Free speech is a far larger concern than what the First Amendment covers.
Platforms that have grown into de facto public squares are large enough that there is a public interest in how they regulate speech, given that the vast majority of people are on the big tech platforms while the alternatives are negligible and choked out by network effects. They are now a gray area between state and what is typically understood by private entity.
There are massive and obvious dangers in letting Google, Facebook, Twitter decree for millions/billions of people what counts as "science" or "misinformation", and they've already demonstrated getting it spectacularly wrong. It's vital to a free society to have a culture of open debate, and these platforms are now our media for such debate.
It's not clear yet what the best mechanism or remedy for this will be, but citing the First Amendment alone is not sufficient to resolve the concern. The First Amendment only applies to government, and the cultural and social issues around free speech have always been much broader than that.
There are older precedents for regulating speech on private platforms in an earlier technological period: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine. Perhaps we need an updated version of that. I wouldn't be surprised if the platforms themselves were ok with it, since I don't believe they wanted to get into the truth-regulation business in the first place. They're doing it because they're subject to intense, inner and outer, political pressure.
Without getting into rightness or wrongness of views, I think it's factually the case that those pressures are coming from a fairly narrow band of political opinion which is far from being the entire spectrum and excludes many mainstream views, so in that sense what we're seeing is something analogous to "regulatory capture" of the big platforms. This gives enormous leverage to one cluster of political opinions over all the others. It's a distorting factor which I think is against the public interest (even though I personally agree with some of their views).
We need debate and persuasion, not hard use of power. This understanding was commonplace, in fact bedrock, for so long that many of us are shocked at how quickly it could be abandoned, and not just abandoned or even forgotten but replaced with a narrative in which it was never that way to begin with!
> There are massive and obvious dangers in letting Google, Facebook, Twitter decree for millions/billions of people what counts as "science" or "misinformation", and they've already demonstrated getting it spectacularly wrong. It's vital to a free society to have a culture of open debate, and these platforms are now our media for such debate.
I'm highly concerned about BigTech regulating the speech of others particularly when the others are experts in their respective fields, and BigTech has none, but is merely parroting an authoritarian government perspective.
When we normally debate a view, people present data from opposing viewpoints and we sort it out over time. Sides present data. Sides explain relevancy and over time, we determine greater accuracy. That cannot happen in an environment where gatekeepers control the speech and dictate the tone and content of it.
> Without getting into rightness or wrongness of views, I think it's factually the case that those pressures are coming from a fairly narrow band of political opinion which is far from being the entire spectrum and excludes many mainstream views, so in that sense what we're seeing is something analogous to "regulatory capture" of the big platforms. This gives enormous leverage to one cluster of political opinions over all the others. It's a distorting factor which I think is against the public interest (even though I personally agree with some of their views).
> We need debate and persuasion, not hard use of power. This understanding was commonplace, in fact bedrock, for so long that many of us are shocked at how quickly it could be abandoned, and not just abandoned or even forgotten but replaced with a narrative in which it was never that way to begin with!
I think this is very well written, and can be related to much of the modern authoritarian use of power, of compulsion, by BigTech in cahoots with government.
> Platforms that have grown into de facto public squares are large enough that there is a public interest in how they regulate speech, given that the vast majority of people are on the big tech platforms while the others are negligible and are choked out by network effects. They are now a gray area between state and what is typically understood by private entity.
In the lawsuit against Trump for blocking people on Twitter, the court ruled that Twitter was a public square for the express reason that government policy was discussed and promoted there. Therefore, Trump (as a government figure) could not block people.
Further, the current Press Secretary Psaki has described how they're directing Facebook to monitor and remove both people and content which was otherwise legal but simply unacceptable to the Administration.
The first situation demonstrates the gray area but the second makes a case that Facebook was acting as an arm of the government.
> In the lawsuit against Trump for blocking people on Twitter, the court ruled that Twitter was a public square for the express reason that government policy was discussed and promoted there. Therefore, Trump (as a government figure) could not block people.
No it didn't. It ruled that trumps account was acting as an official government account, and so trumps account fell under stricter regulations that govern how the government can communicate. Twitter was still able to ban his account though, because Twitter isn't the government!
> Further, the current Press Secretary Psaki has described how they're directing Facebook to monitor and remove both people and content which was otherwise legal but simply unacceptable to the Administration.
No, Facebook used the government as a source of official information. They then chose to remove other information. The government wasn't telling Facebook to remove stuff. The choice to make the CDC authoritative was Facebooks choice. They aren't acting as an arm of the government.
The White House claims to be an active participant and directing their attention to things to be removed. In case you missed that press conference, here's a transcript and video:
> QUESTION: Thanks, Jen. Can you talk a little bit more about this request for tech companies to be more aggressive in policing misinformation? Has the administration been in touch with any of these companies? And are there any actions that the federal government can take to ensure their cooperation? Because we've seen from the start, there's not a lot of action on some of these platforms.
> PSAKI: Sure. Well, first, we are in regular touch with the social media platforms, and those engagements typically happen through members of our senior staff, but also members of our COVID-19 Team.
> Quote continuing: Given as Dr. Murthy conveyed, this is a big issue of misinformation specifically on the pandemic. In terms of actions, Alex, that we have taken or we're working to take, I should say, from the federal government, we've increased disinformation research and tracking. Within the Surgeon General's Office, we're flagging posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.
Unless you believe Psaki is lying which I hadn't considered.
The White House can make pretty much any request of Twitter and Facebook.
Twitter and Facebook, in turn, can decide whether to act on those requests.
The social media aspect is new, but otherwise, this is bog standard big corp <-> fed gov politics. Every prior president has used the bully pulpit to encourage very large companies to do things, and followed up/paired those requests with a concert of relevant activity within the executive branch.
FB/Twitter are not "acting as an arm of the federal government" except in the most sensational and hyperbolic foaming-at-the-mouth-talking-head sense; in the same sense as, for example, saying that Carrier was an arm of the federal government during the Trump years.
I did not say there were "acting as an arm of the federal government" to quote myself: "makes a case that Facebook was acting as an arm of the government"
"Makes a case" means literally "make an argument in favor of" and not "definitively is"
Unless you're claim here is that Psaki is threatening Facebook, there's nothing remotely illegal happening here. Facebook is like "hey, tell us about misinformation" and the government is like "hey we think this is misinformation". And then Facebook reviews the posts they flagged and removes some of them.
The argument you're making is akin to "Its illegal for Psaki or a white house staffer to ask for airtime on CNN, because that violates CNN's first amendment rights" (or perhaps more subtly "because then CNN is acting as an arm of the government", but that's still wrong).
My claim was simply that the White House directed information/accounts to be removed. Your response was "The government wasn't telling Facebook to remove stuff." which - according to the video I cited - is clearly untrue.
I'd love to understand your point but I'm not going to engage further with someone pedaling misinformation.
Your claim was that Facebook was "acting as an arm of the government." That's simply untrue.
And they weren't telling it to remove stuff. They were asking it to, after fb set up a way for the government (among other groups) to flag misinformation. You're glossing over those difference, but they matter.
> No it didn't. It ruled that trumps account was acting as an official government account, and so trumps account fell under stricter regulations that govern how the government can communicate. Twitter was still able to ban his account though, because Twitter isn't the government!
Again, I suspect you missed a bit:
"U.S. District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald in Manhattan ruled on May 23 that comments on the president’s account, and those of other government officials, were public forums and that blocking Twitter Inc users for their views violated their right to free speech under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution."
The key part being "under the presidents account." The president using twitter does not change twitter. The president is held to standards of the government, which is not allowed to block people. But the rules that affect the government don't affect twitter, they only apply to government officials using twitter.
Twitter is still allowed to block people who reply to the president, or, as they did, ban the president.
> The Internet Association - quoted in the article - is concerned about the implications of that case but glad to hear you are not.
Yes, hence they provided a brief asking the court to rule a certain way, and the court did, by keeping the ruling particular to Trump's government account.
There isn't any newer or better ruling, you're just misunderstanding this one.
> by keeping the ruling particular to Trump's government account.
From the article I cited:
"The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University on August 10 sent the Justice Department a list of 41 accounts that had remained blocked from Trump’s @RealDonaldTrump account. The seven users who filed suit had their accounts unblocked in June."
aka Not his government (@POTUS at the time) account. Once again, misinformation from you. :(
The thing you're still missing is that the ruling was that the @RealDonaldTrump account was being used in an official government capacity, and therefore would fall under said government specific regulations.
If you look at the actual ruling[0], you'll see that on page 9-11 of the ruling, they outline ways in which the @RealDonaldTrump account was used in an official capacity, and on pages 42 and 43, they outline how this is governmental control of the account (but not of twitter as a whole).
Quoting the ruling:
> First, to potentially qualify as a forum, the space in
question must be owned or controlled by the government...Here, the government-control prong of the analysis is met. Though Twitter is a...company that is not government-owned, the President and Scavino nonetheless exercise control over various aspects of the @realDonaldTrump account...The President and Scavino’s control over the @realDonaldTrump account is also governmental...the President presents the
@realDonaldTrump account as being a presidential account as
opposed to a personal account and, more importantly, uses the account to take actions that can be taken only by the President as President
So please, stop crying "misinformation" when you're just wrong about the legalities of the situation. You may disagree with the ruling, but my description of it is factual.
It's worth noting that the Fairness Doctrine was applied to things like radio where you had to have a license, and which were more limited. It was not (at least after a couple court decisions) applied to other media like newspapers, which could operate without a license.
Google, Facebook, and others do not require a license to operate. Anyone can establish their own website to counter points made on those platforms. The Fairness Doctrine would seem (even if it still existed) to be non-applicable to the various web platforms.
A more updated version of it might be more expansive, but would probably run into issues with compelled speech. Since the internet is pretty wide open, again anyone can make a website if they want, it's hard to justify compelling a platform to host content.
I agree that's worth noting, and I'm not suggesting a literal revival of the fairness doctrine, just noting that there are past precedents for regulating speech in the public interest. You're no doubt right that it would run into legal difficulty, and actually the corporatist supreme court would be expected, amusingly enough, to side with the illiberal left on this issue.
This is a canard though:
> Since the internet is pretty wide open, again anyone can make a website if they want, it's hard to justify compelling a platform to host content.
Anyone can make a website that no one reads, but not anyone can make a public square. As I said above, the alternatives are choked out by network effects, so the internet is not "pretty wide open" in any way that counts for public debate. It used to be, but that was before it consolidated into an oligopoly. That is why the public interest and free speech questions necessarily shift to these platforms. In the world we now live in, it's distracting to offer the prospect of "anyone can make a website" as if it were a realistic alternative.
It's not a canard, it's well-founded by examining precedent. The courts already decided that compelled speech (the Fairness Doctrine) didn't make sense without scarcity of a medium or difficulty to publish through the medium. The precedent is that newspapers (which is a harder field to enter into than starting a website) couldn't be compelled under the Fairness Doctrine because it wasn't licensed and was wide open. That's absolutely not a canard here (do you know what that word means?).
Starting up a website is even easier than publishing a newspaper so it would be very bizarre for that precedent to somehow not be applied in this instance.
https://ask.metafilter.com/55153/Whats-the-middle-ground-bet...