It's the opposite, but sure, Vox. These laws restrict what those platforms can do TO their users and what they are allowed to constitute as bad behavior. Protecting citizens against platform bias and the ideological capture that has already taken place is here reframed as taking control of the platform itself. Only in the most technical of philosophical framing would this be true.
The fact is that these platforms have invited this kind of oversight by hiding behind federal protections designed to encourage free speech and abused the language of those to justify actually curtailing speech. Literal cake having + eating with constantly flaunted double standards and tongue wagging has led to this attempt to rein that abuse back in.
It is also painfully clear that the mainstream platforms have been pushed and encouraged by ONE of the major political parties to behave in just this way. Judicious reinterpretations of law, careful ignoring of bureaucratic policy outcomes, and media partnerships to fluff up the "but it's for the good of democracy" angle whenever Obama weaponizes Facebook ads to mine electorate data in the "most technically savvy campaign ever conducted" but the exact same behavior framed as the end of the world when a conservative firm runs a user poll in 2016.
This article is just another attempt at that. Tactics bad when Republicans want it, or new regulation has language that might actually stifle one of their beloved and profitable hustles.
article full of propaganda that falsely states what texas law does, plus in their desperate attempt to bash this court opinion, they use arguments that got destroyed in the same court opinion.
some example.
Its supposed anti-censorship provisions are so strict that it would likely prevent the major social media platforms from removing content touting Nazism or white supremacy
protected speech.
Under existing First Amendment law, individuals and private businesses have a right to speak their own minds, and also a right not to speak when they do not wish to. [...]This freedom allows companies to choose which viewpoints of its users it publishes, too
nobody is stopping them to speak their own mind or refrain from doing so for example on their company account. they are arguing that them censoring viewpoints on their own platform is a First Amendment expression, which is not. also they aren't even publishers.
Given the current state of events, I think a second civil war and dissolution of the union are more likely than our corrupt government ever overturning citizens United. Much like mass immigration and giving money to Israel, corporate personhood is one of those things that is opposed by a super majority of the citizens but is nevertheless a complete given for everyone in Washington.
I don't construct the right as free speech for corporations. However, corporations are groups of people. They have individual rights which they can presumably exercise as a collective as well. To say otherwise is to say that: A pamphlet by John Smith is protected, but a pamphlet by Citizens for Sovereignty (repr. John Smith) is unprotected.
The issue seems to come at size. Corporations may be large groups of people who are not ideologically connected but economically. Then one influential person within the group may claim to speak on behalf of all of them without confirming that even most of them agree. This is more difficult for me.
Censorship is fundamentally coercive. Protected speech (specifically viewpoint expression) has no coercive element to it, whatsoever.
The thing about that XKCD comic of old that gets trotted out works under the assumption that you are asking someone to leave your property, under the possibility of forcible removal.
If you think you can use force to remove someone, then you'd better be damn sure that your property isn't a public common area, that you haven't monopolized communication, and that you don't exist solely as a entity with no editorial interest.
I like the explanation that it's similar to malls. Courts have actually dealt with people who go to malls and hand out flyers, and were banned for the content of those flyers to protect the mall from claiming forcible association with the pamphleteers. Well the courts ruled that malls don't have editorial power, and can't assume that anyone would inherently associate them with some random pamphleteer who literally walked in off the street with no barrier to entry. The malls were wholly privately owned, on privately owned land, and the claims still didn't fly.
The Social Media companies are public companies sponsored by government subsidies, tax breaks, grants, and funds, that also take their censorship orders directly from the state, acting as explicit state agents.
Yeah, it's not even a private company. It's a public company. It's a public, governmentally regulated, corporation.
I still think the problem is monopoly. Assuming the company is not coerced by the government, they may be taking orders, but they are cooperating willingly. If there were 5 Facebooks, then maybe one of them wouldn't obey the government's soft directive, and the John Q Publics of the world could have a voice there.
It's entirely too convenient that there's one government and one Facebook. It's entirely too convenient for the censors that they need only convince one shithead (-berg) that the speech needs to be suppressed. And that that same guy gets them reelected.
And monopolies don't exist without public intervention to support them. Otherwise, they are too unwieldy, inefficient, and ineffective to survive on their own.
The argument would be that making the companies carry the speech they object to would be compelled speech, which is a big 1st Amendment no-no. The mall explanation comes from the Pruneyard case, where a California law requiring private malls to allow pamphleteers was upheld. But there's also Section 230, which the companies rely on specifically to disclaim any responsibility for user generated content on the theory that it is not their speech. Can't have it both ways, the 5th Circuit ruled.
Incidentally, the Pruneyard shopping mall is about the most ordinary thing you can find, the last place you'd think would be associated with a Supreme Court case.
Disagree. Any company that becomes big enough to qualify as a monopoly should be nationalized. Either that or be subject to all the restrains and responsibilities of the government.
Social media, by it's nature, can't be broken into smaller companies. Therefore, these companies cannot be allowed to run privately.
Either that or be subject to all the restrains and responsibilities of the government.
This is how I know you don't deal with governments, government agencies, or government corporations.
There are no restraints and responsibilities on the government. Regulations exist fundamentally to curtail competition, not to protect you, and they never have, and they never will.
Let's try this: what if your electricity bill is too high?
Here's what I have to do:
Make an appeal to a consumer department within the government utility, justifying why my bill should be different
Have that appeal be rejected for procedural reasons because their goal is to dissuade people from appealing their bills.
Make a 2nd appeal.
Have that appeal be rejected for subjective interpretations
Be told no further appeals will be tolerated for the next 5 years
Vote for a new governor
Hilariously win election
Have that governor appoint a new Secretary of Energy
Have that new Secretary of Energy appoint a new Undersecretary of Energy
Have that new Undersecretary of Energy appoint a new head of the Consumer Relations Board
Have the new head of the Consumer Relations board of remove most of the board and replace with people who will listen to me.
Make a 3rd appeal
Have my appeal get rejected for procedural reasons
Make a 4th appeal
Have the appeal pass!
Get new electric bill
See electric bill price per kilowatt hour decrease, reducing my bill by $50!
See that my electric bill now includes a "Transportation Fee" of $50
Thank god the utilities are nationalized, I could have gotten screwed! Oh wait...
That basically happened to me.
The reality is that private companies have to make money to survive. When they fuck up and burn their customers, they are held accountable by people putting their money elsewhere.
The government, and all government corporations, steals your money. They are also the law. There is no mechanism to punish them for getting things wrong. They already took your money, and gave themselves legal immunity. Voting will very likely not change any part of the bureaucracy that you're actually having to fight unless you are voting for someone who plans on gutting the bureaucracy by tens of thousands of people, or by privatizing the institution altogether.
Without being nationalized, Twitter will die eventually.
If you Nationalize it, Parag Agrawal becomes the Secretary of Public Communications. He has no time limit, and is kept regardless of who you elect; he will probably stay at that position for the next 20 years. You do not have the right to sue Twitter.gov without permission from the government. You will be taxed to pay for Twitter. You will then be asked to pay a subscription fee on top of that for Twitter's maintenance. Twitter's budget will balloon wildly out of control, and we will have to print money to pay for it, making you deal with the consequence of inflation, on top of it's tax cost and subscription. The quality of the site will dramatically decrease. Rumble, Truth Social, Gettr, and Gab will be re-classified as criminal enterprises that are not allowed to compete with the government. Political discrimination will be 100x worse. Twitter.gov will drag on being a horrific parasite on humanity well into 2050, 20 years after it would have gone bankrupt if private.
Because then it will be impossible to improve, it won't be allowed to fail, you will pay wildly out of pocket more than it's worth, and it will be exclusively used a political weapon going forward.
MySpace killed itself. AOL is gone. Yahoo! has been a b-list site for a decade. Netscape Navigator died. Opera was one of the first browsers, and has been rebuilt from the ground up more than once.
It's the opposite, but sure, Vox. These laws restrict what those platforms can do TO their users and what they are allowed to constitute as bad behavior. Protecting citizens against platform bias and the ideological capture that has already taken place is here reframed as taking control of the platform itself. Only in the most technical of philosophical framing would this be true.
The fact is that these platforms have invited this kind of oversight by hiding behind federal protections designed to encourage free speech and abused the language of those to justify actually curtailing speech. Literal cake having + eating with constantly flaunted double standards and tongue wagging has led to this attempt to rein that abuse back in.
It is also painfully clear that the mainstream platforms have been pushed and encouraged by ONE of the major political parties to behave in just this way. Judicious reinterpretations of law, careful ignoring of bureaucratic policy outcomes, and media partnerships to fluff up the "but it's for the good of democracy" angle whenever Obama weaponizes Facebook ads to mine electorate data in the "most technically savvy campaign ever conducted" but the exact same behavior framed as the end of the world when a conservative firm runs a user poll in 2016.
This article is just another attempt at that. Tactics bad when Republicans want it, or new regulation has language that might actually stifle one of their beloved and profitable hustles.
article full of propaganda that falsely states what texas law does, plus in their desperate attempt to bash this court opinion, they use arguments that got destroyed in the same court opinion.
some example.
protected speech.
nobody is stopping them to speak their own mind or refrain from doing so for example on their company account. they are arguing that them censoring viewpoints on their own platform is a First Amendment expression, which is not. also they aren't even publishers.
Given the current state of events, I think a second civil war and dissolution of the union are more likely than our corrupt government ever overturning citizens United. Much like mass immigration and giving money to Israel, corporate personhood is one of those things that is opposed by a super majority of the citizens but is nevertheless a complete given for everyone in Washington.
I don't construct the right as free speech for corporations. However, corporations are groups of people. They have individual rights which they can presumably exercise as a collective as well. To say otherwise is to say that: A pamphlet by John Smith is protected, but a pamphlet by Citizens for Sovereignty (repr. John Smith) is unprotected.
The issue seems to come at size. Corporations may be large groups of people who are not ideologically connected but economically. Then one influential person within the group may claim to speak on behalf of all of them without confirming that even most of them agree. This is more difficult for me.
explain to me how texas controlling it could possibly be worse than who currently controls it
I thought this was Vox Day for a second and I had missed something based.
Censorship isn't speech.
Censorship is fundamentally coercive. Protected speech (specifically viewpoint expression) has no coercive element to it, whatsoever.
The thing about that XKCD comic of old that gets trotted out works under the assumption that you are asking someone to leave your property, under the possibility of forcible removal.
If you think you can use force to remove someone, then you'd better be damn sure that your property isn't a public common area, that you haven't monopolized communication, and that you don't exist solely as a entity with no editorial interest.
I like the explanation that it's similar to malls. Courts have actually dealt with people who go to malls and hand out flyers, and were banned for the content of those flyers to protect the mall from claiming forcible association with the pamphleteers. Well the courts ruled that malls don't have editorial power, and can't assume that anyone would inherently associate them with some random pamphleteer who literally walked in off the street with no barrier to entry. The malls were wholly privately owned, on privately owned land, and the claims still didn't fly.
The Social Media companies are public companies sponsored by government subsidies, tax breaks, grants, and funds, that also take their censorship orders directly from the state, acting as explicit state agents.
Yeah, it's not even a private company. It's a public company. It's a public, governmentally regulated, corporation.
I still think the problem is monopoly. Assuming the company is not coerced by the government, they may be taking orders, but they are cooperating willingly. If there were 5 Facebooks, then maybe one of them wouldn't obey the government's soft directive, and the John Q Publics of the world could have a voice there.
It's entirely too convenient that there's one government and one Facebook. It's entirely too convenient for the censors that they need only convince one shithead (-berg) that the speech needs to be suppressed. And that that same guy gets them reelected.
That is the problem.
And monopolies don't exist without public intervention to support them. Otherwise, they are too unwieldy, inefficient, and ineffective to survive on their own.
The argument would be that making the companies carry the speech they object to would be compelled speech, which is a big 1st Amendment no-no. The mall explanation comes from the Pruneyard case, where a California law requiring private malls to allow pamphleteers was upheld. But there's also Section 230, which the companies rely on specifically to disclaim any responsibility for user generated content on the theory that it is not their speech. Can't have it both ways, the 5th Circuit ruled.
Incidentally, the Pruneyard shopping mall is about the most ordinary thing you can find, the last place you'd think would be associated with a Supreme Court case.
Well, yes, it would be very bad if the State of Texas nationalized Twitter and Facebook. Luckily that didn't happen.
Disagree. Any company that becomes big enough to qualify as a monopoly should be nationalized. Either that or be subject to all the restrains and responsibilities of the government.
Social media, by it's nature, can't be broken into smaller companies. Therefore, these companies cannot be allowed to run privately.
This is how I know you don't deal with governments, government agencies, or government corporations.
There are no restraints and responsibilities on the government. Regulations exist fundamentally to curtail competition, not to protect you, and they never have, and they never will.
Let's try this: what if your electricity bill is too high?
Here's what I have to do:
Thank god the utilities are nationalized, I could have gotten screwed! Oh wait...
That basically happened to me.
The reality is that private companies have to make money to survive. When they fuck up and burn their customers, they are held accountable by people putting their money elsewhere.
The government, and all government corporations, steals your money. They are also the law. There is no mechanism to punish them for getting things wrong. They already took your money, and gave themselves legal immunity. Voting will very likely not change any part of the bureaucracy that you're actually having to fight unless you are voting for someone who plans on gutting the bureaucracy by tens of thousands of people, or by privatizing the institution altogether.
Without being nationalized, Twitter will die eventually.
If you Nationalize it, Parag Agrawal becomes the Secretary of Public Communications. He has no time limit, and is kept regardless of who you elect; he will probably stay at that position for the next 20 years. You do not have the right to sue Twitter.gov without permission from the government. You will be taxed to pay for Twitter. You will then be asked to pay a subscription fee on top of that for Twitter's maintenance. Twitter's budget will balloon wildly out of control, and we will have to print money to pay for it, making you deal with the consequence of inflation, on top of it's tax cost and subscription. The quality of the site will dramatically decrease. Rumble, Truth Social, Gettr, and Gab will be re-classified as criminal enterprises that are not allowed to compete with the government. Political discrimination will be 100x worse. Twitter.gov will drag on being a horrific parasite on humanity well into 2050, 20 years after it would have gone bankrupt if private.
Why is that bad?
Because then it will be impossible to improve, it won't be allowed to fail, you will pay wildly out of pocket more than it's worth, and it will be exclusively used a political weapon going forward.
MySpace killed itself. AOL is gone. Yahoo! has been a b-list site for a decade. Netscape Navigator died. Opera was one of the first browsers, and has been rebuilt from the ground up more than once.
This is how things run.