Politicians are bound by literal centuries of free speech tradition and precedent. I trust them much more than I trust activists in Bay Area meeting rooms who believe that a company's mission should be promoting a worldview they got from Tumblr and Twitter.
You don’t get to point to centuries of free speech tradition as a justification while you advocate directly for undoing some of that tradition. That’s not a credible argument.
You’re appealing to centuries of free speech jurisprudence that constrains the actions of politicians. But the precise nature of that jurisprudence is to keep politicians as far away from the business of regulating speech as is possible.
Your proposal would purposefully involve politicians in the regulation of speech, contrary to that jurisprudence you point to. It is therefore not an internally consistent argument to point at the traditions you’re actively undermining as a reason why your actions will not have unintended consequences.
> Politicians are bound by literal centuries of free speech tradition and precedent. I trust them much more than I trust activists in Bay Area meeting rooms who believe that a company's mission should be promoting a worldview they got from Tumblr and Twitter.
But...that centuries of tradition means that companies, whether as a result of activists in meeting rooms or otherwise, get to make those decisions, and politicians don’t. By transferring that power from private actors deciding what ideas to use their own resources to transmit and promote to politicians, you would terminate that free speech tradition.
Would love to amend the constitution to not allow censorship of speech by private companies. If it's hate speech, etc. then obviously yes but otherwise censorship is toxic.
No private companies should be deciding the public discourse and unfortunately the most common forms of communication in today's age are all routed through private entities.
This is not possible without a constitutional amendment.
Also, the idea of giving politicians control over what speech must be carried on social media strikes me as stark raving mad. There is no chance that won’t be abused.
Yeah I think we're on the same page, no one should be able to censor speech that isn't hate speech is really the main point. And definitely no jurisdiction should be given to politicians.
You’re proposing giving jurisdiction to politicians, you just don’t seem to be aware of it. Someone, somewhere will need to decide what speech is and is not “censorable” (a gross abuse of that word) above and beyond the regular standard of “protected speech”. Basically nobody wants to live on an internet where Twitter cannot moderate some protected speech , as that’s how you end up with 4chan. Hate speech is protected speech, pornography is protected speech, as is all kinds of harassment and bullying. Someone will need to draw the line for what can and cannot be moderated on all platforms, and that is a huge amount of power to hand out.
It’s also fundamentally unconstitutional. You cannot do this via legislation alone. The courts have long held that forcing someone to speak is as bad as punishing someone for speaking, and there is no constitutional framework for anything other than protected and unprotected speech. The courts will strike this bill down, it’s pure political theater for the base.
I think 4chan is the perfect example of a site filled with lots of hate speech. There are well-established legal precedents for what hate speech is already. There would not be enforcers of this on each website but if a person's rights are violated they would be able to sue the company and a court would decide if they were censoring the person without a legitimate reason or not. It would have to be done at the federal level one way or another due to Section 230 precluding state laws. If anything, Section 230 is too loosely defined right now:
"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"
The otherwise objectionable bit is basically a blank check to censor anything.
> There are well-established legal precedents for what hate speech is already.
[Citation Needed]
> There would not be enforcers of this on each website but if a person's rights are violated they would be able to sue the company and a court would decide if they were censoring the person without a legitimate reason or not.
Creating a legal cause of action is a fantastic way to create a chilling effect without getting your hands dirty. This is a pretty common trick lawmakers use to try and backdoor introduce rules they can’t legally enforce themselves.
Also, the courts consider themselves to be constrained by the first amendment. You can’t endrun around that amendment by using the judiciary, which is why Times v. Sullivan was decided the way it was, even though that was a civil action between private parties.
> It would have to be done at the federal level one way or another
Doing it at the federal level is not sufficient if the courts believe that the law is unconstitutional.
> The otherwise objectionable bit is basically a blank check to censor anything.
Again, this is not censorship. You are grossly abusing that word. The moment you face legal consequences for speech, we can talk about censorship. The word you’re looking for is “moderation”.
Second, you’re tap dancing around a really big problem. It’s fine and dandy to point at 230 and say “it’s too vague”, but arguing against something is easy. You need to propose a clear alternative standard that will stand up to judicial scrutiny. You have not done that.
No. “Hate speech” is a vague BS term that can be applied to anything that disagrees with any established political group. I would rejoin the military to fight in a war that keeps “Hate speech” out of the US law books. The first amendment shall not be infringed on even if whatever being said is the most hateful diabolical thing imaginable. Absolutely no exceptions.
You should read up on the tolerance paradox. The people behind this FL bill are the type to abuse such tolerance, all while telling bakeries it's chill if they refuse services for gay wedding or similar.
Hate speech does not have a definition in the US, and barely has a definition in countries where it is banned. I am sure almost everyone who has ever been banned for political reasons has had hate speech given as the official cause.
Not allowing censorship of speech by private companies is precisely they same thing as the government censoring speech. It is the government being allowed to control discourse even among private citizens on private property; the steps from such a law to a society in which the truth is only what the government says it is are few.
> Not allowing censorship of speech by private companies is precisely they same thing as the government censoring speech
Nonsense. That's like saying that common carrier regulation [1] (e.g. requiring that railroads take all customers) is the same thing as the state imprisoning people without cause. It's the total opposite.
The state can, must, and will apply common carrier regulations to modern communication infrastructure like internet infrastructure and social media. That's not even close to state-mandated censorship.
Government says you're not allowed to ban speech on your property. Tough shit, they say, you're a public forum and no one can avoid using you. Twitter is basically the railroad! But, yes, ok you can ban "hate speech," and presumably illegal speech, like repulsive pornography.
Who decides what the hate speech is? It's not longer the platforms, their owners, or their users. Users can't leave a platform if they dislike the hate speech policy, as every other platform is homogeneously bound by government regulation to allow and disallow the same forms of speech.
The government is now in the business, by virtue of requiring no private censorship, of defining what "acceptable" speech is. What if the political environment becomes even more fraught, and one side makes the argument that the core ideology of the other side is fundamentally 'hate speech?' Worst case, they're elected with enough of a majority to start banning such speech on all private companies' platform (hopefully at this point Americans are using platforms hosted in Europe). Best case, social media is a wasteland, with one side convinced by the norms of the time that the other literally shouldn't be allow to speak - it's hate speech! Which is defined and regulated by the government! Controlled by my party!
To the point of your analogy, speech in the form of sending an HTTP post request to a private website is not the same as traveling on a railroad. The forms of traveling on a railroad while behaving horribly are well defined and easy to regulate. Ditto the carriage of information over wires for the internet - that should be a common carrier. Running a social platform is not the same as carrying unknown packets of information.
When information so carried by a common carrier is composed to make complex political speech on privately-held platforms, which are themselves expensive pieces of property which exist to make a profit, the government should back off. The platform is itself an expression of free speech and free enterprise - it is not common property, and despite the over-puffed impression of Twitter lately, it is not, by any means, the only public forum.
To stretch your analogy, this is more like the government defining what sort of conversations can be allow among the passengers of the railway.
The one political faction deciding anything the other side says is hate speech has already happened. Okay, so the censored party decided to leave the censoring platforms because they don’t like what they’re doing. Oh wait, the most major alternative social platform is shut down by their hosting provider and the two App Store providers with monopolies and the providers claim it’s a hate speech service. Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, etc. use their monopolistic market positioning and financial leverage to crush any and all competition and that’s where we are today.
Because the core problem with right wing, anti-censorship sites is they turn into repugnant shitholes the moment they get traction. Because it also turns out that there is a large overlap between people who cry about cancel culture and people who have strong opinions about Jews, the Holocaust, the Nazi party, Democrats, “liberals”, transsexuals, gays and whatever other Republican Party talking point is flavor of the month.
You can spend 5 minutes on those sites to verify the claim that it’s full of hate speech.
To risk dropping my objective ideological stance in this thread, you allude to an important point. Public fora belong to their participants as a society, not as individuals. It is reasonable and required for societies to define taboos and proscribed opinions. It is inherent. That is why speech free from government interference is a powerful idea: it avoids the tendency of societies to perform a sort of regulatory capture and enforce their taboos with ultimate power.
Here on Hacker News there are complex taboos around how we may express our opinions and the type of posting that is deemed detrimental.
While it is important that the government not enforce these taboos, it is neither wrong nor necessarily evil for a society to enforce them through its use of free association - and exclusion.
Boy, isn't that the truth. It's been shocking to see how alternative platforms get the banhammer from their payment network or hosting provider. I agree with the parent that it's hard to define what "hate speech" is. But the "common carrier" ought to apply to hosting providers and payment processors even if it can't be applied to social media sites like FB and Twitter.
> but, yes, ok you can ban "hate speech," and presumably illegal speech, like repulsive pornography.
Why do you think it's a given that anti-censorship common-carrier regulation would have an exception for "hate speech"? There's no constitutional precedent for that. There are specific categories of speech that the government may restriction --- slander and obscenity, for example --- and so-called "hate speech" isn't on the list. The United States has a very strong protections for free speech, even speech that offends people. Social media can, will, and must be legally required to carry everyone's speech, even when that speech is offensive.
Social media is exactly like a railroad. It's infrastructure marketed to the general public as an important part of participating in society. Unelected and unaccountable individuals in Bay Area meeting rooms do not get to unilaterally decide how the rest of the world may speak.
The first amendment also respects the right to freedom of association. This law is akin to the government forcing you to do business with someone you would rather avoid, for example to make a cake for a gay wedding that goes against your personal religion.
Do you see the breakdown here? The government cannot force private parties to associate with anyone like this, especially a controversial political figure.
You seem to misunderstand the basic sense of the first amendment.
Nonsense, you can’t refuse service to people who are gay or muslim. This political affiliation is being carved out as some exception. This is the antithesis of the non discrimination the US has established itself as culturally. Suddenly the left is coming out with this segregationist/apartide/cancel culture edict. I’m sorry but we had this era of civil rights where we rejected discrimination in businesses.
> This law is akin to the government forcing you to do business with someone you would rather avoid, for example to make a cake for a gay wedding that goes against your personal religion.
But, the government does do that... specifically that ;P. The baker won a single narrow verdict on exactly their facts, but the Supreme Court refused to say anything about anything else and AFAIK most courts are on the "you must not discriminate" side.
Poster mentioned it because it happened and I presume they don’t agree it was constitutional. And because it is an example in which the sort of people hoping regulate social media’s free association prove themselves to be hypocrites rapidly.
Can Christian Mingle require that I assert I am a Christian? Should they be allowed to ban me if I start advocating Satanism?
Because the railroad can't be used to turn my favorite social media into the haven of trolls, fools, and reactionaries. If you accept all speech without any boundaries - ie, with no defined "hate speech," the internet will swiftly become the domain of the loudest haters.
Your arguments apply to Twitter banning Trump - but they also apply to dang banning a poster who trolls everyone.
If a politician's hobby is shouting fire in crowded, dark theaters and a theater chain bans the said politician from their property - whose fault is it?
Winning a vote does not exempt one from other responsibilities, such as obeying the law. There are places that do that, but it just means you're electing a king. Our system was/is explicitly designed to prevent this occurrence.
Freedom of association is an expensive thing to get sued over. Hopefully the state is ready to blow taxpayer dollars on the inevitable loss trying to defend this.
Having done a fair amount of business/commercial real-estate in Florida, I can tell you first-hand that Florida is probably the most fraud-friendly state in the Nation.
Both parties have ironically forsaken their core values on this issue of censorship.
It used to be the religious conservatives pushing for censorship of offensive speech and liberals fighting back against that.
Freedom of expression is a fundamental liberal value, but it has become politically practical for many liberals/democrats at this time to forget about that.
If we're talking irony, it's that the only free speech in danger here(corporations are people per Citizen's United) is that of the social platforms.
Private entities have no legal obligation(thin "town hall" argument or not) to respect free speech, and are absolutely empowered to police content as they see fit.
For an elected legislative body to come in and say it's "illegal" to post content(and they are by making the inverse equally illegal), they are explicitly treading on the free speech rights and Section 230 legal protections of companies like Facebook and Twitter.
>Private entities have no legal obligation(thin "town hall" argument or not) to respect free speech, and are absolutely empowered to police content as they see fit.
Indeed, thats what this whole discussion is about: creating laws to protect individuals speech from corporations.
Laws are not static.
Private entities also had no legal obligation to serve black people or gay people not long ago, but we changed that too.
As your XKCD comic is merely arguing from a position of conservative legal authority, it could have applied just as well to blocking black and gay people when that was not protected by law.
Is this even enforceable? Do Facebook, Twitter, etc. have any legal entities in Florida? If they do, would it be a big deal to dissolve them? Can a state still fine a company that has no legal presence in their state and force the company to pay?
Could this even escalate to FB/Twitter banning all users from Florida? That would be a delightful twist. (Ok, sure, I know, it wouldn't go that far.)
Generally speaking, we’ve held as a society that the rights of free association are very strong, but not absolute. We only allow the government to abridge these rights when the state has a compelling interest in doing so.
Obviously you’re aware that we have decided as a society that there are certain “protected characteristics” that cannot be the deciding factor for free association, including race, religion, sex, among other things. These are selected due to their immutable nature (religion is a special case I’m not going to explain here), and we’ve decided that it’s worse for society that people be excluded from economic or social participation based on who they are than it is for the government to override the free association rights of those who wish to discriminate.
Political affiliation and speech is not a protected characteristic, because it is a choice. You can choose to not only change parties, but also change how you communicate such things. In fact, many institutions fundamentally demand the ability to exclude people based on their political affiliation, including primaries and political groups. We literally could not run a primary, caucus, or PAC without the ability to discriminate based on political affiliation.
To continue the metaphor, this is less like someone getting kicked out of a shop because of their race or gender, and more like getting kicked out for refusing to wear pants.
Irrelevant to the legal argument. Religion is specifically called out in the first amendment as something that the government cannot mess with. The courts have consistently held that attempting to favor one religion or determine whether or not someone’s religious beliefs are sincere (and therefore worthy of protection) are a bright red line that must never be crossed.
The fact that people do convert religions is irrelevant to the reasons why the religion is specifically protected.
>These are selected due to their immutable nature (religion is a special case I’m not going to explain here)
Why did you choose to leave that out? Is it perhaps because it invalidates your entire argument?
Freedom of religion and expression are coded in the same amendment for a reason, and come from the same historically progressive ideals.
>To continue the metaphor, this is less like someone getting kicked out of a shop because of their race or gender, and more like getting kicked out for refusing to wear pants.
Do you think freedom of expression is as important and historically significant to human rights (i.e. the right to not be refused service based on your skin color) as freedom to not wear pants?
> Why did you choose to leave that out? Is it perhaps because it invalidates your entire argument?
Sigh. I'll remind you that it's a rule around here to presume good faith. Dealing with such comments is noxious and tiresome.
I left it out because my post was already too long. If I left it out because it invalidated my point, I wouldn't have mentioned it.
> Freedom of religion and expression are coded in the same amendment for a reason, and come from the same historically progressive ideals.
Yes they are, but the amendment you're referencing limits only what the government can do, not private parties.
We as a society have placed some restrictions on the right of free association via legislation, not amendment, but the overlap with the first amendment is much less clear than you imply. Some aspects of the first amendment have been turned into protected characteristics (religion), others have not (speech).
> Do you think freedom of expression is as important and historically significant to human rights (i.e. the right to not be refused service based on your skin color) as freedom to not wear pants?
I believe that freedom of expression is important, but I also believe that freedom of association is important. When the two come into conflict on private property, I generally hold that the right of free association is more important than free expression. This is because free expression is only temporarily inconvenienced if one is told to express elsewhere, while free association is inalterably destroyed if one cannot ask someone to leave your private property based on their behavior.
>free expression is only temporarily inconvenienced if one is told to express elsewhere, while free association is inalterably destroyed if one cannot ask someone to leave your private property based on their behavior.
Were not talking about abolishing freedom of association or property rights, thats the same strawman hateful business used which of course did not happen.
Were talking about the most powerful corporations in the world who have become de facto owners and governors of the town square in which the majority of communication takes place.
Gorsuch and Barret certainly won’t be friendly towards this law if it makes it to the Supreme Court. I think this is posturing at its finest, and a waste of the FL AG’s time.
It might even have the effect of strengthening First Amendment protections by creating yet another precedent in a long line of permissiveness-expanding precedents that began since NYTimes v Sullivan and Brandenburg v Ohio.
Given the ideologies in the court these days, I would expect them to focus on the Article 1 question first, but it’s not unlikely that speech would make it into any opinion. The court has a lot of classical liberalism, but a strong preference for narrow and incremental decisions.
Right? If someone runs for some local position with no requirements to get on the ballot, can they start posting incitements to violence against DeSantis or whoever? Writing "go shoot this guy" might run afoul of other laws, but if you just post about how a lot of people are saying so-and-so has a child sex dungeon and somebody ought to do something about it, that's still free speech right? Or can you still get kicked off for, say, posting objectively false information or roundabout encouragements of violence? That was basically where the "deplatforming" controversy started in the first place.
> but if you just post about how a lot of people are saying so-and-so has a child sex dungeon and somebody ought to do something about it, that's still free speech right?
That depends on a number of things. Is the subect a Public figure or not? Do you know that claim you are repeating is false? Do you have a reasonable belief that the rumor ia true? How many people are you talking to? Are you repeating the claim out of malice?
“Social media platforms have morphed into the town square” - sounds like they want government-run social media instead of privately-operated social media.
Maybe Ron DeSantis should start his own social media platform instead of attempting to force private businesses to give up their freedoms.
Edit 2: I guess this is HN's way of censoring political content. Mark hot/upcoming article as "dupe" of old article that has way less traction and does not even show up on the front page (or on any following pages as well).
The private business are using public right-of-ways and spectrum to carry their data, so they ought to be held to the same standard that makes cable television provide public access channels. If Google censors me, maybe I’ll dig up their cable that runs through the right-of-way on my private property.
Cable television does not have to provide public access channels. Broadcast providers do since they have formal leases with the FCC for spectrum which is a finite public good. It isn’t formal regulations; it’s basically terms in the lease agreement. The internet is a not scarce like TV spectrum was.
but cable TV's cables do use public streets and right of ways, negotiation of those franchise often include lease agreement terms that require the cable company to carry a city's public access channels .....
A public option for social media is exactly what I want. Townsquare.us, run by the government, where all speech except that which is literally illegal is allowed. Supreme Court for challenges. No ads or tracking allowed. Post illegal content? Feds come knocking.
The only useful purpose of Facebook for me is using it as a somewhat modern phone book. It’s a great tool for tracking down old or new acquaintances and establishing a line of communication. It’s kind of what Facebook used to be before the newsfeed and like button. I wish there was an alternative to Facebook without the tracking and advertising, run by something not profit seeking. Maybe an organization like NPR or PBS?
The point is that it settles, once and for all, the role of government in policing social media. If social media really is the replication of the public town square, then one that has the same operating model is called for.
Doesn't matter if people want to go there. The point is that it exists, and the model is governed by the taxpayers.
The issue at stake: governments telling private businesses what they can and can't host on their servers.
Impact of a government social media: If you get banned from Facebook, you have the option to post your non-illegal content on townsquare.us. Therefore, your free speech rights are not being impacted. The right to speak is not the right to be heard by the audience of your choice.
> There are already tons of sites you can move to if you get banned from a platform, so there is no functional difference.
But none of those platforms draw a direct line between the constitutional guarantee of free speech and implementation of that speech. That’s the idea behind the public option: it’s the constitution with teeth, freedom in its purest form, while leaving corporations open to experiment with restrictions as the market demands.
If social media is the public square then the government would just seize the servers just liked they seized all the public squares/roads/areas from private people.
To be clear, in my vision of this, people would be allowed to advertise however they want. Businesses could have accounts. But having a space for ads and then using behavioral ad targeting would be out.
In your vision of it, perhaps. Citizen's United, however, has already decreed that corporations have free speech rights like everybody else. By creating a distinction between commercial and personal speech, the government would be interfering in the 1st amendement rights of personal and commercial entities.
My vision doesn’t create a distinction between commercial and personal speech. In fact, it does the opposite, by not privileging commercial speech and giving it a special space on the page. If you want to advertise you wares, do so, but you don’t get to pay to get attention. Get people to follow you because they like what you have to say.
When you wrote "having a space for ads and then using behavioral ad targeting would be out", I understood it to mean that you did not want any space at all for ads and not just a lack of designated space for ads.
With that being said, the only way I see this happening is if the government builds its own ISP and /or IXP, secures its own peering agreements (with the understanding that another ISP can refuse), hosts the website on its own servers, and accepts all potential spam that comes from all of its users.
In addition, none of this will stop tracking by ads using tricks like the Facebook Pixel, obfuscated analytics, or fingerprinting scripts as code is also free speech. In fact, none of stops any tracking on server-side by government agents either. Any IP logs or information that's gleaned from user access of government services is understood to be self-incriminating and will be treated as such as in the case of a drug dealer in Massachusetts.[1]
All in all, who is expected to pay for all this (and on what grounds) and how do you intend to stop ads or any tracking at all with these factors involved?
Oh the users would most certainly be tracked by the government. In fact, that's part of the point. One of the unfortunate byproducts of Parler getting shut down was the loss of visibility of right-wing terrorists.
A more generous interpretation is "no ads allowed" means the platform is not funded by advertising, but by public dollars. That way the system design does not become so maliciously driven by engagement/addiction metrics
The roads used to be full of spammers, but governments started banning stuff like prostitution and street peddling to reduce it. And the difference between government and a social media platform is that the government will go to your home and fine you dollars or put you behind bars if you run a professional spamming agency. So I think a government run option would have way less spam in the long run, but almost surely less freedom as well which might not be what people want either. We already see people getting arrested for relatively minor comments they post on social media in UK.
I wouldn’t be surprised if people got paid to spam ads on the website. People who don’t have any money (or care what Google indexes on them) would gladly send spam on behalf of their drivers license.
It would be unusable. Porn is legal, gore is legal, hate speech is legal, as is any threat that’s not likely to cause “specific and imminent lawlessness”.
The bar for the government being able to legally suppress speech is purposefully very, very high. This is good when it comes to keeping the power of the state out of matters it shouldn’t be involved in, but this is bad when you’re trying to make a social media platform usable by anyone but the absolute dregs of society.
Content moderation is very, very hard, but people actually want it. There’s a reason why people stay on Twitter while whining on Twitter rather than going to 4chan or 8kun
>It would be unusable. Porn is legal, gore is legal, hate speech is legal, as is any threat that’s not likely to cause “specific and imminent lawlessness”.
Such is the nature of living in a free society. Certainly there are ways, in even the most basic social media platforms, of un-following / blocking certain posters. And if the content isn't targeted by algorithm, should be fairly easy to avoid content you don't want to see.
Any if not, well, there's always Facebook and Twitter.
> “Social media platforms have morphed into the town square” - sounds like they want government-run social media instead of privately-operated social media.
What they want is for the government, run by their preferred party, to regulate privately-owned social media such that moderating their preferred political speech, however extreme or misleading it may be, becomes illegal.
Disclaimer Edit: I’m not a lawyer, Supreme Court predictions and cases are just a hobby of mine.
Well, there’s a lot of interesting things to unpack here. First amendment questions, the Commerce Clause, and the 10th amendment all come to mind. Sec. 230 is being directly challenged, but I don’t think this was the way to do it. This will probably fail in circuit court, be denied an appeal, and fail to be granted certiorari. I can see Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh voting to hear it, but nobody else. But ultimately this is going to waste a lot of the Florida AG’s time on a very lengthy legal procedure.
If Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh voted to hear it it would be demonstrable, once and for all, that they are the greatest partisan hacks ever to sit on the bench. IMO
> Big Tech is prohibited from de-platforming Floridian political candidates.
> Any Floridian can block any candidate they don’t want to hear from, and that is a right that belongs to each citizen — it’s not for Big Tech companies to decide.
What nonsense. Why are politicians some special class of people?
Politicians already have special rights and restrictions.
Here's the argument. Democracy requires that politicians have the ability to contact potential voters. There are contribution limits as well as spending limits. In politics most of the money is spent trying to contact voters.
So tech companies banning some politicians but not others is a contribution in kind to a campaign.
The value of a verified Twitter account is far more than the direct contribution limit.
Therefore either all politicians should be allowed, or all must be banned from Twitter.
The FEC is unable to do its job because the Senate hasn't been confirming appointments.
So now states are trying to pass laws to fill the gap.
Television and radio have the right to decline political ads from non candidates and if they think the content is inappropriate or violates the legal rights of another. Are there protections like that in this bill?
Are there protections for other protected groups? It seems like it's just piecemealing special privileges rather than creating a good framework.
What's wrong with hating anyway? Hate is a perfectly normal emotion. It's okay to hate. A lot of things are worthy of our hate. I think it's strange how people are expected to not express any negative emotions at all.
It’s a Cynical idea, in that it advocates an inherent virtue to human subjective experience, even hate - like Diogenes the Cynic asserting public masturbation was fine.
So, my response: our emotions have no inherent ethics. They may have a survival value, because strong emotions can compel us to action we may reject if we were rational. Is that - irrational survivalism - really a state to aspire to? Has it any likelihood to induce ethical behavior or advance civilization or make the world nicer for your family?
I agree that negative emotions are rather more taboo in America than is healthy. But reflecting on why they are taboo at all, I would rather err on the side of Spock than Worf.
Because everyone is special and deserves their own special protections above the general population.
Sadly this is a huge trend to score political points right now. For example, I think there was a bill providing extra protections to Asian Americans, and a referendum in PA to add race based protection to the state constitution. The protections already exist, so it's just political theater.
Politicians have always been special. For reference, see human history. This is why government needs to be constructed with actual mechanisms to hold politicians to account and root out corruption. The kind of self-dealing and rules-for-thee shit that we used to take seriously. The media should be the last line of defense against corruption in politicians. Because we are seeing corruption in the open now is because those other government mechanisms are failing.
I'm not sure I would classifying "deplatforming" them as a universally good way to hold politicians to account, but yeah, sure, platforms can shut you off when you are an endless fount of lies and propaganda.
The law means the companies can still decide to ban regular peoole at will, but cannot decide to ban politicians. Thus a special protection for politicians is enshrined in this law.
Edit: The core purpose would be much better served by a user "bill of rights" that protects all users against capricous and arbitrary decisions to revoke access with zero explanation.
The law merely requires you to be registered as a candidate and only prevents deplatforming between when you register and when the election occurs.
I read the bill but couldn't find the referrenced statute that defines deplatforming. It isn't clear to me if social media companies woyld be required to reinstate banned accounts of peoole who run for office or would be merely prevented from banning them.
I'm glad that social media platforms remove people violating community guidelines, whatever they are. I don't want people here on HN who do nothing but post flamebait, and I don't want people on Twitter who do nothing but post hate speech. I don't want platforms to be required to host any and all people.
But it's critical that politicians can reach us by whatever means we're using. They are a special class of people, because they're the people we're choosing to represent us. If a political candidate can't reach an audience because they don't agree politically with the platform providers, that's a big fucking problem for democracy.
I'm not saying I like the idea, but it's vastly better to me than to have the Overton window chosen by the platform provider. If you can propose a way to stop bad-faith candidates from abusing it, that'd be a great thing, but it's secondary to preserving the ability for political candidates to state their positions, whatever they are.
No, perhaps you're right. I was originally responding specifically to the argument that politicians shouldn't be treated differently from other people, but I've let my point drift.
I don't know whether the rule is necessary. But if it becomes so, I do believe a special rule for political candidates, as opposed to requiring all platforms to host all people, is the right choice.
I want politicians to post on whatever people are using to get information. Almost nobody I know my age is regularly watching the news on TV, or checking the local paper's website. They might have other channels, but they certainly don't have other channels with the same reach.
Today I'm proud to announce my candidacy for Dog Catcher of Sarasota, FL, and that I am suing this website for its communist deplatforming of my many troll accounts.
No analysis needed: it's symbolic. It won't do anything at all--except, of course, make many lawyers richer. DeSantis is doing this as a favor to certain folks.
Is there any meaningful change to curtail the amount of power these companies have? Legislation like this seems like show and does nothing to control the fact that a handful of social media companies can make enormous editorial decisions not just on political candidacy... but basically everything else. Seems like another one of those stories that will likely go nowhere and turned into a partisan divide, but maybe I’m just bitter.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 290 ms ] threadYou’re appealing to centuries of free speech jurisprudence that constrains the actions of politicians. But the precise nature of that jurisprudence is to keep politicians as far away from the business of regulating speech as is possible.
Your proposal would purposefully involve politicians in the regulation of speech, contrary to that jurisprudence you point to. It is therefore not an internally consistent argument to point at the traditions you’re actively undermining as a reason why your actions will not have unintended consequences.
But...that centuries of tradition means that companies, whether as a result of activists in meeting rooms or otherwise, get to make those decisions, and politicians don’t. By transferring that power from private actors deciding what ideas to use their own resources to transmit and promote to politicians, you would terminate that free speech tradition.
No private companies should be deciding the public discourse and unfortunately the most common forms of communication in today's age are all routed through private entities.
Also, the idea of giving politicians control over what speech must be carried on social media strikes me as stark raving mad. There is no chance that won’t be abused.
It’s also fundamentally unconstitutional. You cannot do this via legislation alone. The courts have long held that forcing someone to speak is as bad as punishing someone for speaking, and there is no constitutional framework for anything other than protected and unprotected speech. The courts will strike this bill down, it’s pure political theater for the base.
"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"
The otherwise objectionable bit is basically a blank check to censor anything.
[Citation Needed]
> There would not be enforcers of this on each website but if a person's rights are violated they would be able to sue the company and a court would decide if they were censoring the person without a legitimate reason or not.
Creating a legal cause of action is a fantastic way to create a chilling effect without getting your hands dirty. This is a pretty common trick lawmakers use to try and backdoor introduce rules they can’t legally enforce themselves.
Also, the courts consider themselves to be constrained by the first amendment. You can’t endrun around that amendment by using the judiciary, which is why Times v. Sullivan was decided the way it was, even though that was a civil action between private parties.
> It would have to be done at the federal level one way or another
Doing it at the federal level is not sufficient if the courts believe that the law is unconstitutional.
> The otherwise objectionable bit is basically a blank check to censor anything.
Again, this is not censorship. You are grossly abusing that word. The moment you face legal consequences for speech, we can talk about censorship. The word you’re looking for is “moderation”.
Second, you’re tap dancing around a really big problem. It’s fine and dandy to point at 230 and say “it’s too vague”, but arguing against something is easy. You need to propose a clear alternative standard that will stand up to judicial scrutiny. You have not done that.
Nonsense. That's like saying that common carrier regulation [1] (e.g. requiring that railroads take all customers) is the same thing as the state imprisoning people without cause. It's the total opposite.
The state can, must, and will apply common carrier regulations to modern communication infrastructure like internet infrastructure and social media. That's not even close to state-mandated censorship.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier
Government says you're not allowed to ban speech on your property. Tough shit, they say, you're a public forum and no one can avoid using you. Twitter is basically the railroad! But, yes, ok you can ban "hate speech," and presumably illegal speech, like repulsive pornography.
Who decides what the hate speech is? It's not longer the platforms, their owners, or their users. Users can't leave a platform if they dislike the hate speech policy, as every other platform is homogeneously bound by government regulation to allow and disallow the same forms of speech.
The government is now in the business, by virtue of requiring no private censorship, of defining what "acceptable" speech is. What if the political environment becomes even more fraught, and one side makes the argument that the core ideology of the other side is fundamentally 'hate speech?' Worst case, they're elected with enough of a majority to start banning such speech on all private companies' platform (hopefully at this point Americans are using platforms hosted in Europe). Best case, social media is a wasteland, with one side convinced by the norms of the time that the other literally shouldn't be allow to speak - it's hate speech! Which is defined and regulated by the government! Controlled by my party!
To the point of your analogy, speech in the form of sending an HTTP post request to a private website is not the same as traveling on a railroad. The forms of traveling on a railroad while behaving horribly are well defined and easy to regulate. Ditto the carriage of information over wires for the internet - that should be a common carrier. Running a social platform is not the same as carrying unknown packets of information.
When information so carried by a common carrier is composed to make complex political speech on privately-held platforms, which are themselves expensive pieces of property which exist to make a profit, the government should back off. The platform is itself an expression of free speech and free enterprise - it is not common property, and despite the over-puffed impression of Twitter lately, it is not, by any means, the only public forum.
To stretch your analogy, this is more like the government defining what sort of conversations can be allow among the passengers of the railway.
You can spend 5 minutes on those sites to verify the claim that it’s full of hate speech.
Here on Hacker News there are complex taboos around how we may express our opinions and the type of posting that is deemed detrimental.
While it is important that the government not enforce these taboos, it is neither wrong nor necessarily evil for a society to enforce them through its use of free association - and exclusion.
Why do you think it's a given that anti-censorship common-carrier regulation would have an exception for "hate speech"? There's no constitutional precedent for that. There are specific categories of speech that the government may restriction --- slander and obscenity, for example --- and so-called "hate speech" isn't on the list. The United States has a very strong protections for free speech, even speech that offends people. Social media can, will, and must be legally required to carry everyone's speech, even when that speech is offensive.
Social media is exactly like a railroad. It's infrastructure marketed to the general public as an important part of participating in society. Unelected and unaccountable individuals in Bay Area meeting rooms do not get to unilaterally decide how the rest of the world may speak.
Do you see the breakdown here? The government cannot force private parties to associate with anyone like this, especially a controversial political figure.
You seem to misunderstand the basic sense of the first amendment.
https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1594/freedom-of...
But, the government does do that... specifically that ;P. The baker won a single narrow verdict on exactly their facts, but the Supreme Court refused to say anything about anything else and AFAIK most courts are on the "you must not discriminate" side.
Can Christian Mingle require that I assert I am a Christian? Should they be allowed to ban me if I start advocating Satanism?
Your arguments apply to Twitter banning Trump - but they also apply to dang banning a poster who trolls everyone.
Opening soon: Zuckerland. Jokes aside, this seems profoundly corrupt.
Of course that have already thought about that. Note that the theme park must have a certain revenue to qualify.
Of course, everyone knows "Small Government" has a trailing caveat of "...for me, but not for thee"
It used to be the religious conservatives pushing for censorship of offensive speech and liberals fighting back against that.
Freedom of expression is a fundamental liberal value, but it has become politically practical for many liberals/democrats at this time to forget about that.
Private entities have no legal obligation(thin "town hall" argument or not) to respect free speech, and are absolutely empowered to police content as they see fit.
The ever relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1357/
For an elected legislative body to come in and say it's "illegal" to post content(and they are by making the inverse equally illegal), they are explicitly treading on the free speech rights and Section 230 legal protections of companies like Facebook and Twitter.
Indeed, thats what this whole discussion is about: creating laws to protect individuals speech from corporations.
Laws are not static.
Private entities also had no legal obligation to serve black people or gay people not long ago, but we changed that too.
As your XKCD comic is merely arguing from a position of conservative legal authority, it could have applied just as well to blocking black and gay people when that was not protected by law.
Could this even escalate to FB/Twitter banning all users from Florida? That would be a delightful twist. (Ok, sure, I know, it wouldn't go that far.)
Seems like this would be knocked down with the commerce clause, a state not being allowed to regulate interstate commerce in this way.
Generally speaking, we’ve held as a society that the rights of free association are very strong, but not absolute. We only allow the government to abridge these rights when the state has a compelling interest in doing so.
Obviously you’re aware that we have decided as a society that there are certain “protected characteristics” that cannot be the deciding factor for free association, including race, religion, sex, among other things. These are selected due to their immutable nature (religion is a special case I’m not going to explain here), and we’ve decided that it’s worse for society that people be excluded from economic or social participation based on who they are than it is for the government to override the free association rights of those who wish to discriminate.
Political affiliation and speech is not a protected characteristic, because it is a choice. You can choose to not only change parties, but also change how you communicate such things. In fact, many institutions fundamentally demand the ability to exclude people based on their political affiliation, including primaries and political groups. We literally could not run a primary, caucus, or PAC without the ability to discriminate based on political affiliation.
To continue the metaphor, this is less like someone getting kicked out of a shop because of their race or gender, and more like getting kicked out for refusing to wear pants.
The fact that people do convert religions is irrelevant to the reasons why the religion is specifically protected.
Why did you choose to leave that out? Is it perhaps because it invalidates your entire argument?
Freedom of religion and expression are coded in the same amendment for a reason, and come from the same historically progressive ideals.
>To continue the metaphor, this is less like someone getting kicked out of a shop because of their race or gender, and more like getting kicked out for refusing to wear pants.
Do you think freedom of expression is as important and historically significant to human rights (i.e. the right to not be refused service based on your skin color) as freedom to not wear pants?
Sigh. I'll remind you that it's a rule around here to presume good faith. Dealing with such comments is noxious and tiresome.
I left it out because my post was already too long. If I left it out because it invalidated my point, I wouldn't have mentioned it.
> Freedom of religion and expression are coded in the same amendment for a reason, and come from the same historically progressive ideals.
Yes they are, but the amendment you're referencing limits only what the government can do, not private parties.
We as a society have placed some restrictions on the right of free association via legislation, not amendment, but the overlap with the first amendment is much less clear than you imply. Some aspects of the first amendment have been turned into protected characteristics (religion), others have not (speech).
> Do you think freedom of expression is as important and historically significant to human rights (i.e. the right to not be refused service based on your skin color) as freedom to not wear pants?
I believe that freedom of expression is important, but I also believe that freedom of association is important. When the two come into conflict on private property, I generally hold that the right of free association is more important than free expression. This is because free expression is only temporarily inconvenienced if one is told to express elsewhere, while free association is inalterably destroyed if one cannot ask someone to leave your private property based on their behavior.
Were not talking about abolishing freedom of association or property rights, thats the same strawman hateful business used which of course did not happen.
Were talking about the most powerful corporations in the world who have become de facto owners and governors of the town square in which the majority of communication takes place.
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/s
Are you against freedom of speech? Why exactly?
Would you feel the same if Democrats/Marxists were deplatformed after the next election?
The Florida Deplatforming Law Is Unconstitutional - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27064221 - May 2021 (37 comments)
Florida bill will fine social media sites for banning politicians- except Disney - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27010054 - May 2021 (5 comments)
Florida plans to fine social media for banning politicians - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27006912 - May 2021 (11 comments)
Disney gets special “theme park” exception to Florida’s anti-tech bill - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27002543 - May 2021 (23 comments)
Florida bill to fine social media for banning politicians - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27001610 - May 2021 (51 comments)
That’d be libel / defamation.
It is also worth pointing out that unser this law you still must inform your social networks of your candidacy so they know they can't deplaform you.
Maybe Ron DeSantis should start his own social media platform instead of attempting to force private businesses to give up their freedoms.
Edit: this comment was originally posted in comments for this link: https://www.flgov.com/2021/05/24/governor-ron-desantis-signs... (got merged into the NYT article)
Edit 2: I guess this is HN's way of censoring political content. Mark hot/upcoming article as "dupe" of old article that has way less traction and does not even show up on the front page (or on any following pages as well).
Then, let FB/Twitter etc do whatever they want
Doesn't matter if people want to go there. The point is that it exists, and the model is governed by the taxpayers.
Impact of a government social media: If you get banned from Facebook, you have the option to post your non-illegal content on townsquare.us. Therefore, your free speech rights are not being impacted. The right to speak is not the right to be heard by the audience of your choice.
I get that you don't share concerns about deplatforming, but presenting this as a solution to those concerns is not accurate.
But none of those platforms draw a direct line between the constitutional guarantee of free speech and implementation of that speech. That’s the idea behind the public option: it’s the constitution with teeth, freedom in its purest form, while leaving corporations open to experiment with restrictions as the market demands.
Another free speech utopia imploded within two sentences.
With that being said, the only way I see this happening is if the government builds its own ISP and /or IXP, secures its own peering agreements (with the understanding that another ISP can refuse), hosts the website on its own servers, and accepts all potential spam that comes from all of its users.
In addition, none of this will stop tracking by ads using tricks like the Facebook Pixel, obfuscated analytics, or fingerprinting scripts as code is also free speech. In fact, none of stops any tracking on server-side by government agents either. Any IP logs or information that's gleaned from user access of government services is understood to be self-incriminating and will be treated as such as in the case of a drug dealer in Massachusetts.[1]
All in all, who is expected to pay for all this (and on what grounds) and how do you intend to stop ads or any tracking at all with these factors involved?
[1]https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/05/how-the-usps-tar...
I'm not sure I follow the code-as-free-speech argument, or how it would apply to a government website. The government banned the use of cookies in 2000. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2000/10/24/r...
It certainly could again.
Of course it would be taxpayer funded.
>Spam: irrelevant or inappropriate messages sent on the internet to a large number of recipients.
Social media and the internet is already overrun with spam anyway so its a null point
So I can post all the ads I want for my revolutionary penis enlargement pills?
The bar for the government being able to legally suppress speech is purposefully very, very high. This is good when it comes to keeping the power of the state out of matters it shouldn’t be involved in, but this is bad when you’re trying to make a social media platform usable by anyone but the absolute dregs of society.
Content moderation is very, very hard, but people actually want it. There’s a reason why people stay on Twitter while whining on Twitter rather than going to 4chan or 8kun
Such is the nature of living in a free society. Certainly there are ways, in even the most basic social media platforms, of un-following / blocking certain posters. And if the content isn't targeted by algorithm, should be fairly easy to avoid content you don't want to see.
Any if not, well, there's always Facebook and Twitter.
https://youtu.be/4Doo9kOTuUk
What they want is for the government, run by their preferred party, to regulate privately-owned social media such that moderating their preferred political speech, however extreme or misleading it may be, becomes illegal.
Well, there’s a lot of interesting things to unpack here. First amendment questions, the Commerce Clause, and the 10th amendment all come to mind. Sec. 230 is being directly challenged, but I don’t think this was the way to do it. This will probably fail in circuit court, be denied an appeal, and fail to be granted certiorari. I can see Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh voting to hear it, but nobody else. But ultimately this is going to waste a lot of the Florida AG’s time on a very lengthy legal procedure.
> Big Tech is prohibited from de-platforming Floridian political candidates.
> Any Floridian can block any candidate they don’t want to hear from, and that is a right that belongs to each citizen — it’s not for Big Tech companies to decide.
What nonsense. Why are politicians some special class of people?
Here's the argument. Democracy requires that politicians have the ability to contact potential voters. There are contribution limits as well as spending limits. In politics most of the money is spent trying to contact voters.
So tech companies banning some politicians but not others is a contribution in kind to a campaign.
The value of a verified Twitter account is far more than the direct contribution limit.
Therefore either all politicians should be allowed, or all must be banned from Twitter.
The FEC is unable to do its job because the Senate hasn't been confirming appointments.
So now states are trying to pass laws to fill the gap.
Are there protections for other protected groups? It seems like it's just piecemealing special privileges rather than creating a good framework.
It’s a Cynical idea, in that it advocates an inherent virtue to human subjective experience, even hate - like Diogenes the Cynic asserting public masturbation was fine.
So, my response: our emotions have no inherent ethics. They may have a survival value, because strong emotions can compel us to action we may reject if we were rational. Is that - irrational survivalism - really a state to aspire to? Has it any likelihood to induce ethical behavior or advance civilization or make the world nicer for your family?
I agree that negative emotions are rather more taboo in America than is healthy. But reflecting on why they are taboo at all, I would rather err on the side of Spock than Worf.
Sadly this is a huge trend to score political points right now. For example, I think there was a bill providing extra protections to Asian Americans, and a referendum in PA to add race based protection to the state constitution. The protections already exist, so it's just political theater.
Edit: Why downvote?
I'm not sure I would classifying "deplatforming" them as a universally good way to hold politicians to account, but yeah, sure, platforms can shut you off when you are an endless fount of lies and propaganda.
You realize a business isn't a person?
Edit: The core purpose would be much better served by a user "bill of rights" that protects all users against capricous and arbitrary decisions to revoke access with zero explanation.
I read the bill but couldn't find the referrenced statute that defines deplatforming. It isn't clear to me if social media companies woyld be required to reinstate banned accounts of peoole who run for office or would be merely prevented from banning them.
I'm glad that social media platforms remove people violating community guidelines, whatever they are. I don't want people here on HN who do nothing but post flamebait, and I don't want people on Twitter who do nothing but post hate speech. I don't want platforms to be required to host any and all people.
But it's critical that politicians can reach us by whatever means we're using. They are a special class of people, because they're the people we're choosing to represent us. If a political candidate can't reach an audience because they don't agree politically with the platform providers, that's a big fucking problem for democracy.
I'm not saying I like the idea, but it's vastly better to me than to have the Overton window chosen by the platform provider. If you can propose a way to stop bad-faith candidates from abusing it, that'd be a great thing, but it's secondary to preserving the ability for political candidates to state their positions, whatever they are.
Is this a problem currently? I am not aware of any political candidate not being able to state their position, whatever they are.
It’s even pretty cheap to do so with the advent of the internet, cheaper and easier than it has ever been.
I don't know whether the rule is necessary. But if it becomes so, I do believe a special rule for political candidates, as opposed to requiring all platforms to host all people, is the right choice.
I want politicians to post on whatever people are using to get information. Almost nobody I know my age is regularly watching the news on TV, or checking the local paper's website. They might have other channels, but they certainly don't have other channels with the same reach.