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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

#811

Post by starik36 »

Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #88
netheril96 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is an interesting model, and there's nothing stopping someone from starting a social media site that works like this. But that doesn't mean that existing ones should be forced to use this model. Let's try them both (and others) and see which ones work best for their users.

Actually this model does exist and is pretty successful. Facebook Groups. The admins of these groups are not employees and have the power to limit whatever, whenever.

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

#812

Post by starik36 »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #463
efitz wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet Reddit, that follows this model, still manages to engage in suppression of on-topic viewpoints that moderators and/or Reddit employees disagree with.

Reddit banned /r/TheDonald, which would have certainly run afoul of this law. You may respond that there were policy based reasons for doing so (brigading, harassment, etc.) and you'd be right. But that's true of moderation decisions made by Facebook and Twitter too, or at least they would say so. In fact that ban was far more egregious than any of the moderation decisions that are being targeted by this law at the b…

> reasons for doing so (brigading, harassment, etc.)

This happens on Reddit all day along with pretty much every political sub on the platform. But they chose to only ban /r/TheDonald.

Reddit had a policy for banning accounts that were calling for violence. Yet during the 2020 riots they conveniently dropped this rule. This smells of massive hipocracy.

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

#813

Post by starik36 »

scarface74 wrote: post #330
gfodor wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope the internet returns to this model for like a dozen reasons. Insofar as we can be sure this kind of regulation gets there it should be celebrated imo.

The internet should be a common carrier. A private company that sits on top of the internet is not a common carrier. Why should the government be able to regulate what private companies publish? I bet you dollars to doughnuts that neither RedState or Truth social would want to be under the same regulations. I’ve been banned from RedState twice.

But if the company is the de-facto monopoly in the political discourse, like Twitter is, then it should be treated as a common carrier/utility/etc...

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

#814

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

Brybry wrote: post #217
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…

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…

So can I post AI generated underage pictures of Doland Trump as an 8-year old having sex with a boar without censorship?

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

#815

Post by headsoup »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #814
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…

So can I post AI generated underage pictures of Doland Trump as an 8-year old having sex with a boar without censorship?

Is that already illegal? If so, no, if not, yes.

Being offensive is not the measure for applying censorship.

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

#816

Post by starik36 »

plandis wrote: post #395
dionian wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so is it ok for a telephone company to cut your line if you support the resistance?

Telephone companies are common carriers (AFAIK) and have additional rules they must follow. Twitter is not.

What about grocery stores? What if they declare that they won't sell you anything because your viewpoint is different from theirs? Surely groceries are not common carriers?

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

#817

Post by kaibee »

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?

It is possible to live somewhere for 9 months every year and yet those 3 months you're not there could be when voting happens.

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

#818

Post by starik36 »

_hcuq wrote: post #554
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.

That company is a de-facto monopoly on political discourse in the world. It should be treated as such.

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

#819

Post by hackerlight »

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…

We should stop trying to find comparisons or analogies to other situations. Social media is its own totally unique phenomenon. We need to analyze it from first principles. If we try to draw comparisons to print media, cafes, or whatever, we are just going to confuse ourselves.
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