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Injunction issued in case about social media pressure from US Government

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Re: Injunction issued in case about social media pressure from US Government

#391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Washington is incredibly corrupt. There is no limits to what they will do to stop someone/anyone from trying to drain up the swamp. Was shocking when my messages To friends on Facebook were being blocked. 1984 was meant to be a warning to the masses not a guide on how to oppress people.

You said in your other post that the vaccine was gene therapy and that cheap treatments were effective. I'm presuming you either mean Hydroxychloroquine or horse paste. None of those statements are true and because of them countless people died. The statements are worthy of head shaking now. During the pandemic they constituted shouting fire in a crowded theater. They are fundamentally unworthy of protection.

"Shouting fire in a crowded theater" is a popular analogy for speech or actions whose principal purpose is to create panic, and in particular for speech or actions which may for that reason be thought to be outside the scope of free speech protections.

It was first used against a man in 1917 for giving an anti-war speech in Canton, Ohio. It was later popularized to charge people handing out anti-war flyers opposing the WWI draft with sedition.

It was later overturned in 1969, in which the Supreme Court held that "the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action."

The fact that people still cite this analogy to argue for the abridgment of free speech 100 years later is truly disturbing.

Re: Injunction issued in case about social media pressure from US Government

#392
post #131

This thread baffles me. There are a lot of replies that either didn’t read the article (or even the headline) that seem to be government apologists, or arguing that a particular email isn’t coercive enough, etc. A court found that the government abused its power and infringes on people’s first amendment rights by using its intimidation power to coerce social media to censor free speech of citizens. Freedom of speech…

The government wasn’t found to be suppressing information, it is just an injunction. The government claims to simply be engaging in dialog about areas they find concerning from a variety of angles including salient public health in a declared emergency, what is considered to be dangerous medical advice, participation in conspiracy and sedition, influence of elections, etc. The injunction, as the article describes, doesn’t prevent the agencies from engaging on a lot of these topics and the topic set is somewhat narrow. The government generally has been allowed to constrain speech that’s a clear danger or interferes with either the goals emergency operations or the safe conduct of emergency operations, as well as public health and safety. This has been upheld in case law and by the Supreme Court for over 200 years.

I’d note that a Trump appointed judge in Louisiana giving a preliminary injunction on something uniquely ideologically aligned by those dimensions and is noted in the article as out of step with precedent isn’t the end of the line.

Re: Injunction issued in case about social media pressure from US Government

#393
post #371
post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do implied threats count as coercion? Does a threatening tone? Does someone in a position of power making demands they don't actually have the power to enforce count as coercion? I don't know. The judge seems to think they do.

What implied threats, what threatening tone? What position of power? If you read the examples cited, nothing even remotely comes close to a layperson interpretation of coercion, and I believe the legal definition is more rigorous, not less.

Therefore, the question is not what decision the social-media company would have made, but whether the Government “so involved itself in the private party’s conduct” that the decision is essentially that of the Government.

The government asking them to remove specific posts and accounts and demote others is pretty clearly that.

Re: Injunction issued in case about social media pressure from US Government

#394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"they" didn't. a GOP-controlled congress did, and that party remains the most opposed to section 230

Democrats have threatened it as well: "Democrats Want To Hold Social Media Companies Responsible For Health Misinformation" Co-sponsored by Democratic Senators Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico, the Health Misinformation Act targets a provision in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects platforms from being held liable for what their users post in most cases. https://www…

Republicans have threatened it as well:

https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/502...

S.5020 - A bill to repeal section 230 of the Communications Act of 1934.

Sponsor: Sen. Graham, Lindsey [R-SC]

you're now free to respond to the substance of the post you replied to: it was, in fact, a GOP controlled Senate which performed the action in question

Re: Injunction issued in case about social media pressure from US Government

#395
post #131

This thread baffles me. There are a lot of replies that either didn’t read the article (or even the headline) that seem to be government apologists, or arguing that a particular email isn’t coercive enough, etc. A court found that the government abused its power and infringes on people’s first amendment rights by using its intimidation power to coerce social media to censor free speech of citizens. Freedom of speech…

> The government did a bad thing. Why defend them?

Talk about smuggling your conclusion into the premise.

Re: Injunction issued in case about social media pressure from US Government

#396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> So funny, did you miss the columbian journalism review destroying legacy media including the nytimes for partisan reporting? Ooh, whataboutism. If we were talking about the NYTimes, I'd have plenty to say about the specific factional bias of that outlet, which, yes, its just as intense as the WSJ’s. If the 1990’s neoliberal consensus (today, pretty much the dominant, though decreasingly so over the last decade, cen…

[flagged]

Re: Injunction issued in case about social media pressure from US Government

#397
post #18

The problem i believe we are coming to is that all secular governance eventually replaces the role once taken by church and religious philosophy. It starts to become the arbiter of moral truth and with out any real moral center it can only but fail spectacularly. The second and third political theories of racial and social idealogies more rapidly succumb to this due to a more overt desire to place the state at this m…

Make no mistake: the old arbiters of morality can also fail spectacularly. Christendom did centuries of crusades with no better justification than "Our god says that land is ours."

The problem is the challenge of scalable applied philosophy. What name we affix to that challenge is less relevant than the challenge itself.

Re: Injunction issued in case about social media pressure from US Government

#398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is anyone on the right arguing for any speech restriction? If so, they are by far the minority in that camp. Only one side is afraid of open debate and pure freedom of speech. Why could that be?

Kind of - crack downs on "obscenity" always come from the right and rarely if ever from the left. For the most part, everybody seems to agree than "obscenity" should be an exception to freedom of speech, although there's quite a bit of disagreement on what constitutes it.

>crack downs on "obscenity" always come from the right and rarely if ever from the left

Tipper Gore and Joe Lieberman would like a word.

Re: Injunction issued in case about social media pressure from US Government

#399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trump should have been impeached and convicted for those things, which have nothing to do with the judges he appointed.

Yes, of course, the same dude extorting a foreign country, committing an insurrection, and selling classified information would never appoint judges on any basis other than their individual merits. Every corrupt individual keeps the corruption pretty compartmentalized away from whatever judicial appointments they are doing.

Attitude aside, this is a very good point. Everything trump did should be reviewed at this point. It's sad that plenty of civil servants / folks who have made careers for themselves and worked to improve this country are likely to be viewed dimly because trump appointed them to positions of power. But the reality is everything he did should be viewed with suspicion.

Re: Injunction issued in case about social media pressure from US Government

#400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blocking isn't censorship; it does not prevent you from speaking. Blocking wasn't permissible because it restricted access by citizens to official announcements; it's like banning someone from coming to a town hall meeting or visiting Congress's website.

> Blocking isn't censorship Trump was blocking those who replied to his comments with takes that were critical of himself or of his policies. He was silencing critics. It wasn't allowed.

That's not what the ruling said. Trumps actions weren't impermissible censorship, they were impermissible for other reasons. You can't just assume a court ruling was done for the reason you believe.
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