DU:
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100217203708
https://old.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/xqfgua/is_this_the_beginning_of_the_end_of_the_internet/
https://old.reddit.com/r/law/comments/xqo2gs/is_this_the_beginning_of_the_end_of_the_internet/
https://nitter.net/search?f=tweets&q=Is+This+the+Beginning+of+the+End+of+the+Internet%3F
Occasionally, something happens that is so blatantly and obviously misguided that trying to explain it rationally makes you sound ridiculous. Such is the case with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals’s recent ruling in NetChoice v. Paxton. Earlier this month, the court upheld a preposterous Texas law stating that online platforms with more than 50 million monthly active users in the United States no longer have First Amendment rights regarding their editorial decisions. Put another way, the law tells big social-media companies that they can’t moderate the content on their platforms. YouTube purging terrorist-recruitment videos? Illegal. Twitter removing a violent cell of neo-Nazis harassing people with death threats? Sorry, that’s censorship, according to Andy Oldham, a judge of the United States Court of Appeals and the former general counsel to Texas Governor Greg Abbott.
A state compelling social-media companies to host all user content without restrictions isn’t merely, as the First Amendment litigation lawyer Ken White put it on Twitter, “the most angrily incoherent First Amendment decision I think I’ve ever read.” It’s also the type of ruling that threatens to blow up the architecture of the internet. To understand why requires some expertise in First Amendment law and content-moderation policy, and a grounding in what makes the internet a truly transformational technology. So I called up some legal and tech-policy experts and asked them to explain the Fifth Circuit ruling—and its consequences—to me as if I were a precocious 5-year-old with a strange interest in jurisprudence.
Techdirt founder Mike Masnick, who has been writing for decades about the intersection of tech policy and civil liberties, told me that the ruling is “fractally wrong”—made up of so many layers of wrongness that, in order to fully comprehend its significance, “you must understand the historical wrongness before the legal wrongness, before you can get to the technical wrongness.” In theory, the ruling means that any state in the Fifth Circuit (such as Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi) could “mandate that news organizations must cover certain politicians or certain other content” and even implies that “the state can now compel any speech it wants on private property.” The law would allow both the Texas attorney general and private citizens who do business in Texas to bring suit against the platforms if they feel their content was removed because of a specific viewpoint. Daphne Keller, the director of the Program on Platform Regulation at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center, told me that such a law could amount to “a litigation DDoS [Denial of Service] attack, unleashing a wave of potentially frivolous and serious suits against the platforms.”
To give me a sense of just how sweeping and nonsensical the law could be in practice, Masnick suggested that, under the logic of the ruling, it very well could be illegal to update Wikipedia in Texas, because any user attempt to add to a page could be deemed an act of censorship based on the viewpoint of that user (which the law forbids). The same could be true of chat platforms, including iMessage and Reddit, and perhaps also Groomercord, which is built on tens of thousands of private chat rooms run by private moderators. Enforcement at that scale is nearly impossible. This week, to demonstrate the absurdity of the law and stress test possible Texas enforcement, the subreddit /r/PoliticalHumor mandated that every comment in the forum include the phrase “Greg Abbott is a little piss baby” or be deleted. “We realized what a ripe situation this is, so we’re going to flagrantly break this law,” a moderator of the subreddit wrote. “We like this Constitution thing. Seems like it has some good ideas.”
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The only reason why we have any freedom of speech on the internet, even to have this conversation right now, is because the people who originally built the internet believed in that and we got used to it. It was never built on anything more than an expectation that we all shared certain values. But it's not the 1990s anymore. There's an element of our society that unironically wants to deplatform anyone who even says words like "free speech" or "due process" and they have the money and power to do it if we let them. You'd have to be a really extreme libertarian to say that the people can't resist the upper classes imposing this on us.
JC bb you know I love you to death, but I'm not gonna let 2500 years of human progress going back to Cyrus the Great to be destroyed overnight because some zoomers feel uncomfortable about words they saw on their phones.
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problem is and i haven't read the law but it seems universally stupid, viewpoint discrimination is so vague as to not be worth anything. imagine if you were just trying to shitpost about trains or something and someone starts spamming their shit about the holocaust or libertarianism or shit
in any sane world jannies could clean it up or whatever or tell them to piss off and go back to stormfront where they belong but from what i've heard and i'm not a lawyer nor gonna pretend to be but it sounds like you wouldn't be able to ban them or remove their shit
love you too
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That's not what the law says, it's aimed at the current underhanded methods of manipulating content, such as the site rules only mattering if you're right-leaning.
On top of that, the idea that once you're at 50 million users you're basically a public utility and shouldn't be cutting people off anyway isn't all that unreasonable. It's not like 10 Nazis pose a serious threat to such a site. The reality is that these sites are exploting their position to manipulate politics, and without firm regulation the internet is pretty much already dead. Just look at how heavily astroturfed and manipulated Reddit has become in just a few years.
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removing a post or banning a user isn't underhanded lol
it's just a good idea
in what way is a social media site a public utility
this would just make sites like Reddit even more astroturfed if you can't ban
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trolling drama users lmao.
you had me for a second there
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not a troll
banning boring idiots and removing boring and bad posts is an unironically good thing
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wtf so you keep r-slurredly missing the point by accident?
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again i didn't miss your point
your point was bad and you should feel bad
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if you didn't keep missing the point, you would have addressed it by now
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Democracycels fear the dictatorshipchad
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The idea that you actually have to state the rules in the ToS, rather than arbitrarily removing whatever you fancy, really isn't unreasonable.
Remember that these rules only apply if the site advertises itself as an open public space. If Reddit wants to put "no right wingers" in it's terms, they're free to do that. However, the bottom line is that right now these sites are claiming immunity from any responsibility for their content under the notion that they're a public platform that they exert no editorial control over. You can't have your cake and eat it. If you want common carrier protections you can't pick and choose - you could say the same about phone networks. Fortunately they never started refusing to let people call donation lines for specific parties.
How so? I'm genuinely curious how preventing all the bullshit sub bans would actually have changed this.
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wouldn't a "we can remove anything we see fit for any reason or even no reason at all" like every site already has in their terms of service basically get around that then? it'd make it functionally useless.
see above.
yes you can, that's how the federal law is. that's kinda the point of section 230, and it's really the only way it could reasonably work.
don't know where "sub gets banned = astroturfing" but if you couldn't remove shit, anyone would be able to manipulate their viewpoint or whatever. it'd make astroturfing much more commonplace since no one could moderate it
so it's either a complete nothingburger or completely idiotic. either way, it's dumb
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Definitely, which is why they included a bit about ToS having to actually make clear what is and isn't allowed.
At this point I'm not sure if you're deliberately missing the point here, but I've got better things to do today.
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anything the admins want and nothing the admins don't want
seems pretty clear to me
no i get your point just fine, your point is just pretty stupid
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I'm 99% sure
@justcool393 is trolling
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Yeah, I'm not at all defending this particular law. Like everything from Texas, I'm sure it's r-slurred. I'm just saying that in principle the government is supposed to protect us from a few oligarchs running Google, Facebook, and Amazon from taking over complete control of public infrastructure. And there's nothing wrong with American citizens fighting for their civil rights.
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Honestly, the majority of people seem complicit in this demand for censorship. Its why so many people congregate around social media companies who curate their content for their particular user. It's not "upper classes." It's demand-driven by normal people.
It's what happens when more and more of the average person get access to the internet. It's partly why the US has a first amendment, not just to prevent government from suppressing free speech but also to prevent the majority of voters from electing officials who would terrorize the rest of the populace. Democracy is dangerously r-slurred because everyone gets to vote.
Perhaps freedom of speech should be enshrined as a protected class, but then again if you can't fire the waiter who screams, "I hate BIPOCs!," then the restaurant will surely close. There doesn't seem to be any good way of dealing with this.
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The law is blatantly unconstitutional. The government can’t just ban something just because you don’t like it. Corporations have a 1st and 13th amendment right to express themselves by deciding what content they want on their platform.
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