Federal Court rules Big Tech has no 'freewheeling First Amendment right to censor' I didn't really have a problem with the "their company, their rules" mindset until the government got so heavily involved in encouraging / inducing / bullying companies into censoring users on the government's behalf. That's where I felt like it crossed the line into a First Amendment violation. Either way, free speech advocates have something to celebrate today. Go Texas!
You are correct that using censorship to support politics is far worse (and in fact possibly the biggest of many threats against democracy today), but censoring by a private organization is wrong when they have protection against liability for their content.
I've got to give credit where credit is due to Donald Trump for bringing up Section 230. I didn't know about it, but once I brushed up on it it became clear that it's the right thing to either repeal or edit that law for the specificity of our times because clearly the government can use social media and private citizens to circumvent their first amendment responsibilities. And I broadly argue we all share those first amendment responsibilities, but for now a mere restoration of the status quo of getting the government outside of the public sector is sufficient.
Good point, but the government does not have to be directly involved with Big Tech for Big Tech to do its bidding.
Completely predictable leftist "outrage" from MSNBC: Judges ruling against Twitter to protect the First Amendment did the opposite The point at which her whole argument falls apart IMHO, is that the government has been coordinating with large social media companies to ban users and censor content. For just one example (but there are more): Zuckerberg blames FBI for censoring The Post's Hunter Biden scoop (nypost.com) It is, in effect, government censorship performed through the intermediary actor of large social media companies. And that's not allowed under the First Amendment.
They have the right to have whatever they want on their servers. The remedy to government colluding with social media companies is to sue the government.
And if they did... I wonder how long it would last. Probably not that long. FB and Twitter would probably end up backing away from it due to backlash from the rest of America...at least the part that doesn't like censorship. Google on the other hand is large. So large that it could easily be considered as a public utility. Google is used by 4.3 billion people across the world, out of 7.9 billion. In the US alone 246 million people use it. As such one could easily consider it as a public utility much like a telephone company or electric company. And then they would fall under the same laws that protects us from those utilities discriminating against us.
Completely predictable that the fascist right wants to force businesses to publish their hate speech and outright lies. It's the only way they can drown out the truth.
Let's talk about Hunter Biden's laptop for a moment. Is publishing the contents of that "hate speech and outright lies"? Should, for example, Twitter be banning accounts that publicize that information at the government's behest?
First off, there are plenty of things they are explicitly not allowed to have on their servers, your insistence notwithstanding. In this case, the remedy seems to have been to pass a law and successfully defend it in court. Looks like that worked here just fine. There's apparently no need to sue anybody. Your thoughts?
That's not the Court's finding. TEXAS SOCIAL MEDIA ANTI-CENSORSHIP CASE. 'The affirmed Texas law prohibits social media companies from censoring “a user, a user’s expression, or a user’s ability to receive the expression of another person based on (1) the viewpoint of the user or another person; (2) the viewpoint represented in the user’s expression or another person’s expression; or (3) a user’s geographic location in this state or any part of this state.” It defines “censor” as meaning “to block, ban, remove, deplatform, demonetize, de-boost, restrict, deny equal access or visibility to, or otherwise discriminate against expression.”' The key two questions are: Are social media companies “common carriers,” and Is the exercise of selecting what users and expression to censor, a form of expression protected by the First Amendment. 'Common carrier doctrine is a body of common law dating back long before our Founding. It vests States with the power to impose non discrimination obligations on communication and transportation providers that hold themselves out to serve all members of the public without individualized bargaining. It’s because they are common carriers that airlines can’t randomly refuse to sell you a ticket because they don’t like your hat, that Verizon can’t refuse to hook up your phone because it doesn’t like your politics, or a hotel can’t refuse to rent you a room because you “look sketchy.” And if a company is a common carrier, states (including Texas) have more room to regulate it.' 'But are social media companies like Facebook or Twitter common carriers? The plaintiff, NetChoice, which is a trade association of major tech companies including the social media giants, argues that they are not, while the Texas legislature determined that they are.' 'The majority opinion includes a lengthy history of common carrier doctrine by way of emphasizing that as various industries grew more important to daily life and the consequences of making arbitrary decisions about who to serve grew more intense, they came to be regulated as common carriers. Being denied a telephone hookup in 1886, 10 years after its invention, would have a far less deleterious effect on life than being denied one in 1976. And like traditional common carriers, social media companies deal with users as basically interchangeable, without individualized bargaining. Just as you can’t negotiate the terms of your airline ticket agreement, you can’t negotiate the multi-page boilerplate user agreements that we all ignore from tech companies. A company’s status as a monopoly or near-monopoly also makes it more likely to be found a common carrier.' 'On the other hand, social media companies are, and have been for quite a while, choosier than AT&T’s telephone division about what messages they will allow to be communicated. Indeed, their actions to reject, suppress, and delete various forms of offensive or disfavored expression (as determined arbitrarily by the companies) is the entire reason for Texas’s law. The majority opinion rejects this as circular reasoning – that the platforms say they can discriminate because they are already discriminating – but do we really expect Twitter and Facebook to be neutral conduits of information? And how much does it matter to our personal and even public lives if they aren’t?' 'In the end, this is going to be a judgment call, likely made by the Supreme Court. It’s also possible that some platforms that support NetChoice end up being deemed common carriers, while others do not. But while this is an important decision, the judgment to be made about the First Amendment analysis is more interesting, and at least as important.' More at the link.
No. I don't think that is the claim of the Court. Is selecting what to censor itself a form of protected expression under the First Amendment? 'There are five main cases that the Fifth Circuit discusses in analyzing whether or not the efforts to censor made by the social media companies are themselves a form of expression protected under the First Amendment. The majority believes they are not, while the dissent believes they are. Ultimately, the decision will likely turn on how the Supreme Court applies and interprets the precedent it set in Miami Herald Publishing Co. v. Tornillo, 418 U.S. 241 (1974).' 'In the Miami Herald case, a political candidate attempted to sue the newspaper using a 1913 Florida law that provided political candidates a “right to reply” to attacks on him or her in a newspaper, for free, in the same newspaper, and with the reply given equal space and prominence as the attacking article. The Herald refused to print his reply, and the case made it all the way to the Supreme Court.' 'In a unanimous decision, the Court struck down the law, with Chief Justice Burger writing the opinion. In its concluding paragraph, he writes:' 'Even if a newspaper would face no additional costs to comply with a compulsory access law and would not be forced to forgo publication of news or opinion by the inclusion of a reply, the Florida statute fails to clear the barriers of the First Amendment because of its intrusion into the function of editors. A newspaper is more than a passive receptacle or conduit for news, comment, and advertising. The choice of material to go into a newspaper, and the decisions made as to limitations on the size and content of the paper, and treatment of public issues and public officials — whether fair or unfair — constitute the exercise of editorial control and judgment. It has yet to be demonstrated how governmental regulation of this crucial process can be exercised consistent with First Amendment guarantees of a free press as they have evolved to this time.' 'The dissent in the NetChoice case reads this as being the most similar to what the social media platforms do – that their “censorship” through selecting what may stay on their platforms and what will be boosted is their own editorial judgment, and is protected by the First Amendment:' 'When the Platforms curate their users’ feeds, which are the behaviors prohibited in Section 7 of HB 20, they are exercising their editorial discretion… If anything, the majority’s research and reasoning supports the Platforms’ contention that First Amendment protections attend the publishing process as well as the actual published content.' 'The majority, on the other hand, sees what the platforms are doing as significantly different from a newspaper’s editorial decision-making – that the censorship is fundamentally an act unprotected by the First Amendment rather than a form of expression. It points out that unlike in a newspaper, the “editorial discretion” happens after the fact, and inconsistently at that, with more than 95% of user expression totally unaffected by the supposed editors. With regard to a point about how the scale makes it impossible to moderate posts ahead of time, it points out that some large websites, including the New York Times, in fact do moderate comments before posting. And it repeatedly points out public statements made by various CEOs and officials of the social media companies that strongly suggest (or flat-out state) that they are not editors:' 'They’ve told their users: “We try to explicitly view ourselves as not editors. We don’t want to have editorial judgment over the content that’s in your feed.” They’ve told the public that they “may not monitor,” “do not endorse,” and “cannot take responsibility for” the content on their Platforms. They’ve told Congress that their “goal is to offer a platform for all ideas.” And they’ve told courts—over and over again—that they simply “serve as conduits for other parties’ speech.”' 'So who is right? Ultimately, again, this has to be a judgment call, and it’s unlikely to get a definitive answer until the Supreme Court takes it up.'
