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

reuters.com

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

#991

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is really the critical factor. Anti-speech pro-corporate-authority advocates always try to put these monopolistic, unescapable megacorporations in the same category as some local mom-and-pop operation. It's a massive intentional category error; megacorps are not little companies you can just walk awawy from. There is a point where a corporation's influence becomes so unescapable and so capable of greatly degradi…

>The same reason that the phone company or a company that owns all the local roads or water mains can't decide to "stop serving" you because they don't like your religion Because it's hard to impossible to get alternate services for roads, water and electricity, i.e common carriers. But there are plenty of neo nazi forums, Gab, Truth Social, Parler, 4chan for racists to express and spread their views.

"Because it's hard to impossible to get alternate services for roads, water and electricity, i.e common carriers."

You are omitting telephone service, which is also a common carrier despite being arguably more competitive than the Big 3 cloud providers.

That's where I personally would come down. This decision is ridiculous; social media companies are highly competitive. But I am much, much less comfortable with AWS kicking off Parler.

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

#992
post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't take HN threads into political flamewar. Even by the (low) standard of the current thread, your comments here are standing out in a flamey way. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I apologize. I was expressing my opinion on politics that seemed inherent in the article itself, but I certainly should not have replied in a hot-take way to an offensive reply, and I should have bowed out before I started. Thank you for your work in moderating this site.

Appreciated!

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

#993

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is really the critical factor. Anti-speech pro-corporate-authority advocates always try to put these monopolistic, unescapable megacorporations in the same category as some local mom-and-pop operation. It's a massive intentional category error; megacorps are not little companies you can just walk awawy from. There is a point where a corporation's influence becomes so unescapable and so capable of greatly degradi…

You mean corporations have a monopoly on violence like the government has where they can legally take away your property and liberty.

Yes. A handful of megacorps acting together (and they all act together generally) can take away your property by banning you, which makes it impossible to have a normal career in fields as diverse as academia, creative media, journalism, tech, and many others. If you're running a small business and trying to promote it, being banned from social media is a huge hit as well.

They already have taken away your liberty to speak your mind in the common public square of our society - social media - because you know they'll ban you if you say any of a wide variety of things, leading to the consequences described above.

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

#994

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Social media companies are censoring people they don't like" This is ridiculous. No one is banned for their opinions on tax policy. No one is banned for their opinions on abortion. People (including the former POTUS) were removed for inciting violence, for fomenting harassment campaigns, and for racism/transphobia/other forms of bigotry.

People have been suspended or banned for "misinformation" ranging from Covid treatments to perceived irregularities in the 2020 elections. The New York Post was censored by Twitter for its initial report on the Hunter Biden laptop, which was subsequently verified as factual. There are countless other such examples. Heck, a friend was suspended from Facebook for a political posting months ago, and he still hasn't been…

I don't want to defend Facebook or any social media platform. I'm sure they are often wrong in who they ban.

But it makes sense to me that spreading misinformation about vaccines is a good reason for getting you banned. Vaccines are a matter of life and death not just for people who get vaccinated or not, but to everybody to whom they can spread the disease. If you tell people not to get vaccinated and they believe you, you put their lives in danger.

Similarly you can be prosecuted for shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater causing people to panic and die being trampled and crushed. You could then try to argue that "It is just my opinion that I have the freedom of speech to shout 'Fire' anywhere and whenever I want to". But courts are not going to agree with you.

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

#995

I don't get it. Restaurants can choose their customers based on how they behave or even how they are dressed. Why shouldn't online businesses be able to reject some of their customers?

If two or three companies owned 99.9% of the restaurants in the world, then we wouldn't let them reject customers willy-nilly. If we mandated that Facebook and Twitter break up into several federated instances owned by different companies with no entity controlling more than one, like we did with Ma Bell into the Baby Bells, then your argument would apply to them.

It's not about willy-nilly rejecting customers. It's about rejecting customers who are offending or causing harm to other customers or preventing them from enjoying their meal.

You are not being banned because of your "opinions" but because of hate-speech. That means speech that can harm others. At least that should be the case, and the law I think.

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

#996
post #767
post #642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To use a bot you need to register an API key for it. Twitter or such could simply revoke the API access. The user is still free to post manually and their free speech is not impinged.

You could just screen scrape and submit that way. Twitter noticing and blocking your user account doesn't get them off the hook, according to the definition of user in the law.

Doesn't it? Pretty sure the Terms of Service would say something about not accessing the service in an automated fashion, except through the official API. They would be banning you then based on a ToS violation, not because of any viewpoint.

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

#997
post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, like you said, everything CAN be a political statement but, more often than not, everything is not, by default, a political statement

I imagine you could assume that everything is, indeed, a political statement, to at least one person in the US.

I will ignore that irrational person incapable of seeing the context of a situation

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

#998
post #569
post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt your blog has 50 million visitors, so your argument is ridiculous

What on earth does the number of visitors have to do with the legal requirement for private enterprises to host spam/nazi content?

This isn’t a legal requirement to host spam, illegal, hateful or any other content. It says that if your site has more than 50 million visitors AND if you allow red team content, you must also allow blue team content

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

#999

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Games let you pretend to do a terrorist attack. Twitter lets you plan to do one.

And Parler let you prepare January 6th. But also let the FBI to know weeks in advance what was planned. And supposedly let them convince some of the most radical people to not participate after all. (I'm still baffled though why the police was so unprepared, it should have been a fort of police shields and water cannons...)

>I'm still baffled though why the police was so unprepared

Most police is just incompetent and lazy.

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

#1000

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Parler let you prepare January 6th. But also let the FBI to know weeks in advance what was planned. And supposedly let them convince some of the most radical people to not participate after all. (I'm still baffled though why the police was so unprepared, it should have been a fort of police shields and water cannons...)

>I'm still baffled though why the police was so unprepared Most police is just incompetent and lazy.

Even assuming that this cliché holds, I wouldn't have expected it to hold at the highest level of police (the ones that should have given the orders to build the "fort").
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