Florida to Supreme Court: Let us regulate social networks as common carriers
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
In my world, corporations being subject to the government is the Hallmark of progressivism.
But no one's actually paying attention to the actual actions, just their own view of the motivation
https://deadline.com/2022/05/disney-ron-desantis-dont-say-ga...
If you've ever interacted with local municipal governments in the US, you would know that most municipal government employees would love to take responsibility for the zoning, police, fire, and tax collection at Disney. They would squeeze it for all they can - and they probably will. The concerned citizens (and Disney, who is likely funding their legal case) do not want this squeezing to take place.
Make no mistake, that town is only operating at a loss because Disney's accountants are writing its books. They are shifting income to the corporation and losses to the city, so they can take advantage of favorable financing terms available on muni bonds for those losses. If someone adversarial to Disney were to take over the town, the revenue/cost situation would be very different since the two would no longer be working together to shift profits and losses around. We are about to see how different it will be.
There is a huge movement in the metro Atlanta area to either break off from the larger city or to incorporate county areas so they can have more local control. There is no movement to take over larger responsibilities by the taxpayers.
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/20...
This is a biased source (a little too right-leaning for my taste), but it has a few interesting quotes from public officials:
https://deadline.com/2022/05/disney-ron-desantis-dont-say-ga...
It helps because Disney in Orlando produces something like $20 billion per year, and owns something like $10-100 billion of property and equipment. All of that is now taxable. It's easy to see how this helps a city: A 1% sales tax would net $200 million, and a property tax would also be in the 8 figures.
Police, fire, and other essential services would cost nowhere near this much. Even servicing the debt on $1 billion of bonds would be nowhere near this much.
In terms of local politicians, this helps them because someone with $20 billion in revenue will be happy to pay you a $500k bribe (sorry, donation to your re-election fund) to give them favorable rules.
I don't know much about the Atlanta metro area, but there have been several cases in the past that I have heard of where rich areas try to break away from larger cities. The cities generally don't want this to happen because these districts are profit centers (this is a reverse of the Disney situation, where a potential profit center would be incorporated into a city). Desires for "local control" are usually about money.
This isn’t something I’m just hearing about from the national news. I bought a second home/investment property in Orange County that will become my legal residence once my wife and I start doing the digital nomad thing later this year.
People locally do not want this. No Republican or Democratic governor has ever complained about Disney’s special tax district until DeSantis brought it up specifically because Disney spoke up. DeSantis is not interested in “protecting free speech”.
Does this sound like anything but retribution:
“You’re a corporation based in Burbank, California, and you’re going to martial your economic might to attack the parents of my state? We view that as a provocation, and we’re going to fight back against that,” DeSantis said during an event at a Hialeah Gardens charter school.
The issue is their motive. Motive is critical.
It does not ban nor prevent the use of the word "gay."
> 3. Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur [for many students]
So I guess technically you can say the word, as long as you don’t explain what it means?
There is no age at which it is inappropriate to listen about these extremely basic facts of the world.
At least in my country, what the GP is saying is almost the precise opposite of how the pupil-teacher relationship is conceptualized. Indeed, people often bemoan teachers who just think they're providing a service, instead of taking their responsibility as mentors seriously.
Just to be clear - an informed electorate is sort of key for American Democracy so openly arguing against any form of education is a pretty clear argument against some really basic tenants of America.
In the broader context this topic would be dull as dishwater and boring as toilet training if a certain type didn't make it interesting if only as a measure of their obsession with sex and other people's mere existence transgressing on useless norms that they somehow assume are vital to our society.
Outside of your fantasies teachers aren't violating your kids boundaries by having a same sex partner or a last name nor yet by telling them some households have two mommies or two daddies. What you are actually concerned about is constant exposure to reality may lead your kid to believe that its normal and acceptable for a man to love another man or a woman another woman which is ok because a substantial minority are gay and it is indeed ok for them to love whom they love.
Instead you'd rather in your words "destroy public schooling" one of the most obvious wins of the modern era to avoid... your kid learning about... adam and steve.
The number of people home schooling went up during the pandemic but it is a single digit percentage not spreading like "wildfire". I expect home schooling to be sufficient for only a minority while a larger portion might well benefit from a partially or wholly online experience.
My kind is American or more broadly Westerner I suppose and I was not aware of any effort to conquer me.
Would it have been inappropriate if she said her and her husband was having a baby? In todays society would it have been in appropriate if she said her and her wife? How do you think these same conservatives would have felt if little Johnny came home and mentioned to their parents that their teacher spoke about her wife?
and by their definition that somehow topics around queer people & gender can be inappropriate; this is not sex education and no, nurses are not handing out hormones to pre-teens.
Many of these laws specifically enable people to sue teachers, governments, officials, women who had an abortion, etc.
That enables conservative & religious fanatics to have the last say and impose their moral worldviews onto the rest of us.
The fact that gay people exist is not 'appropriate' in many of their minds. Which is gross and sad. And therefore these laws give the vocal minority the power to force the rest of us back into the closet.
Because that’s what the law was about.
Which is, of course, because there are two sexualities - straight, and political.
> "Clara, my wife, and I went to see bears at Yosemite. It was so exciting! Can you point to Yosemite on a map?"
Everyday situation at any school I ever went to. Schools are not learning factories, they are social places, especially in K-3.
I am not arguing for teaching toddlers about homosexual BDSM culture here. I just think that particular law is overreaching its goals, possibly to stroke the egos of religious zealots.
This isn't remotely true. Your rural local government -
a) generally has to serve the interests of its constituents, ie the fuckup mayor or do nothing member of the county commissioners board will eventually be called out, shamed in public, and lose reelection.
b) unlike Disney, does not move in lock step chasing quarterly profit - which is a very good thing, as it allows for long term cooperative efforts, like bringing a sanitation system to a small town of 800 people.
c) Are by-and-large the most useful people when it comes to pushing back against encroachment by companies who would prefer a company town. Your county commissioner, county seat mayor, etc, almost always have interests that run counter to the largest factory in the area, which is a blessing. That's not to say corruption doesn't happen, but most people are honest, and try to help the folks they represent as best they can.
Disney is far closer to the factories that try to bully, cajole, and coerce their way to a better bottom line, than it is the elected body of a rural area.
You mean the same local government where I grew up that within my still living parents lifetime enforced Jim Crow laws?
Or do you mean the local government where I live now that specifically said that “religious institutions” can be put up in residential areas but are twisting in all sorts of contortions trying to keep a Hindu temple out?
Or could it be the same state governments that are banning abortion left and right even though it goes against the wishes of their constituents?
Maybe it’s the same local government that condones police stopping minorities far more than non minorities because they “look suspicious”?
On the other hand the residence of Orange County Florida are definitely not in favor of Desantis forcing them (soon us) to take over control of Disney.
I know this not just because of what I heard on the news. Orange County will soon be our legal residence and where we spend the winter (the rest of the time traveling). I thought if nothing else, you could count on conservatives to be good for business and lower taxes. The stunt that the Florida governor did is good for nothing but his own ego.
Then Florida tells Disney to watch its step and the left come out in defense of a massive corporation - “why won’t you leave poor Disney Corp alone!!”
Really amazing to see.
Prop 209 then Prop 16.
At first you were racist by being racist. Then you were racist for not wanting to repeal anti-racist laws.
Just like how not having blind auditions for orchestras was racist (not hiring enough minorities). And now having blind auditions is racist (not hiring enough minorities).
If you explain "literacy test" voting laws prior to the US Voting Rights Act without that sort of context people imagine well, you send one smart black teacher, they do a few lessons, next year every black person in the town can vote, while presumably many poor white folks can't right?
But that's not how it works, in practice the "test" is whether you're white or not. If you're white you "pass" and if you're black you "don't pass", and if you complain about this loudly enough well, maybe you have an unlucky "accident".
Lynchings are never this circumspect.
Accounts of lynchings also emphasize the treatment of black bodies as evidence of disdain. But even lynchings of white victims often involved mutilation and the taking of "souvenirs", as in the aforementioned lynching. Again, no doubt this was disproportionate, but even the most obvious sorts of discrimination aren't as "black & white" as popular narratives would have you believe. (NB: I'm not challenging the idea or existence of disdain regarding black bodies.)
I think these finer distinctions matter because they're fundamental to understanding the concept of systemic racism--arguably, there really is no other kind but systemic racism. To sell the idea of systemic racism, we tend to shape historical narratives to better fit how people conceive of racism. But taking that license can be counter-productive as it then makes it easier to refute or justify claims of racism, or the very notion of racism, particularly for those so inclined.
Despite the wildly disproportionate population sizes, more than three times the number of Black people were lynched compared to white people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_racial_and_ethnic_d...
Now do per-capita murder rates today, I think you'll find the same disparity.
The fact is, lynching of whites and blacks (usually for murder) were inline with "likelihood to commit that crime" based on having virtually identical per-capita murder rates today. Lynchings occurred in the past primarily because the law didn't function effectively.
No one wants vigilante justice (then or now), but we shouldn't be too surprised that communities police themselves when the government can't (or won't).
Jesus Christ I thought this thread was bad but then we get to this post.
It's also true in more significant ways, in that lynchings happened because people felt that crimes (or "crimes") were not being appropriately dealt with.
Except the context is the high number of white lynching's that also occurred.
[*] As mentioned elsewhere in thread, it's not so simple to say who was or wasn't 'white' at various periods in America's history, and we shouldn't assume that lynchings of non-Black Americans were necessarily not motivated by racism or other neighboring prejudices.
Actually yes, in many cases. 'White' in these stats often includes Jews, Italians and other groups who also suffered from discrimination based on their ethnicity. The category 'white' has not remained constant over the past 200 years. You can certainly find scholarly treatments of this point if you look on Google scholar.
Have you done so to sources your own statements?
Posting a link rather than quoting the relevant parts make me think that's all you did, once I called you on it. Should you be held to the same high standard?:
> take on the best existing scholarship on the subject and give references to support their arguments
You essentially put the burden on me to figure out how this document supports your argument - that the majority of white lynching (in some unspecified time period) where racially motivated.
I've also found quite a few that argue white lynching were motivated by support for progressive racial causes, but yet to find concrete statistics/evidence supporting that conclusion either.
Given the way that lynchings seemed to function in some parts of the U.S based on documentary photographs and such that probably some people would like to make illegal, it could just as well be argued that lynchings happened because the country did not have effective mass entertainment.
That is explicitly not what the GGP argued. They were very clear, and it's incredibly disingenuous to suggest otherwise. You can make your own argument but don't misrepresent others'.
> It's also true in more significant ways, in that lynchings happened because people felt that crimes (or "crimes") were not being appropriately dealt with.
"I want to beat someone, hang them from a tree, and then have a picnic around their mutilated body" is not something that needs to be both-sides-ed as someone's personal beliefs on justice.
I don't know if this is the typical HN thing of "I know a few details, I can figure out the rest from first principles" but there's an incredibly large amount of historical evidence of people who very plainly stated their motivations that you need to reckon with before you can make claims like these. Like, it's not reasonable to claim the KKK was primarily an activist group primarily motivated by the need for criminal reform.
Meaning the most crazy, shizophrenic person told tale in a comunity becomes the "law" base. Lynchings are a horror.
Do you really believe that black and white lynchings were certainly recorded accurately? To say nothing of the proportions as someone said below.
You're providing nothing useful here. Typical softening of racism as many, for whatever reason, like to do. Cut it out.
> is often credited to Francis M. Wilhoit, who died in 2010, it was actually written in 2018 by a different Frank Wilhoit, a composer.[10]
:)
And in this article: https://slate.com/business/2022/06/wilhoits-law-conservative...
> But in fact it’s the work of another Frank Wilhoit, this one not a professional scholar of American politics but a 63-year-old classical music composer in Ohio, who wrote the adage as part of a longer point in the comments section of the political science blog Crooked Timber [0].
[0]: https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progre...
"Rules for thee, but not for me."
I've seen tons of recent support for censorship from ideas and speech the (left? I wouldn't consider it actually left) doesn't like. Then you have conservatives moving against these books that promote woke religion and suddenly these same people are very pro free speech.
The left has always been pro-censorship: Stalin and Mao, for instance, set up societies with lots of censorship.
The right is also pro-censorship: think Hitler, or any religious conservatives for that matter.
If you're talking about what modern Americans consider "left" and "right", though, I'd agree, but what Americans consider "left" generally isn't very far left, and it depends on who you ask: talk to an internationally-minded American and they'll say the Democratic party is centrist at best, or center-right. Talk to a Trump voter and they'll say that party is "far-left radical communists".
The right is significantly more dangerous now, but I don't see that as a historically universal truth.
Both exist on either end of the ideological spectrum. Right-wing authoritarianism is a thing, and so is left-wing libertarianism.
One could argue that calls for gender-affirming surgeries or treatments are equally, if not, worse. These topics are especially prevalent in the LGBTQ community, as I have found from my experience. Nevertheless, we seem to encourage this kind of behavior whereas we. It is important to be aware of which ideas you are rejecting, especially when the community you seem to be defending is also committing acts of the same caliber.
I’m sure that racist whites thought that MLK was agitating for “equally bad, if not worse” things than Governor Faubus but they were just wrong.
Also none of what you said addresses the the proposed legislation.
Ultimately, we value free speech because it leads to a more fair and just society. It's not a rule that is followed by blind faith. Personally, I think allowing unlimited corporate spending on political speech amplifies the voices of a select few so that others are not heard. Essentially censorship of the masses. I fail to see how that leads to a fair and just society.
Let’s say I want to personally spent $1 million supporting a candidate I like. But I’m worried their rival will sue me for libel. So I’d like to form a LLC so that I won’t be personally liable in that case. This seems reasonable to allow.
Corporations cannot donate to (federal) political campaigns, period. See https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/candidate...
Now, both individuals and corporations can donate to Super PACs an unlimited amount, yes. But corporations have no different limits than individuals. The whole point of so-called Super PACs is they're theoretically "Independent-expenditure-only political committees" and can't coordinate with candidates. Basically the "We have strong views about abortion" Super PAC can collect as much money as they want from anyone they want* and run as many ads as they want telling people which candidates share their view on abortion and which are monsters.
You may view this as vile and bad, and that's fair, but why should a group of people spending their money together (i.e. a corporation or union or whatever) have fewer rights than an individual spending their money alone?
*Foreign nationals maybe not included in this? Not sure.
What's an exorbitant amount? Imagine some people, passionate about their particular political issue, pooling their money together to put up billboards, run radio ads, get a few TV spots, have a spread in the newspaper, buy some instagram ads, whatever. That's speech! Of course it is! Having the government restrict is a terrible precedent. The ability to try and influence other people, to convince them that your position or your candidate is the right one, is also a principle of democracy.
> The issue at hand is whether or not you can spend unlimited amounts of money on that speech via a corporation. Individuals cannot spend unlimited money donating to political campaigns, for instance.
I specifically said individual donations to political campaigns were limited. I think you’re arguing a very pedantic point that I didn’t even make rather than talking about whether or not our society would be better off limiting all forms of political spending.
When you ban or limit groups of people, like corporations or unions or co-ops, from spending on elections, you give more power to those rich individuals, not less.
For example, Disney's CEO is about five million dollars. Disney the corporation has about 13 billion dollars cash-on-hand.
This is not true. Net neutrality is about service providers not getting to choose which services you connect with. If your ISP decided you can use Hulu but have to pay $10/mo extra for Netflix, that's a net neutrality issue. It's not about the volume of bytes. It's about who the bytes are coming from and going to, which is a content issue.
My bro is the head tech guy for a cable company. He opposes "net neutrality". For B2B reasons. For him, it's about interconnect fees and fairness. Something like they build the pipes and someone, let's say TikTok, hogs all the bandwidth without paying their fair share.
I have no idea if my bro's narrative makes any sense. My bro also believes The Flintstones is a documentary (creationist). So I usually just smile and nod along when he starts to rant about something.
Whereas my understanding is closer to what you've stated; net neutrality is a B2C policy issue.
Whatever the case, my bro and myself, with our very different understandings and priorities, have no overlap in our positions.
I’m biased in that I work at a company that uses a lot of bandwidth. My opinions are my own.
Companies like TikTok pay their fair share. They pay their provider to take their bytes. Their provider pays one of the “big pipe” companies and passes the bytes along. Then they pass it along and charge your bro’s company. Then your bro’s company passes it along and chargers the consumer. This is oversimplified, but it’s the general flow.
What your bro wants to do is skip the line. It’s not enough to charge consumers, he wants to charge the companies, or the consumers more depending on the company.
It’s like UPS opening up your package, seeing there are Nikes in there and wanting to charge either you or Nike extra. You’re already paying for delivery.
That is the disconnect. In their mind you are 'sharing' with all the other people that bought the same thing, whereas you believe you were the only one that bought what they said they would sell you, like any other purchase works.
I imagine lobbyists buffaloing your average elected representative. It's a compelling story. Even if it's untrue.
The Florida law says a social media platform "may not willfully deplatform a candidate for office" and imposes fines of up to $250,000 per day on social media companies that ban candidates for elected office. The law also says social platforms "may not apply or use post-prioritization or shadow banning algorithms for content and material posted by or about... a candidate," and may not "censor, deplatform, or shadow ban a journalistic enterprise based on the content of its publication or broadcast."
No, which is why no one is stopping you from typing in a URL in your browser and visiting a website.
But a computer owner should be able to decide what goes on on their computer (even google or Facebook). The network that connects everyone is what should be regulated and forced to be “free” or “unrestricted”.
Because they're "stopping me" already, as of late.
How do you feel about the Civil Rights Act?
The discussion would then be about if we legally protect members of tribe with certain gender, skin color, cultural affiliation, etc, why would we not protect a tribe of certain political views, that is an interesting question that I am not sure how to delineate.
Who do they define as a candidate? If I'm running for student council would it apply to me? What requirements are there?
Similarly, who is a "journalist"? Anyone can declare they are one.
Finally, what constitutes post-prioritization? If I search for something, then ideally posts relevant to what I searched for would be prioritized in results, does this count as "shadow banning"? In any list there can only be one element that is first. Are the others "shadow banned"?
Now let's look at this and see if the circumstances justify the government seizing the right of the social media hosting company to determine what content they want to serve on their website.
- Does the company have a natural Monopoly due to rights given to them by the public (such as the right of way for cable/equipment installation enjoyed by other common carriers)? No. These companies enjoy no such special privileges.
- Is there a substantial cost for a competitor to enter the market? No. Software and server infrastructure are cheap compared to costs incurred to existing common carriers.
Then I do not see a justification for the government to rescind the rights of the social network operators in this way.
Any one who publishes their work, cites their sources, and signs their (real) name is a journalist.
I don't have the heart to respond to the rest of your objections.
OK, but this can then be misused for other causes — for example, in the UK there is a deposit that general election candidates have to pay, which IIRC was introduced because too many people kept filing to be candidates because that was a way to get out of a legal obligation (draft, I think).
I expect the same here. Is anyone illegible to file for candidacy? Is this exactly the same dividing line you want between the tweeters and the tweet-nots?
(I am amused by the idea of Trump social media site being forced to host the literal Communist Party USA candidates, but that's a different matter).
> Any one who publishes their work, cites their sources, and signs their (real) name is a journalist.
This definition is so broad as to include me. Thanks, I guess, but I don't think I warrant that status.
We definitely have too many candidates. In practice, other filters, rightly or wrongly, cull the herd to only "serious candidates". Basically, ability to raise money and get endorsements. If you squint, they both kinda look like forms of social proof.
The political parties used to be the filter, but now they're impotent. For better or worse.
--
> I don't think I warrant that status.
Maybe not. But name some "journalists" in corporate media who have your credibility and authenticity.
By my definition, you are far more of a journalist than most talking heads and pundits can even claim to be. (Whereas anonymous coward me is not.)
A "professional journalist" also has the resources to do fact checking and corrections (errata).
Most of the news and analysis I consume today comes from podcasts, bloggers, and books.
That's not great.
Using Manufacturing Consent's thesis of media filters, because I don't have another model, it comes down to who is "in charge". Right now, our society's choices for mass news are corporate propaganda and corporate recommenders (algorithmic hate machines). Some people can afford to buy high quality bespoke news. Some are quirky or crazy enough (news junkies) to keep their own ledger (bozo list).
There are some exceptions. HN, metafilter, user groups (aka special interest groups) like some subreddits and ravelry.org, can also provide higher signal to noise over a longer time frame.
--
Thanks for humoring me and reading this far. I write to understand and it helps me to go thru the effort.
A political candidate is one who is a member of a political party and is running for a public office or has already been elected to such offices in the past. (Yes, I am discounting independent candidates as they are a minor aberration that, in my opinion, shouldn't be allowed in mature democracies). Whether the democratic system is presidential or parliamentary, political parties are one of the common institutions and base political units that are part of a democratic political system.
> If I'm running for student council would it apply to me?
No, since it is not a public office. This law is targeted to protect the free speech rights and political views of active politicians and elected representatives. For example, Twitter, under pressure from the current right-wing government of India deliberately tried to sabotage the social media outreach of an elected Member of Parliament and an opposition leader:
“I want to bring your attention to what I believe is Twitter’s unwitting complicity in curbing free and fair speech in India,” Mr. Gandhi wrote in the letter to the Twitter chief executive, Parag Agrawal. “I have been reliably, albeit discreetly, informed by people at Twitter India that they are under immense pressure by the government to silence my voice.”
The proposed laws can actually protect tech platforms from this kind of government pressure too, which should be welcomed by us.
> Similarly, who is a "journalist"? Anyone can declare they are one.
Just like shouting "I declare bankruptcy" doesn't activate bankruptcy laws in your favour, "declaring" yourself a journalist doesn't make you a journalist in most countries.
If social media platforms want that right, like news media platforms, they have to hire real editors and agree to be liable for the information they publish and disseminate. Why should social media platforms get an exception to this but news media platform on print, TV or radio be bound by extra restrictions (liability)?
> Is there a substantial cost for a competitor to enter the market? No. Software and server infrastructure are cheap compared to costs incurred to existing common carriers.
Yes, there is the "network effect" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect ) which is a huge barrier for any new competitor to overcome. One way to remove this barrier and provide a more level playing field would be to create and enforce a standard that would foster connection and communication between all such social network platforms. Do you think the tech companies will allow this?
Both the right and left have become supremely prescriptive in their own ways.
I want stronger local government. I have no way of trusting any of these assholes at the federal and state level. Why do they get to set standards for schools, infrastructure funding, or social policy? We have grid lock in part because there are different opinions on what's best.
So be it. We'll all do what we want, and time will prove what works best. Then we can use the federal/state levels for their intended purpose: handling externalities and international affairs.
It's a nation, and students are nationals. There needs to be some national standards.
At least with the Feds they are under a constant microscope. The most heinous corrupt shit in America almost always happens at the local level because they can get away with it
[1] https://washingtonmonthly.com/2020/08/30/libertarians-took-c...
Please, no. I get the rationale. It's the local knowledge problem, combined with state/federal being more likely to be populists.
But local government irrecoverably sucks for systemic reasons that I've just started to notice.
With local governance there is no way to resolve dilemma like incentives that cause negative sum decision making, i.e. locally good but globally bad policies. For example, restrictive planning laws. Good locally, terrible globally. So terrible that it is the kind of thing that is a threat to the stability of society.
Another reason is that the competence of local governance is significantly lower than state/federal governance, who have budgets to hire actual intelligent experts. I don't know if you're interacted with local government officials. If you have, you will notice what I'm talking about.
A third reason is that corruption is worse in local governments. It flies under the radar because they're not under the microscope of journalists. There's no good mechanism to decorrupt them.
Good federal governance is the way forward.
Now you can argue that it's not actually half, and so long as it's less than that, a functioning democracy would allow you to steamroll over them. However, once enough people in a democracy consider it illegitimate, it stops functioning really fast.
Also, goodness isn't a binary switch, and goodness needs to be compared with the alternative.
I'd add that reducing local government doesn't mean that federal government has to be large and bloated. I still want a lean federal government.
I can also never pin down exactly what advocates of larger local government actually want. What powers and capabilities, specifically, should be removed from federal and done by local?
It's all the other bad side, not the same freaking loonies that keep everything status quo and pat each others backs.
People on the left need to remember that if they give the government more power to regulate speech online, whether it is to fight disinformation or hate speech or whatever else, the right wing will have the same power the next time they win office. It's so short sighted.
Unless you want our society to vacillate between left-wing censorship and right-wing censorship every time power changes hands, you should oppose giving any more censorship powers to governments.
No one on the left wants the government to do this. What happens is that "many on the left" tend to yell loudly about stuff to the extent that people in power feel they need to moderate their own speech and actions. Virtually no one on the left wants "the government" to do this.
The left, in fact, is extremely dependent on its ability to exercise free speech rights to make this happen. Everyone you want to cite who got "cancelled"? They got cancelled because someone else exercised their first amendment right to a hissy fit. Literally no one is trying to censor you. They're just shouting louder (and, to some extent, better and more convincingly).
But indeed, the count-counter-messaging was too strong and it was shut down, because at the end of the day what amounts a PR organization isn't going to be very useful vs. the ammunition it can provide to people wanting to scream about censorship.
Hilariously that statement is a perfect example of the kind of disinformation and memery techniques that that (aborted) department was trying to refute.
Relatedly, the vague "don't say gay" law has a significant impact on LGBTQ teachers right to free expression -- straight teachers are totally free to talk about their spouses, for example, but gay teachers are not. Quite reminiscent of the "don't ask don't tell" policy.
[1] https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2022/a-viral-list-of-b...
[2] https://floridapolitics.com/archives/557111-florida-second-o...
The idea that a teacher wants to talk to their students about their personal lives is utterly foreign to me.
Maybe it's just a sign of times changing?
Edit: this thought came to me in the context of a quote I saw from a teacher upset he couldn't talk about going surfing with his husband.
There was a wide enough income gap in our school that teachers talking about vacations was frowned upon, since you never really knew which kids didn't actually ever get to go on vacations, etc.
With cases like that, personal details end up discussed inadvertently because it's impossible to avoid. So-and-so's wife might be a teacher in the same district, or they might show up at school during late work hours and so forth. Same if they're running a club or some extracurricular activity.
I don't think that's especially weird at all.
So they want to shut down any and all speech in that regard but force companies to publish speech that may not fall within their terms of service.
This is small government?
My school also had two married teachers who shared a surname. We all knew they were married.
There were also a few teachers (band, orchestra, sports coaches) whose spouses would volunteer at events and travel with them.
Also quite a few teachers wore religious symbols -- cross on a necklace kind of thing. And quite a few of my teachers had pictures of their families on their desks. They didn't make a big deal about it, but evidence was in plain sight.
Now, I was in the high school in the 90s. I'm not sure when you think this changed.
That strikes me as odd. I recall this happening many times. Heck, there were even several pairs of teachers who met at school and got married. One teacher proposed to another teacher during a town parade where many students and teachers were present. It's not like teachers dwelled on personal details in class. It's just that it would be impossible to miss.
Even now, we know very little about the romantic lives of our son's teachers – and I expect our son knows even less than we do. Even when we do know things, it is through gossip among parents, or socialising with teachers – not from teachers telling the children about it in class.
Many teachers also have pictures of their family on their desks, as one might in their office at any other job.
Especially in lower grades, teachers are not robots that exclusively teach content from bell to bell each day.
This is pretty different from coming to school and telling 7yos about the sex party you went to this weekend and which gender you were identifying as when you went. This is the reality some parents are trying to prevent when they say some American teachers are taking their freedom to share their personal lives a bit far.
Let's be real, obviously there's nothing wrong with having a teacher who's LGBT. What people have a problem with are the folks who derive their entire identity out of that, and then greatly encourage the kids they teach to do the same. It's not dissimilar from a teacher being a veteran and insisting on sharing that part of their life with their students, to a point where parents find it crosses boundaries. We actually had a teacher at my high school who used to be a sniper in the Canadian Armed Forces. He was eventually told by the principal no more Afghan war stories, as it was making the students feel uncomfortable hearing that sort of thing from teacher.
The very obvious comparison here is a teacher coming to school and telling their kids, in detail, about their sex life or multiple gender transition surgeries. While they're topics which I'm comfortable with, I can't speak for every parent and I think it's wrong for the state to say "these topics MUST be socially acceptable to you, bigot."
Just teach the class! You don't need to get them excited about queer culture or gun culture or joining the military. Everyone would be better so much better off if teachers could just largely leave their personal lives at home and stick to the syllabus.
That sounds extremely specific. Do you have a source? Because I tend to agree, if somebody told my kid shit like that I'd also want them fired too.
If someone at the dog park told you a story, is your response to ask for a source and dismiss her when she tells you that one very obviously doesn't exist? Seems like a funny way to interact with people.
When has this ever happened?
> What people have a problem with are the folks who derive their entire identity out of that, and then greatly encourage the kids they teach to do the same.
When has this ever happened?
> The very obvious comparison here is a teacher coming to school and telling their kids, in detail, about their sex life or multiple gender transition surgeries
When has this ever happened?
Straight people also have sex parties. Why are we legislating against LGBT people specifically?
Were you expecting a news article? I'm not the 7yo in the classroom, these are just things I've heard from other parents while I've been spending time in FL. People are earnestly scared about what their kids are being taught in school and I think it's pretty cruel to abuse them instead of taking their concerns seriously.
Any of the examples I used are pretty obviously anecdotal, I'm surprised that wasn't clear to you. Not everything which has ever happened in this world has a Wikipedia article or video to link back to, some things just happen and then people tell others in their community, they don't necessarily run to write a blog post.
If you aren't living in FL right now I'm not sure how nuanced your perspective is going to be on the topic, but your opinions are always welcome, of course.
Yes, actually.
I can scaremonger straight people equally well, but choose not to. LGBT people are just the latest casualty in the nonsense "culture war."
For example, this: https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-777442211945
People saw cat litter on campus, which is commonly used to clean vomit off of floors at school, and fabricated this outrage. Anecdotes are not enough to villainize an entire group of people.
I live in TX, the book-banning capital of the US, so not too far off from FL.
I shared an anecdote from a woman who had absolutely reason to lie, this wasn't a conversation on the internet, this was a handful of us chatting together at the dog park. Did you seriously expect me to do what you just did and smugly tell her that without a source she's just speaking lies? It's a fairly juvenile and reddit move, but again, we're seeing it right now.
If the only way you allow your priors to be updated is by reading news articles, I think you're going to find yourself fairly behind in cultural trends.
Finally, if news articles are truly the only way you can read, please feel free to read about what's happening near my hometown. [1] This should align well with your current assumption that it's not possible for LGBT people to do any wrong, and that any accusation of such is just right-wing 'nonsense'.
[1] https://globalnews.ca/news/9151189/school-board-aware-protes...
Germany making pro Nazi rhetoric illegal no matter where is a ban (one I can agree with)
Florida making sure their Public money is not spent on this is not a ban. You can still own and publish these books in Florida. Or have them in a privately owned library or at a private university or school.
Let's stop hyperbolizing. It is actually totally reasonable to censor books in libraries targeted towards children. Not doing so is unreasonable.
That is a ban.
And lending a book is a positive action. If you gave the library your playboy collection should they keep it? Why or why not? Clearly, it is important to have standards for school libraries. There are other books that elementary school libraries should not contain. For example, mein kampf should be maybe available to higher-grade high-schoolers. Certainly not children. My school library growing up would not lend books marked for older grades to younger ones without permission. This is the same thing.
There was so much misframing and misinformation about the bill, continuing to use the Democrat and media made up name and language for the bill shows your slant. Just because many media organizations kept calling it, that doesn't mean anybody here should.
Just like the reframing of "woke" and "critical race theory" are misinformation - right? Right?
I have accepted that reframing language is now a legitimate political tool, and from my PoV, the right has been doing it a lot, such as labelling any milquetoast protest by groups nominally on the left an "insurrection" after 1/6. I believe it's a deliberate attack akin to semantic satiation to render a word meaningless, the conservative operative bluntly admitted (on Twitter!) to successful rebranding "woke". That egg will not be unscrambled.
You'll likely make a terrible politician[1] then, because that is a terrible approach in game theory when facing an opponent who defects consistently.
I was being descriptive - not prescriptive. This is now our political reality regardless of how we feel about it: politicians hold entire hearings to get 10-second sound-bites, and political operatives focus-group effective language which tends to be pithy and evocative (which gets called "misinformation" on HN when it's the other side doing it). Talking heads get coached on which phrases to use and the meme (in the original sense) gets spread and repeated by viewers/listeners. Asking people to stop using a specific term which was selected for being catchy is a losing battle - Pandora's box was opened on what are effectively PsyOps by political parties.
1. Jimmy Carter was a terrible politician in the same vein - he gave an honest answer when asked by the press if he had lusted after any woman who's not his wife. He is a good man, but that's not good politics.
It does not ban nor prevent the use of the word "gay." Asserting so is pushing information that is false, hence misinformation.
The bans in the article you cited are done at the school district level, not the state level. Holding the executive branch of government of Florida responsible for those decisions would be similar to blaming the Biden administration for the actions of Florida's executive branch.
It also appears that the link you cited confuses curriculum selection with book banning. There's a range of what can be called a book ban. For example, when the novel Ulysses was banned, people who sold the book were arrested and imports of the book into the US were seized. That's definitely a book ban. Nothing of the sort is happening in Florida.
There are also cases where local school districts remove titles from school libraries, but those books can still be borrowed from public libraries, sold in book stores, or purchased or read online. If that's a book ban, it's not a book ban in the same sense that the ban of Ulysses was a book ban.
Then there are decisions by local school districts about what material should be used to teach classes in the schools in that district. For me, exercising control over school curriculum is not a book ban and is in no way similar to seizing copies of books and arresting people for selling those books.
1. Are complained about by a parent and
2. Are obscene
Note that 2 is open to interpretation, so this justification has been used to ban classics like beloved and the kite runner, as school librarians can face criminal penalties if they don't do what (a single) parent asks.
The same is true for federal law.
From https://www.justice.gov/criminal-ceos/obscenity:
"Federal law strictly prohibits the distribution of obscene matter to minors. Any transfer or attempt to transfer such material to a minor under the age of 16, including over the Internet, is punishable under federal law."
Is that book banning?
Do you think federal laws against providing pornography to minors should be overturned?
For example, the graphic novel "Gender Queer" has been banned under the broad brush of "pornography" in Florida, when it's educational and certainly not intended to grant anyone sexual satisfaction. The key thing is that cis- and hetero-normative "obscenity", like an anatomy textbook is likely acceptable, but the same images in a book that described queerness would not be.
Specifically, to use your source, none of the books banned in Florida would pass the Miller test as all of them taken as a whole, posses "serious artistic, political, or scientific value", and few are "prurient" in nature, nor do they describe sexual conduct in a "patently offensive" way.
To use the examples from above, Kite Runner and Beloved are both critically acclaimed, award-winning novels, to claim they have no artistic merit is...simply wrong.
If it's heteronormative to merely show anatomy (and presumably describe mating) then I don't understand why that's worth calling out. It's no insult to anyone to say that male-female relationships are the most common and the only ones that produce children. We don't need to represent everything as equally likely to say that it's okay.
As for cis, I struggle to see how anatomy would intersect with gender-identity at all. Bodies are male or female, and may be intersex.
> graphic novel "Gender Queer" has been banned under the broad brush of "pornography" in Florida, when it's educational
This feels like a problem of having to find a category. If there was an 'unapproved medical advice' category it would be more descriptive.
As for its educational content, it recommends - not merely discusses but actively recommends - drugs and breast-binding for something that many (most?) parents do not think is a medical condition.
> nor do they describe sexual conduct in a "patently offensive" way.
In looking it up and reading it I discovered that the author said "It's been two years since it was published, why are they mad about it now?" and the answer to that is schools. The book wasn't being protested when it was available for sale, and in public libraries, only when it was placed in school libraries.
I think the 'patently offensive' element here is specifically that it's being placed in schools even though many parents don't want it and even explicitly over their objections.
Also the don't say gay bill is fake news because it doesn't say that.
The idea that the law restricts a male teacher from having a family photo or talking to students about what he did with his husband over vacation is completely false. That would be as illegal as preventing a teacher from praying with students in their off-time (after football games), which recently got re-affirmed by the supreme court. It only binds teachers' speech when they are operating in their official capacity as agents of the state.
While you might not agree with this particular restriction, agents of the state generally do not have free speech when they are acting in their official capacity. Teachers, DMV employees, and police officers all have lots of restrictions on their official speech. The ability of the people to restrict the speech of their agents is very important for maintaining a democracy. It keeps religion out of school curricula and it is what makes cops read you your rights when you are arrested.
Not that you said otherwise, but... I think we should go back to a transactional mix-and-match style of politics, with different coalitions per issue, instead of the "agree with your friend tribe and disagree with your enemy tribe about everything" style that we seem to be locked into these days. There shouldn't be any shame in being part of the same coalition on one issue with people who are reprehensible on other issues. Agreeing with the Florida government about some point of social media regulation doesn't imply I agree with them about anything else.
Modernity has brought us closer to subjectivism than ever.
We desperately need elections where more than just the two dominant parties can compete without a spoiler effect.
This is happening, just FYI, up in Canada right now - there are four parties worth talking about - Liberals, Conservatives, NDP, Bloc Quebecois - the last two are essentially just regional parties which do occasionally win surprise seats but mostly just exist within a localized area. That is enough, in our parliamentary system to force cooperation at a federal level - but without serious action I can't see any ending in sight other than slowly devolving to American politics.
The reality is, the parties are systemically more interested in self preservation than governing. So neither seem to support serious reform.
Uhm... you do realize there are plenty of us on the left who adopt exactly those positions?
Everyone says they want free speech. But deep down they don't. Some don't want gay marriage written in books, and some don't want anti-vaxxers to post misinformation. Those are 2 sides of the same coin.
Freedom of speech is a critical cornerstone of liberal government. The fact that so many sides want to reduce this right is what is scary.
The same paternalism has justified poisoning one's own people in a "war" against alcohol, dictated who was allowed to have sex with whom in privacy of their own home, and resulted in human experimentation for the supposed betterment of society.
We have much less freedom than we think, and the freedom we do have we pay a very high price for. I often use the phrase "What price freedom?" in conversations, and unfortunately most don't understand what it means.
1. Your freedom can cause problems to me an to society as a whole
2. We pay much in blood and treasure to maintain our freedom
3. There are unintended consequences and knock-on effects to most all rules regarding freedom.
Or to generalize: "Freedom isn't free"
This immediately puts massive scale social media in a very unique place. By contrast, public school libraries are anything but a monopoly. If they don't offer a book you want, there are countless other ways to get it that are no less convenient, to say nothing of the digital age and searching for 'book i want pdf.' This generalizes to other scenarios as well. At one time it was believed that private businesses out be able to restrict employment or service based on things like the race or religion of their customers/applicants. But as this started to become a more substantial issue in terms of scale, society decided otherwise.
But that's an argument against Facebook in particular, not against social media as a category.
Fundamentally, the problem is that we have allowed the modern "public square" to be in these spaces entirely owned by private companies.
What we really need is an open protocol for a federated social network that works very much like Facebook (so, not something like Mastodon, which is designed to work like Twitter, for instance—though it would probably be worthwhile to do the same with it) and have the government operate some public "reference servers" that anyone can join, while others can also operate servers that can federate with them. That way, you're still able to connect to people even if they're not on your particular server...provided they don't belong to a server that's been blocked from federation due to hate speech or something.
The other issue is a bit more strategic. Policy victory brings electoral victory, and you don't get to pick and choose which other policies come along for the ride when someone wins. Nobody agrees with a politician or political party on every issues of course, but it's probably not a good idea to ignore the rest of their views entirely just because they happen to back at least one policy you agree with. At the risk of invoking Goodwin, if you weren't a fan of that Hitler fellow but supported him anyways because you liked road construction, you might have regretted your choice.
Imagine creating a forum and now the Florida government dictates what you can and can't moderate. Disastrous.
There is a way to get there: it's changing our voting method.
Single-choice, first-past-the-post, winner-take-all voting is effectively guaranteed to result in a two-party system.
There are a number of alternative voting systems, and all of them that I've heard of have flaws, but Ranked Choice Voting is one of the better ones, and seems to be gaining some traction recently in a few places.
If you really want to break our political duopoly, push for Ranked Choice Voting at every level you have influence over. It'll be easier the more local you get, and the more jurisdictions adopt it, the easier it will be to get others to do the same.
For example?
https://www.wlrn.org/education/2022-06-09/palm-beach-county-...
> District staff sent out a list of questions teachers have to answer, like — does a book encourage students to believe that people are racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously? [...] If teachers answer “yes” or “unsure” to any of the questions in the district’s guidance, the book is to be removed from the classroom for further review.
Gee, would ya look at that
I don't see how this is any different.
Sorry, that one's actually a school board in California, but the same idea applies here, right? The state is to blame?
I think the fact that you deliberately expressed what's been a complicated, and almost exclusively school-board driven, phenomenon in such a simple way shows you either haven't read much outside the headlines, or are just hoping to pull people to your side while discouraging them to do any actual research.
Either way, your comment comes across as just as transparently politically motivated as the actions you're criticizing. If you don't like DeSantis and want him voted out, please just say that, it's not necessary to beat around the bush.
No, I want him voted out because of specific actions and I also want every politician inclined to take those specific actions voted out. I don't hate him because he's a Republican, I don't hate him because he's a straight white Christian man, I don't hate him because he's from Florida, I don't hate him. I hate the actions that he's performed (funny thing about that MLK quote; some people just cannot tolerate being judged by the contents of their character).
To pretend that the people behind these "school-board driven" actions are not motivated by, encouraged by, and supportive of DeSantis is completely ludicrous. Anti-LGBT activists are clamoring to join school boards around the country, looking to effect the same policies.
One are transportation companies (including companies that transport electronic communication). The key differentiator between those and social media are that the content is private. So while they have to carry anything, the content of what they are carrying is from one party to another, and the carrier may not even know what it is. So that model shouldn't apply to social media.
The other type are broadcasters, like TV and Radio. But the way those are regulated, they don't have to show anyone's content all the time. They get to choose what content is shown, but also be liable for the content being shown.
But then there are cable companies. Which carry multiple broadcast channels. And they are not liable for the content on the channels they carry, nor do they have to carry all channels. What they do have to do however is set aside some of their capacity for public access. This is how social media should be regulated.
They can choose what channels (broadcasters) they want to carry, and the broadcaster is liable for content. Funny enough, this is already how social media works! The only change would be every social media being forced to add a section that is unmoderated for "public access" in which they would not be liable for the content.
I imagine that would go about as well as you'd expect. It would be filled with child porn, hate messages, and the occasional unpopular political opinion.
Online platforms are both communication platforms for private communication and public broadcast platforms like TV and Radio. Just apply the existing laws and regulations to both these aspects. If they don't want any liability, then they should be treated as common carriers who have to be neutral to the content that flows on their platform - let the content producer be liable. Ofcourse, this means anonymous content cannot be allowed.
Politicians really should not have special exemptions or privileges when it comes to free speech issues. Eg: they have exceptions to use robo-calls, text spam, etc.
Realistically, we probably need to define when an organization is a media influencer vs. a niche communications platform. I do think Facebook/Twitter/Etc. need to be held to a different level of accountability on things like this than say Tomshardware, or HN.
Because political censorship is the worst censorship (you might argue that all censorship is political.) It's like how political prisoners are the easiest sign a place is a dictatorship.
If the powerful are censoring the political process, there are no means to make any of the powerful less powerful. It becomes self-perpetuating.
I think there is a balance between "social media must not interfere with blatantly false statements from politicians" and "social media can ban their political detractors without consequence". The ideal reality would be the public actually holding politicians responsible for being deceptive or treasonous, but that does not appear to be on the horizon either.
The solution being proposed is to allow administrations to keep pushing narratives that support the regime. You can't consider yourself a defender of the population against politicians while also granting them the power to suppress speech through proxies. When you find yourself favorably referring to mainstream media in the past for their ability to control the speech of elected officials, you're spiraling towards Zimbabwe.
The alternative being suggested here seems to be to allow the regime to compel media outlet to publish their propaganda, because some don't like media outlets being able to choose the views they promote.
Whose fault is it that Truth Social is an abysmal failure?
1. Network effects mean that there's only space for one platform in a particular niche.
2. There are reports (are they reliable?) that people who are more left wing are more habitually online and post much more.
If the above two are true, then left-wing social networks will naturally dominate.
As far as #2, why should tgat be an argument for the government to be involved?
As far as #2 is concerned, well I don't know if it is an argument for the government to become involved, but if something is driving huge divisions in society which are arguably destabilising the country (again, this is arguably wrong) then should the government not intervene? I'm European by the way, so my philosophical priors might be different to those of an American.
It's not as though government doesn't regulated other human behaviours which cause damage if left unregulated. Drink driving, for example.
I’ve made the offer plenty of times, I would gladly overcharge any conservative to lead the creation of a social media site that could stand up to the likely traffic. It would be like the atheist who got rich selling a mobile Bible app.
If I couldn’t lead the charge, I need to give up my $DayJob.
You can have a free market with monopolies/duopolies.
It amazes me that people on HN of all places is saying that they can’t create anything without a dependency on cloud providers.
I was talking about Apple and Google removing the app from their app stores.
I think they are back now, but it looks like it killed much of its steam.
>According to the former CEO of AWS, only 5% of all IT spend is on any cloud provider. The other 95% self host
This number sounds a bit weird. I assume you are saying cloud costs are only 5% of IT spending which means it includes salaries. If that is the case you can't assume any level of self hosting. Can you provide the source on this or clarify what you are saying?
https://accelerationeconomy.com/cloud/amazon-shocker-ceo-jas...
> With a $51B revenue run rate that’s growing 28% YoY (these were the Q4 2020 numbers we last publicly shared), it’s easy to forget that AWS is still in the very early stages of what’s possible. Less than 5% of the global IT spend is in the cloud at this point
Why does Parlor need to be an app at all? They can just be a website.
You should reread the article. It is saying 5% of it spending is on cloud. That has nothing to do with the percentage of cloud vs self hosting.
It could be 5% of it spending but account for 100% of hosting.
>Why does Parlor need to be an app at all? They can just be a website
Because it makes it easier for people to interact with and can encourage engagement. There is a reason why every social media site has an app.
I know first hand how many large enterprises and state and local government institutions are self hosted.
In context, he is obviously talking about AWS’s growth potential by going after a large untapped market.
As far as “needing an app”. Do you really think the same people who will show up by the thousands to watch Trump and go through the trouble of invading the Capital won’t go out of their way to go to a website and post their opinions?
It wasn't stated in the article that 95% of hosting is self hosted. I would appreciate some article or something that actually makes that claim.
>I watch the ReInvent videos. He is very much talking about growing by going after the other 95%.
I haven't watch those videos, but if it just reiterates the article then it won't prove your point. 5% of costs has nothing to do with market share.
Continuing to say 5% is useless when it almost certainly doesn't mean what you are claiming.
>I know first hand how many large enterprises and state and local government institutions are self hosted
Has nothing to do with the percentage of hosting.
>As far as “needing an app”. Do you really think the same people who will show up by the thousands to watch Trump and go through the trouble of invading the Capital won’t go out of their way to go to a website and post their opinions?
A growing number of people don't even have a computer. They only have a phone. It is difficult to deal with many sites on phones. Not sure how good Parler is, but they are frequently a subpar experience like notifications not even working most of the time.
I'd you want engagement you need an app. Its as simple as that. That is why every social media has its own app instead of directing people to their websites.
Global IT spend is 4.5T.
https://www.serverfarmllc.com/blog/mind-blowing-worldwide-it...
AWS percentage of that spend is infinitesimal.
I am not saying that you need to have an app to succeed, only that succeeding without one will be difficult and lead to a higher likelihood of failing.
If apps are a waste and don't provide any use to people then why do these companies waste their time and money making an app? Why do users often times use the apps?
>Global IT spend is 4.5T.
> AWS percentage of that spend is infinitesimal.
Literally has nothing to do with anything.
I don't think you understand what I am saying despite repeating myself multiple times.
The percentage of spending going to X doesn't let you figure out the market share of X. Even if it could, which it can't, it has nothing to do with the topic at hand.
I am not even talking about data centers. You brought it up and couldn't even provide the accurate figure for market share. Spending on IT has nothing to do with market share.
The market share for cloud is many times more than 5% or whatever you were claiming.
That’s an easy sign right up until you have to define “political prisoner”. According to some, people convicted of crimes committed during the January 6th insanity are “political prisoners”.
If so, that is the clearest violation of the 1st amendment. A common misunderstanding is that there is no unfettered right to free speech anywhere, anytime, free of any consequence. The 1st amendment only guarantees that the government shall not impose consequences based on speech alone (with the exception of the crowded movie theater example or incitements to imminent violence). That is very different from a movie theater asking someone to leave because they are talking (which the movie theater is perfectly in their right to deny service to anyone)
AFAIK, all Jan 6 convictions have been for trespass, obstruction of government, assault, etc.. If you know of any examples that do not fall into similar categories, that would be extremely interesting.
First of all, Citation needed. Second of all, you realize that the people responsible for making prosecutorial decisions regarding Jan 6th crimes are not going to be the same people making those decisions for crimes committed during George Floyd protests and riots, right? You think they’re political prisoners because of perceived inconsistencies among decisions made by the DOJ on one hand and various people in local jurisdictions on the other? Just more of the same insanity that led to Jan 6th.
Indeed, prior to the mid-20th century, it was understood that other kinds of expressive speech (pornography, etc.) did not receive as much, if any, protection.
IMHO, Facebook is like the bulletin board in a bar. A pipe would likely treat all content equally, Facebook does not do that, and I don't think there is an expectation that they would. If Facebook were a pipe, then there would be no recourse to moderate anything. Ergo it could be chock full of illegal content & porn, and if it were a pipe - nobody could complain to Facebook about the 'bad' stuff that is getting posted. Hence, seemingly they can moderate user-generated content pretty much however they please, it's their bulletin board. Further, if Facebook were a pipe, it could easily get flooded by several hundred/thousand payed trolls to post an overwhelming amount of content that Facebook could do nothing but allow to drown out everything else. Seemingly government telling Facebook they couldn't do (or how to do) moderation could put Facebook out of business (it could just wind up being crap/porn/spam)
I think the bulletin board analogy within a private space is likely a good analogy. The theme of the board is supposed to be posting for your friends by friends. I think it's within Facebooks right to then keep to that theme. The alternative is that they cannot in which case the users could utterly hijack the content within Facebook, and seemingly government regulation at that point would be preventing them from operating how they want (a seemingly very Ayn Rand like situation)
I suspect the 'is it a pipe' or 'is it a bar' question is perhaps easier to look at via 'proof-by-contradiction' when examining other large websites and services that are not so dissimilar.
Another thought, what if a private company wanted to not be a pipe, or what if they actually wanted to be a pipe. Let's say someone had a product launch that was intended and was for all purposes a pipe - though they "couldn't" be because of a user requirement. That seems odd, seems like whether you are a 'pipe' or a 'bar' could be stated in a prospectus and would not need to be a function at all of user count (but instead a function of services provided and how they are provided). In another example, a new phone carrier, just because they are small, would still be a pipe.
These days, the ”private company so this isn’t 1A” argument oddly reminds me of the omnipresent 200x-era GOP claim that running a federal budget is akin to balancing a household checkbook. Designed to be convincingly simple to state and yet extremely obnoxious to refute to a layperson.
Facebook in particular probably wouldn’t even exist without backing from DARPA, the “defunct” TIA program, and a host of other spooky agencies, corporations, and individuals (Palantir and Thiel for instance).
Skip over 18 years of also-damning stuff to when the public/private mask started to blatantly slip in 2020: Since then, we’ve had multiple leaks, whistleblowers, etc demonstrating overt collaboration between the government and social media companies to censor, ban, and shape narratives.
Not a lawyer, don’t know how you’d frame a 1A lawsuit, but it is absolutely unacceptable that our digital public square is being operated by companies that clearly serve as “Bill of Rights Avoidance” shell corporations for the intelligence agencies and now the Executive Branch writ large.
It’s like everyone forgot about Snowden. This sort of highly suspicious take should be everyone’s default position at this point, particularly in tech.
And no, you absolutely cannot “just build your own Project Lifelog if you don’t like it”.
Do you have any references for further information about how the government supported Facebook? If Facebook received some support from the government, does that make their platform a public square? What would that threshold be?
I'm really suggesting that "open to the public" does not mean "public". Hence, while anyone can sign on to 'Facebook', the nature that they pay for their servers, to develop software, have a business model, etc.. does not make it a public square even if it might feel like that at times (it's a private corporation, which means nobody has a first amendment right to do whatever they want with that software - there actually is no freedom of expression in the US, just freedom from government persecution to express what you want - that is what is written in the constitution)
Some of what I mentioned is covered in a very roundabout way in this Vice article [1] while the Palantir/Thiel connections (as well as info on early FB executives being “former” CIA employees/contractors) is on FB’s Wikipedia page. There’s a decent NYT write up from ~2010 on some of the DARPA connections but I’m having a hell of a time finding it right now.
As far as I know, there’s less of a smoking gun so much as there’s a series of very big dots that are hard NOT to connect to the intelligence agencies. You can search up some of the stuff below and draw your own conclusions. Much like with PRISM etc, where security researchers weren’t exactly surprised at the content of the Snowden leaks, the alphabet agency connections to SV are pretty apparent but we’ll never see documented proof without another Ed Snowden.
Eg: DARPA’s Total Information Awareness program was established post-9/11 with the stated goal of creating a total digital panopticon. It was officially canceled due to public outcry. That said, several of its programs have popped back up over the years and many analysts believe it was just broken up into classified chunks - SAFE HOME [2] being one of the more recent and obvious examples of an old TIA project resurfacing.
Lifelog was another TIA project that was essentially “Facebook’s social graph but with satellite tracking and bio surveillance for added creepiness”. It was shutdown one day before Facebook launched [3].
Basically there’s a whole lot of very odd circumstantial evidence (usually the only kind of evidence you can get regarding active intelligence programs) that heavily suggests a link between early FB and DARPA/CIA. It’s very similar to Palantir and suggests that the main outcome of the negative public response to TIA was to push it underground and into “private” hands. It absolutely glows in the dark (RIP Terry) and should be subject to the same rules and Constitutional restrictions as the agencies that aided its birth and certainly still play a huge internal role to this very day.
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/vbqdb8/15-years-ago-the-mili...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/08/22/white-hou...
Most mainstream coverage on domestic intelligence overreach is from the 2005-2012 era; there’s almost a tangible brick wall in the middle of the Obama years where mainstream coverage of this sort of thing switches from being critical-by-default to being just shy of a press release (a good example is the SAFE HOME link in my other comment).
Conservatives love “the free market” and “small government” when it suits them. These are the same politicians who are opposed to net neutrality. It’s much easier to create an alternative social media platform than create an alternative ISP.
The first amendment by its terms applies to the government. But that doesn’t mean that states can’t provide similar protections from the conduct of private parties.
Why not just keep the government out of regulating private company’s content? Aren’t conservatives all about “small government”?
Honest to goodness, the hyperventilation about how "important" social media is just amazes me.
Many businesses don't have normal websites for better or worse.
Many government agencies announce things through Twitter and Facebook for better or worse (worse in my opinion).
> Many government agencies announce things through Twitter and Facebook for better or worse
Twitter seems to be the more common of the two there. They should not do that.
Facebook could get their databases and backups wiped tomorrow and I'm pretty sure nothing would substantively change in my life or my work (and I work in tech). Same goes for Twitter. I might be exposed to less second-hand stupidity on an average day.
I see lots of hand-wringing about them being somehow equivalent to power plants or water districts, but to me it seems like a tortuous justification for "make them act how I want them to act".
How is any social network today important for daily business? You can live a perfectly normal life after deleting every single one of them, and so many people have done exactly that. Facebook is not equivalent to electricity or running water.
1 - Become a political candidate (even if a write-in for some bottom-end office in a tiny municipality)
2 - Register with social networks as a Florida-protected candidate
3 - Spend all your time spewing hate at people you don't like. Maybe automate that, to get both far more spewing and far more free time.And if the social networks are forced to follow this Florida law, and Mr. A. Troll De Vile was spewing hate at the politicians behind the law...might some social networks feel "deepest frustration" that they were, alas, legally barred from banning Mr. De Vile?
/g/ is far more entertaining than HN.
Someone in Florida will issue a terrorism threat that goes afoul of European laws or something and social media platforms will sooner side with the rest of the world than Florida. And how is Florida going to have any standing to try and sue a company in compliance that does not operate in or offer service to Florida?
It's the same as what's going down in Texas. Never mind that as another commentator mentioned these same state governments are also busy burning books and censoring other individuals so it's not a matter of equal freedom. They want the ability to threaten minorities.
I think what you would expect in a sane market is that they are forced to negotiate a more expensive deal with the remaining service providers due to the supply/demand imbalance.
As there are so few service providers here, there's only a few levels of risk-tolerance/good-moral-fiber that you can negotiate on. Activists only need to push a site above the highest risk-tolerance level (which is unnaturally low due to this quantization)
While it's a somewhat different example and a bit reductive, I find this XKCD[0] to be relevant to the issues with Kiwi Farms.
I run several websites on my physical hardware and through the internet links for which I pay. I don't want (and won't allow) any speech on my private property that I don't wish to host or amplify.
If the government (as Florida's appears to wish to do) tries to tell me what content I must (or must not) publish (assuming it's protected speech under the First Amendment), not only won't I comply, I will scream bloody murder -- as it's a direct violation of the First Amendment -- because the government is involved.
What is it that strips other non-governmental entities of those same rights? Absolutely nothing.
Do I like much of the nastiness, trolling and disinformation that's out there? Nope. Which is another good reason (I abandoned the big "social media" companies nearly a decade ago because I objected to their business models) not to use the big "social media" players.
And whether you agree or disagree with those who do use such platforms, it's their choice to use them or not. Just as it's those (and every) platforms' right to host or not host any particular speech/expression.
I don't understand why technical folks don't understand this. If the government can force you to host speech you don't want to host on your own private property, then property rights are irrelevant.
As for the whole "common carrier" thing in relation to the big "social media" platforms, they don't have exclusive access to rights-of-way (e.g., last mile conduit for wired internet access, ownership of the cell towers, etc.). Setting up your own site is simple and cheap/free.
You have the right to free expression. You do not have a right to an audience.
If the big "social media" platforms (and/or platforms like Cloudflare, AWS, etc.) pull a 1357[0] on you, you do have recourse. Do it yourself. This isn't a complicated thing to understand, IMHO.
I'll say it again because I want to make it clear: I abandoned all the big "Social Media" platforms nearly a decade ago and find their practices and business models to be deeply offensive. What's more, I don't use Cloudflare or AWS or any other similar platforms.
So no, I'm not defending those corporations. At all. Rather, I'm defending the ideals of free expression.
Is it? There were a few DDoS protection services on the market, but they seemingly all dropped KF, so what then? Is that not analogous to kicked out by every ISP?
>I can't grow my own wheat, build my own car [...] - these all require economies of scale. But they aren't natural monopolies, there's plenty of competition in each space. On the other hand, internet is a natural monopoly because the capital costs are so high and are relatively inelastic with the number of users served.
You probably can grow your own wheat or build your own car. But I like your definition of monopoly.
I would say that more generally, that a monopoly is any business that has insufficient competition to motivate them from abusing their stakeholders (including customers, workers, etc.).
One can still find what happened to them chilling, but that doesn't make CloudFlare a "common carrier."
The way things are now, I can't ever in good conscious recommend any small or medium sized business own any part of the email infrastructure except the MX record, I've simply seen too many cases of the financial damage caused by not using gmail as a host.
Requiring all hosts to operate on a single, fair, well defined standard would be to the benefit of the people of the United States.
Which is to say, they are not at all.
SV corporations are spineless.
And yet, because this is a party-political issue, you have the Republican Party swearing up and down that ISPs are not (presumably because common-carrier status implies net neutrality and this is unpopular with donors or something?) but that social networks are (because they exhibit "bias").
Unfortunately, my party's base is made up of people who are not super into tech unlike the Democratic party whose base is increasingly rich tech workers.
On the other hand, my fellow Republicans do jobs you may think unimportant,like farming, plumbing, construction, etc.
Perhaps, when you think about it, democrat regulations of these professions are equally ridiculous when you look at it from the perspective of someone in these professions.
Half our political discord would be solved if we just thought of ourselves in the other person's shoes and listened instead of chocking it up to stupidity or malice.
Half of my conservative friends have no idea how the internet works. They don't understand the wires behind it. When you explain to them what's going on, they become more sympathetic to net neutrality. Perhaps try explaining instead of dismissing?
> Perhaps try explaining instead of dismissing?
How can social media be a common carrier when it cannot be accessed through a common carrier?
It feels like we're fighting to have our one sentence displayed among the ads, while giving up the ability to create our own webpages and platforms.
Everyone already can host their own websites somewhere, AWS isn't even required.
That doesn't mean regulating them like common carries is good or workable, but we need to start by recognizing that there are first amendment claims on both sides now.
I look forward to see how cases that go to the Supreme Court are going to be handled. I personally believe that a private business like Facebook has the right to control content on their app/website.
Of course, they're unlikely to behave so blatantly, at least initially. They're more likely to just sort of hint at how anti-trust prosecutions might be started or not depending on whether the platform follows the government's "advice".
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
Let's please not make the mistake of saying all issues that relate to freedom of speech are First Amendment issues.
The problem is when government and social media actively collude to side step the government’s responsibility to the first amendment…the government has dragged the social media companies into first amendment territory.
You have two ways of handling this: one…have the government police itself…which it won’t do, because it is already actively trying to find ways around its responsibility to freedom of speech; Or two, start lawsuits that expose the collusion and start making it expensive for social media companies to collude with the government to censor.
The government's responsibility to the First Amendment is "don't make laws that limit freedom of religion, speech or assembly". I don't know what it means for government to collude with a third party to side-step that responsibility.
I'm somewhat amazed at how poorly the people in favor of this understand what appeal these social networks was to let them grow large in the first place.
Isn't it obvious that it wasn't by letting everyone post anything? We've had that all along. No need to force social networks to do what has already always been an option (go ahead and start that personal blog and post all your thoughts on it).
But of course, that's not what the politicians mean. They use the words "common carrier" to make it sound like they aren't doing what they are actually doing: attempting to force social media companies to be megaphones for the political messages of the politicians.
De facto state media. The very opposite of free speech and the first amendment.
It would be laughable if the Supreme Court was principled.
Second, as some have already said, this is the wrong level of the Internet to manage such a concept of common carrier. Facebook isn't in the business of actually routing data between two points on the internet. Facebook handles internal data on its own internal networks that connect up to the core of the internet which then that core connects to all the edge networks (consumer facing ISPs). This approach is better as it means there's no arbitrary singling out of one provider over another (Comcast vs some random rural co-op) due to political climate. Everyone gets the same process, everyone has the same burden or benefit.
Third, this is all political theater in an age that frankly doesn't really make sense to me. How is this exactly going to get the core voters of Republicans out to the ballot box? I just see this as over the top nonsense.
[1]: https://spec.matrix.org/latest/
[2]: https://gitlab.com/cactus-comments
[3]: https://matrix.org/blog/2020/12/18/introducing-cerulean
Basically, once a social network surpasses say, 20M users, it becomes a defacto political entity, with the power to move elections. Given this immense power, the government should regulate accordingly.
Instead of passing detailed regulations though, I am of the opinion that if a company passes 200B USD in enterprise value, that Congress should get the right to appoint 50% of the board of directors. This way, the company's responsibilities match its defacto political power to sway elections.
Basically, make Facebook into an Amtrak or USPS. If Facebook does not like this idea, then they can split the company into pieces.
Additional benefit: this functions also as anti-trust regulation. Amazon would be subject to this as well.
Then the government can profit as well, like a sovereign wealth fund
If no anti trust, then become a federal agency.
I don’t want to put words in your mouth, so correct me if I am wrong. You are saying that shareholders ought to hold this immense power that say Facebook has to move elections?
Certainly, if the alternative is that those in government get to wield it instead. I would wager I've considerably more trust in government and politicians than average - I do believe that in the main they're working very hard for what they perceive to be the greater good - but I draw the line at the politicians getting to directly control the political media.
Part of this is that I don't think Facebook's power alone is "immense" - but if you had all of the large media centrally controlled then you'd be getting there.
The very idea completely compromises those "bi-annual elections". How can you effectively challenge the state when all the large media is state-controlled?
Do you really think that the in power government won’t push corporations to keep them in power?
It amazes me that people want to give the government this much power.
It amazes me that we let social media platforms run freely with whichever narrative, ideology they enforce. Government influence has in most cases a negative outcome, but letting these platforms, especially ones at the scale of Twitter and Facebook, act freely is unwise.
Would you also want the government to control RedState? FoxNews? Truth Socisl?
Like I said; government influence has a negative outcome in most cases, but allowing social media platforms to do as they wish is a recipe for disaster if we're not there already.
> Im sure the religious right would love to control the narrative
I'm sure the ideological left appreciates the social media platform's bias towards their progressive ideology. It's equally wrong if they had a different bias. You, we, need to stop being divisive, it's toxic.
Like I said, for the third time: government influence has a negative outcome in most cases. I'm not sure how you got to a different conclusion.
The government should keep social media platforms in check and protect their citizens against censorship (in any form, as long as it is lawful) on large, influential platforms.
You said yourself it would be a “negative outcome”.
The state pushing this is the same state that tried to force companies not to speak about diversity. They literally named a law “Stop Woke”.
"The government should keep social media platforms in check and protect their citizens against censorship (in any form, as long as it is lawful) on large, influential platforms."
> Would you want that same government to force HN to allow political topics?
If we were talking politics and Dang would censor anyone because of their ideology, yes, the government should set laws in place against that.
> Would it apply to religious organizations that set up a social media platform?
No.
> You said yourself it would be a “negative outcome”.
Yes, stop misinterpreting it, I had expanded on it in the same sentence.
> The state pushing this is the same state that tried to force companies not to speak about diversity
You mean the same law that "prohibits teaching or business practices that contend members of one ethnic group are inherently racist and should feel guilt for past actions committed by others"? The same law that prevents schools and business from reducing a person to just their race to assign labels of privileges regardless of all the nuances that make up an individual?
Good, stop justifying prejudice.
Isn’t the government in fact pushing a narrative when they don’t allow companies to focus on sexual an racial harassment? Should companies not train interviewers that you shouldn’t discriminate based on someone’s accent or where they went to school?
If I set up a website where I want to talk about Christianity should I not be allowed to ban discussions about Islam or vice versa?
And there are very much “labels” when I as Black person was the dev lead for local company in the South where any time consultants and vendors came in they automatically assumed one of my reports - a white guy - was the manager.
It even happened at a business lunch with my team. The waitress asked the table in general was this one check or separate. I said one check, started pulling out my wallet and she still handed the check to the guy who I assume looked like a manager even though I was the only one reaching for a credit card.
My family is “labeled” all of the time when we “look like we don’t belong” somewhere in our city that was as recently as the mid 80s a “sundown town” and we are still very much the minority (less than 4%).
My 6 foot 5 step son who has lived in the burbs all of his life is very much “labeled” when he walks into a store.
>So the government should pass laws that tell private companies what they can’t talk about.
Yes, they should not allow private companies to spew and enforce systems of prejudices.
> But the government should also pass laws that force companies to publish every other opinion?
Yes, that's the free speech part, you know.
> Isn’t that the government now controlling free speech?
Not even close.
> Isn’t the government in fact pushing a narrative when they don’t allow companies to focus on sexual an racial harassment?
Except it only happens when it doesn't actually happen, and you look through a lens of prejudices, like the law attempted to prohibit. We have a justice system for when it actually does happen, though.
> Should companies not train interviewers that you shouldn’t discriminate based on someone’s accent or where they went to school?
And that is exactly what the law would prevent; "teaching or business practices that contend members of one ethnic group are inherently racist and should feel guilt for past actions committed by others".
White people in metro areas are often prejudiced against “rural America”. Lighter skinned Black or often prejudiced against darker skin Black people. There have been reports that Indians are still practicing the caste system in hiring. Second and third generation Americans of the same race talk about people from their own country who are “fresh off the boat”.
But either way, seeing that you don’t see a problem with the government controlling speech that you disagree with is the very reason that the government shouldn’t have that power.
>Nowhere in the DI&E training I’ve taken at the country’s second largest employer do they claim one group is inherently prejudice.
Good, so that law you were so much against wouldn't affect you.
> We are all inherently prejudice based on our own lived experiences.
So that is your excuse to justify systematic prejudice? That is the same line of thinking racists use to justify their disgusting behavior.
> White people in metro areas are often prejudiced against “rural America”. Lighter skinned Black or often prejudiced against darker skin Black people. There have been reports that Indians are still practicing the caste system in hiring. Second and third generation Americans of the same race talk about people from their own country who are “fresh off the boat”.
What are you implying? That we shouldn't hire based on merit, but perceived race or prejudice? Your argument is all over the place, make a point.
> But either way, seeing that you don’t see a problem with the government controlling speech that you disagree with is the very reason that the government shouldn’t have that power.
No, that is not what you are seeing, but what you want to see. Feel free to re-read the entire thread because you seem to come to conclusions of your own.
I've repeated countless times that the problem is prejudice, not free speech. You're willingly ignoring what is said and make up conclusions for yourself.
But the law is not about hiring. The law is about what companies are allowed to include in their training and the government was trying to decide what could and could not be said by private corporations.
The government wanted to in fact control speech - not hiring decisions.
Are you okay with the government controlling what private companies can say during their training?
I don't think antitrust does much to Twitter. So that reduces its popularity as a solution among politicians. I feel like politicians ceded their power to Twitter. So I write it off as 'you made your bed, now lie in it'.
Sounds harsh, but the world would be a better place. Also, government agencies and political candidates should be banned from interacting on social media that is not federated. That is it.
Unfortunately, politicians don't understand the meaning of federated.
This should be done as an anti-trust action, and facebook should be broken up. Twitter should also be broken up, but it is an utterly useless product, so probably just liquidated.
Social media should be for trashy pursuits, not serious discourse. Those should be done on open fora. Hacker news as well ought to be federated.
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edit: my guess as to what they are now is online services who republish submitted third-party content or however section 230 defines them.
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edit2: An interactive computer service that retransmits material provided by an information content provider.
> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
So they are explicitly and definitively not publishers.
> We’ll say it plainly here: there is no legal significance to labeling an online service a “platform” as opposed to a “publisher.” Yes. That’s right. There is no legal significance to labeling an online service a “platform.” Nor does the law treat online services differently based on their ideological “neutrality” or lack thereof.
It wouldn’t take that long for people to read up on what section 230 actually is before saying “publisher” like that means anything (is related to anything the law talks about).
Laws of course need interpretation, but if people think, “Oh, they’re a ‘publisher’” (whatever that means; they probably couldn’t tell you) “they must be subject to different rules,” they’re frankly just kind of dumb.
A situation of only draconian moderation or none at all will tend towards only draconian moderation since very few users want a truly unmoderated space like the more obscure chan sites. Its the worst of both worlds.
This is too direct for me to be putting words in your mouth: do you believe that any and all content moderation is an unambiguous good?
Do you believe that zero content moderation is good?
> Companies are going to make mistakes and have to take corrective action.
We should help them by giving them far less latitude.
The problem is that no one filing these various cases against social media is properly alleging sufficient facts to suggest government coercion: it's that Twitter (et al.) are state actors because §230, or yappy politician said they should do this [1], or even merely arguing that First Amendment applies to social media absent showing of state actor just because. All of which are stupid arguments so facially wrong that they're not going to survive a motion to dismiss.
[1] While threatening legislation is in fact illegal government coercion, this needs to be understood on the same grounds as true threats: namely, it has to be reasonably believed and understood to be a specific threat, and not hyperbole or puffery or the like. Also, and there are some people who fail to recognize the basic linearity of time, a supposed threat made after the action in question was taken cannot have been a cause of that action.
Alex Berenson did.
> In sum, plaintiff’s breach of contract and promissory estoppel claims survive for now. Plaintiff’s other claims are futile and are DISMISSED WITHOUT LEAVE TO AMEND.
[0]: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.38...
Now, if Berenson sues Twitter again (and/or Biden, presumably) and the judge finds those communications (and other facts) sufficient to establish state action (i.e., the claims survive a motion to dismiss), then that may be sufficient to be a counterexample to the original comment.
Yes. Because it's a natural extension of property rights. Do you not believe in property rights?
"Natural extensions" of property rights are religious beliefs. I believe they should be protected, but not indulged.
Property rights as assigned by law let you decide who to allow or disallow access to your property. If the property is open to the general public, there are some additional rules you have to follow. But you're free to ban activities from your property.
Might there be situations where property rights need to be weighed against other considerations?
Social media is neither of these. I don't rely on it to sustain my life, nor access government services.
If we're going to regulate social media it would be more akin to newspapers or broadcasting.
You are committing the fallacy of begging the question. Whether social media is a common carrier is precisely the matter up for debate.
>> We have established norms for these situations
There is a process by which norms are established and what is going on now is part of that process.
ISPs aren't treated as common carriers at the moment, and these laws were enacted by the same political party that treats this as a free speech issue. So I have trouble taking seriously any politician who supports such laws. They're hypocrites; pure and simple.
Very few things are unambiguously good; particularly without specifying a moral or ethical context.
But I think it is more important to encourage good moderators to moderate more than it is to punish poor moderation.
The freedom of association is a valuable one, and people should be allowed to decide who they associate with to talk to
If Reddit now has legal liability does Reddit need to moderate All subreddits by themselves? That sounds impossible.
Social network and communications have nothing to do with each-other? are you reading what you are writing? How is Facebook messenger call different from a phonecall of the 21st century?
It's impossible to use an alternative messenger to communicate with people who use FB messenger. Unlike e-mail providers or phone operators, these newer web services don't have any interoperability, they're closed systems.
To switch from Facebook, a person gonna need to convince all people they communicate with to switch as well - to the same alternative messenger. That's very high cost to switch, borderline impossible to do for many people.
I have at least 7 apps on my phone now that I can use to call someone over an app.
You are kidding right? You don't think the government already controls almost everything about how companies can operate?
They were allowed to have it both ways because the Internet and especially user generated content was new and no one knew where it would go. Now I think there's been plenty of history and time to see it shake out and they should pick an option; either common carrier or publisher but not both.
/ did i use that semicolon right?
For corporations that aren't closely held, it's not clear that changes much, though.
[EDIT] Changes much legally, I mean. Ethically—well, again, corporations are a creation of of government, so it seems to me that can come with whatever strings attached the government cares to create (so far as what's ethical, if not what's a good idea), and if the folks running corporations don't like it, they can always... stop running corporations. No one's forcing them to run a corporation, and they can all go do whatever they like with full protection of the US Constitution and all that jazz, if they use their own personal resources and don't hide behind corporate liability shields.
Nah, but I also reckon there's a reason the press is mentioned specifically in that amendment.
I mean, they do in fact already dictate a lot about how both unions and corporations can operate, so yeah, prohibiting endorsement of candidates using union resources doesn't seem entirely crazy to me. Though, again, I'd rather they didn't.
If you’re okay with the government controlling any legal organization do yoh feel the same way about government controlling churches? Advocacy groups?
Well, seizing is rather different than regulating, for one thing, and for another, because most of the time I'd probably think it was a bad idea. I do think it's an option that should be on the table in some circumstances. Just that it's probably wises rarely to use it.
I didn't write that I thought the government ought to interfere with businesses constantly, to extremes, in all sorts of ways. I just think the justification for their ability to do so, if they want, falls out how incorporation works, and what a corporation is.
> If you’re okay with the government controlling any legal organization do yoh feel the same way about government controlling churches? Advocacy groups?
I'd rather they didn't take them over, if that's what your suggesting, but they in fact regulate tons of things about these organizations, including, specifically, speech.
The government makes laws about how private companies and citizens can act all the time without funding them. You think the government has to fund every auto maker in order to impose emissions standards on them? Or that every company making communications equipment/chips is funded by the government, so that they can impose regulations on what spectrum they can use?
This is a terrible precedent because there is no sane, logical way to define social networks as common carriers, and because Section 230 was specifically written to allow and encourage content moderation.
The same argument has been made against regulation since regulation existed. Government should exist in large part to reign in the private market when an obvious public good is at stake.
If you’re hosting a garden party and one of the guests has become disruptive to everyone else, are you not allowed to demand they cease their behavior or leave your property just because their angry ranting is not illegal speech?
You’re totally within your right to say “I’m out, this party sucks anyway, you guys don’t want to have honest debate” but it’s a little absurd to force the property owner to allow you to stick around when you are no longer welcome.
> Is it out of the realm of possibility that a conscientious electrical supplier might not want to power a racist's computer?
Isn’t this the case that these same people are making for why ISPs should NOT be neutral, even though they’re much more like electricity and roads than private garden parties?
I think there is real bias (and in the West it's more biased against conservatives and some minority groups while it's different elsewhere, depends mostly on the dominant ideology) and there's faux discrimination to get victim points to trade in for control.
Moderation is hard. They get it right 99% of the time.
Something like secushare would take the place of forums I assume: https://secushare.org/society
First, websites are websites. It doesn't matter if it's Facebook or your own personal blog, they're functionally identical in terms of features. They both have a means to communicate with other visitors and they're nominally accessible to the public at large with one being more popular than the other. Meaning that you're saying that if hypothetically a personal blog became popular then the blogger couldn't just delete posts they didn't like even though they're on the hook for hosting content (paying the host provider, laboring to write the content, laboring to moderate the content, and so forth). This seems suspicious to me since it treats being popular with being a monopoly which the two aren't the same. Facebook can ban you but you and your friends can freely setup a VPS with a web forum and keep it private among yourselves to talk and socialize. If say Comcast banned you then I would think you'd have an argument but with a website, it makes no sense in the context that you have an alternative to communicate with users but that you don't have a right to communicate via a specific application/platform.
Second, you're not owed a successful business model. This is important as you talk about folks making a living on websites like Facebook or YouTube (which is more relevant in my opinion). If the case law did bear out the opposite then any act of blocking spamming, scams, or other disruptive economic activity on websites would be illegal but it's not thankfully. I'd rather deal with having several websites not letting me post content because it isn't a good fit them (imagine Free Republic, who's banned me many years ago, letting me spread the good word of PJ Proudhon and other left market anarchists, or me forcing Rebel Media [a conservative website/outlet] to host a transgender vlog). Rather, it means we can self-sort into sites that fit our interests. Granny's knitting blog need not be bothered hosting posts about aquariums. Joe's betta fish web forum need not worry about hosting knitting content. And so on.
Third, no one is calling police on people being racists or fascists in general. This particular scenario is nonsense, so I'm going to just shrug and move on.
Fourth, many of those blocking tools you mention would be illegal under similarly proposed social media laws. All these current attempts to regulate popular websites are just another way to force users to consume content they would otherwise now (ex. trucks with pictures of aborted fetuses being driven around nominally pro-choice areas). The proponents of such regulations are against audiences self-sorting as they can't grow their support base. It's why so many other unrelated, but significant, laws are appearing such as laws forcing teachers to narc on LGBT students. It's meant to break down sites that have appeared to cater to such marginalized groups or are otherwise a big tent platform (inclusive to many but not for anti-social movements such as anti-LGBT). It's a multiprong approach to the demographic changes that has doomed reactionaries for the last three decades.
Just today he explicitly editorialized a post title (with a comment explaining why) because it exposed some government corruption; I don't even remember what because it was just so unremarkable and ordinary for HN. ETA: Oh lol it was the same subject as this post, but different title. I guess he let this one get away from him.
The article mentioned that 11 federal agencies were involved in asking social media companies to remove posts. I guess Hacker News needs standards mentioned in the FAQ about how many federal agencies need to be involved in an activity before it can be referred to as "vast".
Don't turn the rest of the internet into 4chan so you can force gross ideas and content onto everyone else.
The Tesla roadster claims 250MPH, and there are others street legal up to 300 afaik.
Sorry for the mixup but this actually is a good point to consider, this is a platform moderating as it sees fit, according to their observations on when handling becomes less capable at speed.
What Florida wants to do is the equivalent of telling carmakers they cannot put speed limiters on their cars, putting more people in danger. If I want my children to have speed limiters in the cars they drive, well, guess I’d be out of luck!
It goes the other way too: it could also be used to force all carmakers to install speed limiters, and never let people even race at a track. As the original commenter I replied to tried to use as a point against the idea.
The problem with the way they framed it is they tried to make it seem like allowing platforms to moderate as they see fit removes everyone’s choice, which is the opposite of the outcome.