Florida governor signs bill to ban Big Tech 'deplatforming'
bbc.com
bbc.com
Amazing.
More likely an in-person VR space.
Vague bills that are sure to be challenged in court are pretty standard partisan fare. They're essentially win-win.
If you pass it, and it's upheld, you get to trumpet your victory.
If you pass it, and it gets struck down by the courts, you get to rally your base with how the courts are thwarting your agenda.
Bonus points if it's on an ephemeral enough topic that it would be impossible for it to "fail" post-implementation.
On a slightly-related note: I do feel that the rules for platform moderation should be different between platforms that are geared towards children vs adults.
I wonder if the future holds an internet that's heavily segregated between the two groups? Maybe everyone will auto-graduate from kidFacebook to adultFacebook when they turn 18?
I really don't think that would have been necessary.
While I lived there, it had strip clubs. A fair number of them. One of the reasons they shut down was a massive roadwork project on South Orange Blossom Trail where a lot of them were. Many, many businesses shuttered due to the road work median limiting left turns, and the widening reducing available parking to next to nothing.
Quite true. Yet, as you would expect, today's Orlando doesn't lack for restaurants, bars, gas stations, night clubs, etc. But one business category conspicuously failed to make a return.
And the wording is on page 17: "The term does not include any information service, system, Internet search engine, or access software provider operated by a company that owns and operates a theme park or entertainment complex"
Watch to see the kinds of arguments big tech is forced to make when they fight this law. Those arguments will be used against them later.
FB, et al., enjoy immunity (criminal and civil) from the illegal stuff their users post, and that is their weakness. There is nothing in the Constitution ensuring that they keep that immunity (or at least the First Amendment hasn't been interpreted to say that yet).
It's actually similar to how the PLCAA (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protection_of_Lawful_Commerc...) protects gun manufacturers from being sued into oblivion. Rights don't mean much when exercising them means you will get buried in frivilous suits.
It's not enjoying, its sensical.
Laws can change, and section 230 is not the only possible "sensical" one.
The First Amendment is a big rock to hide behind. But there are other avenues of attack that are clearly possible.
Those attacks will happen when people feel that the spirit of free speech is truly being threatened, where politicians can't effectively reach even people who want to hear from them.
Edited for clarity.
"The new law will ... impose fines of $250,000 per day on any social media company that de-platforms candidates running for statewide office. It would also impose a $25,000 a day fine on companies that de-platform candidates running for local offices. ... DeSantis said any Floridian can block a candidate they don’t want to see online and it’s not up to Big Tech companies to make those decisions for the public."
Seems odd to take such a moral stand on this issue, but only offer protection to political candidates/politicians.
(from https://nbc-2.com/news/state/2021/05/24/desantis-signs-bill-...)
If there was a healthier and broader marketplace of forums that people spoke on, I would agree that those private companies could do whatever they want.
...but since probably 99% of all political discourse is concentrated on a single digit number of social media platforms, then I think they there's a systemic risk of election influence we need to protect ourselves from.
> 99% of all political discourse is concentrated on a single digit number of social media platforms,
let's not blur discourse from the banned candidate/politician with discourse by the population at large.
Any candidate could be banned from Twitter, but that doesn't stop discussion about said candidate on any platform. The candidate can still respond on other platforms and subsequent discussion can still ensue.
I can only guess Florida's motivation on this is but I have a hard time believing that protection from election influence is the primary factor.
She has been trying to fight the bans on her own, for a while.
Do not know if the new law will help in her cases or not.
I am certain it will be challenged, however.
The legal battles that this will spawn , will be used to sharpen the legal language, evidence, etc.
Overall, the direction that Conservatives will take -- is arguing that Political speech must be protected the same way that religious speech is. So this is a federal level battle, overall.
Personally, it seems that giving examples of how hotel owners were refusing Black customers, in the past -- by arguing that they can build their own hotel, and equating this to the Left tech titans vs Conservatives -- will not work.
As race, ethnicity or biologicals gender is not chosen. But religion is.
With regards to theme park protections, I guess they are not speech platforms anyway, so carving out -- for one of the larger tax payers is understood.
This is a raging ideological war in the country that has been going one for more than a decade. Conservatives feel on the defense for some time, the time of questioning the legal weaponry that sides use -- has long passed.
Will be interesting to see how investment banks that have large presence there -- will react as well. They may threaten to leave (and covering up by the demands of their clients) to apply their pressures, as well.
Everybody who has not yet taken side, will have to pick one.
Saying whatever you want is not and should not be a protected class.
It doesn’t matter that the definition of inappropriate behavior or speech is subjective. Each party will determine for themselves what they think is reasonable. As long as they aren’t infringing on any other rights or breaking other laws in the process, this is totally fine.
And yet I had to very very carefully word that for the sake of my own conscience because I know full well that HN will crucify me regardless on the theory that merely mentioning this topic amounts to homophobia.
I'm not a legal expert, but I'm guessing that there would be need to be clear evidence of harassment from the customer (or something of that sort) in order for the shop owner to be able to refuse service.
Otherwise, any asshole could get around discrimination laws by simply claiming they don't think customer the actually wants the product. That would be a terrible situation.
> It doesn’t matter that the definition of inappropriate behavior or speech is subjective. Each party will determine for themselves what they think is reasonable. As long as they aren’t infringing on any other rights or breaking other laws in the process, this is totally fine.
I'm not so sure it is. You're allowed to refuse service to a black person, for instance—you just can't do it because they're black. But this law says you can't ban a politician at all, not merely because they're a politician. This law would be like saying you can't refuse service to a black person for any reason.
It sounds like he's arguing that the social networks are making editorial decisions, isn't that what they're desperately claiming not to do?
Says who?
I can't really see how one could argue that Facebook or Twitter should be able to avoid being classified as a newspaper if provide something that is very similar to a gossip magazine, where they can choose freely what to print and not. They can and do ban gossip and unfavourable information about politicians they favour, for example, and they could suppress bad press about people that pay them.
I don't think they should be able to do that, without any accountability. Do you? If so, why?
However, I do agree that there's a discussion to be had about twitter, youtube etc due to their dominant positions within the market. But I don't think that just forcing these companies to host anything that isn't illegal is the right way to go, and would likely result in making them even more shitty than they already are.
Disagreed.
Newspaper-like and unmoderated, unbiased “utility like” don't work as exhaustive categories.
If I run a BBS, an IRC channel, an internet forum, a subreddit, etc, I would like to be able to moderate without having to pre-approve all messages before publication. I also don't want to have to go to court because someone has posted something illegal which I did not remove in a timely manner, or get sued because I removed something that I thought crossed a line, but was eventually determined by some court not to.
I see nothing wrong whatsoever with online services open to the public enforcing house rules. It only becomes an issue when a single service grows so large that it starts to essentially subsume the public sphere. That might require some intervention, but please do so in a nuanced way that isn't based on some imaginary binary distinction between 'publishers' and 'platforms' that hasn't accurately described how online spaces work since the late 70s...
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...
Or take it from Mike Masnick:
> If you said "Once a company like that starts moderating content, it's no longer a platform, but a publisher"
> I regret to inform you that you are wrong. I know that you've likely heard this from someone else -- perhaps even someone respected -- but it's just not true. The law says no such thing. Again, I encourage you to read it. The law does distinguish between "interactive computer services" and "information content providers," but that is not, as some imply, a fancy legalistic ways of saying "platform" or "publisher." There is no "certification" or "decision" that a website needs to make to get 230 protections. It protects all websites and all users of websites when there is content posted on the sites by someone else.
> To be a bit more explicit: at no point in any court case regarding Section 230 is there a need to determine whether or not a particular website is a "platform" or a "publisher." What matters is solely the content in question. If that content is created by someone else, the website hosting it cannot be sued over it.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...
The discussion is not about whether or not social media companies have Section 230 protection but whether or not they should have it.
In an ideal world we repeal Section 230 and the US government provides, free of charge, a small digital space for each citizen to say whatever they want in the context of free speech. There's no reason we should allow these tech monopolies to exist and maintain their fiefdoms of extrajudicial decisions about what is or isn't considered protected speech. If we want to assert that digital communication is a protected right, there's no other way.
Where do they do that?
My understanding of U.S.A. First amendment is that government won't infringe on your right of free speech. It doesn't say you can come into my home, workplace, store, or website and yell what you want on my property.
There's nothing "Extrajudicial" about it and it's not "Protected speech". It's just a business owner saying "you can say whatever you want, but not necessarily in my home, on a platform I built and pay for".
I think we've gone weird somewhere if we think Facebook == Public Square on any level. It's just somebody's storefront (and insert cliches about who / what is the product :)
In some ways, I am hoping tech giants do MORE weird policies / bans / things, so hopefully general population sees it as a private proprietary closed property / platform that it is, not a friendly public gathering spot we somehow take it for. But I still don't think they are doing anything illegal/extrajudicial... it seems people feel they have strange rights or ownership on Facebook or Twitter, have some investment in property, treat it almost as a mix of paid-for condo and public space (depending on what they need to assert at the moment)... and none of that is the case. At best, you are walking in a Mall, and if you start yelling obscenities, pontificating, or even start advertising for different shops etc, the mall security guard will escort you out, as is legal and proper. It's not government infringing your constitutionally protect free speech, it's not extrajudicial, even if you don't like it and really really wanted to yell obscenities or market your business or promote your personal point of view in the mall.
- Aaron Swartz
Our government, on some level, is supposed to be accountable to general public and there exists, in principle, a mechanism to hold them accountable.
Whether that mechanism is flawless or not, whether it works as well as we want it to, should not distract from the fact that there isn't even REMOTELY such a mechanism for big corporations. When people clamor for flawed government being replaced by companies, I shudder exactly for that reason. You're trading system with public protection/accountability that's flawed, to one where public protection/accountability do not exist, by design.
My post should not be mis-interpreted as being against government or regulation.
But I don't think Facebook is infringing upon my constitutionally protected free speech. If we want to regulate Facebook (and I think we should), we need to have a more thought-through reason, method, desired goal and tracking of outcomes.
This is exactly my point. If we are going to classify online discussion on platforms like Facebook as being protected free speech, there is no way that we can allow those services to be in control of who gets to say what. The government has an obligation to provide an acceptable platform for citizens to have online discussions in that case which would actually serve as a digital "town square", protected by our first amendment rights. Anything else becomes a de facto infringement of those rights. And saying "well you can build your own website" is naive and missing the point. To put a barrier like that in front of the exercising of one's rights is tantamount to a digital Jim Crow.
But that is a massive "If" and I'm denying you the premise, until you convince me otherwise. I think you're starting from a certain point assuming everybody is there already.
Note, I agree with many of your detailed points later, such as "build your own website" missing the network effects of established platforms; but most fundamentally I think what you're taking for granted is the actual big important discussion to be had, e.g. "The government has an obligation to provide an acceptable platform for citizens to have online discussions" - I don't think Government has that obligation today, and if you / we think it should, then that's the discussion and lobbying to be had.
(Never mind how well I think a government-created platform with government-designed technical stack and UI, and with guaranteed free speech and no moderation whatsoever, will actually work in practice... to quote Frank Borman, what we have here is a failure of imagination :P )
In their decisions about which comments to delete and which not; which users to ban and which not.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...
edit: Wow, 3+ of us jumped in with same link, Mr. Masnick has a following here :D
That's a noble goal, but this is a clear culture war law that will crumble under any real scrutiny. Hitching your wagon to a law that's all about sticking your finger in someone's eye isn't going to help your cause. So instead, what could a good regulation look like?
Maybe something that says these providers are forced to moderate the user-facing pieces of their platform separately from the core infrastructure pieces of their platform: so you can be banned from posting to Facebook for whatever reason Facebook wants, but your existing "Login with Facebook" connections won't break.
Maybe toss in some data retention requirements as well – you can't post new photos, for example, and you have up to a year to pull the photos you've posted before Facebook is allowed to purge them.
It’s hard to say what the right balance would be. But just imagine if instead of the US, we were in Belarus. Or any other country with autocratic tendencies. Would we want the media to be one sided even if it’s controlled by oligarchs who would have clear selfish agendas?
What do we want when the pendulum swings the other way? The same top down private decision on permissibility?
I think there is a reason the likes of Roger Daltrey, John Cleese and others are weary of tech censorship. If these tools had been available in the 70s and 80s the world would be a different place.
Also giants like Google should not break all your stuff if they consider you did something wrong on youtube.
Your perspective changes when you are hit by this stuff. My son managed to get my PlayStation account suspended for 2 months(while I have a 1 year subscription PS+ working) without no right to appeal and no clear/exact reason of what happened.
"Activist Judges!" as a rallying cry.
It would be nice to see rational equitable solutions as to who can speak and where though. It wouldn't be such a big deal if were back in the age of 100,000 tiny blogs.
But in this age of a handful of big platforms determining which content and viewpoints are acceptable, there might be some moral hazard and negative potential for society. This is true no matter what your particular politics or religion might be and even if they are "on your side" today.
They can do that, but not while claiming to be a platform.
Platform or publisher.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...
Depending on how people see Big Tech, the law may or may not be changed. And the kinds of arguments FB, et al., make to defeat this law will affect how people see Big Tech.
Did I mention Section 230 Of The Communications Decency Act?
Well no I didn't.
The concept is broader than any law. And you should not be getting legal advice from Mike at techdirt anyway.
If corporations had an unlimited right to free speech, the Civil Rights Act wouldn't be constitutional. Clearly though, it is, so the courts have found that some limits on private businesses ability to discriminate is legal.
They rallied hard against net neutrality because "the government can't tell private companies [ISPs] what to do"
Now they want the government to moderate speech on private platforms. That's hypocrisy that even a 2nd grader could point out.
It's most certainly a "they" thing.
We've talked the abstraction to death; there is nothing new to contribute. This is an opportunity to apply it to an actual real-world instance.
That's inherently political because it was created politically. There is no way to ignore that it was crafted by one political party to the detriment of another. We can avoid naming them if you think that would help from getting people's hackles up, but it's also part of a pattern of behavior that goes far past this one instance.
Discussing this as an abstraction is a luxury for those who don't have to live with the consequences. Blaming those who object for promoting "anger and hatred", while giving a pass to those who pass the law designed to disenfranchise them, is inherently partisan.
Even if you can I don't see the value honestly.
When social media companies assume legal liability for content on their platforms we can talk about the protections of the First Amendment and the limits that grew under law over the past 230 years; they were casually discarded over the past 20.
The irony here is that Rand pretty explicitly supports the right to deplatform people in The Virtue of Selfishness. Up until recently it was a common attitude in conservative political circles that forcing someone to publish content they disagreed with was itself the violation of a right. See below:
"The right of free speech means that a man has the right to express his ideas without danger of suppression, interference or punitive action by the government. It does not mean that others must provide him with a lecture hall, a radio station or a printing press through which to express his ideas. Any undertaking that involves more than one man, requires the voluntary consent of every participant. Every one of them has the right to make his own decision, but none has the right to force his decision on the others."
I struggle to find a single source that the American right likes to cite which would go in the opposite direction, given that more right-leaning conceptualizations of rights tends to be a freedom from as opposed to a freedom to right. Given this framework, social media companies have a freedom from providing a platform for ideas they find objectionable.
If "deplatforming" is taken to mean "depriving people of an easy means to find and communicate to an audience" it can be an effective technique depending on context, alternative communication channels, etc.
If "deplatforming" is taken to mean "a novel social ill based on depriving people of their right to communicate" then yeah it's a myth.
Free speech is like encryption at this point. Sure, it's not technically illegal, but if you actually try to do something for the public to use then the system will find some way to make it impossible and shut you down.
I admit that I also enjoy riling up first amendment fundamentalists but it isn't my main goal and these are my sincerely held beliefs so I don't think really qualifies as trolling.
Putting the potential straw man aside, wouldn't you say that your definition of a 'myth', whatever it might be, is ambiguous to the point where you can accuse anyone of spreading myths and disinformation, even if they're factually correct? For example, let's get everyone offended and say that someone could say that George Floyd getting killed by police is a myth, because he was killed for resisting and being a criminal, and it wasn't a bad thing at all. People cast a moral judgement on this event, so in a way it is a myth, is it not? Or is it when it's something that contradicts your own moral judgement?
If deplatforming worked, the LGBTQ rights movement would have failed because they were kept in the closet. Deplatforming does not work, particularly in an era where "The 'Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."
I also assert that "The 'Net" of today is a much different one than that inspired John Gilmore's quote, as non-censoring alternatives to Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube have failed to gain much traction.
A prominent politician does not lack means for getting their message out. If anything, being banned from a social media site provides free airtime on conventional media as they talk about it. It's unclear whether the net effect is positive, negative, or otherwise.
But it is clear that riling up people with talk about "deplatforming" is pretty effective. And, at least for the past couple of decades, riling up their constituency has been a fairly effective political tactic.
https://wannabewonk.com/gab-and-free-speech-on-the-internet/
And besides that, If I have 20 options like I do with social networks and it's as easy to change as to create a new account, I'll simply change providers or I can easily create another account in 3 seconds. This kind of argument comparing apples and oranges is terrible.
20 years ago, we could have seen the same argument that internet is not like water or power.
Conservative congressman Tom Cotton is showing a headline (I think from CNN) that bashes him for repeating the 'debunked' idea that corona may have come from the Wahun lab. Of course that theory is very much alive and viable today.
Republican Rand Paul is upset that some songwriter made a Twitter post offering to buy drinks for someone who 'finishes the job his neighbor started', a reference to the neighbor who physically attacked Paul a few years back. Paul correctly points out that Twitter is supposed to have a policy against threats and violence.
So yes, there seems to be something there.