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Facebook, Google, Twitter To Face US Lawmakers About Tech 'Censorship' (cnet.com)
Facebook, Google and Twitter are headed back to Washington next week to testify at a congressional hearing about alleged tech censorship. From a report: Tech companies have faced accusations that they're censoring conservative speech on their platforms. The companies have denied the allegations in the past. The hearing before the Senate Judiciary's subcommittee on the Constitution is scheduled for April 10 and is titled "Stifling Free Speech: Technological Censorship and the Public Discourse." A Facebook spokesperson said Neil Potts, its public policy director, will be testifying. Twitter and Google didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. A source familiar with the Senate hearing said Twitter and Google officials will also be attending. The hearing will likely mark Potts' second congressional appearance next week. Facebook and Google officials are expected to appear before the House Judiciary Committee on April 9 to answer questions about the spread of white nationalism on their platforms.
here we go again.
Just because one has a right to express one's opinion in this country doesn't mean that any corporation has the obligation to carry/post/air your opinion on the platform they own.
Very good point. Facebook, for example demands that you MUST allow their creepy "targeted" ads. Despite laws passed in the EU that make that illegal.
These companies get to have their cake and eat it too. That alone is an argument for breaking them up.
Corporatism != Free Market
While I'm no constitutional scholar, I'm not sure that Marsh v. Alabama applies here. I'm not sure that it doesn't, either.
An attempt was made to use Marsh v. Alabama as a precedent in Cyber Promotions v. America Online, but that attempt wasn't successful.
I'm not sure that "well established", when it comes to electronic communications, is quite accurate.
Check out Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck and Cyber Promotions v. America Online. At the moment, I think it would be more accurate to say "unclear".
So you'd want to ban antivaxxer propaganda. But think: not that long ago it would have been your opinion on the matter that would have been banned, not theirs. Free speech and censorship work both ways.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
The following is current US law.
The phone company is not responsible for the content of any phone call, because they don't control the content of the communication. They don't even know what you're saying on the phone, so they aren't responsible for what you say using their phone network. That probably makes sense intuitively. This is long-standing law.
If a magazine, such as US News and World Report, publishes libelous articles falsely accusing you of all kinds of things, with reckless disregard for the truth, they are responsible. You can sue them. Their writer and editor decided to publish those lies about you. This is also long-standing law.
In essence, if they control what is said, they become responsible for their decisions. The term is "editorial control".
Wise management of a platform, therefore, has been to refrain from editorial control. Don't decide what gets posted - or you will be responsible for what you decided to publish. Slashdot found a good way to do that. Nobody at Slashdot decides to remove "bad" posts. Rather, the readers decide how prominent a post should be. Slashdot gets the benefits of moderation (crap tends to become invisible fairly quickly) without the legal liability of Slashdot picking and choosing.
> How , if they become a publisher, do they become liable for an opinion piece any more so than a newspaper?
A newspaper is liable (responsible) for what they publish. Their editors decide what to publish and not publish. Because of freedom of the press protected by the first amendment, they are allowed to say pretty much anything that is either true or purely opinion. Libel will get them in trouble, and certain other things that aren't protected.
Practical effects were that widely-distributed communications (broadcast) were controlled by media companies, which were responsible for their content; person-to-person communications such as phone calls and letters were only carried, not controlled, by large companies. Individuals were responsible for what they wrote, but they could only write to a few people at a time.
Speaking of freedom of the press, for about thirty-five years there has been a push from the big government party to force publishers to publish whatever the Congressionally appointed bureacracy at the moment thinks is "fair". Relevant search terms include "fairness doctrine" and "equal time". Basically Reagan was good on television (he was a movie star), and the opposing party was trying to legistlate themselves more air time. The courts and the "limited government" party have pushed back on this, of course.
More recently, as the web has become more popular, we've had more and more instances of individual speakers reaching large audiences, such as popular blogs, Twitter accounts, and YouTube channels. That means that an individual can reach a large audience. The company simply carries the communication, without editorial control. No longer do you have to be a large media company in order to have a sizeable audience.
With that change, the long-standing separation between carriers and publishers (authors) has led to some uncomfortable situations. Does Facebook really have no responsibility for what is posted there? Well, is the postal service responsible for what is sent through the mail?
With the new ability for individual speakers to reach significant audiences, compromise is sometimes used. Remember the phone company or the USPS isn't liable in part because they don't even know whether the content of the communication is lawful or not. In some cases, once the platform has been NOTIFIED of unlawful content, they can then follow a specified procedure to protect themselves from liability.
One example of a specified procedure is a procedure available in instances of a claim of copyright violation. The copyright holder notifies the platform that they are hosting infringing material. The person who posted it can then notify the platform that they disagree, they say it's NOT infringing. If person w
The law is clear.
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 (47 U.S.C. 230(c)) states:
(c) Protection for “Good Samaritan” blocking and screening of offensive material
(1) Treatment of publisher or speaker:
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
(2) Civil liability:
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of —
(A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or
(B) any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in paragraph (1).
1. They are not liable for what you post.
2. They can censor you if they want to.
"You want to know how to help your kids? Leave them the fuck alone." -George Carlin