That's odd, I don't recall arguing for nationalization of Twitter, nor do I recall planting a "conservative" flag. People see what they want to see I guess...
The comment was talking about there being a blurred line in how these companies exist in our world today. Not arguing for cake based discrimination. If Twitter and co are in novel ethical territory, it's worth questioning if we need new a new paradigm.
I would replace "conservatives" with "people in general" and remind everyone that this is why protecting personal freedoms, even ones you don't like, is of the utmost importance.
> The Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment constrains governmental actors and protects private actors.
To draw the line between governmental and private, this
Court applies what is known as the state-action doctrine.
Under that doctrine, as relevant here, a private entity
may be considered a state actor when it exercises a function “traditionally exclusively reserved to the State.”
Jackson v. Metropolitan Edison Co., 419 U. S. 345, 352
(1974). [0]
Twitter didn't restrict Trump's tweet. It added their own speech (and not masqueraded as Trump).
Follow me here:
Citizen United says that corporations have the same free speech rights as individuals, thus allowing them to exercise their "speech" by dumping tons of dark money into politics.
Twitter exercised free speech by publishing something on their own platform.
The government is now trying to limit Twitter's right to free speech as has been upheld by the Supreme Court.
> Would it be right to simply say, "if jwaldenbach doesn't like Zoom's polices, he doesn't have to use it"?
Yes.
> What is Western Union added a 'fact check' to your telegrams?
Don't use Western Union
> What if Google inserts a 'fact check' in your emails?
Don't use Google?
You don't have to use Zoom, you don't have to use Western Union, if you don't like their policies don't use their products.
Trump uses Twitter because he likes it but it's twitters own site! If they want to put 'Trump is a big orange fat dumb loser' under every one of his tweets they can, if they want they can turn it into the 'we love dogs!' site tomorrow, just replace the whole website with pictures of dogs they can. It would kill the company, but they can do it if they want.
I have no idea where this idea that Trump is being forced to use twitter and they're manipulating his free speech on someone elses website is coming from.
Your answers were expected, but I mentioned Zoom for a specific reason...
Currently, many judicial hearings are being conducted using Zoom. You can literally be ORDERED to appear for a hearing using Zoom.
In this situation, what would you make of Zoom inserting that tag line? Does it change your analysis?
If yes, why? It's still a private company. Does the fact that the government is requiring you to use is restrict what the private company may or may not do?
There are two sides to the "if you don't like it, don't use it" argument. You are focusing only on one side; namely, if the consumer doesn't like it, he need not use it.
The Zoom example might open your eyes to the other side; namely, if a private company chooses to offer a service to the government, it needs to abide by certain restrictions... and, if it doesn't like it, it need not provide that service.
In the Zoom example, if Zoom insists on putting the tag on your video during hearings, a reasonable response would be to turn to Zoom -- and not you -- and say, "If you aren't willing to curtail your 1st Am. rights a bit, Zoom, then don't provide the service to the Court... the choice is yours."
If Twitter is hosting government officials and agencies -- in their official capacity -- there are certain restrictions it muse abide by; namely, not modifying, editorializing, or shadow-banning their posts. If Twitter doesn't like this restriction, it can choose not to host that government official or agency.
> In this situation, what would you make of Zoom inserting that tag line? Does it change your analysis?
It would be counter to the contractual agreements and policies that Zoom has set up. Twitter has no such obligations.
> The Zoom example might open your eyes to the other side; namely, if a private company chooses to offer a service to the government, it needs to abide by certain restrictions... and, if it doesn't like it, it need not provide that service.
The company is responsible for operating according to the terms that both it and its users agree to, and the law. That is it.
> If Twitter is hosting government officials and agencies -- in their official capacity -- there are certain restrictions it muse abide by; namely, not modifying, editorializing, or shadow-banning their posts. If Twitter doesn't like this restriction, it can choose not to host that government official or agency.
Twitter's only mistake is not reprimanding the racist hate-mongers like Trump for the policies it supposedly has. Any regular user or lesser public figure would have (and has) been banned if they tweeted the things he does.
If Twitter has agreements with these users, stating that they are immune from all of Twitter's posted rules, then sure your argument has footing. Otherwise, you don't get to hijack a platform with your own rules and because you happen to work for the government and open a free account there.
Free speech as an idea doesn't just apply to the government, it is just that we only enforce free speech on the government. The ideal of free speech and its merits applies just as well to private actors and we should try to live up to it whenever we can. If you think that companies should be able to use their power and influence to suppress the speech of individuals then I would say that you are more authoritarian than liberal.
I'm so baffled by this because there are plenty of places where speech is suppressed and its fine. A highschool teacher can fail a student for shouting answers in an exam. A person can kick someone out of their house for saying horrible things. A cafe can ask someone to leave for saying slurs. A professor can ask a student to leave a lecture hall for talking...
The right to speech is curtailed all the time in private... We even teach it to our kids, such as raising one's hand, or waiting their turn.
You are misunderstanding free speech, it isn't a literal statement. Free speech is about being allowed to express ideas, not disrupting classrooms or harassing others. If you are allowed to express your idea after waiting for your turn, then your speech wasn't suppressed even if people told you to be quiet for a while.
It is fine to police disruptions, but you shouldn't police ideas. If all conservatives are told to wait for their turns while it is fine for liberals to just blurt things out then it isn't free speech. However if everyone is forced to wait and a conservative gets banned for talking out of turn then it is still free speech, he got banned for disrupting and not for his message.
It is hard/impossible to create laws around it since it is hard to formally define, but often it is obvious when it is infringed in practice just that we can't litigate it.
You haven’t been to imgur have you? Some sites have a point system and if your “social score” is too low you most definitely can get banned. There’s generally more left leaning people than right leaning people on some platforms, and when someone disagrees with someone else but otherwise can’t refute their statements they hit downvote. Enough of this and you get a ban.
You took my comment too literally - of course there are people who've been banned somewhere online for having opinions another human disagreed with. My point was that no large social media platform has a policy of banning people for civilized political disagreements.
Ok so what do we do about the first part of banning people for having a different opinion when they were otherwise civilized? A social media site having a policy that directly states “if you disagree with my statements i’ll ban you” is clearly not an issue nor is even worth discussing. I can’t really see how this is taking your comment too literally.
Some site are like that, plus talking about the voting system is against the rules, and even if you get plenty of upvotes, you can still be throttled or banned by a moderator.
Or maybe we think that giving the government the power to tell private companies which speech they must allow is more authoritarian than letting the companies decide for themselves. Whenever there are tricky balancing questions like this, I always err on the side of the party that doesn't have a monopoly on violence.
Extending free speech laws to cover companies which acts as public forums is not the same as the government telling companies what they are allowed to say and do. If you think that free speech laws are fine for governments then you should also think it is fine for certain companies which grew too powerful and influential.
How do you think those laws will be enforced, if not the government telling companies "you must allow this defamatory and/or untrue content on your servers"? Facebook and Twitter can't censor me, because I am not a customer of either company, and neither has a law enforcement wing. The government, on the other hand, has unlimited firepower and I have no choice whether to "do business" with it. So yes, I will absolutely apply different standards to each.
Why is it up to the company to decide what is defamatory or untrue? If you read the rebuttal twitter posted on his tweet you’ll see it boils down to “no evidence”. This doesn’t mean his claims are not true, it means there’s no evidence they are. These are very different concepts. So now twitter is running around saying it’s untrue when legally it hasn’t been proven untrue. They should instead take a hands off approach and let people think, read and decide for themselves.
I personally feel much freer to think for myself if government officials can't force private companies to carry their personal content. Of course it's highly unlikely that Twitter fact-checking the president will make any difference - everyone who's been paying attention made up their minds about the guy years ago - but if Trump is really so triggered by it, he is of course free to post his thoughts elsewhere. It's awfully telling that he immediately decided to involve federal regulators, although I suspect this will be just as effective as the fact-checking.
Trumps EO today did not and will not force companies to carry government content. Instead it removes protections for them if the limit access to things not specifically protected in the Communications Decency Act.
The rest of it you’re welcome to your opinions and interpretation of events. There is, however, quite a bit of people that agree with him.
This is just disingenuous. The message here is unambiguously "carry our content unedited or you become legally liable for everything posted on your site." Don't pretend that the decision of whose content is "protected" isn't going to be 100% subjective and partisan depending on who appointed the federal regulators. Or do you really think Trump's FCC or FTC (or whichever agency he imagines will enforce his new EO) is going to leap to the defense of, say, an Ilhan Omar tweet?
This is absolutely not disingenuous, this is reading the EO exactly as written without putting a bias on it. It very clearly states that removing things not specifically protected in the Act do not grant you the protections provided by the act. What’s disingenuous is trying to put a personal bias on this and trying to convince others this is true.
Context is bias now? Are we supposed to pretend this document appeared out of thin air, and can only be interpreted in an ultra-literal fashion, regardless of the goals it represents and the way it will be interpreted in the real world?
Well the original law is from 1996. And read the document before making any other comments because it’s clear you haven’t yet read it. It reasserts what is allowed under an existing law from 1996
This is what is allowed under Section 230: "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." The EO isn't reasserting anything, it's fundamentally changing the conditions.
The fact that Trump even admitted on camera that he'd shut Twitter down entirely if he could find a legal route for it kind of gives away the game.
This text is in the original law so how is this changing anything?
His choice of words is usually unfortunate, but the problem he’s pointing out does exist.
How does it look when the Twitter execs are known to lean left, post publicly their hatred for the president then take actions within their control to force their point on others?
Nothing is being forced on anyone. If Trump is unhappy with their fact-checking, he can take his business elsewhere. Or start his own microblog service, since he supposedly has so much money.
It just blows my mind that I used to have nearly identical arguments with left-wingers.
I don’t agree with this mentality of taking it elsewhere. Essentially what you’re saying here is we should segregate social media based on political viewpoints. This, I feel, is a very dangerous precedent to set. Regardless of what side you’re on do you want to live in an echo chamber?
As for forcing, agree to disagree then. Putting the link on a tweet and then linking to essentially an opinion piece is the definition of fake news. Ignoring the link meaning potentially missing an actual valid point. Ignorance is also dangerous. Why can’t they just take Facebooks stance and stay out of it entirely?
So then what would you call an opinion piece being touted as truth? And please no personal insult or insulations that “something is wrong” with me, you people still arguing a clearly valid point have destroyed my HN reputation with all the downvotes as it is.
What if, instead of trying to bully Twitter to not post fact checking links for Trump's tweet, we instead ask them to do so fairly for both sides of the political spectrum? I'm pretty sure there are lots of factually false left-wing statements that could make use of the fact checking feature.
That is the only issue here that I could see as being partisan, it's not about adding fact checking links, it's about doing so regardless of the political affiliation of the poster. I wish there was a lot more fact checking added to most statements on Twitter.
What are you talking about? Trump is the one going after Twitter's right to free speech with this executive order. Liberals (and probably, hopefully, and if so, rightly, some conservatives) are the ones arguing for free speech right now.
Exactly. Politics is the mind killer. Would they have the same opinion if Twitter was a right-leaning Trump-mouthpiece that was disproportionately quelling left-leaning voices? Take a step back and recognise you can agree with Trump's action and not necessarily admire the man.
We don't have to speak in hypotheticals here. There are plenty of examples: voat, gab, TD, etc. What laws are/were being pushed by liberal politicians to use the force of law to shut them up?
Please do link to government documents or quotes from elected officials.
It’s not a question of laws used, more psychological factors. Some people seeing those statements made by twitter may believe them blindly. We need people reading into important topics like this and forming opinions without being bated. Part of the problem you’ll also see in this thread. The downvotes here set the tone for the comment the viewer is about to read. Why is it’s view changed at all? Nothing this commenter said was offensive yet on some sites their comment would be hidden entirely.
What statement was made by Twitter that could be followed blindly? All I saw was "Get the facts about mail in ballots".
You can only infer a bias on that based on your own preconceived notion about Twitter's biases. A completely ignorant and unbiased individual may just as likely think "Twitter wants to show me why Trump is right" as they are to think "Twitter wants to show me why Trump is wrong".
If you really want to have people
> reading into important topics like this and forming opinions without being bated (sic)
then you should be all for this kind of neutrally positioned link to more information. I'm certainly open to entertaining alternatives, though.
The existence of the link in the first place. You have to be pretty far removed from reality to not know Twitter execs have a left lean to their bias. So the a completely unbiased person will notice that only some tweets show this link and could build a bias based on other psychological factors, such as wanting acceptance from a seemingly majority of peers.
I am for neutrality. I’m also a realist. IFF they could pull this off universally, in that all tweets are subject to these same fact checks, then I’m all for it. Removing personal biases of the person doing the fact checks will be a challenge but we can achieve this through multiple fact checkers with specific biases. Like the bulls and bears statements you find with stocks. But we cannot achieve this, we lack both the peoplepower and technology given Twitters scale. Short of it being universally applied to all accounts it can’t meet the definition of neutral. Therefor, don’t do it at all. Instead someone else using Twitter can reply to his tweets with the fact check. This keeps Twitters hands and potential biases entirely out of a very complicated topic.
Well, they have posted many times on their position on Trump, which is a left leaning position. Then, rather quickly they throw this fact check on one of his tweets. Regardless of what their actual intents were the actions to me look a bit shady. Especially since the fact check comes down to “no evidence”, which is completely different then proven false.
If tech companies instead shut down people clamoring for unions and worker rights then you'd see the left rushing to introduce measures like the one signed by Donald Trump right now. So this is really a bipartisan issue and not just a right wing one, we should all work together to regulate the power of big tech. They might be mostly well-intentioned today, but it is best we regulate them before they have a chance to turn bad.
That's an entirely subjective opinion - and one that should ideally be left up to voters and/or their elected representatives, not to any single individual (like our president, or unelected bureaucrats in the FTC/FCC/etc.). And I continue to maintain that it's insanity to be terrified of Twitter's power when the government can order any one of us killed or locked up indefinitely and there are zero consequences when they screw up.
Does Gab silence liberal views? Bans, shadow-bans liberal accounts? Puts "fact checking" marks on their posts? If they do, then liberal politicians are more than welcome to take action.
