Trump signs executive order targeting protections for social media companies • Hacker News Board

Re: Trump signs executive order targeting protections for social media companies

#541

Post by username90 » Thu, May 28, 2020, 10:36 PM UTC

rbanffy wrote: post #430

CamperBob2 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That arguably changes when the President starts to use it as a primary means of communication with the citizenry.

They didn't remove his message. They merely pointed out it was misinforming the public. Speaking of which, shouldn't we make it a crime to lie or substantially mislead the public while holding public office?

> They didn't remove his message. They merely pointed out it was misinforming the public.

Why should a private company have this power? I don't think that people who run a successful website automatically are qualified to fact check the president and insert blurbs directly in his messages. That needs to be regulated some way.

Re: Trump signs executive order targeting protections for social media companies

#542

Post by phkahler » Thu, May 28, 2020, 10:37 PM UTC

sneak wrote: post #201

rbanffy wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you need a phone to phone someone, call an ambulance or the police. You need an ISP to get to the internet. You don't need Twitter.

Forget Twitter, and substitute “gmail deliverability”? Without that, you cannot run a business.

>> Forget Twitter, and substitute “gmail deliverability”? Without that, you cannot run a business.

I was going to say it's not really about access but censorship. Using gmail as an example is nice because I do appreciate their spam filtering which spammers might consider a form of censorship (lack of deliverability). And yet I'm against platforms like twitter censoring things. The spam situation quickly leads into another set of arguments with me about traceability.

Re: Trump signs executive order targeting protections for social media companies

#543

Post by smeeth » Thu, May 28, 2020, 10:37 PM UTC

adjkant wrote: post #475

smeeth wrote: post #326

Of course this is being handled ham-handedly, but it seems to me that section 230 is a ludicrous piece of legislative malfeasance that allows content publishers to duck the legal responsibilities of publishing while profiting from behavior that is obviously publishing. I can't see how a Twitter/FB feed is substantively different from a curated "letters to the editor" section in a newspaper and I cannot for the life o…

> I can't see how a Twitter/FB feed is substantively different from a curated "letters to the editor" section in a newspaper and I cannot for the life of me understand why it is treated different legally. Both companies offer non-algorithmic feeds where users are 100% in control of what they see. Even with an algorithmic feed, users are still doing far more curation than any "curation" that an algorithm does, which i…

Feed structure and content aside, is writing and applying a custom TOS that covers content not editorializing/publishing?

This is the crux of the argument from the political right at the moment: Twitter is deciding what sort of content is and is not allowed on their platform according to some sort extrajudicial rationale. I don't understand how that isn't publishing.

I'd bet any definition of publishing includes exerting control over which content to display, when to display that content, and where. These companies do all of those things.

Re: Trump signs executive order targeting protections for social media companies

#544

Post by gamblor956 » Thu, May 28, 2020, 10:38 PM UTC

thrusong wrote: post #61

TheColorYellow wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its an interesting thought experiment to assess in what ways Twitter is a "private website". It really is a public web space that is operated by a private company, but I can't help but feel that the nuances and similarities of what Twitter really is and what responsibility they truly hold in society is above the courts comprehension.

Do you have the right to stand in your community's biggest mall screaming racist things or does the property owner/operator have the right to remove you from the premise?

Pruneyard v. Robins says the private owner of the mall can kick you out. But note that state laws may provide state-level free speech rights separately from the First Amendment (and several states have such laws).

In contrast, a public space like a public park is subject to free speech requirements, which is why the Westboro church can scream vile racist things from a playground.

Re: Trump signs executive order targeting protections for social media companies

#545

Post by Mirioron » Thu, May 28, 2020, 10:38 PM UTC

gamblor956 wrote: post #482

MrJagil wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that’s a simplistic view. No one is arguing Twitter is comparable to a store with a display window. The reality is that Tweets are broadcasted to billions of people. It’s a new reality. It’s a newspaper where anyone and everyone is authoring anything, including presidents, and with the roll of a die, the message is amplified to a multiple of the expected audience. Twitter may technically be a private platform…

The reality is that Tweets are broadcasted to billions of people. No, they're not. You have to visit the Twitter website or otherwise pull the data from some source to get tweets. it’s about ethics and morals and how we compose a society with mighty power imbalances, fortified by new tech. It's technically trivial to create your own Twitter. There are indeed plenty of competitors to Twitter. Twitter has no moral or e…

>No, they're not. You have to visit the Twitter website or otherwise pull the data from some source to get tweets.

Would you make this same argument when it comes to privacy? Technically it's your computer sending your data to Google/Facebook, therefore you are giving them permission to use your data, because you're so generously providing it to them. Technically this is true and any real privacy solution would have to address this point, but it's clearly not what is done in legislation.

Re: Trump signs executive order targeting protections for social media companies

#546

Post by joshuamorton » Thu, May 28, 2020, 10:38 PM UTC

xiphias2 wrote: post #503

joshuamorton wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at all, they're directly at odds in this case. The President using presidential authority to restrict what twitter can say on their own platform is directly violating the first amendment to restrict twitter's free expression. You can argue that twitter is also restricting others' free expression, but that is their right, while the government preventing twitter from doing so is a 1A violation.

It would be as simple as you write if social media companies would take responsibility for the publishing rights for what they publish, but they don't. For a long time they are picking and choosing the laws they want to abide by.

> It would be as simple as you write if social media companies would take responsibility for the publishing rights for what they publish

What do social media companies "publish"? In this case, the only thing twitter published was a link to information about mail-in voting[0]. That's it. They did so in the context of a tweet. So at worst, twitter would be liable for any illegal content in either President Trump's original tweet, or in the content I linked at [0]. That is what current US law says.

To change that would require an act of congress or a supreme court ruling. The court is unlikely to rule in favor of Trump[1], as the conservative justices favor businesses rights. So that leaves a new law/amendment to the existing law. That would need to pass the house, which seems unlikely as well.

[0]: https://twitter.com/i/events/1265330601034256384

[1]: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200528/01321044592/two-t...

Re: Trump signs executive order targeting protections for social media companies

#547

Post by jrockway » Thu, May 28, 2020, 10:38 PM UTC

partyboat1586 wrote: post #470

ineedasername wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the free speech of Twitter to be abridged? Section 230 allows good-faith moderation. Whether or not you believe they should do it, current law and court rulings have come down on the side them being allowed to do it and maintain their safe-harbor status.

We are taking about reform not what the current state of the law is. Twitter has an outsized impact for the small number of people who make those decisions.

You have to look at social media like a newspaper that publishes letters to the editor. They're the editor, you're writing letters. The editors are free to throw away crazy letters, edit letters for length, syntax, and content, or discontinue the section entirely. That's what free speech is. If a newspaper won't publish your letter to the editor, you can make your own newspaper and publish whatever you want.

You need a really good reason to take away Twitter's editorial control over Twitter. Please provide one. (The best I see so far is "Twitter is really popular, so they shouldn't be allowed to edit their own website." I am not convinced that that is a good justification for limiting the freedom of the press. If that's where we want to go, I would be the first in line to make sure Fox News drops their conservative bias and gives liberal viewpoints a fair shake. Does that sound good to you?)

Re: Trump signs executive order targeting protections for social media companies

#548

Post by pnw_hazor » Thu, May 28, 2020, 10:39 PM UTC

krapp wrote: post #65

TheColorYellow wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its an interesting thought experiment to assess in what ways Twitter is a "private website". It really is a public web space that is operated by a private company, but I can't help but feel that the nuances and similarities of what Twitter really is and what responsibility they truly hold in society is above the courts comprehension.

>It really is a public web space that is operated by a private company No, it isn't, any more than a store is a public space because it has windows the public can see into. You have to sign up for a Twitter account and accept their terms of service to post on the site. It's a private platform run by a private company for its own private business interests.

The difference is that stores and malls invite the public in for a limited non-protected purpose - shopping or other commercial activity.

Twitter invites the public in to exercise free speech, which in a public space would be protected. This invites an analysis that Twitter may be a quasi-public space that offers some 1st Amd. protections.

Re: Trump signs executive order targeting protections for social media companies

#549

Post by Izkata » Thu, May 28, 2020, 10:39 PM UTC

paulgb wrote: post #147

glennvtx wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem there is that these sites have become echo-chambers, where they breed extremism. These kinds of ideologies (E.G. Nazism) need to be exposed to the light, like a bacteria, in order to be shamed and debunked.

This is a nice theory but are there any instances of Nazis being converted to normies because someone told them they were wrong on the internet? Instead what seems to happen is that normies get pulled into Nazi content because the recommendation algorithms on these sites see heated discussions as engagement and try to feed it.

The only study I'm aware of on that is on Youtube's recommendation algorithm, which found the opposite is true - it tends to steer people away from radicalization.

Re: Trump signs executive order targeting protections for social media companies

#550

Post by adjkant » Thu, May 28, 2020, 10:39 PM UTC

Izkata wrote: post #508

adjkant wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How exactly does 1000 cases of fraud over 40 years back up his tweets in any way? The voter fraud argument is a political weapon for voter suppression. Not to mention that mail in ballots are already in existence. Heck, I've used them the past 5 years myself.

It's the proportion. A significant amount of the fraud is in mail-in voting, which means it's significantly less resistant to fraud. Shifting everyone from the more-resistant in-person voting to the less-resistant mail-in voting will result in a sharp uptick in voting fraud. This is exactly what Trump said in the tweet.

> This is exactly what Trump said in the tweet.

No, that is not what he said. This is the tweet excerpt:

> "There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent. Mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed."

"substantially fraudulent" is not 0.0000001% of ballots (that's napkin math of ballots since 1980). If mail in ballots are 10x more likely to be used in fraud, then 0.000001% is not either. This is factually false and the "fact checking" was applied as such.