their own point of view.
I honestly think there are real issues with the public means of communication being privately owned by a smallish number of entities, but it does free expression no good to make the fight about letting lies, disinformation, and other forms of untruth to flow unimpeded.
If news providers and other knowledge providers are allowed to curate what data they present then I don't think it's reasonable to demand that Google be held to a higher standard. Further, literally nothing is stopping you from creating your own knowledge aggregator if you feel that Google is doing a bad job of displaying pertinent data.
Another argument is that they have legal protections as content providers. However, the same protections don't apply to content publishers. If their censorship places them in the publisher category, they could open themselves to lawsuits. YouTube is an example that usually comes up. If a user uploads an illegal video, YouTube has protections against lawsuits. As a publisher, they would have more liability for the content they host.
He goes "I will build a wall spanning a continent to stop mexicans" and you see deep debate about how effective it would be, the price, the logistics of it... it's clearly a dumb idea, why does everyone pretend it's not and engage in deep consideration of it?
Now I'm seeing the same thing. Extensive debates about public opinion, the first amendment and the difficulties of moderating a service with millions of subscribers, when it is painfully obvious that the only reasoning by the president is "they messed with me so I'm going to get revenge".
I've learned that Trump is an incredibly dull instrument, but the points he raises (when you get past the verbal diarrhea) tend to be things that some significant fraction of his "base" care about or that are not actually novel policy ideas. "The wall" as he describes it is dumb. But it has existed in some form since the 1990s (albeit only segments) and the way he describes it is a simple symbol for people that tend not to know how to "solve" problems related to (illegal?) immigration.
Most average people don't care about policy details so they don't know how to argue them to "win the argument". Trump gives them a sports team to cheer for and simple slogans to shout so they feel like they are participating.
> when it is painfully obvious that the only reasoning by the president is "they messed with me so I'm going to get revenge".
The problems that Trump has with social media companies go back far more than 2 days and a fact checking link. His Attorney Generals (both Barr and Sessions) have been working with Republican state Attorneys General for years to craft a response to what they see is "liberal Silicon Valley techies banning (or shadowbanning or remonetizing or ...) conservative voices". Trump doesn't see a downside to taking this action.
The interesting thing is that there are far more than just political American conservatives that want to see regulation of {YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc}. Elizabeth Warren wrote a detailed essay on medium.com about why they should be more strictly regulated. A crazy YouTuber from San Diego got so pissed at YouTube for banning her account or demonetizing her channel that she drove up to San Bruno (not sure exactly which city/location) and shot up the building. There are quite a few stories of vague ToS being enforced in a not-so-predictable manner which leaves end users with banned accounts (which may be the nexus to more important accounts like email accounts).
And in fact, Twitter’s civil leadership policy has been allowing such users (including Trump) extra leeway.
The fact that Trump is mad about this shows that what he’s concerned about isn’t his own freedoms of speech are being impinged on, but that his freedom from accountability in discourse might be threatened.
Extract this scenario out into meat space. Imagine if a town was running a bulletin board where anyone could post town news and a citizen posted a flyer talking about town crime statistics that were wrong. A town employee noticed and posted an addendum identified as being from the town right next to the flyer saying "actually the real data is X". Should town employees not be allowed to do that?
"encourage the unfettered and unregulated development of free speech on the Internet," as one judge put it;".
https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230/legislative-history
Once upon a time, the rights of citizens only protected them from the federal government's actions. States could (and did) infringe on these rights. Corporations were much less powerful at this time, so were not much of a concern.
We ended up fighting a war over this, and one result was the 14th amendment, which binds the states to also protect these important rights.
Now a days, corporations are powerful enough to infringe these rights. We've dealt with this in the past when "trust busting" was more of a thing. There is established precedent for not allowing monopolies to infringe on people's rights.
There's nothing special about the "private sector" that allows big corporations to infringe people's rights without due process.
If you have an issue with how Twitter, FaceBook, YouTube, et al. moderate content, you are completely free to create your own Internet service which you may moderate as you see fit.
The US government exists to insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, and promote the general welfare. The government is not interested in protecting the rights of citizens. Instead, it is the rights of citizens which are meant to protect us from the government. Other laws may dictate how businesses are allowed operate but the first amendment absolutely does not apply to private businesses.
These were private companies infringing on rights.
The president sent in the national guard.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964
The civil rights act did not make up any rights - it created law to enable enforcement and protection of rights people already had, but which were being infringed - both by states and by private businesses.
The social media monopolies are infringing on our rights. There may not as yet be a legal remedy for that, but it seems likely that there will be, as in many ways these companies are more powerful and wield more influence over people than governments do.
> The social media monopolies are infringing on our rights
The right to free speech is not a natural right; nor does it apply to anything but freedom from government persecution on the basis of speech. Freedom of speech is a right that is granted by the constitution and has been further defined by case law over the past 250 years. The Supreme Court has pointed out that private companies are not subject to protections enumerated in the constitution, which, again, only apply to the government[3].
[1]: https://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Right
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_rights_and_legal_right...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Community_Access_Cor...
Every election season, I’ve said, “These are some of the worst candidates I’ve ever seen. I’m not sure how much lower the bar can get.” And then it gets lower.
If you don't want this to happen you can't vote for the administration (not "candidates") who did it. Nothing changes until someone starts losing elections. But my guess is you aren't willing to go that far, because of something about Biden.
The only thing that's changed every election is that you're 4 years older an paying attention.
I honestly used to be proud to be an American. Now I am so ashamed that when I travel (or back in the days when I traveled) I lie and say I'm a Canadian.
You should say the truth: you're an American, and Americans have a diversity of views on most subjects, just like every other country.
If you have to spend the better part of two decades trying to defend your country as NOT being a white trash dumpsterfire...
They said it just makes life easier while travelling.
Given the wildness of that particular dark corner of our history, I'm looking forward to reading about the history we're living through now. Hopefully after some emotional remove, like in another ten years.
I've only ever heard people complaining that people misunderstand the first amendment. I've yet to see someone say they believe the first amendment governs and protects against private censorship.
However, I constantly see people conflating the concept of free speech and the first amendment. Free speech is an ideological principle, not a law.
If you read the first section of the EO it is clear that they are attempting to make an argument that Twitter, by moderating/curating/screening, is no longer protected by section 230, as defined by the famous 90s court cases regarding prodigy, aol, and compuserve. [0] [1]
Spurious argument or not you are mischaracterizing the situation.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratton_Oakmont,_Inc._v._Prod....
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeran_v._America_Online,_Inc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmBGFVUjCaI
It seems like an executive order is more of a guideline on how they interpret the law. He mentions that congress would need to make changes to the law for it to have teeth. He also said there will be lawsuits on the way.
I wish these conflicts could be resolved peacefully. But, unfortunately, they cannot. If you want a civil war, you will get one. You are on the wrong side of history. You will lose!
I'd be pretty disturbed if an ISP all of a sudden prevented me from contacting wikipedia, or throttled my access to competitors. The ISP is private, but it's not really in the spirit of freedom to do so.
Similarly, if an airline said they won't sell me a ticket because I'm going to a rally for a particular politician. Or if the post office (or fedex) wouldn't carry my letter to the editor because they disagree with my opinion. Or if I couldn't get basic banking, insurance, or other business services because my legal business is politically unpopular.
There also is some legal murkiness because a federal judge ruled that Trump couldn't block people on Twitter[1].
[1] https://www.governing.com/topics/politics/gov-twitter-facebo...
The second issue at hand is the catalyst for this change. Jack Dorsey picked a fight with a giant orange toddler. For some reason the American people entrusted this giant orange toddler with the full authority of the executive branch of the United States of America. The orange toddler decided throw a fit and use this power that is meant to better the American public to retaliate against this personal attack. This second issue is the one that makes me sad to be a registered Republican and an American.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v....
Twitter is a California company.
> movie theater where they need to shut the hell up or leave.
This has nothing to do with anything. The 1A has always been understood as a freedom of content, not form. Noise ordinances and rules are constitutional.
What Twitter wants, though selective undocumented "curating" of its platform, is the ability to slander, intimidate, harass, terrorize and verbally abuse whomever they don't like, without actually being drug infront of a jury and tried for crimes.
Telco's wanted the same government exemption that USPS had; someone mailed a letter with a bomb, they can't be held responsable. This was something the courts were likely to give them anyway.
Intentionally promoting a user's post containing a manifesto about assassinating a standing president is no different than USPS mailing millions of manifesto letters to people. One mechanism is simply more automated.
At the risk of this being downvoted to oblivion, why doesn't he think that Twitter, a privately run company, has the right to fact-check claims made on their site? Even if there were some secret evil liberal agenda on Twitter, which there absolutely is not, why aren't they allowed to do that exactly? Is he planning on holding Fox News to the same standard and make them put less racism apologia on their network?
You're operating under a principle that says that people are essential equal in terms of rights and that there is a moral obligation to consistency. The old Golden Rule, and everything. Under that framework, it's stupid to punch someone in the face unless you also want to get punched in the face, because your principle of equivalence says that you should be prepared to receive anything you give.
But these people have an entirely different model. There is no right and wrong. No fairness, no consistency. It is simply a model of power. If you have the power to do a thing, you can do a thing. And if others don't have enough power to do the same back to you, their loss.
You wouldn't get irate that the Earth pulls the moon out of its orbit more than the moon affects the Earth. It's not "unfair" that the Earth has more mass. It is simply a fact, and that fact determines how those planetary bodies act.
The mentality of authoritarians is the same with respect to power. The universe has granted power to some and not others, and the only moral code is to use what you have to do what you can get away with.
It's confusing, because these people often use words like "right" and "fair", but they are using them purely as tools of power for the effect using the words has on others, and not under any actual belief in them. My kids when they were toddlers would cry "not fair" any time they didn't get their way, because they learned that claiming something was unfair was sometimes an effective strategy to sway parents. It's the same thing.
> It would go a long way if we stopped dividing each other up into camps.
Also, the only division I've ever seen is from people who can't handle a coffee cup that says "Happy Holidays" on it.
I used "these people" to refer to the people that are not like the ones I described in my first paragraph. There are certainly those on the left and right who are decent, moral people. Would it have helped if instead of "these people" I'd said "people not like that?" Those are basically equivalent in terms of what I intended to say.
> You would likely place me in the category of "these people" because I believe social media favors the left side of arguments.
No, I think you're jumping to a conclusion that I was referring to conservatives or those on the right as a whole but nowhere in my text did I do that. I said "Trump (and many in the GOP)". I didn't make any mention of the right. There are many conservatives and people on the right who are not Republicans and I explicitly noted that there are Republicans for whom my claim doesn't apply.
I can understand being sensitive to this issue since it's hard being a conservative in progressive circles these days, but I don't think it's reasonable to construe that my comment applied to you.
> I believe in a fair an open internet, let ideas be shared and stop censoring.
I didn't state any opinion for or against what Twitter did or how Trump reacted.
Now the Right have embraced postmodernism, and the Left have no idea how to respond.
TV news corporations know how to respond, and they've done the same thing for five years now. They keep him (or his empty lectern) on TV as much as they possibly can. Ratings gold!
Because seems to be presenting themselves as a neutral platform, which they have shown themselves to not be.
EDIT: Just to clarify, obviously Twitter is not presenting themselves to users as a neutral platform. But for legal purposes, they are cloaking themselves in the same privileged status as a phone company, when they clearly are not.
B) Verizon (Comcast, Spectrum, etc...) are closer to something like a utility. I wouldn't be supportive of a water or electricity company not providing services to people I disagree with. Twitter is not a utility, it's a glorified fortune-cookie-sharing site. It's a not a "right", and there's no reason that you should feel entitled to it.
Usually fact checking "services" like snopes.com, politifact, or WaPo with the pinocchio heads, have a consistent model about what they are willing to touch, how they approach it, and how they determine factualness, etc.
Just throwing out that Twitter is or isn't _the_ platform makes no sense.
https://gizmodo.com/comcast-to-customer-who-noticed-it-secre...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15890551
2. Twitter has never had any obligation to be a neutral platform
Eh? Twitter bans accounts _all the time_. It hides stuff from search, and hides potentially explicit content behind an "are you sure you want to see this?" It is in no way a neutral platform. Fact-checking world leaders was originally conceived by twitter as an alternative to just banning them when they get dangerous.
Right, so why are they trying to claim that they are a neutral platform then, for legal purposes, when they very clearly are not one??
Twitter responds to any lawsuits by claiming that they are a neutral disinterested platform, when they very clearly are not. They enjoy the same legal protections as the phone company, when they obviously are not at all the same!
Where are they claiming that? There's no such requirement under the CDA (if there was, then any website with a stated political or other stance and a comments section would be in serious trouble).
> Twitter responds to any lawsuits by claiming that they are a neutral disinterested platform, when they very clearly are not.
Examples of this?
> They enjoy the same legal protections as the phone company
No, they don't. Totally different protections.
Hum I don't think that could possibly be true. What leads you to think this? Phone companies existed before Section 230 and as far as I know their behavior didn't change. Have you read Section 230? It definitely reads like it was passed to give entities like Twitter more power to delete objectionable content and it definitely doesn't read to me like it obligates them to be neutral.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230
By the logic of the order, Fox News should also lose their immunity and be liable for suit for anything posted by commenters to their online articles.
https://help.foxnews.com/hc/en-us/articles/233194608-Do-you-...
> Where have Fox News editorialised (sic) users content?
not
> Where have Fox News editorialised (sic) users political speech?
so my reply should in no way construe my opinion of what is or is not political speech.
Now that we've established that Fox News does in fact editorialize user content, we can move on to the original question of whether or not they should now
> be liable for suit for anything posted by commenters to their online articles
The law is capable of distinguishing between ideas, including whether content is good-faith speech or trolling. Pretending the two are the same and that a law could not possibly allow for a platform to moderate the latter without sacrificing its "neutrality" seems unreasonable.
I think it is a valid question that could be scrutinized in court, but there is no need to be obtuse about the fact that these are different categories of speech that the law could treat differently specifically with regard to how it would categorize ("neutrality" of) a platform on the internet, not whether or not the speech is entirely forbidden period.
The whole point was the editing of comments. You keep going back and forth between 'political speech' being the same or different, but you hallucinated that as having anything to do with the discussion.
> these are different categories of speech
Maybe to the government, not to whether a website is a publisher or a platform. Protected political speech and criticism of the government has nothing to do with the topic at hand, no matter how many times you keep trying to inject it.
I definitely never varied my own view on this. You most likely misinterpreted my first comment and the quote ">", or worse, you're being intentionally dishonest.
In any case, go read the EO. Right now, your opinion amounts to, "Trump bad, therefore removing a comment that spams racial slurs is the same as editorializing a comment that states a political opinion."
This is an appeal to emotion attempting to twist the position of those who oppose this EO, but, hopefully, that won't fly in a court of law. We shall see.
Fox News is already publisher under any reasonable definition.
They are liable to suit if Fox News employees post illegal content on their website.
Twitter has the exact same treatment under the law today. It’s not liable for suit when Trump tweets lies about Joe Scarborough. But if @jack or @TwitterSafety tweeted the same lies, it could be sued in court for libel and section 230 would not be a defense.
Fox and twitter are already equal in eyes of the law today.
There was a later ruling in Hungary that seemed to go the other way though: https://globalfreedomofexpression.columbia.edu/cases/magyar-...
They still enjoy immunity with respect to user-posted content, because that is part of the explicit language of the statute and a Presidential Order can't override statutory language.