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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

#741

Post by kortilla »

hedora wrote: post #734
Brybry wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a lawyer but I don't think this would apply to bots. The Texas law text[1] says it only protects 'users' which are defined as people. And even then the law only prohibits censorship for specific reasons. It doesn't say companies can't ban users for running bots. Even if the messages the bot is posting are protected the fact of running the bot itself should still be a bannable offense if it's not allowed in th…

Corporations are people. This clearly defines bots hired by any corporation that is in, does buisness with, or communicates with a person in Texas as a "user". Edit: Skipped a step: When spent by a corporation, the courts have ruled that money is speech. Therefore, the bot's output is clearly the speech of the corporation, which is definitely a person.

> Corporations are people.

No they are not. They share some specific rights as people, but are not people. A corporation can’t be murdered, can’t vote, can’t be imprisoned, can’t marry another person, etc.

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

#743

Post by hedora »

adventured wrote: post #245
CJefferson wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's a very simple solution that works very well with social media for that. You don't receive the OP's messages unless you are friends him them, or change your default settings to allow strangers to message you.

Or, like linkedin: Charge a small amount to send messages to non-friends.

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

#744

Post by hedora »

ekianjo wrote: post #717
coffeeblack wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let each user block what they don’t want to see. With filters, ai, etc. Don’t have a centralized “overlord” decide what an individual is allowed to see. That should be obvious and not controversial.

This kind of thing wouls never be a problem in the first place if social network stopped shoving in your face content from people you dont follow. The are de facto acting as publishers because of that.

If only we had centuries of established case law regarding publishers and liability...

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

#745

Post by shadowgovt »

rayiner wrote: post #728
shadowgovt wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it turns out that professional vetting institutions have biases. If those biases appear partisan, it may be the case and that they are partisan for a reason having to do with the nature of the professional expertise that and the lack of said expertise on the other side of a partisan divide.

A disproportionate share of the intellectual horsepower in the legal profession is on the right. Which is why the conservative legal movement is so effective even though liberal lawyers outnumber conservative ones 10:1.

I don't think I've seen evidence of this in my lifetime. If anything, legal decisions in the federal court system have been pretty liberal until recently.

My generation saw the legalization, nationally, of gay marriage as well as the protection of personal property rights regarding firearms against government attempts to circumvent those rights for law-abiding citizens. Meanwhile, an attempt to modify the census (a fairly broad executive power) failed to pass muster in the court because someone wrote down basically the only way such a modification could be illegal (blatantly attempting to disenfranchise states along racial lines)... Was their actual intent.

And we probably shouldn't go into the absolute debacle that was the attempt to override the electoral will of the 50 states in the 2020 election.

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

#746

Post by foolfoolz »

bglazer wrote: post #524
cabaalis wrote: post #489

Naming who appointed judges when writing articles about their decisions is a dog whistle. Change my mind.

Its not a dog whistle, its just a whistle. Judges have the politics of the politicians who appoint them; why else would the politicians appoint them? Frankly, it’s extremely naive to assume that judges are apolitical.

it’s extremely naive to assume politics are the only reason to appoint a judge

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

#747

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

Buttons840 wrote: post #163

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…

You are under the assumption that Twitter or other platforms will not innovate or attempt to adapt to the new legal landscape they find themselves in.

Give users intuitive filters? Give users the ability to create invite-only communities? Etc.

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

#748

Post by solarmist »

Thorentis wrote: post #738
MichaelCollins wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> reach millions of people I think this is the heart of the problem. These social media companies didn't merely build agoras, they built amphitheaters. They build amphitheaters so large that control over the amphitheater makes you a kingmaker. Now they can't let go of that control, because doing so would risk the wrong people using it. They never should have built amphitheaters this large in the first place. Better i…

The logical solution to this problem then, seems to be breaking up the amphitheatres. If these places are too big that we are forced to treat them as public squares, then we should pass laws that do not allow amphitheatres that large to exist.

That actually seems like a pretty reasonable solution.

It would solve all the issues with private people/companies having too much sway. And the disconnect people have trying to reason about someone with that kind of world altering influence.

It would be like monopoly laws but for amphitheaters. I think we’d need to be much more aggressive with the definitions though and having fewer than 10s would trigger these laws.

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

#749

Post by DangitBobby »

NaturalPhallacy wrote: post #689
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…

> Reddit also has a Terms of Service and it has banned hate groups under such terms of service. > So of course moderation seems biased when your views are hateful to begin with. It doesn't seem biased, it is biased. Reddit's policy on "hate groups" is both sexist and racist, according to one of their employees, and their actual practices. "Our rule1 protects groups that are attacked based on a vulnerability, which do…

The people on that site are infuriating. I managed to spend about 60 seconds on that site before I saw someone say "racism = prejudice + power" in response to someone else saying you can be racist against white people. Why try to change the dictionary definition of a the word "racism" to mean "systemic racism", I wonder?

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

#750

Post by osigurdson »

Maybe there should just be a way to for people to opt in to censorship in their feeds. For example, one could click on a "no racism checkbox" in order to have racist content removed from their feeds. This way, platforms would be responsible for detection instead of curation. It seems like it would be better for the platforms as well.
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