Earlier quoted context omitted.
so is it ok for a telephone company to cut your line if you support the resistance?
Telephone companies are common carriers (AFAIK) and have additional rules they must follow. Twitter is not.
Looks like it does now
U.S. appeals court rejects big tech’s right to regulate online speech
431–440 of 1001 posts
Re: U.S. appeals court rejects big tech’s right to regulate online speech
#432Earlier quoted context omitted.
Users should protect themselves from this. With the expectation that they will, there will be tons of tools available and this scenario will be a nonstarter. Decentralized defenses against bots will be far more effective than the central planning of information ecosystems we have today. Just watch.
Do you really think the average non-technical user will have a clue as to what to do about this hypothetical problem? I don't think that's a credible take. Consider that this situation isn't like email spam filtering. I can't run a spam filter on the Twitter app on my phone. And if Twitter is not allowed to filter spam, that's it: no spam filtering for Twitter users.
> I can't run a spam filter on the Twitter app on my phone
That's nothing fundamentally preventing this. It's Twitter themselves who've decided not to allow you to do this. Were their app more open to extension you would be able to download and configure a spam filter of your choosing.
Re: U.S. appeals court rejects big tech’s right to regulate online speech
#433Earlier quoted context omitted.
Users should protect themselves from this. With the expectation that they will, there will be tons of tools available and this scenario will be a nonstarter. Decentralized defenses against bots will be far more effective than the central planning of information ecosystems we have today. Just watch.
Do you really think the average non-technical user will have a clue as to what to do about this hypothetical problem? I don't think that's a credible take. Consider that this situation isn't like email spam filtering. I can't run a spam filter on the Twitter app on my phone. And if Twitter is not allowed to filter spam, that's it: no spam filtering for Twitter users.
You'll be able to go to a different platform that does allow decentralized spam filtering then
Re: U.S. appeals court rejects big tech’s right to regulate online speech
#434Earlier quoted context omitted.
Citizens United determined that corporations have some of the same natural rights that people do. In particular, First Amendment right, which in turn means that corporations can do the same politicking (and political funding) that natural persons do. This ruling countermands that: the (implicit) right to not be compelled to speak would seemingly no longer apply to corporations or, more accurately, the people within t…
Citizens United determined that corporations have some of the same natural rights that people do. In particular, First Amendment right, which in turn means that corporations can do the same politicking (and political funding) that natural persons do. A more charitable way to put this: you don't lose your First Amendment rights just because you joined with other people for commercial or other purposes.
I don't think that's accurate. I don't think anyone believed that joining a company would -- for example -- mean that they were no longer allowed to make financial contributions, individually, to political campaigns.
Citizens United affirmed that it was ok for corporations to use corporate funds to make political speech via financial contributions. Not allowing that would not imply that people who work for a corporation have lost their individual first amendment rights.
Re: U.S. appeals court rejects big tech’s right to regulate online speech
#435Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why the cutoff? Is it because all the companies it would apply to agents conservative, like Truth Social?
Because there needs to be a cutoff in determining when it becomes a "public" square.
I just googled it and found that "With so many “small towns,” the average local jurisdiction population in the United States is 6,200." why not use that as the limit?
Re: U.S. appeals court rejects big tech’s right to regulate online speech
#436Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can see the tweets and posts because a private company allows you to make an account, and even then you don't see all. That's like walking into a Starbucks and reading the chalkboard. Everybody who can enter can read it. Factual it's faster and easier to enter a Starbucks than creating an FB account. And like we all know if FB decides to ban your account you can nothing do about it. Doesn't sound like a public pl…
When a private place has 50 million users it clears that has become a “public place”. Think as if the subway was privately owned
"In 2018, a Nielsen Scarborough survey found that over 37.8 million Americans visited a Starbucks (Statista, 2021) within the last 30 days."
So Starbucks is now a public place?
I don't think so.
Re: U.S. appeals court rejects big tech’s right to regulate online speech
#437Important to note that this 5th Circuit ruling conflicts with the 11th Circuit's ruling. And SCOTUS had previously reinstated an injunction against this very same law. And this 5th Circuit opinion has very idiosyncratic reasoning [0, just the first few pages will blow your hair back]. A sample: "In urging such sweeping relief, the platforms offer a rather odd inversion of the First Amendment. That Amendment, of cours…
This opinion is just badly written and badly reasoned. It's not even well written enough that it is worth trying to debate. Of course the judges in question were rated unqualified by the ABA (which is a really low bar) so not surprising.
> a corporation’s unenumerated right to muzzle speech ..
That is clearly not based on facts. Corporations simply have a right to choose which speech they will AMPLIFY. That is not the same as muzzling anybody.
They don't knock on your door and say you better stop expressing these views or we will harm you. They don't even harass people online. They just simply choose which speech they will pass on and which not.
If you tell me something and I don't tell anybody what you told me, does that mean I "muzzle your speech". Of course not. Rather it is the case that you don't have the right to demand that I pass on your emails to all my contacts.
This is bad jurisprudence. I wonder, was this judge perhaps nominated by D. Trump?
Re: U.S. appeals court rejects big tech’s right to regulate online speech
#438Earlier quoted context omitted.
230 is broad. At the time, websites were mostly just hosts of content. The individual is posting on the website but otherwise the website is a tool. This changes with recommendation algorithms. Nearly all social media is based on some kind of recommendation algorithm. Should that be covered by 230? It could be argued that it starts to get closer to an endorsement of certain content (and indeed, some of that recommend…
Chronological is still fits the interface of a recommendation algorithm. You can take HN as an example of a recommendation service - while they remove things that are off topic, you'd have to argue that YC endorses whatever is in the #1 spot on HN.
And at any rate, #1 on HN is not the product of any simple rule like "most upvotes per unit time with some decay function applied." There is significant judgment in expressed in the way that stories are ranked. The source code as of 2012 was enough to demonstrate this, but in my understanding yet more judgment has been applied since then.
Re: U.S. appeals court rejects big tech’s right to regulate online speech
#439Censoring and moderating and content, as it relates to this lawsuit, is very expensive. I wouldn't be surprised if it ranks pretty high in their cost chart. The only reason that social media platforms do content moderation is to manage the financial (advertisers), and the political risk. Well, if the politicians and the courts tell them they can't moderate political stuff, then the political risk has been removed. Al…
Hugely expensive. Zuck mentioned in the rogan episode they spend roughly $5b annual on "Defense" aka moderation and safety. To put it in perspective, that's roughly in line with what the defense budgets of Switzerland and Mexico.
Re: U.S. appeals court rejects big tech’s right to regulate online speech
#440Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s a pretty abrupt turnaround from the same legal movement that brought us Citizens United . I’d be interested in a fair (i.e. not overly critical or fawning) book length history of the Federalist Society and how it’s evolved.
It's a mistake to think of much of the American right as a legal movement or theory vs something more akin to a moral or religious one. Consistency is not the point. The examples of this in the media are the easiest to see: consider the performative outrage and hurt feelings you'll get on a Monday with the grief of how everyone is such a snowflake today on a Tuesday. (EDIT: this is in all likelihood true for every po…
>this is in all likelihood true for every political party everywhere
Of course it is. And of course consistency is not the point. Hypocrisy is just good politics. "It's bad when you do but good when we do it" is optimal strategy.
Check out Schmitt for the "friend/enemy distinction" in politics [0]. All political factions plays this game, this is fundamental to democracy [1]. Holding your opponents to standards and principles you yourself don't follow is how you win. And of course speech rules within social media platforms is fundamentally a political issue.
[0] https://youtu.be/0d3aRYlSHDU "The friend-enemy distinction"
[1] https://youtu.be/HqgLlYO4JSo "Carl Schmitt On the Contradiction Between Parliamentarism and Democracy"