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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.
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.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
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).
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.