41–50 of 54 posts
Yep, that means a bakery would be required by law to provide wedding cakes to people they don't like.
Anything less than this is straight up hypocrisy. If you think that a business should have the right to refuse business to anyone... this is what that is lol.
If the States win this case, it will be amusing to watch social media sites try to comply with laws banning political censorship in USA also complying with laws in EU mandating political censorship.
Ordering people to say things the government likes is compelled speech. The First Amendment broadly prohibits it and that broadly benefits us . It's in our interest to safeguard and preserve rights that protect our speech.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That the problem is big and requires care doesn't strike me as a substantive objection to the effort of addressing it using the tools that we have (legislation, however imperfect) Again, not disagreeing. Just saying the solution as presented is obviously flawed. And I haven't seen a solution whose proponents don't similarly throw their hands up with generalities the moment it's poked.
"Throw my hands up" doesn't seem like a fair characterization. I wasn't offering legislation, I was offering a framework within which the details can be fleshed out that perhaps would lead to practical legislation (I mean, this is an HN comment after all, there's only so much you can reasonably expect). You seemed to disagree with the effort entirely, but your critique merely points to difficulties inherent in legisl…
> was offering a framework within which the details can be fleshed out
So the framework is revoking § 230 for large websites that moderate user content. Except providing a safe harbor for removing illegal stuff. Also off topic. Presumably also spam.
What does that actually do except buy every lawyer a ranch? We haven’t actually drawn the line between censorship and moderation. And I’m arguing we can’t; there isn’t one. Where we draw the line we do so by identity; who is speaking or doing the moderating/censorship.
The act of censorship or moderation is the expression of an opinion. I haven’t seen a way to remove one without the other; that’s the error drawing up a list of examples doesn’t solve. There is always another example, and at that point, we aren’t drawing a line anymore, we’re back to putting content in a good and bad bin, just a little more centralised.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Throw my hands up" doesn't seem like a fair characterization. I wasn't offering legislation, I was offering a framework within which the details can be fleshed out that perhaps would lead to practical legislation (I mean, this is an HN comment after all, there's only so much you can reasonably expect). You seemed to disagree with the effort entirely, but your critique merely points to difficulties inherent in legisl…
Fair enough. > was offering a framework within which the details can be fleshed out So the framework is revoking § 230 for large websites that moderate user content. Except providing a safe harbor for removing illegal stuff. Also off topic. Presumably also spam. What does that actually do except buy every lawyer a ranch? We haven’t actually drawn the line between censorship and moderation. And I’m arguing we can’t; t…
In broad strokes the line is simple: moderation is ensuring content stays on topic, censorship is limiting the topic. In practice it gets thorny. But we don't need to solve the concept in its full generality. This would only apply to sites that reach the size such that "public square" is a reasonable description of their social relevance.
The problem is these sites want to be the destination for communication, while also shaping that communication according to some narrow political aims. Also throw in maximizing engagement. These constraints should be seen as inherently contradictory. If you want to be the de facto public square, you should not be limiting topics among interested parties. I'll leave the specific verbiage to the lawyers, but the target is clear enough: people interested in engaging on some topic (barring illegality) should not be prevented by the site in engaging on that topic. I see nothing inherently contradictory or impossible about any of this.
The answer to all of this is to create a federal social media framework modeled after the USPS. This allows private corpos to do their curation but creates an actual public square where speech is free.
The government wants to regulate private social media because that's where the people are, and thus that's where the influence is.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> in specific cases it can be legitimate. We should not be powerless to legislate unless we're able to articulate some ideal discriminator that picks out only the intended target and nothing else Sure, but there should be a guiding principle. The point isn't we're powerless to act. It's that we should act thoughtfuly. Defaulting to carve-outs indicates the idea is inchoate. Even in this thread, we've expanded from ma…
That the problem is big and requires care doesn't strike me as a substantive objection to the effort of addressing it using the tools that we have (legislation, however imperfect).
There must always be a floor of reasonability and articulability before legislation is the answer. Especially where Federal legislation is concerned.
Social media companies have speech? If they have speech then why aren't they liable for that speech?
I don't think they should be able to have it both ways. Social media companies have speech? If they have speech then why aren't they liable for that speech?
> I don't think they should be able to have it both ways.
> Social media companies have speech? If they have speech then why aren't they liable for that speech?
The state governments trying hold social media sites liable for users' harmful speech want to "have it both ways": Hold social media sites liable only for certain speech, yet pretend that the proposed laws instituting that liability regulate conduct without regulating speech.
Most of the speech targeted by proposed third-party liability laws such as KOSA is protected by the First Amendment (LGBTQ information, eating disorder discussions, body image posts, etc.). Without some evidence of causal harm on a case-by-case basis, not even first-party liability - liability on the users who posted the speech on social media - would pass the First Amendment, and third-party liability would not apply in such cases. But assume that first-party liability would apply. What about third-party liability for social media sites' moderation of user speech?
The First Amendment can prohibit both direct and indirect restrictions on protected speech. Strict scrutiny [1] requires laws impacting constitutional rights to use the methods least restrictive of those rights. Moderation of user posts by social media sites is a First Amendment right, just as posting by users of social media sites is a First Amendment right. Holding the social media site liable for First-Amendment-protected user speech violates strict scrutiny because a method less restrictive of protected speech is holding the respective users liable for posting that speech.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strict_scrutiny
And before anyone brings up republication liability on newspapers: defamation is unprotected speech. Defamation does not have First Amendment protection. But holding a party liable for defamation in the US requires that the party distributing the allegedly defamatory speech know that the speech exists. Newspapers tend to check even their op eds before deciding whether they should stay. But the humans managing social media sites don't necessarily know that any particular post exists, especially when the moderation system includes automatic processes. Section 230 declares that social media sites are not liable for defamation even if they know about it. Without Section 230 in place, social media sites would have an incentive to stop manually moderating posts, because you can't know about specific defamatory posts if you don't look at them.