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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

#771

Post by netheril96 »

DannyBee wrote: post #143
swayvil wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In one case the corporation is speaking. In the other the corporation is facilitating me speaking to you (like a telephone wire). That strikes me as a pretty clear distinction. My hair is not blown back at all here.

The first amendment does not protect you against anything but the government. Full stop. Between people and people, corporations and corporations, and corporations and people it does nothing. The opinion fails at this very basic fact because they want it to be false. Not because there's any law suggesting it is false, nor has there been in a hundred years, but because they dont like it they just decided to make it up…

> The first amendment does not protect you against anything but the government.

Which is why Texas has to pass a regular law to protect us from the corporation, as the Constitution fails at that.

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

#773

Post by Kamq »

kortilla wrote: post #741
hedora wrote: post #734

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The concept is a "legal person", which means there's a whole host of things corporations can do.

The big ones being that they can be sued and charged for breaking the law, you can't do either of those things with, say, a rock or a dog.

They can also sue you back which is, admittedly, less fun.

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

#774

Post by toastal »

quantumwannabe wrote: post #764
MandieD wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GMail does this with my absentee ballots if I don't get lucky and see them go to Spam instead, because the State of Texas gives counties that really don't care about citizens who live overseas a system for generating ballots that is so slapdash that emails are from a domain that doesn't have DKIM or SPF, and the link to click is HTTP and not even an FQDN, but an IP address.

Why should you have the right to vote in a place where you don't live?

Because you're a citizen and you pay taxes.

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

#776

Post by catiopatio »

mpalmer wrote: post #757
catiopatio wrote: post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, corporations either have personhood or they don't. I'm fine with allowing them to censor speech if they also are liable for the speech they do choose to publish, just like any other individual, newspaper, or publisher would be. Platforms cannot simultaneously claim that: (1) They are mere conduits for other people's speech, and thus, deserve to be shielded from any liability for what they publish (2) What the…

I was under the impression that the law isn't quite settled on this point. I certainly am not going to pretend to understand the legal interests at play in this question. Why exactly should I be suing YouTube for hosting someone else's libel?

The law is very settled when it comes to publishers and common carriers, and has been for very long time.

If Fox News publishes libel, they can’t just claim that they’re hosting someone else’s reporting.

If a telecommunications provider publishes someone’s libel, they are shielded from liability as a common carrier. In exchange, however, they must provide their services non-discriminatorily to the public.

If FedEx delivers controlled substances as part of their usual course of business, they are also shielded from liability as a common carrier, but the same responsibility to serve the general public applies.

YouTube and other “interactive computer services”, however, were granted an explicit privileged shield from liability by the Communications Decency Act of 1996, with none of the responsibilities historically associated with that privilege.

Without the CDA, Twitter wouldn’t exist; they’d have been sued into oblivion long ago. Instead of solving that problem by extending our well-understood common carrier framework to “interactive computer services”, we granted them a massive privilege and asked for nothing in return.

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

#777

Post by Sunspark »

xani_ wrote: post #653
PradeetPatel wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's already being done by reputation management firms. As someone who worked as a resource liaison manager at one, it is not uncommon to see the majority of our social media operators are from diverse cost-of-living locations such as Nepal, rural Pakistan, and parts of Africa.

"diverse cost-of-living locations" is such a corporate way to call it

"..to improve the living conditions of our valued employees and members of the family, we sent them some plastic water bottles. They can hydrate themselves with clean water and then they can make a hole in their tin roof ceiling and stick the bottle through and this way it will act as a lightbulb and improve conditions in their dwellings."

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

#778

Post by rayiner »

shadowgovt wrote: post #745
rayiner wrote: post #728

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

See: https://scholarship.law.stjohns.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti.... Go back and compare judicial decisions from the 1940s to 1970s to ones today. The ones today are much more grounded in statutory text, constitutional history, etc., and less reliant on policy arguments, notions of justice and fairness, etc.

Even “liberal” legal decisions are far more conservative today than they were in the 1970s. Compare Roe and Obergefell (both written by socially liberal Republicans). Roe has lots of high minded hand waving about rights and dignity and whatnot. Obergefell meanwhile starts from deeply rooted traditions and spends a tremendous amount of ink making the case that gay marriage is sufficiently like traditional marriage that it should be covered by the same constitutional protection.

This became starkly apparent when Roe was overturned. By that point, the ground had shifted so much that even liberals had a hard time defending Roe on the merits. They had instead retreated to stare decisis. Because even a lot of liberal lawyers today have a hard time swallowing the idea that judges should be in the business of inventing new rights to implement their vision of what’s just.

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

#779

Post by yibg »

netheril96 wrote: post #70
Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the only reason. Without any moderation, sites would degenerate into cesspools that only cesspool dwellers would want to visit. Few site owners want their properties to be cesspools.

Why not give users the power of moderation? Currently the website owner makes the decision for me about what content I should not be seeing. I want instead all or at least almost all content preserved and the ability to create and subscribe to blocklists. The website can have a default blocklist active to make it palatable for the majority.

Isn’t that email before decent spam filters? I much prefer my inbox with spam filters.

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

#780

Post by Spivak »

slumpt_ wrote: post #684
fny wrote: post #660

Texas is setting itself up to be a huge regulatory counterweight to California. 1. We had the finance ruling related to fossil fuels. 2. We had the abortion ruling. 3. We now have this. This is going to be a huge shift politically. California, given the size of its economy, has often been a defacto regulatory power across the US. Given California's energy issues and high debt levels, their influence may wane even fur…

Regulatory counterweight I think may attribute outsized influence to the regressive state. I can't imagine the abortion ruling is going to have any impact on how California ever conducts itself, e.g. Even in the event of a federal ban California would likely protest and protect women's autonomy.

I find this particularly relevant because in a recent public debate in my state the pro-life proponent actually argued that an abortion ban wasn’t taking any rights away from women since they could just go to California.

It was a irl selfawarewolves.

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