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Political Bloggers May Be Forced to Register
Thebes writes "Under Senate Bill S.1, political bloggers with a readership of over 500 who comment on policy matters or hope to incite 'grassroots' action amongst their readers would be forced to register with the Federal Government as lobbyists."
So how exactly are you supposed to accurately count the readership of a blog? By the number of web hits? Comments? "Friends"? Death threats? What if the two people who do read your blog print off your rants and distribute them to thousands of people that you have no idea are reading your blog?
Maybe it's just a common sense judgement because the 500 people figure falls in the valley between having a blog that anyone cares about, and having a blog that you really, really, wished anyone would care about.
I use to be Republican. It isn't about sides. It's about freedom (ours) and power (theirs).
If we are to remain free, we should be able to criticize the government WITHOUT revealing our identity.
The idea is that we, the people, can overthrow our government IF it goes too far. It is our duty to do so.
500 is such a low number that it's clear all the government wants to do is keep tabs on bloggers. Lobbyists are required to file reports of their activities quarterly. Other laws regarding lobbying are mostly to do with spending money on a politician (not really relevant here, since bloggers *aren't actually lobbyists* and so they probably don't do that anyway). Also, politicians are banned from becoming lobbyists for 2 years. That means that politicians wouldn't be able to keep political blogs (since I assume their readership would be > 500) for two years after leaving office. How is that a good thing? While lobbying reform from earlier in 2006 was mostly a good thing, it also emphasized that being a lobbyist was worse than not being one from a number of perspectives. What the proposition aims to do is effectively restrict the freedom of political bloggers. Some might indeed be in need of some restricting, especially if their viewpoints clash with mine :cough: but really it's just too sweeping of a suggestion.
I like basketball!!1!
The good folks at M-W.com http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/lobbyist have this to say about lobbyists:
intransitive verb : to conduct activities aimed at influencing public officials and especially members of a legislative body on legislation
transitive verb
1 : to promote (as a project) or secure the passage of (as legislation) by influencing public officials
2 : to attempt to influence or sway (as a public official) toward a desired action
Shouldn't this then mean that when a blogger has 500 or more public officials as readers?
If a blogger is being paid by a lobby group, it simply makes them a shill, and has no more influence on lawmakers than actual public opinion might. This is, after all, how public opinion is formed, by listening to our peers, the news, and other sources and making up our own minds.
Should political magazines be required to register as lobbyists? Would a preacher/priest/etc. be required to register as a lobbyist if he mentions politics from the pulpit and the church has more than 500 members? This would cause tons of problems for certain demographic groups in the US.
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Suffice it to say that anyone who wants to post to slashdot would definately have to register. Aaah... sweet civil disobedience of posting as AC. Won't that just ruin the moderator system?
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
his means that you can be paid for grass roots lobbying and not have to register if you have less than 500 readers, which actually protects your rights.
Um... protects whose rights?
Currently, grassroots lobbyists such as Downsize DC, which keeps me informed of Congress's activities, have no such registration requirements. If this law is passed, they will have to comply and will probably be harassed. Which will harm a political information service I use, which I consider a blatant violation of their rights and my rights to free speech and free petition.
Readership is not even the right axis of measurement. Controlling lobbying used to be about controlling money spent to make sure people couldn't just buy elections. Now that the Internet allows the dissemination of ideas for next to nothing, they're trying to control speech with "readership of 500". The cat's out of the bag with this bill's text -- "controlling lobbying" is all about those in power wishing to remain in power by controlling ideas, and not about keeping the fat cats at bay.
Do you, however, want to use a tax-exempt religious organization to urge people to write their Congressional representation to take a specific action on a specific measure? Unfortunately for you, that's just lobbying and a blatantly inappropriate mix of religion and politics.
You're suggesting a scenario in which someone attempts to influence the writer indirectly using money. However, you can't simply assume, as a matter of law, that everyone who's earning money from their writing is subject to such influence. As others have pointed out, all newspapers would then have to register as lobbyists, too.
This is just typical lawmaker confusion about the Constitution, like the many other attempts to restrict free speech online. If it passes, it'll never stand up to a court challenge.
Yes, they are two separate issues.
Do you believe that if the money that went into the war in iraqiganistan instead went into social programs, but nothing was done about the apparent plague of guns on the street that our society would see a net zero impact in crime? If we had billions of dollars pouring into rehabilitation, education, and crime / punishment reform, all of that would simply be throwing good money after bad if you didn't also fully stop new gun sales?
The very social programs you're promoting are in theory supporting a decrease in the motivation for the people who you seem to think are a) buying all the guns and b) causing all the crime. Performance is the combination of Motivation and Capability. If you impact the motivation, there's a signifigantly lower chance of performance.
That is, unless you're fundamentally against guns in principle, and don't think that anyone should have them, ever. People are going to get killed by accidental discharges, but babies drown in buckets too. Life sucks. I'm never going to use a gun to go randomly kill someone. Why should I let you restrict my right to go shooting or even hunting with my family, my (gasp) kids, or anything else?
I would certainly respect your right to want to change the laws in the states, but it sounds like you're position is really muddled. You're cross mixing different issues to try to make a grander point about some sort of cosmic democratic golden rule where we should all be better people. I'm not promoting any sort of republican / democrat / political dialogue here....but you're muddying up the conversation with Iraq, Republicans, and political vitrol.
I own guns. I shoot guns. I am not an evil person. Very simple.
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...Are you really saying "being paid to write and distributing a pamphlet" is so fundamentally different from "being paid to write and distribute a pamp^H^H^H^H BLOG! ON THE INTERNET!" that it should abide by a second set of laws?To put things in perspective, Slashdoters often complain there's fundamentally no difference in "doing X" and "doing X ON THE INTERNET!" so they shouldn't be patentable. Why did we suddenly decide "being a lobbyist" and "being a lobbyist ON THE INTERNET!" are so fundamentally different? From a readership perspective, I don't see the difference between pontificating on the internets and doing so elsewhere, nor between doing so for free and doing so for profit. If we accept this regulation, how do we measure whether an employer is of the sort that requires registration of its journalist employees? Are only the DNC & RNC covered? What about the NRA or PETA? CBS news? Fox news? How about The Heritage Foundation, or MoveOn.org? What about the Church of Scientology, or Richard Stallman...? Where does one draw the line between regulated and unregulated sponsors of published opinions?
Political speech is exactly the kind of speech the First Amendment is meant to protect. If a regulation usurps the freedom to publish political speech anonymously or pseudonymously, then that's not reform, it's a cancer.
I guess onion routers aren't just for Chinese dissidents anymore...
(By the way, I don't think bloggers and pundits should really be called "lobbyists." Lobbyists are generally folks who cajole the elected officials themselves into doing things.)
Pi Ran Out
I'm not sure, the text indicates that you have to be paid. And if I could read legal I would be more confident, but it looks like you might have to be paid to do exactly what you are doing (i.e. if someone posted after being paid to post by a politician).
If only we had a long running control sample of people where we could have a high ratio of guns to people to see what happened to the crime rate.
Oh, wait. It's called Switzerland.
High on guns, low on crime, since 1291.
Just to be fare tho, Japan is also doing pretty well, and as I understand it they have low crime and low guns. Hmm. But wait...maybe it's NOT THE GUNS that make the difference?
Mozy, free online backup service
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But I would bring up at least two fixes to this law:
A) The 500 readers -- Just HOW do we know how many readers there really are? Sure, in plenty of cases it might be clearly yes or no, but... Instead, they should measure hits (yes, that doesn't accurately measure readership, but it IS something we can measure) and set the limit at 2000 hits/day or something.
B) Register? No way. There's no reason to force registration with the government. Instead, they should make them disclose the sponsorship, e.g. "Disclaimer: I was paid $x by FooCorp for this post." or "Discliamer: I work for FooCorp." On the other hand, I have no problem with forcing the sponsors to disclose to the government how much they paid which people for "grassroots" (e.g. astroturf) activities. Bonus points if those filings are publicly available.
If the rumor I just made up that cybernetic Nazis are invading the world is correct, then we're in trouble!
Settle down there, Enjolras.
Did they even bother to read the bill's text, which clearly states that you have to be paid by a client to make arguments for a specific action in Congress?
;-) Given the above precedent, reading the discussions here could easily be considered "pay" for contributing to the discussions, especially if you make your living as a computer geek. But I don't know how you'd calculate the value for tax purposes.
Well, to that first point, you might be surprised at what can be interpreted as "pay". For example, like a lot of computer geeks, I'm an amateur musician, and I play at a lot of local events that don't pay. But I do get into the event for free, and can hang out there as long as I like. I asked a tax expert about this once, and was assured that, yes, that free entrance to an event is legally payment for my performing, and I really should declare the ticket value as income. That's right, being allowed in free to an event where you're performing without pay is considered payment for your service. If you've ever done this, you are legally a professional musician, and because you were "paid" for performing.
So when you post here, do you read the other messages? (I know that many don't, but probably a lot of us do.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Just because laws achieve something that you or I might like personally, doesn't mean they're a good idea. The law is a very blunt instrument that doesn't tend to deal well with fuzzy situations, and the question of someone's motivations for political speech aren't necessarily as easy to pin down as this law seems to imply.
I'm not terribly happy about defending the free speech rights of astroturfers, but this may be one of those situations that arise with free speech, where it's meaningless if you don't grant it even to people who are saying things you dislike. "Lying about who you are" is not illegal in most circumstances, with some exceptions e.g. lying to the government, or cases where monetary fraud is involved; but none of those seem to apply here.
My question is, what is it about the activity of these astroturfers that raises a requirement that they should register with the government, when other kinds of people don't have to? The only answer, afaict, is that the laws related to campaign finance and lobbying do in fact put restrictions on free speech. Those laws in themselves are a tangle of fairly arbitrary definitions and limits, so it's difficult to make snap judgements here. But I'm just not comfortable saying that just because someone is being paid, that they can't write whatever they want to without having to register with the goverment.
Besides, who is being protected from what here? If the electorate is so clueless that they'll just follow the advice of some slick-looking blog and go lobby their congressperson for whatever that blog told them to, then I'm afraid the problem is with the electorate, not with the blog or the laws. Do you blame the pusher, or the user? Passing laws to try to prevent the electorate from being manipulated is just treating the symptom. Everyone's always trying to manipulate the electorate, but most of them aren't subject to regulation.
I'd have less of a problem with a law which required disclosure *on the blog* about who is funding the message, if it's a political one - similar to the case with campaign ads. But requiring registration with the government sounds like overreach to me.
I also agree with people who have suggested that classifying many people as lobbyists could be detrimental. For example, is Al Gore a lobbyist? Let's say he's taken money from environmental groups for his movie etc., and he has a blog where occasionally he encourages people to lobby their congresspeople. This law seems to require him to register as a lobbyist, so now he can be smeared and dismissed by his opponents as a registered lobbyist. And that's the problem: afaict, this law won't just apply to the astroturfers you'd like to see brought to heel.
Finally, as I mentioned in another comment, what happens when someone posts on a blog hosted outside the U.S.? Are we going to institute a Great Firewall, just like China? That's the road that restricting free speech leads you down.
WRONG. Read the posts above -- you'd only be in trouble if someone's paying you to get on Slashdot and advocate. Astroturfing, in other words.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Requiring registration with the government in order to be allowed to publish is a restriction on free speech. You don't need to register with the government to publish other kinds of material. An eligible person who fails to register under this law is subject to penalties, and those penalties would be incurred because of the person's speech. That's a restriction on free speech. As I said, I'd have less of a problem if this was simply a disclosure requirement, without the government registration aspect.
There's no comparison to something like dentists, since there's no constitutional right to operate on someone else's teeth.
Another problem with this law is that the definitions seem quite vague, and there's plenty of precedent for laws like this being applied far beyond their initial ostensible intent. If you get paid money to support your activities in publicizing something, you're arguably a hired agent, and that's where my Al Gore example was coming from. Ditto for what it takes to be classified as stimulating grassroots lobbying.
That may be because people think they're getting something that they want, and haven't thought it through. It's quite fascinating that all it takes to get support here for a law which imposes legal restrictions on speech on the Internet, on blogs, is to ostensibly target an unpopular group.
My bet is that this is all moot anyway. Even if this becomes law, someone'll challenge it and courts will throw it out. I don't see how it can be constitutional.
You're speaking of Byrd right? I think so, but it would be very disingenuous not to point out that the Democratic Party of that era, like the Republican Party then, was very different from the Democratic Party of today. That was the era of the "Southern Democrats" who were a stark contrast from far more moderate and Liberal Dems in California and New England. In fact, look at the voting record for the Civil Rights Act of 1964:
In reality, this was a North vs. South issue and not a Republican vs. Democrat issue. Actually, I didn't realize the numbers were like this myself - this bipartisanship is making me well up.
The Democratic Party had a very difficult time trying to wrest the party free from the Southern Dems. Maybe this is somewhat like the difficulty moderate Republicans have with the evangelical and fundamentalist conservatives who really hijacked the party after Nixon lost in 1960 being so Liberal among other things.
You think I'm being overly partisan, just slagging Democrats?
Yeah, you are. *wink* Jokes aside, I think the real point here is that the party in power is never on the side of the First Amendment. Why would they ever be? The only people who need the First Amendment are those whose speech might offend those in control. When the Republicans were in power, they regularly stopped on the Bill of Rights, especially the First Amendment. Of course, they didn't do it alone; and I'm not even talking about Dems like Zell Miller. Ask any street photographer. Over the last few years many of us have been harassed, intimidated, and treated like criminals without having broken any laws. John McCain's quest to bring ethics to Congress is a joke, but apparently no one remembers he was one of the Keating Five.
To be fair, in the '80s Democrats like Al Gore trampled on the First Amendment under the threat of their congressional wives denying them sex if they didn't get behind censorship: PMRC.