America turned against the First Amendment

First Amendment Freedom of Speech Midterm Elections, Courts Hyperocrisy, and the Age of the Internet: Anarchy vs. Democracy

To put it bluntly, the First Amendment doesn’t work if the legal system doesn’t work. Arguing over the rare exceptions to free speech doesn’t matter if people can’t be meaningfully censured for serious violations or if verdicts are vestigial afterthoughts in cases filed mostly for clout. If the courts are not serious about taking it seriously, it is useless.

The bigger issue, though not the only one, is that the internet allows people to speak to each other at a scale unprecedented in human history. The shortcomings and tradeoffs of the laws governing that speech have never been so evident, and their troublesome edge cases never so numerous. Instead of trying to reckon with a new world, people who make and enforce those laws have abdicated their responsibilities in favor of wielding raw power as well as being careless with common sense.

Virtually every American politician professes to love the First Amendment. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is a law that many people hate. But the more they say about 230, the clearer it becomes that they actually hate the First Amendment and think Section 230 is just fine.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23435358/first-amendment-free-speech-midterm-elections-courts-hypocrisy

Section 230: First Amendment Predictions for Covid Defamation and Harassment, Gun Sales, and the Law of Right-Wise

No person or organization who uses an interactive computer service will be considered as the publisher or speaker of the information that they give.

The law was passed in 1996, and courts have interpreted it expansively since then. It effectively means that web services — as well as newspapers, gossip blogs, listserv operators, and other parties — can’t be sued for hosting or reposting somebody else’s illegal speech. The law was passed after a pair of seemingly contradictory defamation cases, but it’s been found to cover everything from harassment to gun sales. In addition, it means courts can dismiss most lawsuits over web platform moderation, particularly since there’s a second clause protecting the removal of “objectionable” content.

The oft-neglected key here is illegal speech. It helps spread false stories about covid, allows huge crowds of people to dogpile teachers and nurses, and facilitates hate speech at a large scale, and many other critiques of the internet and social media. There are a few cases still in flux, like the defamation lawsuits against Fox News for provably false and unsupported statements about voting machine manufacturers. Defamation is a difficult bar to meet. Section 230, according to Biden, allowed Facebook to host fake news. Last year, he took Facebook to task for “killing people” by allowing the spread of covid vaccine misinformation; shortly thereafter, Democratic senator Amy Klobuchar proposed stripping Section 230 protections for health misinformation.

But making false claims about pandemic science isn’t necessarily illegal, so repealing Section 230 wouldn’t suddenly make companies remove misinformation. There’s a good reason why the First Amendment protects shaky scientific claims. Think of how constantly our early understanding of covid shifted — and now imagine researchers and news outlets getting sued for publishing good-faith assumptions that were later proven incorrect, like covid not being airborne.

Removing Section 230 protections is a sneaky way for politicians to get around the First Amendment. Without 230, the cost of operating a social media site in the United States would skyrocket due to litigation. Unable to invoke a straightforward 230 defense, sites could face protracted lawsuits over even unambiguously legal content. If a post is considered to be illegal, it will be encouraged to be removed on web platforms, even if they do not prevail in court. It would burn a lot of time and money. platform operators do whatever is necessary to keep 230 alive. When politicians gripe, the platforms respond.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23435358/first-amendment-free-speech-midterm-elections-courts-hypocrisy

How stupid are Democrat proposals to reform Section 230? We need the first amendment to protect civil liberties and the freedom of speech in the 21st century

It’s also not clear whether it matters. Jones declared corporate bankruptcy during the procedure, tying up much of his money indefinitely and leaving Sandy Hook families struggling to chase it. He treated the court proceedings contemptuously and used them to hawk dubious health supplements to his followers. Legal fees and damages are hurting his finances but the legal system isn’t doing anything to change him. If anything, it provided yet another platform for him to declare himself a martyr.

Contrast this with the year’s other big defamation case: Johnny Depp’s lawsuit against Amber Heard, who had identified publicly as a victim of abuse (implicitly at the hands of Depp). Amber Heard’s case was less cut-and-dried than Jones’, but she lacked Jones’ shamelessness or social media acumen. The case became public humiliation because of the incentives of social media but also due to the courts failure to respond to how things like live streams contributed to the media circus. Defamation claims can meaningfully hurt people who have to maintain a reputation, while the worst offenders are already beyond shame.

Up until this point, I’ve almost exclusively addressed Democratic and bipartisan proposals to reform Section 230 because those at least have some shred of substance to them.

Republican proposals for speech reforms are crazy and bad. We’ve learned just how bad over the past year, after Republican legislatures in Texas and Florida passed bills effectively banning social media moderation because Facebook and Twitter were using it to ban some posts from conservative politicians, among countless other pieces of content.

The First Amendment probably renders these bans unconstitutional. They are government speech regulations! Texas’ fourth Circuit Court of Appeals had a strange decision to uphold its law without explaining its rationale after the appeals court blocked Florida’s law. Months later, that court actually published its opinion, which legal commentator Ken White called “the most angrily incoherent First Amendment decision I think I’ve ever read.”

The Supreme Court temporarily blocked the Texas law, but its recent statements on speech haven’t been terribly reassuring. The Texas case and the Florida case are almost certain to be heard by a court that includes Clarence Thomas, who is believed to be the only person in the world who believes the government should be allowed to treat social media like a public utility. Conservatives have been against treating internet service providers like a public utility in order to regulate them.

The justices voted not to put the law on hold. Some have interpreted Elena’s vote as a protest against the “shadow docket” where the ruling happened.

But only a useful idiot would support the laws in Texas and Florida on those grounds. The rules are rigged to punish political enemies at the expense of consistency. The internet service providers who control the chokepoints allowing anyone to access the platforms are attacked by them for their power. Disney was spared from speech laws in Florida because of its spending power there, then later proposed blowing up the entire copyright system to punish the company for being out of line.

Even as politicians rant about tech platform censorship, many are trying to prevent kids from finding media that acknowledges the existence of trans, gay or gender non conforming people. On top of getting books pulled from schools and libraries, Republican state delegate in Virginia dug up a rarely used obscenity law to stop Barnes & Noble from selling the graphic memoir Gender Queer and the young adult novel A Court of Mist and Fury — a suit that, in a victory for a functional American court system, was thrown out earlier this year. A panic over genitalia is not limited to the gay community. Even as Texas is trying to stop Facebook from kicking off violent insurrectionists, it’s suing Netflix for distributing the Cannes-screened film Cuties under a constitutionally dubious law against “child erotica.”

The First Amendment means that software code is speech, and it means that software-based services can’t be regulated. Airbnb and Amazon have both used Section 230 to defend against claims of providing faulty physical goods and services, an approach that hasn’t always worked but that remains open for companies whose core services have little to do with speech, just software.

It is obvious that Balk’s law is an oversimplification. Internet platforms change us — they incentivize specific kinds of posts, subjects, linguistic quirks, and interpersonal dynamics. But still, the internet is humanity at scale, crammed into spaces owned by a few powerful companies. And it turns out humanity at scale can be unbelievably ugly. It could be a case of vicious abuse from one person, or it could be a campaign of threats, lies, or terrorism involving thousands of different people, none of it rising to the level of a viable legal case.

The issue of how and why the social media platform limits the reach of certain content is a hot topic on Capitol Hill and among some prominent social media users. Twitter has repeatedly said it does not moderate content based on its political leaning, but instead enforces its policies equally in an effort to keep users safe. In 2018, founder and then-CEO Jack Dorsey told CNN in an interview that the company does “not look at content with regards to political viewpoint or ideology. We are looking at behavior.

The software update will show you if you have been shadowbanned, the reason and how to appeal, Musk said. He did not provide additional details or a timetable.

His announcement came as Musk cheered the release of a new set of company documents that once again put the spotlight on the issue of limiting the reach of certain content, a common practice in the industry that Musk has endorsed and criticized.

Musk said last month that the new policy at Tweets is freedom of speech, not freedom of reach. “Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted & demonetized, so no ads or other revenue to Twitter.”

With that announcement, Musk, who has said he now votes Republican, prompted an outcry from some conservatives, who accused him of continuing a practice they opposed. The clash reflects an underlying tension at Twitter under Musk, as the billionaire simultaneously has promised a more maximalist approach to “free speech,” a move cheered by some on the right, while also attempting to reassure advertisers and users that there will still be content moderation guardrails.

The second set of the so-called Twitter Files, shared by journalist Bari Weiss on Twitter, focused on how the company has restricted the reach of certain accounts, tweets or topics that it deems potentially harmful, including by limiting their ability to appear in the search or trending sections of the platform.

Weiss believes that these actions were not taken with users in mind. In some instances, it’s possible for the company to apply strikes that correspond with suspensions for accounts that break its rules. In the case of strikes, users receive notification that their accounts have been temporarily suspended.

The Twitter Files, Part Duex! Of a Left-Leaning Figure: A Case Study of George W. Bush and the Digital Age of the Internet

In both cases, the internal documents appear to have been provided directly to the journalists by Musk’s team. Musk on Friday shared Weiss’ thread in a tweet and added, “The Twitter Files, Part Duex!!” along with two popcorn emojis.

Weiss offered several examples of right-leaning figures who had moderation actions taken on their accounts, but it’s not clear if such actions were equally taken against left-leaning or other accounts.

In the spring of 2022, I was sitting in my college apartment studying for an exam when I received a call from an unfamiliar number. Not thinking anything of it, I answered and was stunned to meet a Secret Service agent asking about an unsavory tweet I’d posted about former president George W. Bush four months earlier.

I was afraid of being indicted for a federal crime at the age of 20 years old because my friend in my room was on the Detroit Field Office website.

It was laughable to me that a federal agent didn’t bother to find out who I was or check my contact information even though they saw my old drunken tweet and thought it was important enough to investigate.

I had a bad relationship with it. I wanted to increase my audience on the social media site so I could sell my Substack like a celebrity. I went to bed drunk after I said George Bush should be dead, after arguing with my roommate about 9/11 and the unjust war in Iraq. It wasn’t uncommon for me to say bad things. My roommates advised me to take it down because they were more cautious than me. Ignoring them, I kept it up for reasons like ego and fallacious integrity. It came back to bite me four months later.

While my college classmates and I were worried about the federal government interfering in the lives of everyday citizens, it’s not the only area of surveillance I should have been concerned about. Internet service providers and platforms like Twitter and Facebook all regularly moderate their service in ways that can either thrust users into the eyes of law enforcement or keep them safe from surveillance. It is up to the people in power to make that distinction. The person in charge of making that call has an important say in whether that was a stupid or legitimate complaint.

“Governments in Iran and China are centralized and control service providers, or have very strict rules on who is operating them and how,” says University of Michigan computer science professor Roya Ensafi, founder of Censored Planet. In some countries there is a requirement for the government to rule on how to implement censorship because service providers are commercial entities. She says that the government always has a good idea of what the internet service providers are doing.