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U.S. appeals court rejects big tech’s right to regulate online speech

reuters.com

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Re: U.S. appeals court rejects big tech’s right to regulate online speech

#551

Post by NayamAmarshe »

MonkeyMalarky wrote: post #482
NayamAmarshe wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why shouldn't online businesses be able to reject some of their customers? If they were advertising it as "a website for everyone except these opinions: ...", your point would have been valid. That's why.

It's right there in the T&C and content guidelines isn't it?

That's the thing, it's not. If they specifically said that I'd be banned for having certain opinions different from Zuckerberg, I'd have never complained but they didn't. They are vague, they are disingenuous and I honestly cannot believe so many people are defending them for censoring others.

Politics aside, Facebook bans people for smallest of things. I got banned for 30 days for quoting someone's comment. It's a censorship dystopia that only people with short-sighted vision of the future could support.

Re: U.S. appeals court rejects big tech’s right to regulate online speech

#552

Post by thrown_22 »

solarmist wrote: post #60

Copied from a comment thread below. Because I feel this is the root of the issue/problem. > I don't see how the heck my website is a public square but my home or café isn't, this argument sounds self-contradictory. Yup. This is the exact problem that we’re (as a society/world) wrestling with. The reason it is (not just seems) different is because of the scope. A message on a chalkboard cannot reach millions of people…

MySite.com will crash if a million people try to read it.

BigCorp.com will not.

If you can serve more than two dozen people you're not a home, pub or private property, you are by definition a public square.

Re: U.S. appeals court rejects big tech’s right to regulate online speech

#553

Post by rufus_foreman »

DannyBee wrote: post #138
mustache_kimono wrote: post #5

Important 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.

eduction's comment asserts the exact opposite of what you are saying. Who is lying here?

Re: U.S. appeals court rejects big tech’s right to regulate online speech

#554

Post by _hcuq »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #425

I don't get it. Restaurants can choose their customers based on how they behave or even how they are dressed. Why shouldn't online businesses be able to reject some of their customers?

That’s the irony of all this. It’s the “freedom” party interfering with a company’s right to run its own website.

Re: U.S. appeals court rejects big tech’s right to regulate online speech

#555

Post by smaddox »

NayamAmarshe wrote: post #457
AstralStorm wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't your right to have a particular newspaper publish your particular opinion. It is your right to publish your own newspaper.

This analogy doesn't work. Social Media is not newspaper, they're a printing machine letting you publish your own newspaper. You can't just register with a newspaper and post opinions for free. Social Media websites and platforms are acting as common carriers. They provide you an audience, without upfront cost. If they discriminate against you for an opinion their 'experts' do not like, they should suffer the consequ…

> You can't just register with a newspaper and post opinions for free.

You don't have to register to send a letter to the editor. The newspaper has discretion about whether or not to publish it.

There's certainly a difference in scale, but I don't really see a fundamental difference in kind.

Re: U.S. appeals court rejects big tech’s right to regulate online speech

#556

Post by concinds »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #437
DannyBee wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 y…

> Corporations simply have a right to choose which speech they will AMPLIFY

I'll readily admit that algorithms can amplify content; but more than enough people have been tweeting for years and barely have any likes on their tweets (see @CNN, though I'm being cheeky). People say that algorithms reward bad content, because they amplify controversy; but really they just give people what they want. A "controversial" tweet with no likes won't get amplified.

The crux is that if you agree that due to their use of algorithms, these platforms "amplify" all the content they host, then surely that means they endorse whatever they don't ban, to some extent? I'm not making a legal argument, just an intuitive one. That reasoning doesn't scale to an understaffed, undermoderated social media platform that can't even ban the omnipresent "double your crypto" scam accounts.

Re: U.S. appeals court rejects big tech’s right to regulate online speech

#557

Post by throwaway0asd »

root_axis wrote: post #259
throwaway0asd wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If social media wishes to be immune from lawsuits regarding the content it publishes, section 203, then it should not have the ability to censor such content for an explicit commercial revenue model. I understand why people hate that opinion, because they want civil discourse and nearly free access to media online. Uncensored content pushes normal people out. Those things are great, but are ultimately out of alignmen…

> If social media wishes to be immune from lawsuits regarding the content it publishes, section 203, then it should not have the ability to censor such content for an explicit commercial revenue model. Why? This is seems like a total non-sequitur. It's pretty obvious that the individual posting illegal content is the person responsible for it and not the platform it's posted to, unless the platform is soliciting or r…

> Why?

It is a non-sequitur only from the perspective of a social media company protecting its media business, but not from any other perspective. If I, as not even a user of the given social media service, were to receive numerous death threats as a result of content published and republished on that social media service I should have the ability to sue them for libel. This, of course, also ignores the numerous criminal liabilities faced by that social media company had they not been shielded by something like section 203, such as depraved indifference harm. There are numerous examples of this scenario both large and small, for example pizza-gate conspiracy theory and various online conspiracy theories attributed to Alex Jones.

At the moment harmed individuals get neither the ability to sue to recoup their harms nor a vote to censor content that is clearly illegal and/or harmful in the immediate to their person. This immunity does not exist for any other communication venue in the US irrespective of first amendment concerns, for example if a radio show or newspaper allowed such conspiracy theories you could sue them into bankruptcy as did Hulk Hogan versus Gawker.

Re: U.S. appeals court rejects big tech’s right to regulate online speech

#558

Post by concinds »

I don't like the frame of "big tech's rights."

Sure, corporations have free speech rights in America. But the pressure to ban "bad people" comes from below; organized campaigns pressure Twitter/Facebook et al to ban certain people, and they oblige in order to protect their brand. That's a problem when we live under a "platform oligopoly" where high-profile people banned from one platform get banned everywhere at once. It's strange that people conflate corporations' free, voluntary actions, with corporations being pressured by an intolerant minority[0]. And before you respond with "we shouldn't be tolerant of intolerance", read this thread: https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1037273239347703808

[0]: https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...

Re: U.S. appeals court rejects big tech’s right to regulate online speech

#559

Post by favorited »

guelo wrote: post #486
mustache_kimono wrote: post #5

Important 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…

> That Amendment, of course, protects every person’s right to 'the freedom of speech.' Wow that's just made up! All the amendment says is "Congress shall make no law...". These are supposedly originalist judges but really they're just culture warriors.

They're only originalists until you ask to see where the Constitution grants them judicial review. Then they need to start pointing at the Federalist Papers.

Re: U.S. appeals court rejects big tech’s right to regulate online speech

#560

Post by puffoflogic »

root_axis wrote: post #259
throwaway0asd wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If social media wishes to be immune from lawsuits regarding the content it publishes, section 203, then it should not have the ability to censor such content for an explicit commercial revenue model. I understand why people hate that opinion, because they want civil discourse and nearly free access to media online. Uncensored content pushes normal people out. Those things are great, but are ultimately out of alignmen…

> If social media wishes to be immune from lawsuits regarding the content it publishes, section 203, then it should not have the ability to censor such content for an explicit commercial revenue model. Why? This is seems like a total non-sequitur. It's pretty obvious that the individual posting illegal content is the person responsible for it and not the platform it's posted to, unless the platform is soliciting or r…

A fairly simple argument for this position is: This speech (the content posted to social media) is either speech by the poster or speech by the social media company; you can't have it both ways. If the social media company isn't responsible for illegal content, then ipso facto it must be the user's speech. But then the company doesn't have first amendment rights attached to that speech itself, such as the right against compelled speech that would be implicated by this law. (Note that this law doesn't by any plausible interpretation limit anyone's speech acts.)

I think everyone intuitively understands you can't assert 4A rights on contraband held by the police while also denying owning that contraband to dodge criminal responsibility. This thing with social media is the same thing but with 1A instead of 4A.

I would consider myself a first amendment absolutist; and yet I don't have a 1A problem with the concept of this law [0] insofar as social media companies choose the position that user speech isn't their speech. The problem is that they won't come out and state that position, they intentionally flipflop on whose speech their websites host exactly depending on what is most convenient. So of course it looks like this is a massively overreaching law when the position flops to "company speech". And if a company came out and said okay we accept responsibility for what's posted on our platform, then I'd be the first in line to say that the government can't force them to publish certain content.

Contrast traditional publishers who definitely have first amendment rights to publish or not to publish things. Well, yes, they do, but they also have legal responsibility for what they publish. The rights follow the responsibility.

[0] Saying nothing of the wording; because I'm sure it was drafted by censorious assholes, like every other law.

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