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.”
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
"I should be allowed to shit in the street" is a viewpoint. Actually going and pooping in the street is not a viewpoint and stopping people from doing it does not violate viewpoint neutrality. Again, these are established legal concepts.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
yeah and no one wants to hear your shitty diatribes about how you want to shit in the street so getting banned for spamposting about that is completely fine
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Your bad personality prevents you from understanding the difference between expressing an opinion and posting it 10,000 times a day
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
Banning spam will never violate viewpoint neutrality.
On the other hand, if a janny opens a thread asking "should people be allowed to shit in the street?" and just bans everyone who replies "yes", then that would violate viewpoint neutrality and if the janny didn't want to receive those answers then the proper solution is to have not asked the question to begin with.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context