701–710 of 1001 posts
Will this apply to bots? What if I have a big list of a complaints about a certain politician (use your imagination, there's more than one politician to complain about), but the "other party" doesn't follow me, in fact, I have very few followers overall. So I create a bot that spreads my opinions by replying to millions of other Tweets. Anyone who mentions the politician of interest will receive a reply from "me" (my…
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What do you think the most convincing part of that techdirt piece is? To me it mostly reads like an exasperated emotional rant. He calls the ruling “stupid” and “batshit crazy” and likens the judges to “ignorant trolls.” And uses italics everywhere. It’s not exactly an appeal to reason. To me the one interesting bit was this: “ The websites do engage in editorial control. The difference from newspapers is that it’s e…
That article quotes the opinion at length, and I think does a good job of pointing out how bad the opinion is on its face . For example, just look at the section where the opinion argues that the platform is bringing up "hypotheticals" it talking about curbing pro-Nazi or terrorist posts. I kept re-reading the quoted opinion again and again thinking "Is this judge a complete idiot?" To be clear, I'm not basing this o…
But IANAL and had to read through it pretty fast.
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Having run a mail server, I don't think it's reasonable to expect most people to contain the deluge of spam and phishing attacks they would get if just told them to "sort it out" themselves.
You misunderstood. Don’t require users to build their bubbles, but have providers offer bubbles for a user to choose from. You could even have external bubble providers that offer different technologies and qualities of filters. Just don’t have one centralised overlord.
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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.
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If you say "we are going to restrict ourselves [at the Government's insistence] to only moderating non-political speech" then someone will insist that some part of your non-political speech is actually political. And from some perspective they will be right. Then you get to negotiate with the government and the courts about what they consider to be political speech or not. And suddenly you no longer live in a country…
> And suddenly you no longer live in a country that has a meaningful First Amendment. The overarching issue is that I don't see what the first amendment has to do with this at all. Corporations have zero obligations to anyone under the first amendment, which only applies to the government.
Which only applies to the Federal government. States have had rules about speech since forever.
Texas wants platforms with > 50M users to treat political speech equally. That's well within a State's right to acquire that protection for its citizens.
Other states can choose different rules, or to leave their citizens with less rights, it's up to them.
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…
Controlling what content is rendered on a site is speech itself. Government making rules infringes on my right what my software can and can’t display. It would be like the government telling Wikipedia can’t edit their articles.
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The decision[0] gives different logic (quoting from page 85): If a firm’s core business is disseminating others’ speech, then that should weaken, not strengthen, the firm’s argument that it has a First Amendment right to censor that speech. In PruneYard, for example, the shopping mall was open to the public—but for the purpose of shopping, not sharing expression. So it was perhaps tenuous for the State to use the pub…
Current law doesn’t have machinery to represent this idea, so it makes sense their arguments won’t match. But at the core of all the arguments this is the idea that’s trying to be settled. And really it’s more complicated than all that because it boils down to the algorithm deciding who to show the posts too. An unbiased algorithm is impossible. Show all political messages to all people, now you’ve just incentivized…
False. Twitter's original algorithm (everyone you followed in reverse insertion order) is trivially unbiased.
The bias creeps in when they analyze the content of the speech (or who specifically likes it or…). You can 100% do an unbiased algorithmic feed that re-orders (or omits) things.
Twitter and Facebook could do it today. They shadow ban and suppress all sorts of things (beyond kicking actual human users off the site).
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…
But the Supreme Court is more likely to agree with the other appeals court, or otherwise modify the scope of the texas law
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Actually, the first amendment applies to the government, not people at all. Most of the bill of rights work that way. They're not things given to people, but things the government is barred from doing. So there's really no legal analysis necessary, the bulk of the bill of rights is pretty easily read and understood by the average person as intended. How can you stand for your rights if you don't know what they are? A…
"the people" is who exactly?
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By some readings of section 230, they may not be able to unless they want to be treated as a publisher of speech. However, almost nobody is going to actually argue that this is the case. Also, IIRC moderation rules are allowed, and if your rule is "no politics on the forum" and someone talks politics, they can be banned. Same with "no racism" or "no antisemitic comments."
Section 230 (c) 3. Seems pretty clear that they can moderate for anything the provider finds objectionable. Do you think this is unclear? > No provider or user of an interactive com- puter service shall be held liable on account of— > (A) 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, exces- sive…
To be clear, I don't agree with those interpretations of section 230 - and neither do many judges.