Florida governor signs ban on 'deplatforming' by tech companies
nbcnews.com
nbcnews.com
- This is blatantly unconstitutional and will be struck down[1][2]. Corporations have the right to free speech and cannot be compelled to broadcast anyone else's speech. This bill is cynical grandstanding.
- The law tellingly does not apply to any entity that "owns theme parks"[3] (i.e. Disney, a major employer in Florida). That fact demonstrates how hollow this effort is. (Disney owns news services and the Disney+ streaming platform.)
1. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/05/florida-deplatforming-...
2. https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/gov-desantiss-proposed-...
3. https://www.orlandosentinel.com/politics/os-ne-desantis-sign...
> "The American Broadcasting Company (ABC) is an American multinational commercial broadcast television network that is a flagship property of Walt Disney Television, a division of Disney General Entertainment Content of The Walt Disney Company."
It is a weird thing to specify and it also opens an obvious gap. Buying a small amusement park with a half-dozen carnival rides would be a negligible cost for a multi-billion dollar social media company. Possibly cheaper than paying for a detailed legal analysis even.
Or just buy a movie theater or a collection of weird selfy booths in malls.
I would enjoy seeing what they came up with as the cheapest way to buy into this loophole. They'll own a Redbox outside of Dee Dee's Diner in Ocala Fl.
Can't they?
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-time_rule
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine
One might quibble about whether social media is the same as a broadcaster but the parent's statement is certainly not true universally.
(As an amusing aside, the latter link contains "In 1969, the United States courts of appeals, in an opinion written by Warren Burger, directed the FCC to revoke Lamar Broadcasting's license for television station WLBT due to the station's segregationist politics and ongoing censorship of NBC network news coverage of the U.S. civil rights movement." Those who repeat the tired "corporations can't be compelled to host speech" slogan would've been speaking in support of WLBT's pro-racism right to not broadcast about the civil rights movement which shows you where their hearts really lie. These people may be on the left but they are not liberals.)
There is no finite public resource that Facebook has exclusive rights to use.
Either way, the point remains: it's not "blatantly unconstitutional" and corporations can jolly well be compelled to broadcast speech they'd prefer not to. And, in the WLBT case, it's even quite self evidently in the best interest of the public for that to be so, in spite of what progressives have been trying to tell us.
The FCC does not regulate broadcasters because they're monopolies. It regulates them because they are granted the right to use a finite public resource. You're comparing apples and oranges.
> If the social and online media companies were broken into many small competing companies such that new ones could spring up easily
I strongly support breaking up the big tech companies. It's almost impossible to compete with them on their ad business.
But as media companies? It's absolutely trivial to compete with them, and they don't seem to try to stop anyone. They just copy their business model.
Since Facebook was founded, the following social networks have become huge and competitive with them: Twitter, Instagram, iMessage, Snapchat, WhatsApp, Kik, Telegram, Signal, TikTok, Vine, Tinder, Bumble... and those are some famous ones.
The problem with Facebook being so dominant is how they did it (by buying competitors) and how they wield their power in the ad space.
> it's not "blatantly unconstitutional" and corporations can jolly well be compelled to broadcast speech they'd prefer not to
No, it's not. It doesn't become true because you keep saying it or because you think it should be. There is no precedent for something like this. You're making the more niche claim, so the burden of proof is on you.
Social media companies that are used en masse should have an independent body when it comes to its content moderation.
That's a reasonable opinion. In the US, it's unconstitutional for that "independent body" to be the government. On top of that, it violates Section 230, so there are two legal barriers.
I personally feel that corporations should not be able to spend millions on lobbying, but enforcing that is also unconstitutional.
Sometimes the consequences of freedom of speech are great, sometimes they're awful. I'm still thankful that we have them and (so far) the courts have upheld them, as they surely will in this case.
Haven’t read the law, but is there a loophole that these people are not banned per se, but they can’t post. A good model would be HN’s dead candidate status.
This law is forcing a private corporation to do something, when that private corporation has limited other options. Moreover, a private corporation can decide who it wants as its customers, just like some restaurants reserve the right to deny service to certain kind of customers.