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Trump signs executive order targeting protections for social media companies

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

#751

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm not sure how much more embarrassed I can get for my country. I honestly used to be proud to be an American. Now I am so ashamed that when I travel (or back in the days when I traveled) I lie and say I'm a Canadian.

This strikes me as shameful behavior. You should say the truth: you're an American, and Americans have a diversity of views on most subjects, just like every other country.

When conducting business this is more trouble, and causes more discomfort, than it’s worth.

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

#752

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly it. Twitter disseminated the president's words as he wrote them to everyone that wanted to see it. They also said it was wrong. Fundamentally the whole exercise is an attempt to conflate Twitters (first amendment!) right to speak its own opinions with somehow "restricting" the rights of their subscribers. And that's insane. Just look at how many people in this very thread are buying into the frame by d…

Personally I think that Twitter inserting their own articles is overstepping their own role. Nobody goes there to view what Twitter writes, nobody goes there to care about Twitter opinions. Them doing this forfeits their status as a public square, now they are publishing their own editorialized content, and not as Tweets but as privileged inserts in others Tweets.

Where is a company limited to only one role? Can Facebook not publish a blog and be a platform?

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

#753

Oh my goodness is he a big dumb stupid moron. At the risk of this being downvoted to oblivion, why doesn't he think that Twitter, a privately run company, has the right to fact-check claims made on their site? Even if there were some secret evil liberal agenda on Twitter, which there absolutely is not, why aren't they allowed to do that exactly? Is he planning on holding Fox News to the same standard and make them pu…

Well, is Verizon allowed to use packet injection to "fact check" a website you view over their internet connection? Because seems to be presenting themselves as a neutral platform, which they have shown themselves to not be. EDIT: Just to clarify, obviously Twitter is not presenting themselves to users as a neutral platform. But for legal purposes, they are cloaking themselves in the same privileged status as a phone…

Legally they can probably get away with it, since it has happened with other ISPs. The technical reason this doesn't happen is due to your connection a website being encrypted.

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

#754

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if you mean this seriously, or in an exasperated but joking manner. If you are serious, it's because Trump has done more for the legitimacy and usage of Twitter than any engineer, businessperson, or celebrity other than Dorsey & cofounders. To be clear: Twitter may take a tough official stance against Trump, but behind closed doors he is the MVP.

This is obviously not true; Twitter was widely used long before Trump and the vast majority of the current user base does not follow Trump at all.

>This is obviously not true;

Follow numbers matter little, if at all. In fact follower numbers are a rounding error in this context. Trump's tweet's reach is on the order of billions of people; hundreds of news organizations cite his tweets on a weekly (sometimes daily) basis, and orders of magnitude more bloggers do so as well.

It's absolutely true, but people may not like to acknowledge that.

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

#755
post #726

I would love to see a law that for corporations, once the corporation exceeds some commercial threshold (e.g. 1M customers or 10M/year revenue or whatever) then you are no longer allowed to discriminate against your users for any reason other than violation of non-discriminatory terms of service. I don't think that companies that achieve near-monopoly status should have the right to arbitrarily cancel, shadow ban, hi…

Do you feel the same about email spam filters?

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

#756
post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PDF of individual confirmed cases: https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/docs/p... Spot-checking and using search for counts, most are manipulation of mail-in or absentee ballots (many being a bunch of ballots by a single person), with the next highest looking like individual people voting who didn't realize they were ineligible.

OK, now where's the .PDF of individual confirmed cases of in-person vote fraud versus vote-by-mail fraud? We can't compare fractions by their numerators, you know. The document itself admits that it is "only a sampling," which, in the absence of further methodological detail, should raise their hairs on the back of your neck. Nobody ever said that vote-by-mail is fraud proof, only that it's good enough. Which it indi…

> only that it's good enough

Well.. How about another case I just learned of today? 'Cause it kinda doesn't seem like we're even at "good enough":

> “Invalidate the election. Let’s do it again,” said Rev. Kenneth Clayton said amid reports more that 20 percent of all ballots were disqualified, some in connection with voter fraud allegations.

[..]

> In addition to apparent problems with the vote count in Paterson, NBC New York has shown video of ballots left out in building lobbies, of one voter handling many ballots, and reported on postal workers reporting finding hundreds of ballots at a time stuffed in mailboxes in Paterson – and even in a neighboring town, Haledon.

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/politics/nj-naacp-leader-cal...

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

#757

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it may actually be a way to empower companies to gain more access to information. If the companies are responsible, then they will want to sue the users for violations and personally identify them. A side effect is that they will have some government agency deciding what is acceptable or not. Much like China.

> If the companies are responsible, then they will want to sue the users for violations and personally identify them I think you're drastically overestimating the profitability of a single twitter user. They have hundreds of millions of active users. It would probably be far easier and more cost effective to ban every user that causes them any amount of grief, than to investigate and potentially sue them.

They already ban users. This change would fine companies that ban racists and conspiracy theorist because some conservative claimed oppression of free speech.

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

#758

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one side has a monopoly on conspiracy theories. The Russia collusion was something spun for years by the networks where people under oath said one thing privately and another publicly.

[citation needed]

They have none except Trump's Twitter feed.

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

#759
post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if you mean this seriously, or in an exasperated but joking manner. If you are serious, it's because Trump has done more for the legitimacy and usage of Twitter than any engineer, businessperson, or celebrity other than Dorsey & cofounders. To be clear: Twitter may take a tough official stance against Trump, but behind closed doors he is the MVP.

That made my curious about what Twitter accounts have the most followers. The top 10 are [1]: 1. Barack Obama, 118 million. 2. Justin Bieber, 111. 3. Katy Perry, 108. 4. Rihanna, 96. 5. Taylor Swift, 86. 6. Christiano Ronoldy, 84. 7. Lady Gaga, 81. 8. Donald Trump, 80. 9. Ellen DeGeneres, 80. 10. Ariana Grande, 74. The next highest politican is Indian Prime Minister Modi, at #17 with 57 million. The Office of the Pri…

Followers are largely irrelevant, here. Trump's tweets are cited on a weekly basis by hundreds of publications globally. More people view trump tweets not-on-Twitter than on the platform.

Obama has 118M followers, whereas Trump's tweets have reach on the magnitude of billions of people. Had Obama been a Tweeter-In-Chief like Trump while he was president, his tweets would've had a similar reach.

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

#760
post #727

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not at all what Packingham says. That ruling was about a sex offender's right to access a website on which he could engage in first amendment activities without government restriction . It was not about whether a social media website was a public platform or whether the websites had to allow the appellant access. Moreover, many of the activities identified in the ruling also apply to private malls...which the…

You keep citing cases regarding private malls. I previously pointed out that a reasonable argument can be made as to why that precedent should not apply. I don't claim to know what the outcome of such an argument would be in court, only that it is a reasonable one to make under the circumstances (and thus the situation is fairly complicated). > Last I checked, the President is not a member of Congress, and cannot uni…

Except... it is. In their ruling the court _directly_ compares social media to other venues for public gathering. I'm not claiming that they explicitly rule it to be one way or the other (they don't), but they do repeatedly make direct comparisons that would appear to lean that way.

Except the text of the case itself literally does not do that. You need to read the actual text and not just the summary. Importantly, every time in the case they reference a "social media" website and a form of expression that could occur in a public forum, it is with respect to how the appellant would use that website--to freely express himself under his own first Amendment rights, and they contrast that with the government's attempt to restrict that expression. And as I pointed out, these activities were expressly addressed in the mall cases I cited, in which the courts said it didn't matter that such activities could occur in a mall, what mattered was that the malls were privately owned facilities. (And that is why I keep bringing the cases up--because malls are the closest analog to Twitter. They let people come in and at the time of these cases had millions of customers/visitors annually--on a relative basis, they were more a part of American life back then than Twitter is now.)

I would also note that the president appears to be targeting Section 230 protections which is quite a different beast.

The Section 230 protected are provided by congressional law, so it's not a different beast. The President does not have the power to target section 230 protections. The executive agencies could arguably make rules to change those protections, if they adhere to the administrative rulemaking process and their rules do not contradict the express text or purpose of the law.

I previously pointed out that a reasonable argument can be made as to why that precedent should not apply.

No, you didn't. The ADA (1990) and Civil Rights Act (1964), are older unrelated laws governing different issues. The CDA was passed in 1996, and so jurisprudence and the law itself already incorporated existing understandings of both of those laws...as well as the SCOTUS cases addressing the exact points you raised in your comment (i.e., the mall cases you keep dismissing). The CDA was written in a world where private facilities were not public forums as a result of multiple SCOTUS decisions saying they weren't. And the law reflects that.

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