Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

671–680 of 1001 posts

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

#671

Post by rayiner »

rainsford wrote: post #603
rayiner wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The distinction the court is drawing isn’t about corporations versus non-corporations, but speech versus moderation. You say moderation is about “editorial control” but that’s exactly the debate. Is Facebook moderation equivalent to the NYT deciding what to publish and not publish? When someone reads a Facebook post, does anyone think that Facebook is the speaker? That legal fiction is attractive for various reasons,…

Even if you subscribe to the viewpoint that Facebook is a "pipe" rather than the speaker, it seems hard to avoid the idea that Facebook's choice of which speech it is a pipe for constitutes free speech by Facebook. Nobody should be confused as to whether a newspaper is the author of letters to the editor, but it has a 1st amendment right to choose which letters to publish.

It doesn’t seem that hard to me to say that what Facebook does with millions of messages flowing through its pipes every day is “conduct” not “speech.”

A better foundation for this seems to be property rights—it’s facebook’s pipes, and their business what they do with it.

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

#672

Post by int_19h »

didibus wrote: post #484
ryeights wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 1st Amendment applies to aliens. https://pennstatelaw.psu.edu/sites/default/files/Are%20Immig...

There are many various alien statuses, so I would guess it depends, but that's fine, whoever it legally applies too, just you need to prove it applies to you first.

It legally applies to everybody. The limits depend not on who you are, but on the contents of the speech.

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

#673

Post by eduction »

eduction wrote: post #446
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.

> Of course the judges in question were rated unqualified by the ABA (which is a really low bar) so not surprising. Not true. The first of the two judges who concurred on this opinion, Andrew Oldham, was unanimously rated “well qualified” by ABA’s federal judiciary standing committee on Feb 15 2018 according to their website see page 5: https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/g... Also concurring,…

Correction: Jones was concurring and Southwick was the dissent. I can’t find any evidence of how ABA ruled on Jones’ qualifications back in 1985 but it’s clear Oldham who wrote the opinion that appears first was never found “unqualified.”

If you Google Jones you will find an ethics complaint, maybe that’s what OP was thinking of. It was over a speech she gave (not recorded) and was dismissed.

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

#675

Post by x86_64Ubuntu »

mindslight wrote: post #112
mustache_kimono wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that history is happening as we speak (Yo, media outlets/reporters interested in writing a feature! This would be an amazing topic.). The crux is really 2016/Trump, Adrian Vermeule's "common good constitutionalism", and outlets like Claremont's The American Mind. For lack of a better term, MAGA conservatives are building an intellectual infrastructure for a very aggressive conservative judiciary right now.

Can we stop miscategorizing reactionary regressivism as "conservatism" ? There is nothing conservative about it. They're essentially trying to drag us back at least a few decades and destroy longstanding institutions, including things like separation of church and state and the right to access medical care.

>...Can we stop miscategorizing reactionary regressivism as "conservatism"

But that is conservatism though. I can't help but see the whole attempt at renaming it "regressivism" is to avoid "conservatism" from taking the fall when people look at it's outcomes. No one that would be "regressive" today was not a conservative yesterday.

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

#676

Post by xani_ »

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?

The difference is that you can go to other restaurant, but social medias are so big that if you're not on twitter/facebook you might as well not exist in public view.

Of course that does not apply to smaller forums and I think that if we had laws that force social companies to not censor people they don't like (let's face it, that's exactly what they want to do), it should be limited to anything that's actually big, not random joe shmoe forum about mushrooms.

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

#677

Post by catiopatio »

NegativeK wrote: post #658
catiopatio wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The intent of the first amendment was to preserve free speech in the public square; "what the first amendment has to do with this at all" is a desire to preserve that underlying societal principle. Section 230 was a give-away to corporations that allowed them to privatize and co-opt the public square; they reap the economic benefit of being shielded from liability for what people post, but none of the responsibility…

> Wyden, now a Senator, stated that he intended for Section 230 to be both "a sword and a shield" for Internet companies, the "sword" allowing them to remove content they deem inappropriate for their service, and the shield to help keep offensive content from their sites without liability. However, Wyden warned that because tech companies have not been willing to use the sword to remove content, they could be at risk…

I’m claiming that section 230 is a fundamentally flawed construction that privatized the modern public square, while socializing the costs inherent in that privatization.

I’m not debating whether section 230 is functioning in accordance with its authors’ intentions; frankly, what they intended doesn’t matter.

Section 230 was a totally inappropriate give-away of unique privileges without requiring commiserate public value be returned in-kind, contrary to our long history of requiring that common carriers serve the public without discrimination in exchange for the unique privilege of being shielded from liability.

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

#678

Post by int_19h »

zeta0134 wrote: post #24
Overtonwindow wrote: post #3

As a free-speech absolutist, I got no problem with this. Unless the speech is threatening the direct physical harm of someone, or violating a law, it should be allowed. At the same time, everyone else should have the tools to filter, block, and mute speech they do not like. If a tweet or a social media post has a certain word or phrase in it that I don’t like, I should be able to mute that and never see it. Social me…

I've been wondering about a technical solution to this problem for a while now. It seems like a properly distributed social media network would still need moderation... but who is to say everyone has to use the same moderators? What if we distributed the task of content moderation and allowed users to subscribe to a moderation team the same way they subscribe to a friend's updates? In this way, users could tune their…

https://getaether.net/docs/faq/voting_and_elections/

"When you vote in favour of a person, you are making that person a moderator for yourself, regardless of whether they win the vote or not.

In other words, you cannot vote yes for that person in public, and have them disabled as a mod in private. Your vote for a person is you making that person a mod for you. The reverse also applies, if you disable a person from being a mod, that is an impeachment vote.

Election makes it so that the people who come into a community, who have not chosen or disabled that particular mod by themselves, will use the mod list shaped by the elections. If a user has explicitly chosen a particular person to be a mod in that community, that takes precedence. Likewise, if a user has disabled a mod, that person will never be a mod for that user, regardless of the results.

If a mod you voted against (a mod you disabled / impeached / voted against) takes a mod action, that is ignored by your client, and has no effect. If a mod that you have taken no action on takes a mod action, it is accepted, but only so long as there is no action in reverse from a mod that you have explicitly voted for. If you don’t like actions of a mod you haven’t voted for is bothering you, you can easily disable that mod, and render them ineffectual."

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

#679

Post by xani_ »

seydor wrote: post #321
supernovae wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit is highly moderated and censored. You can't even post facts in /r/conservative without being banned. Reddit also has a Terms of Service and it has banned hate groups under such terms of service. With a large bias towards far right hate groups because there really is no existence of far left hate groups. So of course moderation seems biased when your views are hateful to begin with. Advertisers generally want n…

Moderated by unpaid users = shit moderation, you get what you pay for. Moderators get rewarded with the rush of 'power'

There is plenty examples of terrible paid moderation

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

#680

Post by 8note »

didibus wrote: post #495
themitigating wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument starts with an assertion that I don't think is true "think if you provide a service that basically creates a free public sphere, " You don't provide any justification for this

> "think if you provide a service that basically creates a free public sphere, " You don't provide any justification for this My justification is two fold. Number one, I think there's a large amount of people who believe that these new media should be covered by free speech. I think you can disagree, but just the fact that a lot of people think so makes it legitimate in my opinion. The question is, is it reasonable f…

What online public sphere has the public created?

Theft or stealing generally implies that property has moved hands. What property has been stolen?

The right thing Imo is for the government to build a social media site to act as the public sphere online.

Post reply on HN