U.S. appeals court rejects big tech’s right to regulate online speech • Hacker News Board

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

#471

Post by stale2002 » Sat, Sep 17, 2022, 8:41 PM UTC

matthewdgreen wrote: post #345

dpifke wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The decision[0] gives different logic (quoting from page 85): If a firm’s core business is disseminating others’ speech, then that should weaken, not strengthen, the firm’s argument that it has a First Amendment right to censor that speech. In PruneYard, for example, the shopping mall was open to the public—but for the purpose of shopping, not sharing expression. So it was perhaps tenuous for the State to use the pub…

If you say "we are going to restrict ourselves [at the Government's insistence] to only moderating non-political speech" then someone will insist that some part of your non-political speech is actually political. And from some perspective they will be right. Then you get to negotiate with the government and the courts about what they consider to be political speech or not. And suddenly you no longer live in a country…

Contrary to what people often claim, the government making any decision at all about what is and is not speech, or political speech, does not cause immediate free speech violations.

Yes, the government decides all the time, in a long standing and well studied legal history, about what is or is not speech.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that the primary purpose of the court system, with regards to free speech cases, is deciding what does or does not count as speech.

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

#472

Post by eternityforest » Sat, Sep 17, 2022, 8:43 PM UTC

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…

Can't they just ban all mass-botting? That doesn't have anything to do with speech, it's just banning what amounts to spambots.

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

#473

Post by richbell » Sat, Sep 17, 2022, 8:45 PM UTC

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…

Prior to banning /r/The_Donald, Reddit created /r/popular as a default alternative to /r/all to prevent posts from /r/The_Donald from making it to the front page. Interestingly, they didn't ban any of the other obnoxious political subreddits that people were complaining about.

https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/5u9pl5/intro...

(Not a Trump fan or even right-leaning, just pointing out that Reddit administrators went to great lengths to suppress a subreddit they disliked long before banning it.)

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

#474

Post by Jensson » Sat, Sep 17, 2022, 8:45 PM UTC

themitigating wrote: post #404

navigate8310 wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obligatory: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/5ektpc/rthe...

This says an admin was accused of editing posts, it doesn't provide proof. It then says users down voted him not employees of reddit. Also subbit reddit admins aren't employees , I believe most people can create a subreddit and be an admin

He admitted it himself that he did it:

https://old.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/5frg1n/tifu_...

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

#475

Post by kyrra » Sat, Sep 17, 2022, 8:46 PM UTC

DannyBee wrote: post #138

mustache_kimono wrote: post #5

Important to note that this 5th Circuit ruling conflicts with the 11th Circuit's ruling. And SCOTUS had previously reinstated an injunction against this very same law. And this 5th Circuit opinion has very idiosyncratic reasoning [0, just the first few pages will blow your hair back]. A sample: "In urging such sweeping relief, the platforms offer a rather odd inversion of the First Amendment. That Amendment, of cours…

This opinion is just badly written and badly reasoned. It's not even well written enough that it is worth trying to debate. Of course the judges in question were rated unqualified by the ABA (which is a really low bar) so not surprising.

The ABA at this point is a partisan institution. Go read into some of their politics and realize that they are very much left-leaning.

Edit: example https://www.wsj.com/articles/anticompetitive-woke-law-school...

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

#476

Post by sangreal » Sat, Sep 17, 2022, 8:47 PM UTC

eduction wrote: post #418

DannyBee wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Full stop. Even setting aside this opinion, this is false, at least according to the Supreme Court. See the PruneYard case that this court repeatedly cites https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v....

That decision does not dispute what you quoted at all. That case is not even about the first amendment, it is based on California’s state constitution. In fact your link makes the exact claim as the one you say is false.

> the federal constitution's First Amendment contains only a negative command to Congress to not abridge the freedom of speech

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

#477

Post by kelnos » Sat, Sep 17, 2022, 8:48 PM UTC

ethbr0 wrote: post #77

swayvil wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a weird bias towards "we need a daddy to tell us how to talk". Maybe it's because moderation is too hard for mere crowdsource+algorithms and maybe it isn't. I dunno. And maybe the owners just want to keep that sweet fascist option open.

IMHO, the deeper aversion is because user-driven moderation goes hand in hand with user-driven ranking. Which is turn makes it harder to non-obviously put your hand on the scales and insert paid content into high visibility feeds. If TikTok inserts a well-matched piece of paid content into a feed, who would even recognize? If HN inserts a piece of paid content onto the front page, people tend to notice.

Perhaps that's how it should be, though? Paid content -- even if I'm required to see it in my feed and can't filter it out -- should be marked as such.

HN has something similar to "paid" content: YC alum companies are allowed to post hiring notices that end up on the front page, and decay down the page according to a pre-determined algorithm. They're obvious in that you can't comment or vote on them, but HN does allow them to be hidden. I think that's the right way to do things; if HN allowed YC companies to post on the front page, and made it look like they were regular posts that got organically upvoted, it would reduce my trust in HN.

Any social media platform that puts paid content in a feed, while trying to make it look like regular content, would also lose my trust.

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

#478

Post by miedpo » Sat, Sep 17, 2022, 8:50 PM UTC

kelnos wrote: post #434

CamperBob2 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citizens United determined that corporations have some of the same natural rights that people do. In particular, First Amendment right, which in turn means that corporations can do the same politicking (and political funding) that natural persons do. A more charitable way to put this: you don't lose your First Amendment rights just because you joined with other people for commercial or other purposes.

I don't think that's accurate. I don't think anyone believed that joining a company would -- for example -- mean that they were no longer allowed to make financial contributions, individually, to political campaigns. Citizens United affirmed that it was ok for corporations to use corporate funds to make political speech via financial contributions. Not allowing that would not imply that people who work for a corporat…

This is correct... but there's also a good reason as to why allowing companies might be a good idea.

Companies allow individuals to limit their liability.

Now I'm sure there are people who abuse this, but it also allows good people to not risk their life getting involved in a political process where they could be sued for their personal assets.

Perhaps it would be better if the government created a separate category though to separate regular businesses from political liability protection "businesses".

I'm still not entirely sure that would be for the best though on a practical level. Businesses do advocate for themselves with lots of money but that money also prefers a stable boring economy... meaning without those actors, we might start seeing laws and lawmakers that are crazy on both sides more than we are now.

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

#479

Post by throwawayacc2 » Sat, Sep 17, 2022, 8:52 PM UTC

seydor wrote: post #211

It is weird that there is no country that allows such freedoms in the world. There is clearly a gap in regulation and constitutions when it comes to the internet because they could have never imagined it 400 years ago. But this needs to be settled in the positive direction and in an egalitarian way: speech that is legal should be free everywhere. and that's the basis upon which every tech business should be built . T…

> speech that is legal should be free everywhere.

Yes! This is precisely what should be the standard. Everything that is not explicitly illegal is legal and protected. No corporation should prohibit legal things.

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

#480

Post by KerrAvon » Sat, Sep 17, 2022, 8:53 PM UTC

xyzzyz wrote: post #334

jacobolus wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the great majority of judges and courts – even the majority of e.g. Trump-appointed district-court judges – have internally consistent legal philosophies and prejudices which happen to differ from one to another. Sometimes judges talk past each-other or fundamentally disagree, but that is not the same as corruption. For the most part judges take their job seriously and do it carefully and in more or less good fai…

> What we are talking about here is judges ignoring the constitution, the law, past precedent, the will of the people, and the facts of the case, in order to make up a logically incoherent "argument" that happens to promote the judges’ pre-decided zany partisan outcome. Such rulings are profoundly corrosive to the rule of law and the legitimacy of the court system. Yes, and this in fact happens in every court, that's…

I assume you mean SCOTUS prior to 2022? Everyone knows about the right-wing corruption at play in the abortion and the forced school prayer decisions.