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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.
The problem is, they are either a platform or a publisher.
The difference is in responsibility. If they are a platform, then they have a wide range of latitude on content on that platform. They aren't responsible. The moment they start picking an choosing, they start to become a publisher, and the content protection narrows substantially.
Censorship is a natural tendency, and we all ought to fight against it in all its forms. The idea that some ideas are just "too dangerous" is a slippery slope that we don't want to ride down.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
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.
Just break them up and stop letting them promote Nazis on their sites.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
It can be politically awkward to admit it, but there's a very plausible explanation for this: Maybe political views just correlate with things which violate the usage policy? Check out a few conservative sites and you don't need to go far to find 'gays are plotting to rape your children' conspiracy theories, people calling for illegal immigrants to be treated as hostile invaders and shot at the border, and rumors of an Islamic takeover. Hardly surprising that they would sometimes get caught crossing the AUP line.
And that's before you read the comments sections. Never read the comments sections. It's not healthy.
Google/Facebook/Twitter all want freedom from any liability for what gets posted on THEIR sites.
They got that from the government in return for ensuring freedom of speech on their sites.
If they don't want to support true freedom of speech, let them be liable for everything posted.
Three companies that need to be smashed into a thousand pieces.
Sorry Microsoft, you were 1990's evil.
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.
The problem is, they are either a platform or a publisher.
Yep, and that is what Congress is grilling them about - why should they remain classified as a platform when they are heavily shaping the views being published? As it stands Twitter is at this point just a really terrible newspaper.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Here's the first sentence (emphasis mine):
The public forum doctrine is an analytical tool used in First Amendment jurisprudence to determine the constitutionality of speech restrictions implemented on government property.
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".
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
You say a general idea is not good, because a lunatic got away with bad behavior under its umberella, so...
Apparently the regulation/restriction of communications "for the public good", or for societal morals, or cultural cleanliness is also "NOT good for society" as you put it. Take a look at the NAZIs as a prime example. [it's fun when you can go all-in on Godwin for a good cause]
Hell's bells, All Marxist thought is bad. with over a hundred million corpses in the 20th century alone as a punctuation, when you consider the regimes of National Socialist Hitler, Soviet Socialist Stalin, and Communists Chariman Mao and Pol Pot as [as you say] "prime example[s]" examples of a unification of Marxism and controlled public speech "for the public good".
The founders of the USA had a much better idea: Let everybofy speak freely and let everybody wisely discern for him/her self whether a particular speaker is right or wrong, good or bad.