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CBS didn't air Rep. James Talarico interview out of fear of FCC

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Re: CBS didn't air Rep. James Talarico interview out of fear of FCC

#251

Post by nitwit005 »

Schmerika wrote: post #240
nitwit005 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pressured, as in asked them to do something, which they ignored. Possibly problematic, but the elephant in the room is Trump directly threatening to put Mark Zuckerberg in prison for life: https://www.politico.com/news/2024/08/28/trump-zuckerberg-el...

> asked them to do something, which they ignored. They certainly did not ignore the request [0] (which came at the same time as the FTC were suing Meta for monopoly). Hundreds of millions of posts were taken down or suppressed. 0 - https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/biden-administration-repeate...

That article does say they ignored it:

> In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn't agree. Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decisions, including COVID-19-related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of this pressure.

Re: CBS didn't air Rep. James Talarico interview out of fear of FCC

#252

Post by QuercusMax »

croes wrote: post #235
QuercusMax wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First off, corporations are not people, so your argument is insane from the beginning. Were the leaders of Vichy France victims? No, they were collaborators.

Corporations are plenty of people with jobs and families that depend on that jobs. Where all the people of France that didn't choose to fight to their death collaborators? Where all the people in the concentartion camps collaborators. Do you blame them or the real perpetrator? I find it strange to put the blame on the middleman instead on the source of all that.

Corporations are made of people in the same way that Soylent Green is made of people. Your argument is incoherent.

There's a difference between not fighting and obeying in advance.

Re: CBS didn't air Rep. James Talarico interview out of fear of FCC

#253

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

claytongulick wrote: post #244
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the FCC chair originally announced he was pursuing this ( https://time.com/7318743/abc-kimmel-the-view-brendan-carr-fc... ), he was pretty clear that he was doing so in pursuit of the President's directive to punish broadcast channels that say things he doesn't like. Trump himself was pretty explicit that the ultimate goal is pulling their broadcast licenses and his subordinates should fabricate an excuse. As yo…

Thank you for the link and the concrete reference, I hadn't seen that before. I think the article and the video summaries I've seen of that interview are a little deceptively edited, but the idea appears to be the same. Apparently, it's illegal to knowingly broadcast false information [1] within certain guidelines, and that can indeed cause a license revocation: "The FCC prohibits broadcasting false information about…

> What do you suggest as a solution? Should false information be ok to broadcast with a ... license?

This seems like begging the question. The issue here obviously isn't truth vs untruth, it is fealty to the regime vs opposition to the regime. All the evidence points in this direction, and there isn't a better case yet made in the opposite.

Witness the example cited above: right-wing talk radio, famous for spreading untruthful info and agreeing with the regime, is let off scot-free. Or how the regime itself spread untruths about Alex Pretti after they killed him. That categorically debunks any purported "truth vs untruth" decision criteria and seems to confirm the fealty vs opposition decision criteria.

Fun thought experiment: re-read this situation, but imagine it took place in russia, by putin's hand. Like seriously, what oppressive regime in modern history HASN'T had some variation of silencing the opposition "for broadcasting 'false information'"?:

> On the morning of March 4, the last remaining independent news outlet in Russia — the award-winning Novaya Gazeta — announced the end of its reporting on the war in Ukraine in response to Russian government demands.

> A new law that bans the “dissemination of knowingly false information” about the Russian armed forces — and carries up to a 15-year penalty — was the final blow. [0]

0: https://niemanreports.org/putin-ukraine-russia-media/

Re: CBS didn't air Rep. James Talarico interview out of fear of FCC

#254

Post by lymbo »

dsl wrote: post #113
sega_sai wrote: post #90

It is a great illustration of how transition to the authoritarianism happens (I've seen it happen in Russia in 2000s). At first you don't even need censorship, you just need to scare owners of channels/newspapers enough, so that they self-censor.

Fear is the enforcement mechanism because it can't be challenged in court. It is long past time for everyone in tech to take a long hard look at the current situation and stop doing anything that financially benefits Musk, Ellison, or Thiel.

I went to a tech founder conference recently and it was quite jarring given the current state of startups to see no lecture or discussion of ethics of products people should be building. It was all focused on demands of PE and delivering profit, no matter the moral cost, not a minute to stop and get a broader systemic reality check. “It turns profit, it must be good”. Not sure how we collectively combat these dominant forces of privacy violation, attention demands, and mass exploitation.

Re: CBS didn't air Rep. James Talarico interview out of fear of FCC

#255

Post by lern_too_spel »

Schmerika wrote: post #239
lern_too_spel wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Pressured." They merely suggested that it was better for the country and for business, and most of the companies agreed. There were no threats of fines or lawsuits, and none were levied.

> There were no threats of fines or lawsuits Weren't there huge monopoly cases being furthered against Meta, Twitter and TikTok at that time? And more action against other major tech companies If I'm threatening you over your 'possible' monopoly with one hand, and 'politely' asking you to censor millions of stories with the other - are those things completely unrelated ? Or is there possible an implied message there?…

> Or is there possible an implied message there?

None of these antitrust cases were dropped for doing what was in their mutual interest. You're grasping at straws.

> Well everyone did what they were 'politely asked

Zuckerberg said Meta didn't do everything they were asked.

Re: CBS didn't air Rep. James Talarico interview out of fear of FCC

#256

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

jajuuka wrote: post #228
hn_acker wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Biden admin were actually sued for their relationship with social media companies. The suit failed but the conclusion was still that the administration was involved in pushing social media companies to take specific actions. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/court-cases/murthy-v-... That's an misleading description of the "conclusion" (and incorrect if by "involvement" or "pushing" you meant unconstitution…

If you actually read the case the evidence is clear that the government was giving direction to social media sites. Which is what the comment I was replying to was about. Read the dissenting opinion. I think you're coming at this from the angle of the court is always correct, and not actually examining the case itself.

"actually read the case" includes reading the judgement ("the conclusion"), which overrules your personal judgement (and mine, whatever it might've been).

> Read the dissenting opinion

Dissenting opinions are often irrelevant, equivalent to a loser shouting into the void because they lost. By definition, dissenting opinions are incorrect, because to be correct, they would need to be shared by the majority, in which case they would be in the non-dissenting opinion, if anywhere.

> I think you're coming at this from the angle of the court is always correct

By definition, the court is always "correct" unless contradicted by a constitutionally higher authority. In particular, a court consensus of 9 co-equal judges is more correct than a subset of 1 or 2 of those same judges. And while I'm sure you're a nice, competent person, perhaps even a lawyer, the court is more correct than you here.

Re: CBS didn't air Rep. James Talarico interview out of fear of FCC

#257

Post by primaryplease4 »

sega_sai wrote: post #90

It is a great illustration of how transition to the authoritarianism happens (I've seen it happen in Russia in 2000s). At first you don't even need censorship, you just need to scare owners of channels/newspapers enough, so that they self-censor.

Does this illustration include the law that was passed an about century ago? Or does time start at a different point in the horizon?

Re: CBS didn't air Rep. James Talarico interview out of fear of FCC

#258

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

mrandish wrote: post #216
dsl wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Censoring an interview with a political opponent is a far cry from spreading disinformation that is counter to broadly accepted medical advice during a pandemic with the intent of harming the general population. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...

Unfortunately, reasonable views from experts like Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School and Jay Bhattacharya Professor of Medicine at Stanford were also suppressed. Kulldorff only responded to a question saying: "COVID vaccines are important for older high-risk people and their care-takers. Those with prior natural infection do not need it. Nor children." Which is correct, mainstream epidemiol…

> views from experts like Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School and Jay Bhattacharya Professor of Medicine at Stanford were also suppressed

It turns out that when you have millions of doctors (or scientists) in the world, at least some of them are going to say things that go against scientific consensus. This does not mean they're correct.

Here are 2 more examples of people saying things:

> [Kulldorff's] declaration was widely rejected, and was criticized as being unethical and infeasible by Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization. Francis S. Collins, NIH director, called him a "fringe epidemiologist". [0]

The lesson here is, if you're cherry picking individuals, rather than going with peer-reviewed scientific consensus, you're liable to be blown way off-course at some point. Personality cults are bad no matter who it is.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Kulldorff

Re: CBS didn't air Rep. James Talarico interview out of fear of FCC

#259

Post by Schmerika »

nitwit005 wrote: post #251
Schmerika wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> asked them to do something, which they ignored. They certainly did not ignore the request [0] (which came at the same time as the FTC were suing Meta for monopoly). Hundreds of millions of posts were taken down or suppressed. 0 - https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/biden-administration-repeate...

That article does say they ignored it: > In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn't agree. Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decisions, including COVID-19-rel…

You're misinterpreting that sentence. It's not that they never agreed. It's that sometimes they disagreed, and they got pressured harder when they did.

Did you read the first two paragraphs?

> In a letter to the US Congress, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has alleged that the US government under Joe Biden "repeatedly pressured" Meta to censor certain content on its platforms.

> In the letter addressed to US House of Representatives, Mr Zuckerberg said that the platform had to make some changes, that "with the benefit of hindsight and new information," they won't make today. He added that he regrets not being "more outspoken" about it.

We know for a fact that Meta had removed over 20 million Corona posts by April 2021 alone [0]. Some of those were genuine misinformation - but a hell of a lot were legitimate and important questions from reputable sources. It's simply not reasonable to believe this wasn't due to pressure.

0 - https://www.cnet.com/news/social-media/facebook-removed-more...

Re: CBS didn't air Rep. James Talarico interview out of fear of FCC

#260

Post by Schmerika »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #255
Schmerika wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There were no threats of fines or lawsuits Weren't there huge monopoly cases being furthered against Meta, Twitter and TikTok at that time? And more action against other major tech companies If I'm threatening you over your 'possible' monopoly with one hand, and 'politely' asking you to censor millions of stories with the other - are those things completely unrelated ? Or is there possible an implied message there?…

> Or is there possible an implied message there? None of these antitrust cases were dropped for doing what was in their mutual interest. You're grasping at straws. > Well everyone did what they were 'politely asked Zuckerberg said Meta didn't do everything they were asked.

> None of these antitrust cases were dropped for doing what was in their mutual interest.

I'm not understanding either what you're claiming or why you believe it. Keep in mind that I don't believe in always taking what the government says at face value.

> You're grasping at straws.

Why would I be desperate? I've no skin in this game, beyond a general wish not to have legitimate and important speech suppressed and censored.

> Zuckerberg said Meta didn't do everything they were asked.

They didn't do everything, they say (did they ever say what they refused to do?), but they did a lot. As did Twitter. We know this for a fact.

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