The bill only allows enforcement by the Texas Attorney General, who can decide who to go after. Creating an over-broad law and then giving someone the power to selectively apply it is putting a huge amount of power in their hands.
Do you think the AG is going to go after companies censoring their political enemies? Of course not - this is about ensuring their allies are protected only. Moreover because the law is so nuts, companies can't "just" comply with the law, they actively need to court the state AG's favour so they don't get sued.
This is't about making Wikipedia illegal - it's about making everything online illegal so they can control internet discourse.
> it has more than 97 million monthly active users on the site.
> And the interactive nature of the site is not incidental to the service. It’s the whole point.
I don't understand this part. I consult Wikipedia many times per week, but I am not an "active user", I don't have an account, and I don't use it "interactively" at all -- just read-only.
> (i) that consists primarily of news, sports, entertainment, or other information or content that is not user generated but is preselected by the provider
(emphasis mine)
So it's kind of a case where extra clarification makes it less clear. Your interpretation would be that Wikipedia is not social media but it could still be interpreted that it is.
I was aiming at the 50 million "active user" threshold. Wikipedia may be social media, but there is most likely a much smaller number who are "active" and "interact" with the site. The article linked also mentions that perhaps Twitter's "active user" count is far below 50 million.
I consider myself and most others as passive users, just as I am with other sites (clearly not social media), such as www.irs.gov (U.S. tax agency) or Merriam-Webster dictionary.
Or, as the article puts it, "Visits and users are not the same"
You are an active user by the conventional definition. A user is anyone that uses the service, whether or not you have an account. Active just means you use it on a regular/recent basis, regardless of whether you are editing or just reading an article.
Hopefully this is not a controversial statement. But I think it's interesting how this law and it's existence is being contextualized in wildly different ways depending on political leanings.
Wikipedia isn't censoring anything at all. The users are, but this law doesn't prevent them.
I'm flagging this because this article is pure stupidity. Which ironically is a claim the author of this piece is leveling at others, not realizing it applies to him more than anyone else.
Wikipedia has blacklists for websites saying you can't use them, and their notability rule says if a topic isn't heavily covered by allowed sources it's not worth having an article on. Unfortunately what happens is that right wing outlets are generally banned while left-wing sources are defended, so it can be impossible to add relevant facts to articles since no left-wing source wants to talk about it and no right-wing source is allowed to publish on it.
For example, site that are allowed (all green):
BuzzFeed News,
MSNBC,
CNN,
NYT,
Washington Post,
BBC,
Anti-Defamation League,
The Guardian,
Jacobin,
Mother Jones,
Playboy,
Snopes,
SPLC,
The Daily Dot
And some site that are banned (red or fully blacklisted)
The Epoch Times,
Fox News (for science and politics),
The Federalist,
The Gateway Pundit,
Breitbart,
The New York Post,
NewsMax,
OANN,
Blaze News,
The Cato Institute,
Project Veritas,
The Post Millennial
I'm not aware of a single news source that has a pro-Trump opinion section which is still allowed on Wikipedia; the only two generally conservative outlets I saw were ReasonTV and WSJ, both of which were generally opposed to Trump. It (somehow) used to be worse although they've moved a bunch of ridiculous left-wing sources to a shade of red.
I'm honestly not sure at this point if people really can't tell the difference or if they're just fine with ignoring it when it's convenient for them. One of those possibilities can be fixed with education, but I'm not sure anything can be done to help prevent the other.
No, it was a broad smattering of different popular conservative news outlets and think tanks vs left-wing outlets and think tanks. It's very hard to directly compare any two news sources from opposite sides of the political isle so I didn't even try.
I encourage you to look at the list though and derive your own opinions. My point is that it's not just people freely editing, there are strict rules and these rules are political. I mean think about the Hunter Biden laptop story; it was published by the New York Post, but they were (and are) banned at the time. Meanwhile many "reputable" organizations (according to this list) were lying about the laptop insinuating (if not claiming) it was Russia disinformation or otherwise fake. How would you get the truth through to Wikipedia? The reality is you couldn't, because of the political bias, and this showed through at the time where pages on the topic claimed it was fake/disinformation even though it was obvious it wasn't.
Do you think the AG is going to go after companies censoring their political enemies? Of course not - this is about ensuring their allies are protected only. Moreover because the law is so nuts, companies can't "just" comply with the law, they actively need to court the state AG's favour so they don't get sued.
This is't about making Wikipedia illegal - it's about making everything online illegal so they can control internet discourse.