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Injunction issued in case about social media pressure from US Government

arstechnica.com

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

#581

Post by sangnoir »

causi wrote: post #307
bequanna wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I don't doubt many of the performers are deriving sexual satisfaction from the performance, but as long as the performance itself is not sexual it isn't harming children. Don't get me wrong, I think "Drag Queen Story Hour" is the gender equivalent of blackface, but a man dressing up like a mockery of womanhood and reading stories doesn't violate anybody else's rights, therefore we have no right to use violence to sto…

Women can be drag queens too! For me, drag adjacent to Cabaret and Burlesque. I'm not a fan of any of those, but I appreciate that they are art forms that people should be free to express themselves in.

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

#582

Post by revelio »

curiousllama wrote: post #251
GeekyBear wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s not so cut and dry, because believers in free speech can believe that the federal government and its employees should also be free to speak. If the speech the government officials are engaging in is a demand to censor the political speech of citizens, then we are looking at a violation of the First Amendment. Nobody is saying that government officials can't engage in other kinds of speech that don't violate th…

> If the speech the government officials are engaging in is a demand to censor the political speech of citizens, then we are looking at a violation of the First Amendment "Censor" is doing a lot of work here. It's important for the government to engage in public speech that may lead another person to self-censor. E.g., a press release saying "FYI: publishing your how-to-build-a-nuke guide is gonna help crazy people b…

The threat of more aggressive tax audits or regulations or whatever is always there. It doesn't have to be spelled out. Piss off the government and they have a billion ways to make you feel pain. It would be absurd if the government could "suggest" you do something and this was considered not an abuse because they didn't literally, at that exact moment, spell out the penalties they would impose for non-compliance.

Of course in a theoretically ideal system laws are precise enough that governments can't simply make your life worse for getting on the wrong side of them. But nobody seems willing to stomach the level of rigor that would require from lawmakers. Three Felonies A Day and such.

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

#583

Post by mindslight »

leereeves wrote: post #556
rewmie wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't see why there needs to be any coercion. If there is no coercion then your complain boils down to others not sharing your opinion, both in the way they don't reverberate your personal opinion and in the way they express opinions you don't agree with. That's kind of the opposite thing you claim you're trying to achieve.

My complaint is about the government removing speech from social networks, even if they did so with just a wink and a hint. And I don't understand the argument that the social networks' willingness to cooperate makes the government's actions more acceptable. That's a bit like allowing the government to confiscate property without a trial, if the bank is cooperative.

A bank is acting as a trustee of property, corporate social mediums unfortunately do not.

If you want a legal right to individual freedom of speech on corporate commons, be explicit about it and work for that! Focusing on this small slice of corporate censorship just because it was encouraged by the government is distraction from the fundamental problem.

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

#584

Post by aksss »

crazygringo wrote: post #423
efitz wrote: 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…

Because freedom of speech isn't absolute, and whether "the government did a bad thing" is the very question being asked, to which reasonable people may disagree. With over a million COVID deaths in the US, there's a very valid question to be raised as to when emergency public health requirements take precedence over a right to spread misinformation/disinformation. Freedom of speech isn't of much use when you're dead.…

It’s one thing to officially commandeer media outlets during an emergency. That’s in-bounds. That’s not what happened here and therefore not what the debate is about.

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

#585

Post by evandale »

afavour wrote: post #563
evandale wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not an opinion because IMO you need a why for an opinion. There's an implicit why most of the time. But Facebook supporting marketing because they make more money with marketing can be a verified fact - there's no opinion element in it and I don't think Facebook supporting marketing by itself is an opinion. If you like rain because it waters your garden I'd hesitate to call that opinion because you have a factua…

Alright, this will be my last contribution here. But: To start, "I like rain" is a factual statement derived from your opinion, not an opinion itself. So let's change it for "rain is good": > If you think rain is good because it waters your garden I'd hesitate to call that opinion because you have a factual reason. > If you think rain is good because it sounds pleasant that's an opinion. You're making distinctions th…

Definitely agree to disagree at this point.

> You're making distinctions that don't exist.

>Thinking rain is good because it waters your garden is based on the fact that it will help your garden grow.

>Thinking rain is good because it sounds pleasant is based on the fact that you enjoy the sound of the rain.

I'm not sure how you can say the distinctions don't exist. There has to be an analogy but I don't think I can come up with one that will satisfy you. I mean you had to rewrite my example to make your point.. not sure how that's not the world's most obvious strawman, you literally twisted what I said into something else and went on to argue against that.

I think it's easy enough to glean what I mean from my past replies if someone wanted to try to understand me.

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

#586

Post by judge2020 »

leereeves wrote: post #556
rewmie wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't see why there needs to be any coercion. If there is no coercion then your complain boils down to others not sharing your opinion, both in the way they don't reverberate your personal opinion and in the way they express opinions you don't agree with. That's kind of the opposite thing you claim you're trying to achieve.

My complaint is about the government removing speech from social networks, even if they did so with just a wink and a hint. And I don't understand the argument that the social networks' willingness to cooperate makes the government's actions more acceptable. That's a bit like allowing the government to confiscate property without a trial, if the bank is cooperative.

It was not "remove this", it was "this probably violates your TOS", so that could be the difference between asking social media companies to take stuff down for only the Government's interest versus both the Government's and the platform's interests. The FBI isn't going to Klan website hosts and asking them to take down Klan content because those hosts don't forbid hosting that sort of speech.

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

#587

Post by DannyBee »

ndr wrote: post #524
dragonwriter wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Likely to do X” is not “have done X”, or even “will do X”. If it was, we wouldn’t need the preliminary in preliminary injunction, the standards for which balance the likelihood of success on the merits with the kinds of impacts the action sougjt to enjoin would have on the situation of the parties, so a greater and/or more difficult to undo impact requires a lesser probability of success to be sufficiently likely to…

It's still rooted in evidence, and that evidence doesn't need to be conclusive. This was to say the injunction is not completely on a whim, agreed on everything else you wrote.

Kinda. It depends on whether you mean the legal definition of admissible evidence or just "stuff"

It is mostly meta evidence - statements about what evidence will show at trial. Which assumes it's valid and admissible and actually shows that and ....

In this case, this isn't on a whim but I wouldn't say it's on the evidence either - especially given the consistent misquotes.

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

#588

Post by joshuamorton »

leereeves wrote: post #462
judge2020 wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In particular, they need to find if there was any actual coercion or threat made by the gov't agencies to remove the speech they asked to. For example, when the FBI was asking Twitter to take down videos (of content that violated Twitter's own TOS), Twitter could've told them to go pound sand. But it would be a different story if the FBI indicated that Twitter "ought to" do it or face increased scrutiny, perhaps.

I don't see why there needs to be any coercion. The offense here is not against the social networks, it's against the people whose speech was suppressed. Whether that suppression was done with threats, requests, subtle hints, or an automated system, if the government's intent was to suppress speech, the means employed make no difference. Edit: imagine an extreme case in which a social network independently created an…

Because the choice was ultimately made by company staff, not government employees

Giving the government a special, higher priority reviewed support queue isn't illegal, as long as the company is acting with independence.

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

#589

Post by ceejayoz »

unyttigfjelltol wrote: post #568
ceejayoz wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This is not how a preliminary injunction works. The court has ordered that the governmment stop doing the in-dispute things until the dispute is resolved - in either direction - in court. The standard for such an injunction is n…

The standard actually is the plaintiffs are likely to prevail on the merits (not "might"-- it's probable per the judge), and in practice a preliminary injunction hearing in a major case can take the form of a mini-trial. The judge wrote 155 pages that, at first blush, appear to be a very serious and thoughtful effort. The judge summarized on page 154 thus: "The Plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits in establ…

"Likely" means more than "possible" and less than "probable", with a pretty hefty error bar given the trial hasn't happened yet. It's a far cry from the settled state the original headline implied.

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

#590

Post by aksss »

shadowgovt wrote: post #319
efitz wrote: 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. The filing is that there is sufficient probability the government did a bad thing to issue an injunction while the court figures out if the government did a bad thing. In general, injunctions protecting freedom of speech are broadly and freely issued. ... But a rational person can ask how we protect free speech by muzzling the government in this context.

But the Court is not muzzling the government in the sense of prohibiting their public message. The court is enjoining their method of influencing public debate - that they were/are preventing what you say from being published based on its content.

Prohibiting unlawful orders is not an abridgment of an authority’s “free speech”.

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