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The Consequences of Indecency (techcrunch.com)
Ron Wyden, a senior U.S. Senator from Oregon, argues there should be consequences for internet companies that refuse to remove hate speech from their platforms. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a report Wyden wrote via TechCrunch: I wrote the law that allows sites to be unfettered free speech marketplaces. I wrote that same law, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, to provide vital protections to sites that didn't want to host the most unsavory forms of expression. The goal was to protect the unique ability of the internet to be the proverbial marketplace of ideas while ensuring that mainstream sites could reflect the ethics of society as a whole. In general, this has been a success -- with one glaring exception. I never expected that internet CEOs would fail to understand one simple principle: that an individual endorsing (or denying) the extermination of millions of people, or attacking the victims of horrific crimes or the parents of murdered children, is far more indecent than an individual posting pornography.
Social media cannot exist without the legal protections of Section 230. That protection is not constitutional, it's statutory. Failure by the companies to properly understand the premise of the law is the beginning of the end of the protections it provides. I say this because their failures are making it increasingly difficult for me to protect Section 230 in Congress. Members across the spectrum, including far-right House and Senate leaders, are agitating for government regulation of internet platforms. Even if government doesn't take the dangerous step of regulating speech, just eliminating the 230 protections is enough to have a dramatic, chilling effect on expression across the internet. Were Twitter to lose the protections I wrote into law, within 24 hours its potential liabilities would be many multiples of its assets and its stock would be worthless. The same for Facebook and any other social media site. Boards of directors should have taken action long before now against CEOs who refuse to recognize this threat to their business. In an interview with Recode, Wyden said that platforms should be punished for hosting content that goes against "common decency." "I think what the Alex Jones case shows, we're gonna really be looking at what the consequences are for just leaving common decency in the dust," Wyden told Recode's Kara Swisher. "...What I'm gonna be trying to do in my legislation is to really lay out what the consequences are when somebody who is a bad actor, somebody who really doesn't meet the decency principles that reflect our values, if that bad actor blows by the bounds of common decency, I think you gotta have a way to make sure that stuff is taken down."
Social media cannot exist without the legal protections of Section 230. That protection is not constitutional, it's statutory. Failure by the companies to properly understand the premise of the law is the beginning of the end of the protections it provides. I say this because their failures are making it increasingly difficult for me to protect Section 230 in Congress. Members across the spectrum, including far-right House and Senate leaders, are agitating for government regulation of internet platforms. Even if government doesn't take the dangerous step of regulating speech, just eliminating the 230 protections is enough to have a dramatic, chilling effect on expression across the internet. Were Twitter to lose the protections I wrote into law, within 24 hours its potential liabilities would be many multiples of its assets and its stock would be worthless. The same for Facebook and any other social media site. Boards of directors should have taken action long before now against CEOs who refuse to recognize this threat to their business. In an interview with Recode, Wyden said that platforms should be punished for hosting content that goes against "common decency." "I think what the Alex Jones case shows, we're gonna really be looking at what the consequences are for just leaving common decency in the dust," Wyden told Recode's Kara Swisher. "...What I'm gonna be trying to do in my legislation is to really lay out what the consequences are when somebody who is a bad actor, somebody who really doesn't meet the decency principles that reflect our values, if that bad actor blows by the bounds of common decency, I think you gotta have a way to make sure that stuff is taken down."
go on, define it
Decency.... hate speech .... blah blah blah blah
Everything that Senator Wyden says is the same exact justification that China, North Korea and every other dictatorship uses for suppressing free speech and free expression.
...and decides that things like "homosexuality", "pre-marital sex" and "mixed marriages" are "against the common decency" - then it's perfectly ok for any matching content to be removed from the internet, right? RIGHT?
Because THAT'S what this is saying...
...when what is considered indecent is decided by those in power?
--- Reality doesn't care about your opinions, it happens anyway and if you are in the way you'll get squished.
Let's start with the bad actor Ron Wyden, somebody who really doesn't meet the decency principles that reflect our values. That bad actor blows by the bounds of common decency. Make sure that stuff is taken down.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" - from The Friends of Voltaire
This kind of commitment to free speech is a pillar of classical liberalism. Sen. Wyden is interested in the opposite: infringing civil rights.
Hate speech does poorly in a free marketplace of ideas, and brings discredit upon the speaker. There is no need to infringe freedom of speech, one of the most fundamental civil rights.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
"Free speech only important if it's offensive".
The thing is, the online services have already taken that first step by agreeing together to remove Alex Jones from all the major social media sites.
The fact that Alex Jones is a reprehensible conspiracy-mongering nutburger is beside the point. Of course he is. Anyone with two neurons capable of achieving a synapse can tell that.
But he's far less of an evil than Holocaust deniers and actual Nazis. If they can remove the lesser evil, whey are they hesitating to remove the greater evil?
They've already passed the "That's already been decided; now we're just haggling about the price" point with the Alex Jones thing.
The only way to win this game is to refuse to start playing it in the first place, but that horse left the barn a few weeks ago.
Social media cannot exist without the legal protections of Section 230. That protection is not constitutional, it's statutory.
The first amendment states the following:
The first amendment is intended to restrain congress from acting against free speech. If revising or removing the Section 230 protections has a chilling effect on free expression, then Congress has abridged free speech, and the act of modifying Section 230 was then unconstitutional. It does not matter that Section 230 did not exist at the time the constitution was made ---- Today we enjoy certain free speech rights, And a law protects platforms who enable us to exercise that free speech right. ANY attempt to curtail that by passing any kind of law or law that says an existing law shall change --- is an abridgement of Free Speech; Once congress passes a law protecting free speech (Such as Section 230) --- which is their authority to do in order to enforce the constitution, The first amendment ensures congress does not have the right to abridge the rights of expression by cancelling that protection.
Who gets to set that "ethics of society" for political speech? One side of US politics for political comments?
Who gets to flag and enforce that "ethics of society" on US domestic politics? Followers of one side of US politics?
The USA saw what "chilling effect on expression" was like under the tyranny of a UK monarchy.
Thats why the USA protects the freedom of speech and freedom after speech.
Why the USA has freedom of the press.
The right to peaceably assemble.
To petition for a governmental redress of grievances.
Self-evident under God. Not the changing partisan politics to "reflect the ethics of society".
US freedoms are protected from governments, not for governments to set limits on.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
If it's not directly inciting violence then no. This is exactly the sort of oppression the far right is hoping and praying for. They'll use this crap to organize themselves. Nothing makes a group band together like an opponent. This is a terrible idea and Wyden should know that. He's better than this.
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Simply look at the problems global platforms are experiencing with foreign governments currently.
Twitter pressured to remove content because it offends the thin-skinned leader of another country (China, Turkey). I mean really, Winnie the Pooh is offensive? Imagine Trump having the power to ban all pictures and references to Cheetos from the internet because its "offensive" to his supporters!
The bigger problem though is vocal minorities.
Imagine the US Government forcing YouTube to remove Mark Meechan's (Nazi dog guy's) videos because a small group of people with no sense of humor complained.
Imagine Facebook removing a Harry Potter fan page because a group of angry Bible Belt moms complained it was "of the devil" and offensive.
Imagine the knee-jerk reaction to the next mass shooting being to remove whatever imagined influence (Ozzy Osbourne, Iron maiden, D&D, Magic the Gathering, Marilyn Manson, Call of Duty, etc) from the internet "to prevent it happening again".
This isn't a slippery slope. Its a cliff. And we're standing at the edge with one foot over the drop while politicians stand behind us screaming that somehow that step will be good for us.
Hate speech is speech the Left hates.
There is this constant attempt by the Left to label any position it doesn't like as far right or Nazi. Thus, once labeled, it can be removed. Coincidentally, this is the same philosophy used by the far left regimes of the 20th century. They failed in part because they punished anyone who told the truth and thus could not obtain accurate information about their situation. That's the problem we developed free speech to deal with. It's very worrisome the Left apparently learned nothing from this.
Hagbard Celine's Law: accurate information is only possible in a non-punishing situation.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Yes, its almost as if they dont already have plenty of existing laws that can be applied for anything that is ACTUALLY ILLEGAL.
What this is pushing for is government oversight on the morality of discussions, and anyone who doesn't understand that deserves to suffer the consequences.
Someone online engaging in actual slander, actual threats, actual hate speech (already getting blurry there) already has LAWS THAT CAN BE APPLIED.
'On the internet' is not some kind of magic legal umbrella.
The larger concern here is farcebook et.al. acting like they have common-carrier like protections and yet ALSO engaging in selective removal of content.
They cannot have it both ways.. Or at least they should not be able to.
It's stupid. I can call you a dick, a cunt, an asshole, a fuckwit, a retard, a moron, an imbecile, a douchebag, a jackass, or a buffoon, and that's all perfectly acceptable and not hate speech. But I can't call you a n*gger or a f*ggot, because hate speech. But you can call me a cracker or a breeder, because hand waving.
Who the fuck makes up this bullshit? Idiots with too much time on their hands and an IQ smaller than their waist band.
If he was a Republican that sentence would have made that very clear....
Welcome to Liberal Socialist Communist thinking.. China would be proud.
5 out of 6 people enjoy Russian Roulette & 6 out of 7 Dwarfs are not Happy
Yeah, but Senator Wyden doesn't like that the meanies get to spew their ignorant crap, so instead of punishing the people that are "editorializing" he's going after the publishers.
Because clearly Mark Zuckerberg needs a few more congressional subpoenas because people are mean on the Internet.
How is this not a clear violation of the First Amendment again? Sure sounds like he's trying to get Congress to make a law abridging free speech, and it won't hold up to the so-called "yelling fire in a theater" test as it's not endangering public safety or willful negligence. In the best case, it's trolling or extreme ignorance - worst case is this is a back door for government abuse of power to go after political enemies and malcontents because you don't like what they're saying.
Who is the arbiter of what's "decent" under this law anyway?
Oh, Senator Wyden. I voted for you once upon a time when you hadn't gone full idiot...
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Wyden is is lying about what the CDA is designed to do.
Social media cannot exist without the legal protections of Section 230. That protection is not constitutional, it's statutory.
Civil libertarians have waiting 20 years for this shoe to drop. Back when the CDA was being debated we predicted that this is *EXACTLY* what would happen. It was never meant to protect freedom of speech. Stop pretending it was. The Communications Decency Act was passed with the goal of protecting minors from online exposure to indecent material.
This law was a legal bait-and-switch setup. Step 1: Pass a law that mirrors something the constitution already guarantees. Step 2: Claim that the protection is statutory not constitutional. Step 3: Remove or amend the law and now you can claim that you can regulate that thing.
I want them to get rid of the CDA because this was never something congress should have had the power to legislate. Twitter, Facebook, Google, Instagram - none of them are liable for what their users post any more than the owner of a building is liable for the graffiti that is placed on it, or the newspaper is liable for the opinions in the letters to the editor. This is a cornerstone of democracy.
You can't reasonably argue that the 1st amendment prevents congress from passing law that inhibits freedom of speech, but also claim that manufacturers of pens are liable for the speech, or manufacturers of loudspeakers are liable for the sounds that come out of them, or web site hosts are responsible for what people post on them, or bulletin boards are responsible for the notes people tack onto them, or that telephone companies liable for the content of calls people make, etc.
Remember that the CDA set the legal stage for the DMCA, which is what makes it possible for the RIAA and MPAA to start using ISPs as copyright police. With the DMCA, these new "statutory protections" that we didn't ever need now had limits. ISPs are now only protected from liability if they cooperate with copyright holders demands, and if they take down "hacking" or circumvention tools.
Wyden is claiming that section 230 is a free-speech clause, but it really isn't. It's called the Commications Decency Act for a reason! They wanted to regulate what is "decent." Section 230 also grants ISPs immunity from liability if they *restrict* someone's free speech. Without section 230, they might be legally liable if they block someone's speech! We are better off without it.
Go ahead, try to stop Americans from cursing online, or posting porn, or posting whatever you want to call "indecent." Does Mr. Wyden really think that is even possible?
I heartily invite you to go and read the first amendment, and then go fuck yourself. You didn't "the law that allows sites to be unfettered free speech marketplaces", you had NO LEGAL POWER to forbid it.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
An astute observation. You're one smart motherfucker!
sig: sauer
Really struggling to find something substantive in that comment that might have justified the "Insightful" mod. You're sort of in the neighborhood of the Paradox of Tolerance, but not that it shows in your comment.
I think the consequences should be to your personal reputation, and the largest problem of the Internet is that there are too many people who don't care about their personal reputation or who feel no accountability for saying negative and destructive things. In the case of trolls, I'm not sure "people" is a meaningful label, since they can just spawn fresh sock puppets so quickly.
In terms of a constructive solution (which always seems lost and even laughable [a bid for "Funny" mods?] around today's Slashdot), I think the solution is to help the negative folks render themselves invisible. I think karma should be enhanced to be a kind of multidimensional metric of EPR (Earned Public Reputation). You would be able to control what sort of people are visible to you and who therefore can intrude into your attention and consume your time.
Personally speaking, I would like to set my visibility threshold a little above the default value. I think the default should be just slightly positive, which means that newbies would mostly be visible to each other, but they could quickly earn the normal level of visibility, perhaps merely by existing for a few weeks even if they don't earn any favorable mods. However by setting my own bar a little higher I would be able to focus on people who I'm more interested in. For example, I would like to favor people who earn funny mod points, even if a particular comment hasn't been so modded.
Time's up. ADSAuPR, atAJG.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
In the past, Ron Wyden has defended constitutional rights. It is sad to see him now supporting censorship.
He is up for reelection in 2020.
Who is the arbiter of what's "decent" under this law anyway?
Allow me to condense Sen, Wyden's remarks;
"We must infringe upon your freedom to prevent those we deem Nazis from infringing upon your freedom." -- Sen. Ron Wyden (D) 2018
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
I would rather not. There have been conspiracy groups forever. JFK assasinations, moon landings, UFOs, con-trails, you name it. It was _never_ a real threat until they started banning it. By banning it they have given more credibility to this guy than anything they could have ever done by just letting him get on his soap box weekly.
Not really. "Social Justice", at least as it is practiced today, appears to be not concerned with equal opportunity but equal OUTCOMES. The only way to make THAT happen is to remove those three aspirations of classical liberalism: political freedom, civil liberty, and economic freedom. It is a belief that somehow everyone is a victim and everyone else owes you something. To to promote it, they foster "identity politics" where people are not individuals, but just parts of either victim or oppressor "groups." And to "rectify it", they seek government and corporate assistance, demonize anyone who disagrees, and seek to shut down any rational conversation in any way possible- like appealing to emotion instead of facts and banning speech. Gone is individual responsibility and gratefulness, replaced with blame, sadness, and outrage. That is the modern social justice warrior, at least as I have observed.
It was _never_ a real threat until they started banning it.
I would say they were never a threat until POTUS started spreading them. These conspiracy theories have become a strategy to hold on to power when the shit hits the fan, and at the expense of the mental health of his base.
moon landings, UFOs, con-trails, you name it
You misspelled CHEMtrails. I see you're just another stoge of the deep state trying to spread misinformation: downplaying it by changing its name. We're on to you. and I'm safe protected from my tinfoil hat AND tinfoil breathing mask. Sure that make it a little hard to breathe and
SJW n. One who posts facts.
What's made conspiracy theories and Alex Jones in particular "a real threat" recently is their widespread harassment of the families of mass shooting victims, driven by the relatively recent rise of false flag conspiracy theories around mass shootings (the shooting was a false flag, therefore the families of the fake people who didn't die are "crisis actors," therefore let's harass the shit out of them until they admit their ties to the Illuminati!).
Alex Jones in particular has driven many targeted harassment campaigns against these family members.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
How is this not a clear violation of the First Amendment again? Sure sounds like he's trying to get Congress to make a law abridging free speech, and it won't hold up to the so-called "yelling fire in a theater" test as it's not endangering public safety or willful negligence. In the best case, it's trolling or extreme ignorance - worst case is this is a back door for government abuse of power to go after political enemies and malcontents because you don't like what they're saying.
Oh, that's just it though - it's not the government censoring your speech, it's the government forcing a third party to censor your speech. Totally different. /sarcasm
And as long as FOSTA-SESTA stands, they already have their foot in the door.
If you get banned from every restaurant in town, you need to admit that you have a problem.
Pretty sure that was the message some certain southerners wanted a certain other group to learn.
Facebook, et al. are losing more users by not banning Infowars than by banning them.
Do you have any reason to believe that or are you just making it up? These groups have been on those platforms since the beginning and it has never been a problem until we got onto this new censorship push.
If you get banned from every restaurant in town, you need to admit that you have a problem.
Pretty sure that was the message some certain southerners wanted a certain other group to learn.
Race is a protected class. Gullibility is not.
Even the US Supreme Court reaffirmed that hate speech doesn't exist and censoring someone using the term "hate speech" violates the first amendment. You have a freedom of speech, you do NOT have freedom from being offended, see Supreme Court outcome of the Larry Flynt case.
From the US Supreme Court case "Matal vs Tam" aka "the slants case" the Justices verdict:
[The idea that the government may restrict] speech expressing ideas that offend ⦠strikes at the heart of the First Amendment. Speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground is hateful; but the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express âoethe thought that we hate.â
A law found to discriminate based on viewpoint is an âoeegregious form of content discrimination,â which is âoepresumptively unconstitutional.â ⦠A law that can be directed against speech found offensive to some portion of the public can be turned against minority and dissenting views to the detriment of all. The First Amendment does not entrust that power to the governmentâ(TM)s benevolence. Instead, our reliance must be on the substantial safeguards of free and open discussion in a democratic society.
So it doesn't matter what media says or state morons try to pass laws... Anyone taking it to court would automatically win as the Supreme Court has ruled more than once like over 20 times that there is no such thing as hate speech and any laws enacted would be found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.
Well, now that we know the National Enquirer disguised a $100K+ campaign contribution as a purchase of rights to publish a Playboy bunny's story, how about the rest of their 'journalism' throughout the election.
The Rachel Maddow segment linked below lists a bunch of blatantly false cover stories that ran throughout the 2016 election season. Now, even if you hate Maddow, and think she's a 'left-wing version of Fox' (she isn't, but hey...), you can't argue with her interpretation of what was on the covers of these tabloids. Okay, so nobody actually believes tabloid covers, but still - they were published for a reason, and it would be hard to argue that that reason was anything other than to make Trump look good and Clinton look bad (even if it's just by boring the ugliest images they could find of her face deep into your subconscious). So, free speech, right? Well, there are certainly limits. So where would this fall? And does the truth or falsehood (and whether the speaker is aware of that falsehood) relevant?
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-ma...
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
Race is a protected class. Gullibility is not.
Which "Race" is protected? And, why only the one you name?
"Protected class" doesn't refer to any one race. It refers to categories which cannot be used as a basis for discrimination. Race is one of those categories.
IF ALL of them are protected then the "protection" is meaningless.
Huh? It means your race (or whichever class you are looking at) cannot be used as a basis to refuse service, be it African American, Caucasian, Pacific Islander, etc. That's pretty fucking meaningful in my book.