Don’t worry, it’s not really government censorship

[iris lilies]

Wow, IL, I read that article twice and didn't see what you are so upset about. The professor seemed to indicate that the government has as much right to speak up and protest as you do about misinformation recognizing the First Amendment jurisdiction but you seem to disagree.
In your opinion, what is the role of any government body when mass misinformation is being released and spread? Gov't funding of "science" is valuable and presently being shared but if the true facts funded by gov't and delivered by reliable sources are being flooded out by misinformation on social media, will you step up and correct the misinformation? If not you, then who?

“The Government” has awesome power to make your life miserable (cough cough Obamatrons in the Internal Revenue Service as example) thru various means.

I greatly distrust the White House’s words. Listen to what the White House says rather than reading the Forbes softening article. The White House is making “ proposals” to FB about what FB needs to do.

That is not Joe Biden speaking as a leader about Covid misinformation which he is welcome to do, and I would expect him to do. That is a planned campaign with teeth, a low level threat. There are international diplomatic dances with enemy countries that engage like this.

I realize that free speech is of lesser concern in Canada. I think you all are dead wrong about that value.

[iris lilies]

In addition to the specific example the article references, and I referred to twice (you can't yell Fire in a crowded theatre):

In the United States, some categories of speech are not protected by the First Amendment. According to the Supreme Court of the United States, the U.S. Constitution protects free speech while allowing limitations on certain categories of speech.[1]

Categories of speech that are given lesser or no protection by the First Amendment (and therefore may be restricted) include obscenity, fraud, child pornography, speech integral to illegal conduct, speech that incites imminent lawless action, speech that violates intellectual property law, true threats, and commercial speech such as advertising. Defamation that causes harm to reputation is a tort and also an exception to free speech.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United...ech_exceptions

I know there are these exceptions but they are limited, and like I said, you would have to show me the write up of how you are going to control speech on the internet. The devil is in the details.

I am not even sure the wide sweeping bans on “ child pornography” ( it is correctly called “child sexual abuse materials” now) or speech inciting imminent lawless action are entirely right.

we all know that obscenity is notoriously hard to define and regulate.

There are problems with these existing exceptions but at least they are fairly narrowly defined. If we limit content on the internet only to that which is absolutely correct, I can’t see how that could be carried out in any reasonable way.

[Alan]

My take on this is that Facebook is free to censor whatever they want. It may have an impact on their business model but that's their decision to make. It becomes problematic when the government suggests that they do so. Our government has already let them know that they want to regulate them in whatever manner they find politically expedient so any suggestion from the highest office in the land could be seen as coercive, and in my mind a clear violation of First Amendment guarantees.

Some may argue that it's in the public good to allow this coercion and in this case it may be, but once we accept this then what happens next year when the White House decides that it's also in the public good to not allow differing opinions on other matters of public interest and "suggests" that social media platforms not allow them?

[catherine]

I know there are these exceptions but they are limited, and like I said, you would have to show me the write up of how you are going to control speech on the internet. The devil is in the details.

I am not even sure the wide sweeping bans on “ child pornography” ( it is correctly called “child sexual abuse materials” now) or speech inciting imminent lawless action are entirely right.

we all know that obscenity is notoriously hard to define and regulate.

There are problems with these existing exceptions but at least they are fairly narrowly defined. If we limit content on the internet only to that which is absolutely correct, I can’t see how that could be carried out in any reasonable way.

My wariness is not with the Government, but with social media, and not with social media content, because as you said, it's a platform. But as a platform it has tremendous power. Watching The Social Dilemma is eye-opening, but here's just the trailer.

[iris lilies]

My take on this is that Facebook is free to censor whatever they want. It may have an impact on their business model but that's their decision to make…

I thought that too until I heard Ted Cruz talk about his view of this problem. He said he had been poking Donald Trump to crack down on big tech for a while before Donald did actually make a big deal about it.Eventually President Trump took some action (although I don’t remember what it was and it was largely ineffective no doubt ) because Instagram or Twitter or one of them did the President wrong. So Donald did the right thing for the wrong reason, typical.

Ted Cruz said that big tech originally was set up to act like the phone company and provide mechanism for communication and content distribution. There Is no FCC that regulates the phone company because content that goes across phone lines are not controlled by the phone company.

There is no FCC to regulate big tech Because they aren’t supposed to be controlling content. But they do.

[iris lilies]

In addition to the specific example the article references, and I referred to twice (you can't yell Fire in a crowded theatre):…

By “show me” I mean you would have to write out the laws you are proposing and show me exactly what you are proposing. The devil is in the details. The platforms through their algorithms do manipulate and control content and that certainly is problematic, agreed.

This thread is more about the egregious, obvious problem of removing content.


I was shocked when my brother’s Facebook account was frozen in a time out last year. He’s no radical Qanon person he’s just your typical suburban right leaning guy. Facebook froze his account without warning. There are never any obscenities coming out of his account. He has his Covid vaccine.

This really shocked me because his posts are reasonable. He was blocked at a time when a whole lot of other people were blocked.


Make no mistake, I do not think the government should do anything about this. My brother doesn’t have an inherent right to have a Facebook account. But observing that just pointed out to me how easily this kind of thing can be controlled by big tech. Of course that move lost FB a whole lot of customers so maybe they’re OK with that.

[Alan]

Ted Cruz said that big tech originally was set up to act like the phone company and provide mechanism for communication and content distribution. There Is no FCC that regulates the phone company because content that goes across phone lines are not controlled by the phone company.

That's an interesting train of thought and I agree for the most part with just a couple of caveats. I think social media sites such as Facebook or Twitter differ from phone service in that the communication they facilitate is not necessarily targeted nor are its users paying for private communications. I think it's more like the opinion pages in newspapers where the public is invited to express their views but the newspaper reserves the right to deny publication. We currently exist in such a weird political dynamic that it seems absurd to think the White House would coerce a newspaper not to print certain viewpoints while many seem to think it's hunky dory to hold social media sites to a different standard.

[razz]

If Big Tech was truly envisioned to operate like a phone company, the present situation is a dilemma. Phone companies never made money on selling ads as the communication and content was distributed. Was it naivety that imagined that Big Tech offered free would not try to find a way to pay for itself?

I have read different accounts reporting that the more outrageous the miscommunication and content, the more people sign on to Big Tech and see the ads generating greater profit for the Big Tech platforms. This incentive encourages miscommunication. People sign on for gossip, etc as they do in real life and to do this anonymously opens the flood gates.
There is no question in my mind that a lot of accurate info is shared on Big Tech as well; it is not all bad.

Is it that the genie is out of the bottle and no one knows how to deal with the consequences? Any ideas?

ETA to Alan's post (#17)- you are partially right about the difference between newspapers and Big Tech being addressed equally. If I/we don't like a newspaper, I/we simply discontinue my subscription going elsewhere impacting its revenue. Big Tech is now so important in global communication that there is little alternative to compete. Most of my local businesses refer to their FB page for business communications.

[Alan]

Is it that the genie is out of the bottle and no one knows how to deal with the consequences? Any ideas?

We're only talking about this because various governments do not approve of some of the content available through big tech and at least in the US there are no existing laws to prevent it as long as it doesn't promote violence or a few other select motivations.

In other countries, either the citizens themselves or their autocratic overlords have decided that there is no such thing as free speech, this discussion is about whether or not the US has finally become one of those countries and is ready to violate one of it's most important founding principles.

[LDAHL]

I don’t think the White House suggesting that platforms may want to consider banning certain people is technically censorship, but it is a close relative.

I don’t think internet-moded BS is qualitatively different from any other form of BS. I’m sure people used to worry about how the printing press might be used to spread misinformation.

BS is eternal. Surely a reasonable person can find a reasonable position between what the credentialed elites are saying this week and and the latest emissions from the opinion fever swamps. I don’t understand this drive to silence people “for the public good”, whether it’s anti-vaxxers, people who don’t believe deficits matter, or any other breed of fool.