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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

#781

Post by brendoelfrendo »

Izkata wrote: post #683
brendoelfrendo wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then the solution is to nationalize Twitter and enforce the first amendment there, not this.

> U.S. District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald in Manhattan ruled on May 23 [2018] that comments on the president’s account, and those of other government officials, were public forums and that blocking Twitter Inc users for their views violated their right to free speech under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-twitter/trump-u...

What's your point? That's a ruling against Trump, not against Twitter. The President can't arbitrarily block access to his communications.

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

#782

Post by thephyber »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #86
thrusong wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

To play devil's advocate, you can't do that in a public park either. You can be arrested for disturbing the peace or some such. So I'm not sure it's necessarily about private vs public.

But the rules for many public spaces and all private spaces are fundamentally different because they get to define who can use the property and in what capacity, or face trespassing charges.

I don't see banning a user from social media sites very different from exercising trespassing laws. Should Republicans be sheltered from trespass laws just because the owner of the property might not be a Republican?

Perhaps the best way for social media websites to avoid being is to more clearly define what content violates their ToS. I suspect most people don't read the ToS and certainly don't know how every company chooses to enforce their ToS with enough detail, and that's almost certainly the confusion when social media users complain about persecution.

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

#783

Post by efitz »

sandipagr wrote: post #755
efitz wrote: 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?

I think it’s completely in the control of the users, so it’s ok. Also I can always look at what was filtered and “fix” mistakes. Likewise, I have no problem with a button that a user can press that says “I don’t like this person, don’t show me their stuff anymore”. I just don’t want the company to press it for me as if the content never existed.

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

#784

Post by colejohnson66 »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #69
cdubzzz wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One potential outcome here -- social media platforms start _more actively_ banning users to prevent potential liability issues, thus fracturing the market. Highly doubt it will work out that way, but it would be nice (well, maybe...).

Hopefully it will lead to what happened on reddit: the worst go off to a competitor which then fails to gain mainstream attention (e.g. Voat, Gab, etc). While they’ll be in an echo-chamber (which isn’t a good thing at all), at least they won’t ruin other communities.

Doesn’t that just lead to an echo chamber on the site they left also? When Trump supporters were banned from the political subreddits, they formed /r/The_Donald. And it’s an anti-Trump-criticism, anti-anything-left-leaning echo chamber. But that left /r/politics to become a left leaning echo chamber itself. Now, one can’t have a civil discussion about anything because /r/politics will ban anything saying Trump did anything remotely good, and /r/The_Donald will ban anything remotely critical of Trump.

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

#785

Post by remarkEon »

I don't know why everyone here is upset by this. Isn't this what we wanted? An actual policy debate, decided by the three branches of government - the executive, congress, the Courts - about what kinds of regulations these super powerful social media companies should have to submit to.

Don't fool yourselves, if Facebook or Twitter wanted to swing an election they absolutely have the power to do that. Isn't that a problem that government is supposed to solve? I'm sorry, and I don't like the guy in charge right now either, but regulation really is the only answer here. Maybe calm down for a minute and let this make its way through the Circuit Courts, refined, watered down, etc etc.

All of that aside, I want my distributed and independent internet back. Maybe we should just be teaching our kids the command line from now on because that might be the only way that we can communicate over this protocol in a civil way.

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

#786

Post by threatofrain »

hintymad wrote: post #500
cdolan wrote: post #2

The biggest takeaway, looking past the headline: “This week a federal appeals court, ruling in a case brought by conservative activists against social media companies, affirmed that private websites are not public spaces and social media companies don't have First Amendment obligations. Any truly strong limits to Section 230 would almost certainly require action by Congress.”

I don't think that section 230 is about First Amendment. I thought it was about whether a company can be shielded from law suit on the content published on the company's website. That is, how to classify a company as a platform or as a publisher.

First amendment is the issue as we're contemplating who should be liable for the consequences of bad speech. If FB is liable than FB is incentivized to censor risky people; if I'm liable then I might watch what I say on Yelp or Wikipedia.

Right now we have a situation where the platform owner can collect the fruits of popularity, while the platform users experience basically no-liability gossip, such as empirical claims about businesses.

Anyone who is hated broadly by the internet, whether just or unjust, would like FB to be liable no matter what is right or wrong, because holding hundreds of tiny individuals accountable for tiny wrongs over the web is a losing battle.

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

#787

Post by nautilus12 »

pengaru wrote: post #92

What's surprising is how often I encounter fellow Americans mistakenly asserting the first amendment extends beyond government and into the private sector. It's like they've never even been to a movie theater where they need to shut the hell up or leave. And here we have a US president signing an executive order in response to being moderated on a web site after years of arguably excessive tolerance of his b.s. I'm n…

His motivations may be personal but they laid out the reasons for doing it pretty clearly. 230 was being too broadly interpreted, can anyone on either side of the aisle dispute that fact?

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

#788

Post by SilasX »

Reelin wrote: post #629
vannevar wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like it or not, a couple tech platforms are the de facto new town squares. I'd agree, but de facto is not de jure. And if we're going to make them into public spaces legally, it's certainly not going to happen through an executive order. It would require an act of Congress, similar to the restrictions and obligations placed on broadcasters.

Except that SCOTUS has already at least flirted with the idea (see Packingham v. North Carolina, 2017). Also the executive order in question doesn't have anything to do with public spaces but rather Section 230 protections; the argument is that fact checking is a form of editorializing.

See also this HN discussion about a case[1], where a judge ruled that Trump can't block people on Twitter.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17135945

[1] Knight First Amendment Institute v. Trump, 17-cv-5205, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York

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

#789

Post by colejohnson66 »

remarkEon wrote: post #785

I don't know why everyone here is upset by this. Isn't this what we wanted? An actual policy debate, decided by the three branches of government - the executive, congress, the Courts - about what kinds of regulations these super powerful social media companies should have to submit to. Don't fool yourselves, if Facebook or Twitter wanted to swing an election they absolutely have the power to do that . Isn't that a pr…

I think some people are upset because he’s not going the proper route. He’s doing an end run around Congress using Executive Orders in an attempt to get what he wants now. Because he knows that something like this would be held up in Congress by the Democrats.

Others are upset because, as the Constitution is written, he cannot force a private website to carry his speech (the Supreme Court has repeatedly rejected “compelled speech”). Although, yes, we should wait for the courts to (hopefully) strike it down.

There’s also the fact that repealing Section 230 would be absolutely detrimental to the internet. Sure, decentralize it all, but, as it stands now, that’s not what the majority of the public want; They want centralization because it makes things easier. Facebook, Twitter, Google/YouTube, etc. are the size they are today because they’re centralized; it makes finding what you want easier.

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

#790

Post by thephyber »

laughinghan wrote: post #494
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, yeah, I suppose it depends how loud you're screaming. I was imagining someone shouting as loud as possible, which you'd definitely get stopped for in many places.

Aren't you just talking about the volume then? You could be screaming the most wholesome things about unicorns and rainbows and still be loud enough to be a public nuisance, and loud enough that authorities will have the right to ask you to pipe down. In America, no matter how big of a community mall, management can always remove you for good reasons (using racial slurs, even at normal volume), silly reasons (they di…

> Whereas authorities cannot remove you from a public square for no reason or silly reasons, only for good reasons specifically identified by law (like public nuisance).

It depends if you are reported and what for. American authorities have prosecutorial discretion, so they can choose to overlook the "wholesome things shouter", but may choose to charge the "racist shouter" with a vaguely defined law like "disturbing the peace". There are enough laws like "disturbing the peace", "trespassing", and "obscenity" which are largely subjective.

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