Internet’s “Magna Carta.” v. SCOTUS

GreatHornedOwlGreatHornedOwl
edited February 2023 in General

On Feb. 21, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in the case of Gonzalez v. Google. At stake will be Section 230 of the U.S. Communications Decency Act. Section 230 has been interpreted by courts to shield online platforms from liability for almost any offense committed by users.

If our court chooses to either invalidate or substantially re-interpret Section 230, there will probably be no immediate effect on CC, but I'm afraid that the internet, as we know it, will cease to exist. It is unlikely that many social media platforms. search engines, blogs, message boards, user-generated encyclopedias and shopping sites would be unable to comply. without major expenditures.

see
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/section-230-supreme-court_n_63e3ba9ce4b0c8e3fc88d2dd
and
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/section-230-supreme-court-gonzalez-google-partisan-amicus-brief_n_63efbd79e4b022eb3e368382

Unfortunately, there is probably nothing that anybody can do to influence the court's decision.

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Comments

  • pavelpavel

    the social media companies behaved like publishers when they amplified or silenced users' content based on politics. The social media companies did this to themselves.

  • GreatHornedOwlGreatHornedOwl

    @pavel - This isn't a question of blaming the social media companies. Yes, they probably could have behaved better. Unfortunately, there is no universal agreement as to what the meaning of better is.

    This seems to be a problem for which there may not be a good solution. Some people want to see Section 230 weakened, and some want to see it strengthened. Some want to leave it the way it is, but even they, don't appear to like it. Interestingly, this is a question that isn't a partisan issue. There are both Democrats and Republicans on both sides. Similarly, Conservatives, Liberals, and Progressives also appear to be split.

    Both Donald Trump, and Joe Biden agree that it needs to be changed, but oddly, they have totally different reasons. I, for one, am not at all certain how I feel about the issue, but I'm leaning toward believing that Section 230 should be left alone.

    If any change is made, in either direction, we can be fairly certain that the Internet will be a very different place a year from now, than it is today.

  • dave31415dave31415

    I’ve just written an article on this. Unfortunately it seems to have bombed by my usual standard. (I guess it’s too long). Short summary. Extend the First Amendment to include large social media companies so they can only censor speech that is illegal. Make it easy for people to filter or block content or people they don’t want to see. The reason is that these companies have even more power than the US government to manipulate public discourse so we want to counter that for the very same reasons and the fact that they are already colluding with the US Government. Keep the Safe Harbor clause. I don’t know why anyone would want to change that. You won’t be able to sue these companies for content if they no longer have the right to stop it to begin with.

  • frankparker9frankparker9

    Sites like CC and YouTube already have to comply with DMCA (copyright infringement) takedown notices, as an example of the fact that Section 230 is not blanket immunity and doesn’t have to be. CC would survive if it was required to remove ISIS recruitment videos, eventually, when notified about them! YouTube would survive.

  • TheFunCartelTheFunCartel

    YouTube would survive.

    @frankparker9 But would Gloria Gaynor?

  • deefinedeefine

    @GreatHornedOwl Take solace knowing that the current Supreme Court as a majority cares most about:

    1) Themselves and their close loved ones.
    2) Giant corporations.
    3) Their political party.

    This means that Section 230 will not be struck down because giant corporations are not interfering too much with the judges and their close loved ones.

    However, there is a hard-to-see twist: if (3) their political party sees reinterpreting it as a way to control popular platforms in a way favorable to their political party while leaving a veneer of protection for Big Corp and Loved Ones, they will reinterpret it.

  • GreatHornedOwlGreatHornedOwl

    @dave31415 - There probably anything wrong with your article. This thread isn't getting much interest either.

    I do have one comment. You advocate extending "the First Amendment to include large social media companies so they can only censor speech that is illegal." The problem will be to determine what is illegal and what is not. Is it illegal to tell people not to get the Covid vaccine because it is more dangerous than the disease? Is it illegal to tell people to "fight like hell" because the 2020 election was stolen? Is it legal to tell people that the Holocaust never happened? Is it legal to tell people that global warming is a hoax, so don't worry about it? Is it legal to tell people that Jews started the California wildfires with their space lasers?

    Do you really thing that the number of law suits will be reduced?

  • TheFunCartelTheFunCartel

    The desire to revisit Section 230 is a bipartisan desire albeit one with different goals. This will be hotly debated after the Supreme Court strikes it down and rendered useless by a bunch of 60 yo + idiots that call their grandkids to find the power button.

    Business as usual. We are all pretty much f’d in this country unless you have a few billion lying around.

  • GreatHornedOwlGreatHornedOwl

    @deefine - I don't think that it will be struck down either, but I will be surprised if it isn't significantly changed in some unpredictable way.

  • dave31415dave31415
    edited February 2023

    @GreatHornedOwl Think of it like the phone company. If someone picks up the phone and starts yelling racist slurs, the phone company doesn’t jump in and stop it. Their job is just infrastructure and allowing communication. What content is communicated shouldn’t be their problem. It should always be the problem of the person who posts it.

    Nothing anything says about COVID should be illegal. In fact my article was triggered by being censored on Facebook when I referenced an article published recently in an esteemed medical journal that argued that evidence from 78 randomized controlled studies show that community masking does not reduce community spread. The CDC went apeshit and told Facebook to tag any post about it as misinformation. Do you know how crazy that is? Facebook then added a link to some shady “fact checker” site where an anonymous author offers a rebuttal. This is why the FA need to be extended to these companies.

    Here is a link if you want to read

    Title: Facebook is now taking sides on scientific debate and marking the other side “misinformation” and other thoughts on social media authoritarianism

  • TheFunCartelTheFunCartel

    What content is communicated shouldn’t be their problem. It should always be the problem of the person who posts it.

    @dave31415 I disagree. This is an age old scientific cop out. Whenever something new comes along the scientific community goes Pontius Pilate on the ethics. Splitting the atom is neither good nor bad, it just is. Sorry, but if you are that smart to think of the benefits of a creation then you can think of the downside as well. We all know the dangers of information manipulation, yet social media companies can stand aside and watch everything burn under the guise of free speech? No the FCC sets up guardrails in the communications industries and the social media moguls should be subject to a few guardrails as well.

  • dave31415dave31415
    edited February 2023

    @FunCartel Censorship is "information manipulating" not the other way around. In a free society, there is a constant battle of words. That's what we want. By points of view doing battle for our attention, we get both sides of the story and there is a higher chance that the people will decide on the best idea. There is no guarantee of it but this is better than a few elite people getting to choose what can be said and what can't or what is right and what is wrong. When we allow that, those in power soon learn that information is power and they use that power to further empower themselves.

    If you read my article (linked above), you'll see that in this case the CDC (US Government) pressured Facebook to censor a paper published in a prestigious journal that they didn't like partly because it criticized them. That's what they do in Russia not America. When you let censors go down the path of "protecting" you from "misinformation", this is EXACTLY what happens and it violates every principle behind the First Amendment.

  • GreatHornedOwlGreatHornedOwl

    @dave31415 - Now you see what I mean. One post, and we already have disagreement.

    I don't believe that any of those examples that I cited are illegal either. However, I do believe that some of them should be. My problem, is that I have not the slightest idea of how to make a rule that can be used to distinguish between speech that is legal, and that that is not.

    Start with the basic premise that most speech is legal, but some speech (e.g. shouting fire in a crowded theater) is not. I'm becoming convinced that it is not possible to create an unambiguous rule that can be used to distinguish legal speech from not legal speech. This would make your proposal that social media companies "only censor speech that is illegal." That would not be possible if there is no way for them to distinguish between legal and illegal speech.

    I also think that there are two flaws with your analogy to the phone company to social media companies. The first, is that when I speak into my phone, my speech can be heard by a single individual, or at most a relatively small group of individuals. Whereas when I post to a social media site, my speech can be read by millions. The second flaw, is that phone companies are neither clairvoyant, nor able to go back in time. When I speak into the phone, it is not physically possible for the phone company to censor what I'm about to say.

  • TheFunCartelTheFunCartel

    @dave31415 i didn’t say censorship. I said guardrails. We already know that information is power. Always has been. The Nazis knew it. So does everyone with a half a brain. But when foreign countries begin planting falsehoods in our own backyard in the guise of facts—this is an issue.

  • dave31415dave31415
    edited February 2023

    @FunCartel I didn't say it should be the responsibility of the communications infrastructure to find and block illegal speech. I just said that they can't block speech unless they deem it to be so. If someone posts that people should go and kill a politician, that's obviously illegal and if the company can detect that, report to the FBI, and block it from reaching more people, that's perfectly fine. The idea is that if you get blocked, you can take them to court where they must prove what you said is illegal. Social media companies shouldn't be acting like law enforcement. Not their job.

    "phone companies are neither clairvoyant"... the social media companies are? It's really no different except that it's a bit easier to reach more people. But anyone could if they want have a group phone call and invite millions of people or anyone and say anything they want. So essentially it is the same.

    Guardrails are censorship. No one that censors information calls it censorship. They is always some nice sounding name like "guard rails" usually branded with the phrase "common sense" and discussed in the language of "safety". That's what China does. If you listen to the Chinese Communist Party talk about censorship, they make it sound so good you almost want to have them do it here. Then you think about it some and you come to your senses.

  • GreatHornedOwlGreatHornedOwl

    What you say sounds great, but it doesn't work, and is impossible to apply in such a way that everybody can agree.

    I think that when Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. said in a ruling that "Falsely shouting fire in a theater" is not protected speech, few, if any people disagreed with that statement. However, look at what case was all about. The court's (including Holmes) decision in that case (Schenck v. United States) was that Speech in opposition to the draft during World War I was not protected free speech under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.

    The case was later partially overturned by Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969, which limited the scope of banned speech to that which would be directed to and likely to incite imminent lawless action (e.g. a riot). Does that mean that telling an angry mob to go to the capitol and "fight like hell." I legal, or is it not.

    Even after (at least) two Supreme Court Decisions on the subject, we still don't have a good method to tell them apart, and I don't believe that such a method is possible.

  • GreatHornedOwlGreatHornedOwl

    @dave31415 - of course, social media companies aren't clairvoyant, but they don't need to be. It is possible (I didn't say either desirable or practical) for a social media company to implement a time delay, thus giving them the opportunity to scan a post before allowing it to go up. The also have the ability to take a post down, even after it has gone live.

  • dave31415dave31415
    edited February 2023

    @GreatHornedOwl I don't know if those are legal or not. You could argue either way. It's very subtle. How literal is he being with "fight"? My guess is that Trump was as shocked as anyone that the rioters got in the building. I think the rioters were shocked too. It could only be tested in court. If it was obviously illegal, he would have been indicted by now. That's why social media companies shouldn't go anywhere near it. They don't know either. I'm not really making a case for how social media companies determine whether something is illegal. That's outside of the scope of the article. The point is they shouldn't censor stuff that is obviously not illegal. My post and the article I linked to were obviously not illegal.

  • TheFunCartelTheFunCartel

    @dave31415 So you are arguing what evil is better then. We are under constant attack via the internet. There are reason why the Russians plow the second most amount of their budget into cyber ops with defense spending just ahead of that. It is cheaper to win the unwitting minds of a nation to make the choices that make you susceptible to takeover because like everything else in this world it is more cost efficient that waging a prolonged war.

    And what China does predates the internet. They own ALL their communication. They own all the factories. They own the air they breathe. Simply put, this is not a chicken and the egg argument as you kind of framed it (with guardrails you lose all control over your freedom of thought). That could happen. But in China it already has happened and it happened before this technology.

    The truth is most consequential industries in the US are regulated (censorship as you wish to call it) but probably the most important one in this day and age, as it has direct access to the minds of Americans and everything they own—social media and the internet—is given the don’t ask, don’t tell treatment.

    So at the end of the day, common sense sleeps with no one as it is strictly in the eye of the beholder. There are undesirable consequences either way—regulatory rules or not. We all have to choose which one and we have chosen differently. That’s all.

  • dave31415dave31415

    @FunCartel I don’t know what Russian disinformation has to do with the CDC blocking a scientific paper from being seen. Russians can’t sue in US court. This concerns having my right to speak as an American citizen. There is no argument that can be made that censoring Americans discussing science can be justified by Russians trying to influence American culture.

  • GreatHornedOwlGreatHornedOwl

    @dave31415 - I completely agree that social media companies should not be permitted to censure any speech that is legal. Unfortunately, that still leaves an enormous gray area.

    I'm not sure that Trump not believing that his mob would actually get into the capitol is relevant. If I punch somebody in the face, and he falls to the concrete floor, hits his head, and dies. I probably didn't intend to kill him but .....

  • dave31415dave31415

    @GreatHornedOwl The whole legality thing is a red herring anyway. I could just as easily said they can’t block anything legal or otherwise. The job of law enforcement is to catch and punish people who break the law. Their job is not to stop people from breaking the law. If someone says we should kill a politician and nobody sees it, then they haven’t broken the law. They might as well have just said it in their head. If you think the person should be arrested for saying such a thing, then you have to actually let them say the thing first.

  • dave31415dave31415

    In fact, not only should the social media companies not be able to block it, they shouldn’t even be able to see it without a warrant unless someone posts something publicly. Same as the phone company. The phone company can’t spy on your group phone calls without a warrant. Why should they be able to see my communications with fiends and family without a warrant ?

  • GreatHornedOwlGreatHornedOwl

    There is some space between preventing someone from breaking the law, and enabling him to do so. Unfortunately the boarders of that space are not well defined, and probably never will be.

    Let me get this straight. Man A goes on the internet and makes a persuasive sounding argument that a particular politician should be killed, and goes on to describe how to do it. Man A has not committed a crime. Three weeks later, man B read the post and kills the politician in the way described. Man B has clearly committed a crime. Are you saying that man A has now also committed a crime? I think we may need to consult with Schrödinger's cat.

  • TheFunCartelTheFunCartel
    edited February 2023

    @dave31415 You just demonstrated my point—there are problems with either view. Several foreign countries are using American social media to infiltrate and influence the choices of this country and sometimes the government oversteps.

    My point is you have a vote to change or modify regulation whereas there is no recourse if the door is completely open. We are at an impasse on this so I am backing away as I can see neither one of us will concede anymore ground.

  • GreatHornedOwlGreatHornedOwl

    @FunCartel - I've been saying almost from the beginning of this thread that this is a problem for which there is no reasonable solution.

  • TheFunCartelTheFunCartel
    edited February 2023

    @GreatHornedOwl Exactly. It is not a right or wrong answer, it is a pick your poison answer.

  • MrPaulMrPaul

    Thankfully, the US Supreme Court’s decisions will not curtail the activities of the internet as a whole, only for companies operating within the United States. Move your corporate base outside of the US and then you can do what you want.

  • [Deleted User]MaverickLegend (deleted user)

    @GreatHornedOwl ” I've been saying almost from the beginning of this thread that this is a problem for which there is no reasonable solution.”
    So basically, everyone that commented on this thread, just wasted their time, because Supreme Court’s gonna do what they’re gonna do, regardless of what anybody’s been saying in this thread lol 😂

  • TheFunCartelTheFunCartel

    @lonelytauros No, that’s not what he or I is saying. But what you are saying kind of applies to every thread because what does anything said on any of these threads matter in the real world?

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