Slashdot Mirror
San Francisco Attempts to Regulate Blogging
Lawrence Person writes "Forget about theocratic Iran or Communist China; today's report of a political entity trying to regulate blogging comes not from The People's Republic of China, but rather The People's Republic of San Francisco. 'The San Francisco Board of Supervisors [announced] yesterday that it will soon vote on a city ordinance that would require local bloggers to register with the city Ethics Commission and report all blog-related costs that exceed $1,000 in the aggregate." Worse, this is not an April Fools joke. It seems that 'campaign finance reform' is turning out to be the biggest Trojan Horse in the campaign to regulate free speech. "Are you now or have you ever been a blogger?"" Chris Nolan -- the "not a joke" link above -- is more reserved about the true scope of the proposed law (which would deal with election-related journaling specifically, not most diary-style Web journals), but has little good to say about it.
Maybe they don't want mass public participation in a particular political discussion?
Websites don't usually allow active discussion on a certain topic, but blogs are encouraging that.
Uselessful technology (Air-Charged
Has anybody got a link to an actual newspaper article on the subject? While bloggers and advocacy sites can break news stories, they're also full of innuendo, rumor, and things blown way out of proportion.
I prefer to get my news from some organization without an axe to grind.
point taken. Not all liberals understand liberty, and not all conservatives get conservatism..... coughBUSHcough. ;)
Actually there is an issue here, and its valid. Its just one of those issues where there is hardly an answer for. Frankly regulating bloggers is a stupid way to get bloggers to disclose their campaign connections.
The best way to deal with "trojan bloggers" or "trojan talking heads on tv" is to simply investigate them secretly and expose them, and assasinate them publically based on the facts of their doings. If someone has taken money, then expose them the old fashioned way.
GO YANKS!
The issue at heart is that there are now so many venues to surreptitously flog political viewpoints disguised as something else. If someone thinks they are reading a personal blog with a political viewpoint and it is in fact a paid action on behalf of a candidate, they have a right to know that up front.
This is happening in many areas and politics is just one. Marketing disguised as objective scientific evidence, etc. I've heard on these boards people dissing the BBC and the CBC because they receive government funds. Yippee, if Fox isn't an organ of republican viewpoint, I don't know what is... so this is really less about free speech and more about truth in advertising.
in other words, you have freedom of speech as long as you don't discuss politics? how long before i get my papers?
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
actually, there are legitmate liberal and conservative labels. taken in the classical sense, a liberal seeks change, while a conservative seeks the status quo. now, how do you define liberal and conservative. we often make the mistake in America of labeling secularists and traditionalists with the lib/cons labels. and there is a huge difference. in fact, secularists could be quite conservative, and traditionalists quite liberal, as per above definition.
today's lib/cons debate tends to break down along three areas, 1) role of government, 2) property rights, 3) individual liberty
liberals generally want more government (higher taxes, more spending), less property rights (gun control, environmental laws) and more liberty (abortion). conservatives generally want less gov., more prop rights, and less liberty, or at least less nihilism.
now, bush is no conservative. he wants a big government, massive spending, and has a federal solution for everything. his foreign policy (save for all the ignorance around here) is very liberal, in a wilsonian/rooseveltian manner. he has eschewed the republicans favored Realpolitik and stability (so Bismarckian) for a proactive policy of change. (and no the war wasn't about oil, or even wmd's. sorry excuse for what will historically be a great policy.) guys like dean really aren't as liberal as secular. bush's soc sec. plan is actualyl quite liberal, while the opponents are quite conservative.
where does that leave the debate, it's really a left vs. right debate, which ahs nothing to do with lib/cons labels. leftism has a decidely deterministic (marx, hegel) outlook, whereas rightism sees history as mutable and the result of great ideas and people (the classical, aristotelian approach. i.e. thucydides, herodotus). it's really more a way of looking at the world. for example, those who see the iraqi war as for oil, believe in the deterministic view, that external forces (class oppression) thus it's an evil venture. whereas those who see the history as shaped by events (thus democracy can reshape the middle east) are usually in favor of the war.
there's of course other factors, as those "conservatives" opposed to the war, i.e. pat buchanan, are influenced by outside forces (anti-semitism, the church, etc.) and thus are more traditionalist leftists. (his opposition to abortion and free trade)
yes, i do teach this stuff. this is a brief summary, but it's more accurate to define left vs. right, which is a substantive debate.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
"Its only applicable to blogs that mention candidates"
Ummm. The First Ammendment's entire purpose is to protect political speech.
No candidate or elected official should ever be shielded from the voice of the people. The 60 day moratorium on political speech by the public prior to an election is one of the most nefarious laws I have ever seen passed in the USA.
The entire purpose of the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights is to define the limits of government to act against the people. The campaign finance law has this all turned around.
And notice that it did not seem to actually work. The last election was awash in money.
Are journalists or columnists in traditional media required to register with the local authorities, pay a registration fee because they're popular, report all their costs (such as travel, meals with sources, etc), or turnover their readership (auditing of server logs) to the government so they can see who might be reading certain opinions?
I doubt that they are. If they are, then that's, at the very LEAST, highly disturbing. The fact that you wish that bloggers would stop posting doesn't mean that the government, or anyone else, should be able to come in and regulate their speech. It's the same principle as the tv: if you don't like the programming, then change the channel, or turn it off.
The reasons politicians are interested in singling out blogs are pretty obvious. Blogs have a relatively low startup and maintenance cost, can be started by anyone, and whereas there are relatively few points of regulation for traditional media, blogs are highly distributed. The squashing of a scandal, omission of facts, or the redirection of public attention becomes incredibly difficult for people (politicians, corporations, etc) who have become accustomed to a certain amount of cover from the elitist press.
Traditional MSM are scared because of such scandals like Dan Rather's Forged Memo story. Before blogs, the fact that there were some serious questions about the authenticity of those national guard memos would have never seen a wide audience and would have been largely relegated to the lore of right-wing conspiracy theorists.
CBS and others are pissed because now their job, getting the story RIGHT, has suddenly become that much more difficult with people who are both knowledgable in such matters AND able to make that knowledge widely known. Furthermore, because of the rapid response made possible by blogs, the facts are checked over and over again and a truer picture of what actually happened becomes hammered out. Contrast this with the relatively slow response times of the NYT or WT, stories with innaccuracies are only slowly corrected and usually in the back sections of the paper. An inaccurate picture is usually what people are left with.
I think there is no clearer ideal of what free political speech looks like.
Humorless sig goes here.
So campaign finance disclosure is now a bad thing?
Once again, it is apparent that /. authors and readers don't bother checking facts and blindy believe any piece of misleading drivel they find on the internet. This is yet another BS article blowing things out of proportion and trying to stir up controversy (and maybe slashdot readership?). If I want to readed misleading, inflammatory, blown out of proportion crap then I would just head down to the supermarket and open the Enquirer!
For those of you who didn't bother to actually read the ordinance before spouting off an opinion, The SF ordinance applies to people actually campaigning and doesn't specifically mention blogging. It says that if you are running for SF political office you have to disclose your expenditures. Standard policy. If you follow the editting marks in the ordinance, you'll see that it previously only referred to "expenditures". The revision added a lot of verbage to include "electioneering communications". Presumably that includes newspaper ads, radio spots, billboards, spam emails, a web site, setting up internet blogs, etc. I would be upset if a city didn't require candidates to disclose their expenditures.
The ordinance does not apply to the average Joe on the street. It does not apply to newspaper articles and blogs not commisioned by the campaigner.