FCC orders review of ABC licenses after Kimmel joke offends Trump and First Lady | Hacker News Reader

FCC orders review of ABC licenses after Kimmel joke offends Trump and First Lady

arstechnica.com

10 pointsSilverElfin7 comments

This is a blatant free speech violation and corrupt abuse of power. Even though Kimmel’s joke was in bad taste, he’s allowed to make jokes. This isn’t North Korea. And yet here we are.

He's even allowed to make jokes that are in bad taste. Nobody's trying to pull licenses over, say, the Oscars, or the Super Bowl halftime show, or any of a thousand other things that were in poor taste going back the last several decades.

So either it's in poor taste, in which case, deal with it by growing a thicker skin, or else it's actually against the law, in which case, prosecute it.

But instead, it's intimidation for speech that the administration doesn't like, and I have zero sympathy. We don't have lese majeste laws for the same reason we don't have kings.

But do we have kings? Biden's admin was forcing Twitter to censor people saying the word "lab" instead of "wet market". And they did it without telling the public. And then when his admin ended, they protected everyone involved with a pardon that covers time before he was even President!

I'm not defending Trump's move here, but let's not live in a vacuum. Both are bad.

Whenever I read an extraordinary claim, no matter how implausible, I try to make an effort to at least Google it and steelman it as best I can. I do this as a sanity check and also to catch myself from falling victim to my own echo chambers. Here's what I found:

1. White House officials from the CDC, FBI, and CISA urged platforms to remove or suppress content deemed "misinformation" including "lab-leak theory. [1]

2. Missouri and others sued the Biden admin and requested an injunction for "federal interference" against social media companies.[2] That injunction was granted.[3]

3. The injunction was appealed to the 5th circuit[4]. Notably, while the the 5th circuit upheld the injunction, they didn't agree that the Biden admin was "coercive", which is why their ruling significantly narrowed the scope of the injunction. From that ruling:

  "Generally, the State Department officials did not flag content, suggest policy changes, or reciprocally receive data during those meetings."

  "...although CISA flagged content for social-media platforms as part of its switchboarding operations, based on this record, its conduct falls on the “attempts to convince,” not “attempts to coerce,” side of the line."
  
  "There is not sufficient evidence that CISA made threats of adverse consequences— explicit or implicit—to the platforms for refusing to act on the content it flagged."

  "Nor is there any indication CISA had power over the platforms in any capacity, or that their requests were threatening in tone or manner. Similarly, on this record, their requests— although certainly amounting to a non-trivial level of involvement—do not equate to meaningful control."

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You wrote the Biden admin was "forcing" Twitter to censor people but even the 5th Circuit, which was sympathetic to this complaint, disagrees.

Sadly my original assumption was true: this is another false comparison. Trump using or even threatening to use the FCC's licensing authority to revoke licenses of private companies that don't fire a comedian for speech the president found upsetting is not the same.

Now, if the Biden admin used (or threatened) the DOJ's authority to seize Twitter or Facebook's domain name if they don't take down legal, 1st amendment protected content the Biden admin disagrees with i.e. "lab leak", then I might agree with you.

My question to you is - do you agree these things are not the same or do you simply not see a meaningful distinction? Why or why not?

[1] https://reason.com/2023/09/11/the-5th-circuit-agrees-that-fe...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murthy_v._Missouri

[3] https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/4/23783822/free-speech-rulin...

[4] https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/23/23-30445-CV0.pd...

Yeah, re-read the entirety of your first link. Filled with content like this:

> A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit unanimously agreed that the White House, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the FBI had "coerced" or "significantly encouraged" the platforms, "in violation of the First Amendment," to suppress speech that federal officials viewed as dangerously inaccurate or misleading.

> They argued that the Biden administration's public and private pressure on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube amounted to government-directed censorship. The 5th Circuit essentially agreed, endorsing much of Doughty's analysis. According to the appeals court, the administration's persistent demands that Facebook et al. do more to control "misinformation"—which were coupled with implicit threats of punishment through heavier regulation, antitrust action, and increased civil liability for user-posted content—crossed the line between permissible government speech and impermissible intrusion on private decisions.

So yeah, please step outside your bubble.

Also, just to re-iterate one more thing, the Biden approach was entirely private. No one knew it was happening. The Trump admin doing this in the public, is most likely just going to get FCC chair burned a lot harder than ABC in the end here. No the Biden admin actually caused years of harm and hid a lot of information from the public.

Did you read your citations?

Wikipedia, for example, acknowledges the Administration "coerced or significantly encouraged social media platforms to moderate content, which violated the First Amendment." The Reason article is overwhelmingly negative on the Administration's seeming censorship. That and other details in the articles don't serve your conclusion.

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