There are a lot of replies that either didn’t read the article (or even the headline) that seem to be government apologists, or arguing that a particular email isn’t coercive enough, etc.
A court found that the government abused its power and infringes on people’s first amendment rights by using its intimidation power to coerce social media to censor free speech of citizens.
Freedom of speech is literally the first thing in the Bill of Rights. The government did a bad thing. Why defend them?
> A court found that the government abused its power and infringes on people’s first amendment rights by using its intimidation power to coerce social media to censor free speech of citizens.
This is not how a preliminary injunction works.
The court has ordered that the governmment stop doing the in-dispute things until the dispute is resolved - in either direction - in court.
The standard for such an injunction is not proof, but "they might prevail in court, and there's potentially enough harm from letting it continue in the meantime".
Also, a WSJ article suggested the point is that discovery needs to occur here before a judgment is made. [1]
Judge Doughty could have dismissed the case without an opportunity for discovery, as another judge did in another NCLA case, Changizi v. HHS, involving the same sort of censorship. Judge Doughty understood, however, that a largely secret censorship system can’t be evaluated under the First Amendment until after discovery.
While I agree here, I want to add a caveat that the linked article is technically a "commentary" pieces, not a news-side piece (aka: it's published on the opinion pages). But even given that, the opinion pages of the WSJ is just as fact-filled as the news side, but just highlights that the person writing it may not be a disinterested party.
The Opinion Pages of the WSJ also tend to lean more conservative, while the news side leans liberal. Though they will happily publish people from the left, such as publishing President Biden: https://www.wsj.com/articles/never-bet-against-the-american-...
> The Opinion Pages of the WSJ also tend to lean more conservative, while the news side leans liberal.
As with most News Corp outlets, the news side of the WSJ leans pretty far to the right (it did so even before it was a News Corp outlet, though not as much), it only seems “liberal” by comparison with its own opinion section.
That said, unlike, say, Fox News, the WSJ news side at least makes an effort to adhere to traditional journalistic norms, its right wing bias is more evident in agenda-setting (story selection, devotion of space, and placement/promotion), and less in commentary and outright fabrications in “news” content.
If you think that's "pretty far to the right," I'd wager you haven't met many people on the right or spent much time reading their thought. There's a whole world of interesting political variety on the left, the right, and elsewhere that will never appear in the newspaper.
When you have a profession that leans one way, most reporting likely follows. So while WSJ news seems conservative, it's positions compared to the general public's views leans slightly left. (Though after reading WSJ for many years now, it highly depends on the reporter).
Very good point...you would think tech folks would be better at identifying relative vs absolute frames of reference, but then the problem space is heavily propagandized and there is only so much time in the day.
What would an absolute frame of reference with regard to political opinion look like? I'm having a hard time conceiving such a thing, since not only does the range of opinion shift over time, but issues move into and out of relevance unpredictably.
It would be something like "select * from [reality]", except there are various problems like physically manifest reality is not the entirety of it, and our records of reality are often technically from the fantasy realm and the truth has been lost to time without our knowledge.
In the case of allsides.com, they're only comparing ~mainstream US media outlets against each other, but there are many cultures that would consider even left leaning US culture to be insanely far right.
In a more serious world, competent philosophers/linguists/historians/anthropologists/etc would deconstruct and expose these organizations for what they really are: propaganda outlets.
That applies both ways - there's no shortage of religious-rightist cultures on the planet that'd treat many sections of the U.S. right as quite left-leaning.
Even comparing to Europe, the memes that the US is to the right or left of Europe is just grossly wrong, often driven by taking one pet issue like public healthcare and using it as the base, when it's just one aspect of policy and there are others where Europe is markedly more moderate or conservative compared to the US.
Oftentimes those sorts of bias-rating sites also report clearly left-leaning outlets as more centrist than they are, and I wouldn't be surprised if outlets like the NYT get far higher ratings for factuality than they deserve.
> So funny, did you miss the columbian journalism review destroying legacy media including the nytimes for partisan reporting?
Ooh, whataboutism.
If we were talking about the NYTimes, I'd have plenty to say about the specific factional bias of that outlet, which, yes, its just as intense as the WSJ’s. If the 1990’s neoliberal consensus (today, pretty much the dominant, though decreasingly so over the last decade, centrist corporate capitalist wing of the Democratic Party) was embodied in a newspaper, it would be the New York Times.
the wsj opinion section has gone wildly off the rails.
love their journalism. can't read half the crap they allow to be published in opeds.
at a minimum, is it too much to not publish outright provable lies?
it actually feels like a similar persecution complex vibe to these lawsuits and congressional hearings to me
that somehow if we aren't forced to listen to them, or that their megaphone isn't as loud as it once was, that they are being persecuted and censored with the most orwellian oppression in the history of our country! (i can think of a lot of truly terrible things our govt has done... literal internment camps and more! but that is besides the point)
no one has silenced them. we continue to hear it constantly.
i hear more anti gay slurs now - on traditional media and online - than i ever remember growing up as a very obviously gay boy ;0
if anything, whenever someone crows about being 'cancelled' their message is spread even farther.
there isn't a right to amplification.
the next door kook was never promised a full page column in the local paper. with a guaranteed readership of thousands or millions.
any truth filter or higher bar for discourse that might have existed in legacy news media has been smashed
news corp is the leader and biggest offender
the democratization of the megaphone (internet gives any random conspiracist opportunity to reach more than cronkite did), has given many the impression that they are owed this power to yell and be guaranteed a listening and receptive audience.
> at a minimum, is it too much to not publish outright provable lies?
I'd love to hear some examples. From what I can tell, they don't lie, but they will leave out details that may provide additional context (much like the NYT and WP opinion pages tend to do).
There is a careful line between opinions and facts. From what I can tell, the editorial board doesn't allow outright facts that can be disputed from being published. But things where there may be a disagreement on a given topic, they will allow it to be published.
this is my all time favorite. which i get is a while ago, but i think the nsa cyber will resonate on hn more than current 'hot topics' (gender. biden policies. the guate piece this week really rubbed me the wrong way. worse it was doing the same thing the author critiqued of u.s. insiders lying to support corrupt interests)
the piece: torture and spying is great and stops terrorists! trust me. because of reasons. damned the research saying this isn't true and lack of any proof i could provide as the ultimate insider. that tan suit wearing barack will kill us all!!!
also having the temerity to publish this during peak bush hate too. balls.
though true that what used to be taken as facts are contested now. and history will never be fully settled timestamped and logged.
it just feels like they are winning with purpose. the christian right has built up an entire infrastructure to churn out 'academic' research, opinion pieces, outright buying news media or creating outlets. all of which is then quoted in judicial opinions by their judges and then taken as the full stop truth; when often most other sources disagree or call it less severe and the source is at a minimum insanely biased
The WSJ Opinion pages generally consist of articles written by The Editorial Board and also those submitted by guest contributors. It would be hard to argue that opinion pieces written by external authors and published by the WSJ have any consistency or standard in factuality or completeness. For example, the column frequently includes content from politicians, business leaders, or former campaign managers like Karl Rove. From what I have seen, the WSJ does not edit external opinion pieces, but can write a short disclaimer.
In particular, they need to find if there was any actual coercion or threat made by the gov't agencies to remove the speech they asked to. For example, when the FBI was asking Twitter to take down videos (of content that violated Twitter's own TOS), Twitter could've told them to go pound sand. But it would be a different story if the FBI indicated that Twitter "ought to" do it or face increased scrutiny, perhaps.
It has been long established in case law that government requests for censorship are tantamount to coercion and threats.
To wit, it matters not if the Giant makes a polite or directly threatening request of Jack. In either case, Jack is right to assume that he has no choice in the matter. And can not be expected to tell the Giant to "pound sand". Conversely, the Giant should not be able to claim that Jack had a choice.
The government has no business asking any entity, which it does not fund, to remove speech in the United States.
I'd argue that the US doesn't have enough of a reputation for disappearing people or putting their business under a heat lamp if they don't willfully comply with police requests that are overbearing. Apple, Google, etc get away with denying a lot of data requests[0]. And despite being put on the stand for 2016 election interference, Jack, Elon, and Mark are doing just fine.
Is that why President Biden called for a federal investigation [0] into Musk's companies shortly after he bought Twitter and told the government censors to "pound sand?"
Keep in mind this was in response to a question from a Bloomberg "journalist" which basically laid out the premise that Musk might be a national security threat. Biden has been known to show up to press conferences with a "cheat sheet" listing which journalists to call for questions, and the verbatim text of the question that each will ask. [1]
Reputation isn't an argument. It would be false in its assumption even if it were.
The case law is established.
There isn't a single case of someone's speech being censored, due to government request, for which the person being censored does not have a Constitutionally airtight First Amendment violation complaint.
I don't see why there needs to be any coercion. The offense here is not against the social networks, it's against the people whose speech was suppressed.
Whether that suppression was done with threats, requests, subtle hints, or an automated system, if the government's intent was to suppress speech, the means employed make no difference.
Edit: imagine an extreme case in which a social network independently created an automated system for government employees to remove posts. Would it be constitutional for the government to use that system?
Well, that’s definitely not true. The government can suppress speech when it sends an emergency action alert to commandeer tv and radio stations during an emergency, for one example.
The fact is that the means employed make every bit of difference when it comes to whether or not the content based speech restriction is tailored as narrowly as possible to achieve a compelling government interest.
On the other hand, maybe it makes not difference to your feelings, which is fair.
Emergency announcements or orders have to be temporary and limited in scope. They also couldn't target specific channels on talk radio just because they have a made up emergency.
Meanwhile the emergency broadcast rules that were created in early tv and radio era definitely don't apply to social media, given that they are discretionary, asynchronous forms of communication, and there's no lack of bandwidth as there was in the early tv and radio era.
I'm obviously not saying the means never make a difference in any case. I'm talking about this case.
I'm saying that using minimal means does not make an unconstitutional action acceptable; you're pointing out that using excessive means can make a constitutional action unacceptable. That's a different situation and not really a reply to my comment or this case.
To make it more relevant, can you point to a single case where a court has ruled that a constitutionally limited action was permitted simply because the means were unintrusive?
A compelling government interest, as you said, could justify the action, but what is the compelling government interest here?
> To make it more relevant, can you point to a single case where a court has ruled that a constitutionally limited action was permitted simply because the means were unintrusive?
I think that's self-contradictory: if the court permitted it, then it did not cross the limits.
If you meant this more broadly, then we should understand that ALL government actions are constitutionally limited and the more an action infringes upon liberty, the more the action should be "narrowly tailored", but actions can still be permitted.
There’s actually a pretty regimented set of rules for the sort of sliding scale you’re talking about. Put succinctly, if the government wants to regulate against your fundamental rights, they have to have a really really good interest and their mechanism must be as narrowly tailored as possible. Less fundamental rights might be regulated against based on an interest that isn’t as strong, or a mechanism that isn’t as narrow, maybe one that is only connected to the interest by a “rational basis”, even if it wasn’t the intent that the legislature had.
Most people other than Rudy Giuliani call these ways of analyzing whether a law is constitutional strict scrutiny and rational basis scrutiny. For intermediate rights, the standard is (wait for it) intermediate scrutiny.
I am only scratching the surface of this subject but you are absolutely right to intuit that the linkage between the means and and the interest.
Ok. I’m glad you’re not saying that; I think it means we are coming at this similarly.
You can choose how compelling the interest is, but my take was that the government has a compelling interest in free and fair elections. Or in making sure a pandemic is handled well.
My hourly rate for research is higher than you probably expect! But your question is super interesting so I will try to answer it this evening. You might have a point about these situations being opposites (contrapositives? I forget) and I have to think about this more.
If there is no coercion then your complain boils down to others not sharing your opinion, both in the way they don't reverberate your personal opinion and in the way they express opinions you don't agree with.
That's kind of the opposite thing you claim you're trying to achieve.
It was not "remove this", it was "this probably violates your TOS", so that could be the difference between asking social media companies to take stuff down for only the Government's interest versus both the Government's and the platform's interests. The FBI isn't going to Klan website hosts and asking them to take down Klan content because those hosts don't forbid hosting that sort of speech.
A bank is acting as a trustee of property, corporate social mediums unfortunately do not.
If you want a legal right to individual freedom of speech on corporate commons, be explicit about it and work for that! Focusing on this small slice of corporate censorship just because it was encouraged by the government is distraction from the fundamental problem.
The standard actually is the plaintiffs are likely to prevail on the merits (not "might"-- it's probable per the judge), and in practice a preliminary injunction hearing in a major case can take the form of a mini-trial. The judge wrote 155 pages that, at first blush, appear to be a very serious and thoughtful effort. The judge summarized on page 154 thus:
"The Plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits in establishing that the Government has used its power to silence the opposition. Opposition to COVID-19 vaccines; opposition to COVID-19 masking and lockdowns; opposition to the lab-leak theory of COVID-19; opposition to the validity of the 2020 election; opposition to President Biden’s policies; statements
that the Hunter Biden laptop story was true; and opposition to policies of the government officials in power. All were suppressed. It is quite telling that each example or category of suppressed speech was conservative in nature. This targeted suppression of conservative ideas is a perfect example of viewpoint discrimination of political speech. American citizens have the right to engage in free debate about the significant issues affecting the country." [1] (emphasis mine)
"Likely" means more than "possible" and less than "probable", with a pretty hefty error bar given the trial hasn't happened yet. It's a far cry from the settled state the original headline implied.
An ultimate win must be "likely" to prevail in a PI, and this judge said it was. "Likely" and "probable" are synonyms".[1] Apparently some courts do apply an relaxed standard in First Amendment cases of "reasonably likely"[2], but that's not clearly right and it's also not a quibble over whether "likely" is "probable" (which it is).
"A court found that the government abused its power and infringes on people’s first amendment rights by using its intimidation power to coerce social media to censor free speech of citizens."
They literally did not.
This is a preliminary injunction, not a decision on the merits.
This is why the court is clear they are allegations, etc.
There is a ton of issues with this injunction and rationale, and it will almost certainly be overturned (or at the very least,seriously modified) on appeal.
In fact, the injunction and reasoning even deliberately misquotes evidence to try to support points. Not like in arguable ways, either.
While that sort of thing may be fun and play okay sometimes at the district level, and in the news, 99% of the time that goes very badly at appeals.
I strongly doubt when that happens that you will come back and say "i guess the government didn't do a bad thing"
>> This is why the court is clear they are allegations
"Plaintiffs have shown that not only have the Defendants shown willingness to coerce and/or to give significant encouragement to social-media platforms to suppress free speech with regard to the COVID-19 pandemic and national elections, they have also shown a willingness to do it with regard to other issues, such as gas prices, parody speech, calling the President a liar, climate change, gender, and abortion"
Doesn't sound to me like the court is clear they are allegations.
The injunction is quite harsh and I agree that it's likely to be seriously modified in its final form.
As fare as predictions go do you think the gov will come out clean or it'll end with "gov did a bad thing"? And if so will _you_ come back and say "i guess the government did do a bad thing"?
First, i always admit when i'm wrong, you can find plenty of examples on HN :)
I don't go through life pretending i will always be right, and I try to learn from the times i get it wrong :)
As for what will happen -
Honestly - it's hard to say.
I think it will be that some people in the government asked for things they shouldn't have (let's ignore if they are illegal things or not or whatever for a second). The government is big. My experience with any large company discovery is that somebody somewhere says or does something stupid. It's hard to believe that won't be the case for the government here[1] :)
I think some people take the view that's okay (despite imbalance of power), and others think they should only be allowed to ask for things that are affirmatively okay.
Historically, the court result has been the former, though usually it's closer to "state/feds pass law saying x, ask you to do x, law gets overturned as not okay".
I think it may be decided to be closer to the middle now if it makes it to SCOTUS - but i'm not sure what that looks like. It's hard to come up with bright line standards, but bad facts make bad law - if the there are senior officials ordering censorship, ....
I don't think folks will go all the way to saying the government may not ask for things that later may be decided to be illegal to ask for.
[1] I would personally be much more concerned if it was senior officials vs random worker bees. Unlike some corporations, the government is actually pretty darn good at retaining evidence,etc. So if senior officials ordered it, the likelihood of a record existing is much much higher than "CEO who verbally tells a junior software engineer to do something bad" or whatever.
Our founding fathers made the distinction between civil law and natural law.
Rights are granted by natural law. If rights were granted by civil law then they would not be rights, they would be privileges and privileges can be taken away.
That is a clear basis for which to make distinctions between cases a person might agree or disagree with even if the process is identical.
When law is used against the weak, it's probably wrong. When law is used against the powerful, it's probably right.
If you believe in rule of law, rule of law is the idea of preventing arbitrary exercises of power. You have to have power to exercise it, so rule of law is first and foremost a belief that the law should protect the weak and bind the powerful.
It's become quite rare for me to see people who defend speech they don't agree with, and rarer still any speech they find repugnant. It isn't liberty vs authority anymore; it's just team red and team blue. One might be wrong-er than the other but neither think people they hate should be able to open their mouths in anything but agreement.
I realized a long time ago that if no one was allowed to say thing I find distasteful the world would be a very quiet place. And I must imagine that there exist people who given the opportunity would be far more censorious than I might be at my worst. As such it seems beneficial to in general to mutually disarm with respect to censorship rather than create a world of pressing silence.
Yeah, it's worrying how many people seem to go: "I don't like this" => "Nobody else should be able to see it". I've had people be confused in conversations where I've confirmed I strongly dislike a thing/person/site, yet do not wish at all to see it banned or deplatformed. Not to do the whole generational sneering thing, but I do find the difference is often whether someone grew up with the pre-social-media internet, where it was common sense that not all of the internet would appeal to you, and you'd need to manage your own experience, or the modern "safe" internet, where people are accustomed to having a direct line to the powers that be to come and remove stuff that upsets them
I've had people be confused in conversations where I've confirmed I strongly dislike a thing/person/site, yet do not wish at all to see it banned or deplatformed.
The day's not over until you've been called a communist groomer and a Nazi.
Kind of - crack downs on "obscenity" always come from the right and rarely if ever from the left. For the most part, everybody seems to agree than "obscenity" should be an exception to freedom of speech, although there's quite a bit of disagreement on what constitutes it.
I disagree. At most you'll see parents deciding that their tax dollars should not be used to stock a school library with "obscene" books in schools. That is not an infringement on speech, those authors are free to publish and sell in any other market.
This just shows how useless a single-dimension left/right axis is. There were plenty of socially conservative Democratic party members then (and now, but moreso then).
This was also a time when the majority (>50%) of Americans disapproved of mixed-race relationships, according to Gallup. That percentage only fell below 50% in 1993, IIRC.
Is anyone on the right arguing for any speech restriction?
Yes. Restrictions on what teachers are allowed to teach are restrictions on freedom of speech. Restrictions on non-sexual drag performances are restrictions of freedom of speech. Bans on calling for boycotts of Israeli goods and services are restrictions of the freedom of speech.
> Restrictions on what teachers are allowed to teach are restrictions on freedom of speech
Do you consider a curriculum to be a restriction on freedom of speech? I ask as a genuine question - being from the UK the norm for me is having a national curriculum and standard testing (albeit it executed by private-but-certified exam boards). It seems like common sense to me that obviously teachers have restrictions on what they can say in a classroom. Any employee does within their workplace and job duties, but teaching is one profession where I'd clearly expect a much higher level of restriction (along with the police, who represent the state, and doctors, who have duties of professionalism and to give medical advice only in line with the regulator, and various other regulated roles)
The restrictions on teachers you speak of are in their functions as employees of the state while performing their duties on the job on the employer's time. Employers setting limits on the conduct of employees on the job is generally not a freedom of speech, or first amendment issue.
That goes double when we are talking about public employees whose conduct is directly the function of law.
> Employers setting limits on the conduct of employees on the job is generally not a freedom of speech, or first amendment issue.
In other words: you're allowed to restrict the speech of other people as long as you own private property. Turns out that freedom of speech in a liberal "democracy" is not all it's cracked up to be.
You skipped the rather pertinent bit where these restrictions apply only to people who chose of their own volition to take them on.
You are, of course, free to not take on the burden of employment from a particular organization if you find their demands on your conduct while they are compensating you for your time to be unacceptable.
This relationship is purely transactional. And, sorry, the idea that this is actually a bona fide problem is facile.
That line of reasoning would make sense if the have-nots in a liberal society didn't need to work just to survive. But that is not the case, is it?
Liberal society loves to characterise itself as a rigid, well-structured system in which individuals choose to make idealised rational decisions to work towards their own interests. As opposed to emotional reasoning, which is conveniently implied to be the diametrical opposite of rational thought. And I call it "convenient" because as a result can easily paint protests and strikes, as "irrational" and "despicable" actions perpetrated by "unreasonable" individuals.
However, as soon as one considers the fact that the disparity of power between people with private property and people without makes it so that the people without private property cannot afford to make decisions on a "rational vacuum". We quickly find ourselves reverting back to "what are you going to do about it? You don't work, you don't eat."
Indeed, allowing employers to coerce the speech of employees by punishing them for actions outside of the reasonable scope of employment is very worrying. Unfortunately, a good deal of the modern "left" supports it when they dislike the person. Much of the right does too, which I have equal disdain for, but I will at least acknowledge it can be logically consistent with some right-wing philosophies (on the more ancap end). Whereas it's a bit strange to see "socialists" saying "but they're a private company!"
However speech in the classroom is within the scope of your job duties. So my employer should not be able to fire me for wearing a Trump or Biden sticker off the clock, but it is fair to prohibit me from wearing it whilst on the job, and to sanction me if I'm proselytizing to customers during my duties
I don't doubt many of the performers are deriving sexual satisfaction from the performance, but as long as the performance itself is not sexual it isn't harming children. Don't get me wrong, I think "Drag Queen Story Hour" is the gender equivalent of blackface, but a man dressing up like a mockery of womanhood and reading stories doesn't violate anybody else's rights, therefore we have no right to use violence to stop it.
Women can be drag queens too! For me, drag adjacent to Cabaret and Burlesque. I'm not a fan of any of those, but I appreciate that they are art forms that people should be free to express themselves in.
Book bans, the "Don't say gay" law, requiring medical professionals to spout specific claims about the "harms" of pregnancy termination and a raft of other stuff too.
Do you claim those are not censorship?
I'm not taking a side here. Government censorship is bad. Full stop.
These are limited to the government itself. The "don't say gay," bill makes it illegal for teachers to teach sexual related stuff to elementary school kids. It's a form of self-governing (no pun intended) and isn't restricting the rights of citizens, which the first amendment protects. It's restricting what the government itself can do. Book bans are also limited to what the school library may carry and doesn't apply to public libraries or book stores and the like.
>requiring medical professionals to spout specific claims about the "harms" of pregnancy termination and a raft of other stuff too.
This is technically compelled speech rather than censorship. It's another concept I'm not overly comfortable with. To be fair, it's compelling a licensed physician to do this when performing his or her profession, which the government (and the people) has chosen to regulate. A physician wouldn't be compelled to do this outside his or her practicing medicine.
> It's become quite rare for me to see people who defend speech they don't agree with ...
I think framing this as being about speech with which one disagrees, or finds repugnant, is a bit disingenuous. It omits consideration of the possibility of speech that is genuinely harmful. For a few examples:
- My friends and I decide it'd be cool to put you in jail, so we report you as committing a serious crime that you didn't, and all give matching testimony that leads to your conviction.
- Pfizer starts selling a new drug that cures cancer. Except it turns out that they completely fabricated all the studies showing its effect, and actually the pills are nothing but placebos.
- A mugger with his hand in his pocket stops you at night and says, "Give me your wallet or I'll shoot you." You give him your wallet and he leaves.
I hope you would agree that these situations are... not ideal, and that the law should be able to discourage them. Despite the fact that all of these are, indisputably, speech.
Absolutely nothing you stated is legal now. The government would not have to intervene asking for censorship in any of these cases. They would press charges and have a court order to remove the non-protected speech.
Sure, I didn't mean to suggest that those things are legal. Just giving a few examples of speech that is harmful, rather than merely distasteful.
> The government would not have to intervene asking for censorship in any of these cases.
Hm, I think that may be pinning quite a lot on some questionable definition of "censorship."
In these examples the law would be banning some specific speech from me, Pfizer, and the mugger, and punishing us if we engaged in that banned speech anyway. Isn't that what censorship is?
Your first two examples are fraud, not speech. Your third example is speech, but if you remove the mugger and have a friend say the same thing to you it becomes a joke.
Yeah I think this is a point people miss. Rights aren't just also for unpopular people and things, they're arguably only for them - because popular people/things are generally not under duress in the first place. So it shouldn't be surprising at all that many debates end up involving unsavoury situations, since that's the only time these safeguards really get put through their paces. I sound like Captain Obvious when I write it down, but I've found it bears repeating
It doesn’t bear repeating because it isn’t at all true. Unpopular speech does need to be protected but even popular speech can be suppressed by governments and often has been when the government has reason to disagree with it.
“Likely to do X” is not “have done X”, or even “will do X”.
If it was, we wouldn’t need the preliminary in preliminary injunction, the standards for which balance the likelihood of success on the merits with the kinds of impacts the action sougjt to enjoin would have on the situation of the parties, so a greater and/or more difficult to undo impact requires a lesser probability of success to be sufficiently likely to warrant an injunction.
Kinda. It depends on whether you mean the legal definition of admissible evidence or just "stuff"
It is mostly meta evidence - statements about what evidence will show at trial. Which assumes it's valid and admissible and actually shows that and ....
In this case, this isn't on a whim but I wouldn't say it's on the evidence either - especially given the consistent misquotes.
They were not particularly diplomatic on the evidence part: "Additionally, the Court’s conclusion that Plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits of their First Amendment claims fails to properly apply state-action doctrine and ignores the voluminous evidence presented by Defendants that contradicts Plaintiffs’ conclusory allegations."
"Temporary restraining orders" (TROs) are extremely preliminary. This is not a TRO.
This is a "preliminary injunction" (PI). A PI is a different phase of the case. Granting a PI is extremely an significant and consequential action by the judge. Think about it this way-- if the judge is right and conservative voices were suppressed-- the PI has the potential to change the political landscape in which the legal challenge occurs. So, in addition to the judge signaling that the plaintiffs are likely to succeed in getting permanent relief, in the meantime the judge also is tipping the playing field in their favor to undo the irremediable harms that are the subject of the litigation.
PI's exist to maintain status quo. It's not that interesting. What evidence standards are used also varies a lot (some courts only use admissible evidence, some do not).
In this case, it will likely be overturned on standing grounds, for example, fairly quickly, if not other grounds.
It has tons of problems everywhere. On standing, for example, it clearly ignores binding supreme court precedent - the court decided, with basically no discussion of why, the states have parens patriae standing to sue on behalf of their citizens in cases like this, but they literally do not, and haven't forever (going back >100 years).
I expect this will be raised almost instantly in the request for a stay.
Actually, i just found the stay request, they already filed it:
"This Court concluded that Plaintiff States have standing under a parens patriae theory
despite the Supreme Court’s clear statement that “[a] State does not have standing as parens patriae
to bring an action against the Federal Government.” Alfred L. Snapp & Son, Inc. v. Puerto Rico,
458 U.S. 592 (1982); Haaland v. Brackeen, 143 S. Ct. 1609, 1640 (2023)."
"The Court also held that all Plaintiffs have standing despite their failure to present any evidence of ongoing or imminent
harm. See Attala Cnty., Miss. Branch of NAACP v. Evans, 37 F.4th 1038, 1042 (5th Cir. 2022).
Additionally, the Court’s conclusion that Plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits of their First
Amendment claims fails to properly apply state-action doctrine and ignores the voluminous evidence presented by Defendants that contradicts Plaintiffs’ conclusory allegations."
I don't think this injunction is gonna stand very long.
I can't stand these arguments. It's like "well maybe we did violate the first amendment but you can't sue us for it." As far as I'm concerned the government should have a special status that basically anyone can sue them for violating the constitution as that damages everyone. We need to make it easier to hold the government to account, not harder.
It’s not so cut and dry, because believers in free speech can believe that the federal government and its employees should also be free to speak.
The legal theory at stake here is that all government speech is inherently coercive. But this is not necessarily true, or aligned with free speech as a principle of society.
Any time someone says “we must protect free speech by legally enjoining the following people from speaking,” I am suspicious.
> It’s not so cut and dry, because believers in free speech can believe that the federal government and its employees should also be free to speak.
If the speech the government officials are engaging in is a demand to censor the political speech of citizens, then we are looking at a violation of the First Amendment.
Nobody is saying that government officials can't engage in other kinds of speech that don't violate the Bill of Rights.
> If the speech the government officials are engaging in is a demand to censor the political speech of citizens, then we are looking at a violation of the First Amendment
"Censor" is doing a lot of work here.
It's important for the government to engage in public speech that may lead another person to self-censor. E.g., a press release saying "FYI: publishing your how-to-build-a-nuke guide is gonna help crazy people bomb US cities, please don't do that."
If gov speech is inherently coercive, then the gov is NOT allowed to make that request. (which feels dumb to me) In reality, it's more likely a court would hold they can say that; they just can't imprison the publisher (or audit their taxes more aggressively) as a result.
So the gov can def say things that would lead to self-censorship. They just can't be dicks about it.
> So the gov can def say things that would lead to self-censorship. They just can't be dicks about it.
The government is going to have a hard time claiming they didn't engage in coercion when they've been actively threatening to yank the Section 230 protections of the Communications Decency Act if the platforms don't step up the censorship.
>You may have never heard of it, but Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is the legal backbone of the internet. The law was created almost 30 years ago to protect internet platforms from liability for many of the things third parties say or do on them.
Decades later, it’s never been more controversial. People from both political parties and all three branches of government have threatened to reform or even repeal it.
>If gov speech is inherently coercive, then the gov is NOT allowed to make that request. (which feels dumb to me) In reality, it's more likely a court would hold they can say that; they just can't imprison the publisher (or audit their taxes more aggressively) as a result.
Governments absolutely can be coercive, but that doesn't mean all government speech is coercive.
Claiming (you're not, just expanding on your point) that government speech is inherently coercive is ridiculous on its face.
My local government sends me a "voter guide" a couple months before every election. By that logic, that means the government is coercing me to vote.
CISA[0] sends me multiple emails a day telling me to apply patches or mitigations to address vulnerabilities/security issues.
CISA is a government agency. By that logic, by doing the above, they are coercing me to manage my private property to their whim.
The CIA is a government agency. Their "World Fact Book"[1] argues against travel to certain destinations. By that logic, they're coercing people to only travel where the CIA wants you to travel.
There are hundreds (thousands?) of other examples of government speech that isn't coercive. Was there coercion WRT communications between the government and social media companies? I have no idea as I don't know all the facts of the case. And neither does anyone posting in this thread.
If the government was coercive, then let's (metaphorically) put them up against the wall to be shot. If not, then let's do it for real. /s
The threat of more aggressive tax audits or regulations or whatever is always there. It doesn't have to be spelled out. Piss off the government and they have a billion ways to make you feel pain. It would be absurd if the government could "suggest" you do something and this was considered not an abuse because they didn't literally, at that exact moment, spell out the penalties they would impose for non-compliance.
Of course in a theoretically ideal system laws are precise enough that governments can't simply make your life worse for getting on the wrong side of them. But nobody seems willing to stomach the level of rigor that would require from lawmakers. Three Felonies A Day and such.
Demands are free speech, even if unreasonable. The First Amendment constrains the application of the power of law, like prosecution and imprisonment. Which is not what happened in these cases.
When a government official demands that the political speech of citizens be censored, that is not protected speech.
If you recall, Trump wasn't allowed to block citizens who were critical of him on Twitter for the same reason.
> In a 29-page ruling on Tuesday, a three-judge panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously upheld a lower court's decision that found that Trump violated the First Amendment when he blocked certain Twitter users
Speech does not censor speech; this is an essential core of the concept of free speech.
If I tell you to take down your comments, I am not censoring you. I’m speaking. It’s only censorship if I can force you to take them down.
The same is true for federal officials; just telling someone to shut up is not censorship. Without an actual threat of force, it’s not censorship or intimidation.
Note that I’m not arguing that intimidation cannot and does not happen. But intimidation requires an actual threat. Not just an angry email.
The ironic thing is that federal officials can speak freely because of the First Amendment. It gives them license to speak because actual legal protections exist for citizen speech. The power of federal officials is well constrained under U.S. law. They can tell a media company to change their content, and the company can say “no.” Because of the First Amendment.
We know from the Twitter document dumps that government officials on both sides of the aisle have been demanding that speech (and speakers) critical of them, their preferred policies and/or their political party be censored.
> intimidation requires an actual threat
Threatening to yank section 230 of the Communications Decency Act if platforms don't ramp up their censorship is an actual threat.
> You may have never heard of it, but Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is the legal backbone of the internet. The law was created almost 30 years ago to protect internet platforms from liability for many of the things third parties say or do on them.
Decades later, it’s never been more controversial. People from both political parties and all three branches of government have threatened to reform or even repeal it.
Come on, none of the people involved in this case had the power to “yank” Section 230. I feel like you don’t have a solid handle on how government actually works, which is hampering this discussion.
You are falsely speaking of Federal Officials as if they are not acting in a government capacity, and therefore have their freedom of speech in that capacity protected by the Constitution.
The opposite is true.
The Constitution's protection of individual citizen free speech very specifically is a restriction on the government (and its officials acting in government capacity, which is how the government speaks) from acting to limit the speech of citizens under most circumstances.
Which is exactly the case in question.
This is how Constitutional protections work. They limit the capacity of the government and its officials in order to protect the Rights of individual citizens.
Case law has long held that even the politest censorship request by the government is viewed as threat of force.
The propaganda around this issue is weak to the point of being insulting.
Below, I further frame the argument against the false-assertion that the government has free speech protections under the Constitution.
The government is specifically restricted by the Constitution in order to convey Rights to citizens.
Just as the FBI does not have Constitutionally protected free speech rights to request censorship of citizens, no matter how politely requested, the FBI can not legally "request of you" to report to prison for five years in the absence of being convicted of a crime.
As any such request carries the presumption of force.
This restriction protects the Constitutional Rights of citizens.
I can request that you report to prison. That is protected speech. I can request that speech be censored. That is protected speech.
Aside from my lack of power and potential force to be able to effect those outcomes, the Constitution also exists to protect individuals from my such requests should I, for instance, then drum up a mob (akin to a government) in order to try to intimidate or force results.
The government is not an individual with Constitutional Rights. It is the entity that the Constitution exists to protect individuals against.
You're speaking of the difference between constitutional literalism, and constitutional intent. The 2nd Amendment, interpreted literally, means I should be able to build a nuke. After all there are no explicit limits. That obviously was not the intent of the amendment by any stretch of the imagination. Such a consideration was never dealt with because this was simply outside any sort of world the Founding Fathers could have imagined.
So too here with the 1st amendment. Interpreted literally, you're absolutely correct. Intimidation isn't passing a law, but obviously the government using threats to censor billions of people (since this would expand even beyond the US) is obviously contrary to every single reasonable interpretation of the 1st Amendment. Again a world where the government even could censor billions of people using intimidation alone is something the Founding Fathers could never have even begun to imagine.
You’re arguing the obvious and easy part. It’s fully settled law that intimidation can violate the First Amendment.
But under current law, intimidation must be proven (there must be an actual threat). The core question here is whether any statement, request, or demand by a federal official will be treated, by default, as intimidation under the law.
If upheld, such a standard would be a radical redefinition of the interactions between the federal government and private sector, and have some very weird and unexpected side effects.
For example, political speech is usually the most protected, but this standard would constrain tons of it. Imagine if the communications officer of a sitting Senator could get prosecuted because they asked a newspaper to alter a story they did not like. Something that happens almost every day in DC.
LOL at the "censorship requests are free speech of the government" argument.
You are trying to assign Constitutional Rights to the government in its relationship with citizens. As if the government was an individual whose rights are covered under the First Amendment and it is the citizens who are restricted from limiting the government's freedoms.
Very specifically, the First Amendment protects Freedom of Speech of US citizens by restricting what the government can do. Under the First Amendment and its case law, the government is widely restricted from censoring citizens.
Your sole rhetorical strategy was to invert that relationship in a manner that does not exist.
Beyond that, it has long been established in case law that government requests for censorship are tantamount to demands that have the threat of force behind them.
The government does not have a "right" to speech, because the government doesn't have rights. Employees for the government generally have the right to speak, unless they are speaking for the government. If they are speaking for the government, that is not their speech, but rather is government speech.
Government speech isn't inherently coercive, but government speech telling one party to muzzle another, or else, is coercive.
Hiding regulatory threats behind “simple, optional requests” is so far beyond the pale that I can’t imagine letting them get away with it. Especially when the counter argument is that the government has inalienable rights to free speech. The federal government is not some downtrodden dissident in need of protecting.
> the federal government and its employees should also be free to speak.
They are. They're not allowed to speak on _behalf_ of the government without limit, though. In this case, it's pretty clear, that's what they did.
They weren't _personally_ reaching out to Twitter as a citizen and asking for posts to be removed. They were asking as _agents_ of the government, through official communications channels established precisely for this purpose, and they did it on taxpayer paid time.
> Any time someone says “we must protect free speech by legally enjoining the following people from speaking,” I am suspicious.
The purpose of their speech is to remove the ability for others to access platforms. They are not making any legal claims or starting any legal cases, they are simply using their power to remove speech from American citizens. They have no _natural right_ to do this.
> Freedom of speech is literally the first thing in the Bill of Rights.
Not necessarily talking about this injunction in particular, but I would like to address this argument. Yes, freedom of speech is very clearly expressed in the Constitution. But there are limits and exceptions to every right in the Constitution, certainly including speech.
There are many things that are indisputably "speech" and yet are also illegal: fraud, extortion, libel, slander, perjury, threats, impersonating a doctor or law enforcement officer, etc.
I think it would be difficult to make a case that our society would be better off if we defined free speech in so broad and absolutist a sense as to permit all of these. So our evaluation of any particular issue must be more complex than "it's speech, therefore it is always automatically okay."
If the government was just trying to police fraud, extortion, etc., then few people would have a problem. However, there is solid evidence that the government worked in secret to censor the speech of a Stanford University professor, physician, and epidemiologist. How is society better off when the government is working is secret to suppress the speech of academics who have opinions that are misaligned with the establishment.
To me, the problem is that the whole situation is rotten, and focusing on one tiny aspect while leaving out the wider context just makes a convenient scapegoat.
Even before centralizing websites entered pop culture, it was blatantly obvious that they are intrinsically subject to censorship, just like TV, radio, and newspapers. cf "The revolution will not be televised". It wasn't a matter of if, and it wasn't even a matter of when. They are defective by design, and most people just straight up didn't seem to care. Just like how they were happy to believe corporate news on other mediums for decades.
Furthermore, most of the power in this country resides outside the de facto government. The pattern of "this is bad for us. please take it down. <possible implied escalation>" is routine and banal. Focusing on a government agency doing this (which actually has much less soft power than say a major advertiser or a golf buddy), and blowing it out of proportion just feels like a distraction from the overall dynamic. "Look we found the censorship! This is what we need to fix!" - even though censorship is pervasive for any centralized media.
>The ruling was criticized by Jameel Jaffer, an adjunct professor of law and journalism who is executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. "It can't be that the government violates the First Amendment simply by engaging with the platforms about their content-moderation decisions and policies," Jaffer told The New York Times, calling it "a pretty radical proposition that isn't supported by the case law."
> While the government must be careful to avoid coercion in its efforts to combat false information, Jaffer said that "unfortunately, Judge Doughty's order doesn't reflect a serious effort to reconcile the competing principles."
> Stanford Law School Assistant Professor Evelyn Douek told The Washington Post that the "injunction is strikingly broad and clearly intended to chill any kind of contact between government actors and social media platforms."
> A February 2021 message in which Flaherty asked Twitter to remove a parody account related to Hunter Biden's daughter said, "Cannot stress the degree to which this needs to be resolved immediately. Please remove this account immediately."
are just self-dealing. If I email Twitter with a request like that, they correctly route it to /dev/null. If the office of the President sends that, they can't do that. It's just too risky. So that's why I think it's an abuse of power.
In the absence of some court ruling that prohibits parody, you have the Constitutional right to pretend to be Hunter Biden's daughter on Twitter. Twitter also has the right to do some editorializing, like not giving them a checkmark, or posting a note like "we don't think this is actually Hunter Biden's daughter", or shutting down the account. It's their right, but they have to do it because they want to do it, not because the President of the United States said so. That's not a power that the President has.
While I personally agree with the causes the administration is fighting for, they are exercising powers that the government doesn't have. That should always be viewed critically. It sucks that people are getting bad information about vaccines. Increase funding for schools or get a Constitutional amendment passed that removes the freedom of speech. Threatening emails are easy, but an abuse of power. Follow the process you swore an oath to uphold, even if you don't get instant gratification. The 1st Amendment exists for a good reason, and we can't forget that.
> A court found that the government abused its power and infringes on people’s first amendment rights by using its intimidation power to coerce social media to censor free speech of citizens.
I'm not sure you read the article you're quoting, because you're claiming stuff that does not correspond to the facts.
The article you're quoting states quite clearly that a judge granted a request for a preliminary injunction imposing limits on how a few state institutions can exercise their rights to fight disinformation.
This is a preliminary injunction. It loosely means "hey we have here a plaintiff that claims a few government institutions are doing something wrong. While we check if the plaintiff's complain holds any water, let's put a pin on these things."
The article you're quoting also states quite clearly that the US government has the right to fight disinformation, specially that which directly harms the public. This happens to be exactly the case.
This boils down to covid denialists and antivaxers in general trying to push their disinformation, and thus trying to stop state institutions such as the Department of Health from suggesting that, say, letting a pandemic spread freely through a population can get a lot of people killed.
The filing is that there is sufficient probability the government did a bad thing to issue an injunction while the court figures out if the government did a bad thing. In general, injunctions protecting freedom of speech are broadly and freely issued.
... But a rational person can ask how we protect free speech by muzzling the government in this context.
But the Court is not muzzling the government in the sense of prohibiting their public message. The court is enjoining their method of influencing public debate - that they were/are preventing what you say from being published based on its content.
Prohibiting unlawful orders is not an abridgment of an authority’s “free speech”.
Nothing the government was doing is preventing what I say from being published based on its content because (a) I left Twitter ages ago (on account of it being a hole) and (b) I have no right to post on Twitter in the first place.
I'm not sure why this needs to be said, but "you" in this context is conceptually an abstraction of the private citizen. Maybe @shadowgovt the individual never says a word that the establishment would disapprove of, but don't count on that always being the case, and certainly don't expect others to fall in line in that regard. Is it your opinion that the government should have such power - specifically to, without officially commandeering/nationalizing the companies, to direct them to censor disfavored non-criminal speech?
I personally believe the government can certainly pass information on to private corporations and then the private corporations can then choose what to do.
Whether the situation went past that is what this court case would be about, and nothing has been decided on that topic yet.
The court clearly found that wrongly because they do say that there are other non first amendment protected speech that the government can indeed suppress on social media.
It’s just these few non first amendment protected items that the court is ideologically opposed to that the government cannot suppress.
> there are other non first amendment protected speech that the government can indeed suppress
This is a famously narrow category (eg CSAM). The gov often can't even suppress state secrets. I think most people are fine with this category existing, even if there's disagreements on what's in it.
Except if you look at the number of complaints that were actually acted on it looks a lot less like they were that intimidating at all. From the Twitter files it seems like way less than 10% of the reported tweets had anything happen to them at all.
It's integral for the executive office to be able to head off garbage information like that spewed by MAGAs and antivax people, no one forced twitter or facebook to censor that garbage, but they chose to. This judgement is garbage and the judge's decision will pretty quickly be vacated by the appellate court because the executive branch has been able to contact newspapers and other media since the beginning of the nation. It seems to me like this judge thinks that the judicial branch is the only "powerful" branch of the government these days, like the Supreme Court seems to think as well.
It amounts to “no one from these 8 government agencies may communicate with anyone working at these three non profits, 20 social media companies or any similar organization”
I’m not defending the behavior alleged here but this judge is not the sort of person you want adjudicating serious issues. You don’t fight censorship with blanket bans on speech.
A supporter of free speech should be horrified by this ruling. If you’re not, imagine an injunction of similar scope where the political sides were reversed.
I don’t give a rat’s ass about the free speech rights of the government. Why on earth would I? The government is already massively constrained in what it can say and that’s entirely appropriate because the purpose of free speech is to protect the right of the weak to speak even when the strong disagree with them.
You may disagree with the ruling but if you’re on the side of free speech, you should definitely cheer it.
lol I gotta say I've been trying to read the defenders of this and take them seriously but your incredulity matches mine...
.. and people are replying to you and _still_ defending the government and think they should have unilateral power over their people
I'm kind of speechless about how many people think this ruling is a bad thing.. like who in the hell out there believes the government should have OPINIONS? Can one of you reply to me?
It's as stupid of a concept as a corporation having an opinion.. opinions are reserved for PEOPLE and I have no idea how you could come up with an argument to change my mind on that.
> It's as stupid of a concept as a corporation having an opinion.. opinions are reserved for PEOPLE and I have no idea how you could come up with an argument to change my mind on that.
I guess I don’t understand your point here unless we’re being ultra-literal and saying a corporation can’t have an opinion because it doesn’t have a physical brain developing individual thought.
An example of “corporate opinion” off the top of my head: Facebook is in favour of advertising. I guess it's just a shorthand for "the executive board and shareholders of Facebook share the collective view that advertising is good" but I don't think anyone is particularly confused about what is meant when someone says Facebook is favour of something.
Facebook is made up of many parts. Some parts find advertising to be directly opposite of their goals. The react team may not like ads being force in their docs for example. If own shares through a pension I may not like advertising.
The CEO decides who manages which roles and divides authority. Opinions comes from these power structures. They could be divided on issues or unified. They speak for the company.
Google is so big you often have conflicting goals from different power structures.
> Google is so big you often have conflicting goals from different power structures.
In that situation I'd say Google is conflicted on the topic. It's still not all that different from a human being, IMO, I can be internally conflicted on a topic and find it difficult to find an opinion that encompasses all of my thoughts.
I get that it's shorthand and euphemism but I don't think it's all that confusing.
> because it doesn’t have a physical brain developing individual thought.
You summed up my point with a single sentence I can agree with, can't argue there!
In your scenario what's the opinion Facebook has about advertising? I'm in favour of more bike lanes in my city but I don't consider that an opinion. Describing _why_ I'm in favour has an element of opinion but voting yes/no is not an opinion to me. Plus, any old why isn't good enough for an opinion. For instance, if Facebook says they're in favour of advertising because it helps them make money then I don't think I can consider that an opinion.
I suppose corporate slogans and mission statements are opinions (We believe the customer is always right) but it's hard for me to call that an opinion because are your values actually opinions? I would say that they can be formed using opinions but I would be reluctant to say they're opinions themselves because of the "strength" of them I guess?
It's not an opinion because IMO you need a why for an opinion. There's an implicit why most of the time. But Facebook supporting marketing because they make more money with marketing can be a verified fact - there's no opinion element in it and I don't think Facebook supporting marketing by itself is an opinion.
If you like rain because it waters your garden I'd hesitate to call that opinion because you have a factual reason.
If you like rain because it sounds pleasant that's an opinion.
If you like rain because it restores your chi it's (probably) an opinion.
I say governments and corporations can't have opinions for lots of reasons. One of them being they're not people, others that follow from that, like you need thoughts or feelings to have an opinion.
It just doesn't sit right with me having faceless entities publishing opinions because by definition opinions aren't based on facts and we have enough of a problem with regular people spreading misinformation.
Alright, this will be my last contribution here. But:
To start, "I like rain" is a factual statement derived from your opinion, not an opinion itself. So let's change it for "rain is good":
> If you think rain is good because it waters your garden I'd hesitate to call that opinion because you have a factual reason.
> If you think rain is good because it sounds pleasant that's an opinion.
You're making distinctions that don't exist.
Thinking rain is good because it waters your garden is based on the fact that it will help your garden grow.
Thinking rain is good because it sounds pleasant is based on the fact that you enjoy the sound of the rain.
Both of these ignore counter-factuals. Sure, you think rain is good because it waters your garden, I think rain is bad because I live at the bottom of the hill and all that rainwater frequently floods my house. I think rain is bad because I dislike the sound.
Your opinion is based on the fact most relevant to you, my opinion is based on the fact most relevant to me. Choosing which facts are most important is a personal choice that results in an opinion. They're all opinions! To finally bring the thing full circle:
> But Facebook supporting marketing because they make more money with marketing can be a verified fact
It is an opinion supported by fact. A Facebook exec could make the argument that they could make more money by dropping advertising and instead charge a monthly membership fee. There are definitely fewer facts available to back up that opinion but it would still be a valid one.
>Thinking rain is good because it waters your garden is based on the fact that it will help your garden grow.
>Thinking rain is good because it sounds pleasant is based on the fact that you enjoy the sound of the rain.
I'm not sure how you can say the distinctions don't exist. There has to be an analogy but I don't think I can come up with one that will satisfy you. I mean you had to rewrite my example to make your point.. not sure how that's not the world's most obvious strawman, you literally twisted what I said into something else and went on to argue against that.
I think it's easy enough to glean what I mean from my past replies if someone wanted to try to understand me.
> you literally twisted what I said into something else and went on to argue against that.
I had to, your original post contained two factual statements and no opinions, so there was nothing to argue!
Based on your previous replies I think your distinction is that liking the sound of rain is different because it’s a thought conjured up inside your head? “It is good that my garden grows” is also a thought conjoured up in your head that others may disagree with. Your argument seems to require some kind of appeal to objective authority that doesn’t exist.
(I know I said the last post was the end for me but I’ll admit to being somewhat fascinated by the counter argument here)
Are you going to continue this conversation or stop? You continue to muddy the waters and twist things and now I don't even know what the original point is.
You've continuously refused to define opinion for me and continuously refuse to put anything in your own words. You throw paragraphs of strawman at me because I'm being unclear. You throw 3 dictionary links in my face with at least 25 different definitions and can't zero in on a single one.
Back at the top you said:
> An example of "corporate opinion" off the top of my head: Facebook is in favour of advertising.
Can you first confirm you said that and you stand by the statement? If you do, explain to me how Facebook saying "we are in favour of advertising" is an opinion.
Now explain to me how "I like rain" is different and not an opinion. You told me "I like rain" is "a factual statement derived from your opinion" and not an opinion and then used that to strawman my argument.
Where I stand "I am in favour of advertising" is the exact same format and is not an opinion from YOUR definition. So how about you explain exactly what you want from me because your contradictions are confusing me.
> Are you going to continue this conversation or stop?
I am going to stop. Your definition of opinion is not one I've ever encountered before but you're welcome to hold it. I can't see any point in continuing to explain the differences.
What's your definition!? Can you please summarize it, I'm dying to know here... or answer this?
> An example of "corporate opinion" off the top of my head: Facebook is in favour of advertising.
How is Facebook saying "we are in favour of advertising" an opinion?
How is "I like rain" is different and not an opinion? You told me "I like rain" is "a factual statement derived from your opinion" and not an opinion and then used that to strawman my argument.
Where I stand "I am in favour of advertising" is the exact same format and is not an opinion from YOUR definition. How are they different?
> I say governments and corporations can't have opinions for lots of reasons. One of them being they're not people
That's just your opinion. Others are of the opinion that corporations are in fact people and deserve all the protections that people deserve regarding free speech. Some such people even sit on the Supreme Court! Materialists would even go so far as to argue countries are conscious.
To me am opinion is a belief you have that's not based on facts.
Why do you want your government to have a belief not based on facts? Furthermore, why would you want the government to push this belief on its people?
Lastly why would you care about the opinion (remember: an opinion is a belief that isn't based on facts) of a corporation to the point that you'd defend their right to make statements that aren't factual?
> To me am opinion is a belief you have that's not based on facts.
> Why do you want your government to have a belief not based on facts?
There's some kind of fallacy at work here, you're establishing what your personal definition of something is then arguing with OP while taking your personal belief as fact.
"Opinions are not based on facts" definitely isn't a universally accepted definition of an opinion. An opinion doesn't have to be based on facts but it's not precluded from it.
Can you please just summarize? There's way too many definitions and this isn't helpful.
I gave you my opinion on what an opinion is, now why can't you return the favour instead of throwing thousands of words back in my face with no nuance or context?
If you're not interested in the conversation that's fine too, but just say so.
I won't be replying any further to this thread. Reading it back I had the realization that once we've gotten to the point where we're debating the meaning of the word "opinion" it is so far off-topic as to be useless to the discussion at hand, frankly. All the best.
Alright, I thought I was trying to end the debate and find common ground but you didn't want to tell me in your own words the definition you use for opinion.
You had me define it in my own words and was able to tell me I'm wrong but you never gave me the same chance.
There's a reason why people throw their hands up and say "it's just my opinion!" when they're blatantly wrong about something. It's a phase used to indicate they don't care about facts and they don't have to defend their position, which I thought was the common definition of opinion: a position one holds even when the facts say they're wrong.
An opinion is a belief which is not itself objectively factual. Factual information can certainly be a basis for them. If we go back the advertising example, we could take two objective facts about advertising:
* online advertising allows consumers to learn about new products and services
* advertising incentivizes user data collection in order that it may be more effective.
From just these two facts one could easily come to a pro- or anti-advertising position based on their values and the relative weights they choose to put on each fact.
Trust and affection are two different emotions that I'm able to separate.
For example, I like Adidas shoes but when they boast about sustainability I question the truth in that and their intentions.
I prefer Pepsi over Coke but I don't trust either to be truthful in their marketing. I think it's bullshit that Santa prefers Coke, for one he's not even a real person, but I don't dislike Coke for using Santa as a mascot.
I hate Disney though and I firmly believe they're among one of the worst companies on the planet. I oppose anything they do out of principle and believe every decision they make needs to answer yes to the question "Will this make us a billion dollars?" I hope to live to see the day they fold and disappear forever.
So no, I don't dislike every corporation and my inherit distrust doesn't undermine my views one bit. I don't know how one can possibly trust a capitalist company whose motives are primarily profit driven. I don't know how one could think a company stands for anything that wouldn't make them money or would honestly have a goal that wasn't driven by profits.
A good barometer on if a company has morals is if they use rainbow logos in Saudi Arabia during June. Try coming up with a single argument for why a company world proudly display them in North America but not in the Middle East without mentioning profits or market share, and good luck. I personally think it's completely indefensible.
What is the point of your comment? I have no idea what you're trying to say.
Liking something and trusting something are different things. I don't trust a single company and it doesn't matter if I like, hate, or love them. They're two mutually independent feelings no matter what you want to call one of them.
> It's as stupid of a concept as a corporation having an opinion.. opinions are reserved for PEOPLE and I have no idea how you could come up with an argument to change my mind on that.
Well, I wouldn't presume to make you think, but _BY DEFINITION_ corporations are legal persons.
Corporation. Incorporate. Corporeal.
This is a legal definition, not biological or sociological or religious or whatever else.
And under that legal framework, the corporation can act as a person and enter into contracts, initiate lawsuits, be sued, be prosecuted, etc. And more basically, the corporation can make public statements which express the _opinion_ of the corporation.
Once folks set aside political bigotries, this shouldn't be a hard concept to understand.
You admitted a judicial opinion is different from a personal opinion and you're making fun of my definition of a personal opinion? But you acknowledge a judicial opinion is different than a person opinion?
Why can't you extend that to a corporation? The "opinion" of a corporation or a judge is NOT the same as a personal opinion and there is a distinction that can/should be made. I'm not sure why you can agree with someone else that a judicial opinion is different than a personal opinion but when I say "not people opinions" are different from "people opinions" I'm wrong?
All that needs to happen for those loyalists to change their mind, is to have the party governing to change to someone they disagree with. Then you will hear how the gov't is killing free speech (that would be a rightful complaint). But we all know what happened to Qwest communications when they declined the gov'ts offer to spy on citizens.
The platforms had a preexisting way to report ToS violations. The government made statements of fact about posts that violated those ToS. The platforms were free to act or not act on those reports.
The government has plenty of ways to express thoughts. Almost every agency has a podium with a room full of reporters waiting whenever they want to make a statement.
For instance, if you're the FAA, you should express opinions about airline operations, air safety, etc. That is your role. If you are the FDA, you should express opinions about food and drug safety. And in both those cases note that you are a regulator, and within your domain, it is your role to regulate the players.
If you are the White House, you are not a regulator of anything. It is fine to express your opinion. In fact the White House has a daily press briefing for specifically that purpose. It is fine to call out people with whom you disagree. Perfectly OK to call them dangerous charlatans and liars. It is not OK to censor their speech. It is not OK use the implicit coercive force of the executive branch to encourage third parties to censor them.
> If you are the White House, you are not a regulator of anything
If you are the White House, you are the ur-regulator of anything any part of the executive branch is a regulator of, as well as the things that the Executive Office of the President is the actual direct regulator of (which are mostly internal to government operations.)
It's obviously not something they can say in press releases, but it also may not be factual (or provable). There are "we think" situations which are important.
Sure, in addition to all of their organs of dissemination, of which they have plenty of options, they can also have their own Twitter and Facebook accounts.
What they can’t do is ring up Twitter and Facebook and say, hey, that’s misinformation, do something about it. Or have government embeds giving guidance.
I don't think so. For example, if there is info on twitter that puts a government employee at risk, I think it's appropriate for someone to point that out to twitter.
They don't have enough channels to do that? They have to do it via veiled threat to a speech platform to delete users posts?
How can anyone defend this behavior? Just because it's your guy doing it? If Trump was telling Twitter to delete posts that hurt his re-election chances would you feel this same way?
Unbelievable that you're being downvoted at all. The authoritarian minded have definitely increased substantially as this site has become more popular and drawn increasingly larger crowds. When it was dominated by those capable of logic and reasoning and having some knowledge of the world, authoritarianism would get smacked down hard and rightfully so.
" I don’t give a rat’s ass about the free speech rights of the government...the purpose of free speech is to protect the right of the weak to speak even when the strong disagree with them."
That doesn't sound right to me. You basically just argued "The purpose of a right to free speech is to protect the right of free speech." It's circular reasoning. Why should free speech be a right?
Out of curiosity I pulled up an article in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
One principle put out by John Stewart Mill is that free speech is valuable because it leads to the truth. If this is correct you should arguably be concerned if the government can't engage in it because we will all be lead away from the truth.
The article says "... arguments show that one of the main reasons for justifying free speech (political speech) is important, not for it's own sake but because it lets us exercise another important value (democracy)."
So if we accept this then if censoring the strong undermines democracy it could be bad, especially if they became strong because the weak elected them into office to represent them.
The article quotes someone who says "Speech, in short, is never a value in and of itself but is always produced with the precincts of some assumed conception of good."
In other words, don't argue free speech is good because free speech is good.
> That doesn't sound right to me. You basically just argued "The purpose of a right to free speech is to protect the right of free speech." It's circular reasoning. Why should free speech be a right?
That's not what GP argued, and you're being quite uncharitable. Their argument goes something like this:
1) Free speech is meant to protect those that don't have a monopoly on speech
2) The government has a monopoly on—or can coerce—speech (because it taxes you, appoints the judges, has a police force, etc.)
3) Therefore, protecting the free speech of the government is not really a stewardship of free speech
This argument makes sense and is not circular. The definition of free speech doesn't even come into play (and is in fact assumed to be desirable: after all, it's in the Bill of Rights.)
So the judicial branch is and is not quite the government, and the government has a mnonopoly on speech even though they can't say things, and I'm being uncharitable by finding this argument less than coherent. Got it.
> (1) So the judicial branch is and is not quite the government, and (2) the government has a mnonopoly on speech even though they can't say things
On (1): yes, that's the idea behind the independent role of the judiciary. They're supposed to be quis custodiet ipsos custodes. Sometimes, it doesn't work out, but usually it does. I'll concede that there's gray area here, but not quite enough to make the argument non-coherent.
On (2): the government can definitely say things (the White House literally has a Communications Director), but also (and more importantly) both stifle and coerce speech. I'm not sure how you came to this second conclusion.
My issue is your claim the government has a monopoly on speech, not your other claims.
Imagine I'm a visitor from mars and you tell me the government has a monopoly on speech. I say, fascinating, so only the government is allowed to talk?
And you say, well no, anybody can talk, generally.
And I say, oh, do you mean the government does the majority of the talking?
And you say no, most talking is done by private individuals.
And I say oh, do you mean the government decides what people can say?
And you say no, no exactly, see there's these people called judges who are not quite the government who prevent the government from deciding what people can say.
> My issue is your claim the government has a monopoly on speech, not your other claims.
Ah gotcha, yeah maybe that's too strong of a premise. You can probably fix it by saying "potential monopoly" or something in the vein of "it would be easiest for the government to monopolize speech," as historically, freedom of the press was meant to counter or criticize strong central governments (e.g. monarchies).
From a constitutional perspective (which is the perspective Supreme Court Justices swear to have), the ability of the government to limit speech is not allowed. Full stop. Sources below.
First Amendment to the Constitution:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
Constitutional Oath taken by all current Supreme Court Justices:
"I, _________, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God."
"From a constitutional perspective (which is the perspective Supreme Court Justices swear to have), the ability of the government to limit speech is not allowed. Full stop. Sources below."
The Supreme court has never said anything like what you just typed in 200+ years of american history. Do you type this every day, constantly knashing you teeth at the existence of trade secret laws, copyright laws, libel laws, and the like, or does the rheteric come out in service of special goals?
Wow what a jerk. I'm going off the Constitutional Oath, which all judges take. Obviously they use judicial discretion but be charitable for a second and at least try to understand my point, which is that deviating from what the Constitution says is the very rare exception, not the rule.
The spirit of free speech is to protect saying things that are either unpopular or inconvenient to the powerful. Speech that is popular or convenient to the powerful needs no such protection! Even in the most repressive states you can still praise the party or the dear leader.
The truths that we need free speech to find are not the congenial truths, but the inconvenient ones.
Yes, I do think that whoever is today's top dog doesn't need defending today. The alternative is just using power to crush the powerless which- I mean okay, that's a normal human reaction but I think it is beneath our aspirations as a country.
It's also not free speech if it's only for some. The government is a very important player in our society, we depend on them being able to speak freely!
I just don't understand how you can think this. If I profess my religion in a private capacity, that's a rightful exercise of my freedom of speech and religion.
If I profess those same beliefs while acting in a public capacity I am infringing on the rights of others by favoring or creating the impression of favoring a particular religion.
You individually have freedom of association. If you don't like gay people, or Vietnamese people, or MAGA republicans - ultimately nobody can make you be friends with them in your private life. However, acting in an official capacity you're absolutely obliged to be neutral.
The government very rightly has restrictions on how partial it can be as it is the arbiter of our society.
To be clear we’re not talking about the government speaking freely. They do so and with seeming impunity for bs relative to their position of authority.
We’re talking about the government coercively censoring speech of citizens in/on the media, not under emergency orders or commandeering, but as a matter of routine. Yes they’ve always done this even with the major news networks thirty or forty years ago (pre-Internet). It was wrong then just like it’s wrong now. It’s more visible and obvious now to more people, the evidence is right in front of us through leaks and email disclosures from efforts like the Twitter files.
You're reading this wrong, they're not saying that free speech shouldn't be a right but that "free speech is important because it protects free speech" isn't very useful when trying to evaluate whether the government itself ought to also have or not have free speech protections.
Is free speech important solely because it protects you against a malicious government and therefore there's no issue at all with non-government entities censoring others' speech and no reason for the government itself to have it? Or is it important because the marketplace of ideas confers some societal benefit and it would be better if agents of the government were equal participants in that market?
I think you might be reading something that's not there. Asking the question doesn't imply an answer. And it's probably better if people can answer it rigorously rather than just repeat the claim because everyone else does.
The government can say whatever they want in press conferences or through their social media. Both the government and their employees have as much free speech as they want - and not only that but they spent billions of dollars for advocacy groups especially during covid. (which we know now was used to promote fraudulent science)
The injunction says the government can't urge, pressure or encourage censorship. (yes everyone should read it). You have to be joking you think that is a bad thing.
> Some of the statements that Doughty deemed to be coercion were made in public by Biden and other administration officials. "When asked about what his message was to social-media platforms when it came to COVID-19, President Biden stated: 'they're killing people. Look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated and that—they're killing people,'" Doughty wrote.
This judge thinks that merely publishing information that other people believe constitutes censorship.
>Various social-media platforms changed their content-moderation policies to require
suppression of content that was deemed false by CDC and led to vaccine hesitancy. The CDC became the “determiner of truth” for social-media platforms, deciding whether COVID-19 statements made on social media were true or false. And the CDC was aware it had become the “determiner of truth” for social-media platforms. If the CDC said a statement on social media was false, it was suppressed, in spite of alternative views. By telling social-media companies that posted content was false, the CDC Defendants knew the social-media company was going to suppress the posted content. The CDC Defendants thus likely “significantly encouraged” social-media companies to suppress free speech.
You are taking a statement about the climate created by overreaching government demands out of context. When a government repeatedly makes authoritarian demands, it causes widespread suppression outside the scope of the initial demands.
But that has nothing to do with the specifics of the injunction. Once again people should read it, and decide if anything in the injunction restricts legitimate government free speech. (it doesn’t)
Thank you. The real issue here is a small number of companies have become the defacto gatekeepers of a large amount of public discourse. That’s a major problem that this debate is just a symptom of.
It would be harder for the government to censor speech if their were more diverse venues for speech, yes.
But the real issue - the matter before the Court - is whether the government is abusing its power by directing the venues to stifle one type of speech and promote another. An injunction is issued when a judge deems the plaintiff likely to succeed on the merits, and the harm inflicted by the defendant’s actions in the meantime to not be redressable.
It amounts to “no one from these 8 government agencies may communicate with anyone working at these three non profits, 20 social media companies or any similar organization”
Except that it doesn't say that. It's quite clear that such communication is still perfectly fine when it's for normal gov't operations; I'll quote it below[1].
The folks objecting to this don't make much sense to me. The injunction forbids the gov't from doing the things that the plaintiff complains about. If the gov't isn't currently misbehaving, then the injunction is a No-Op: the government's claimed current state of doing nothing wrong will just continue as is (putatively) already is.
What is lost due to the injunction?
[1] Here are the exceptions to the injunction:
IT IS FURTHER ORDERED that the following actions are NOT prohibited by this Preliminary Injunction:
1. informing social-media companies of postings involving criminal activity or criminal conspiracies;
2. contacting and/or notifying social-media companies of national security threats, extortion, or other threats posted on its platform;
3. contacting and/or notifying social-media companies about criminal efforts to suppress voting, to provide illegal campaign contributions, of cyber-attacks against election infrastructure, or foreign attempts to influence elections;
4. informing social-media companies of threats that threaten the public safety or security of the United States;
5. exercising permissible public government speech promoting government policies or views on matters of public concern;
6. informing social-media companies of postings intending to mislead voters about voting requirements and procedures;
7. informing or communicating with social-media companies in an effort to detect, prevent, or mitigate malicious cyber activity;
communicating with social-media companies about deleting, removing, suppressing, or reducing posts on social-media platforms that are not protected free speech ….
> The folks objecting to this don't make much sense to me. The injunction forbids the gov't from doing the things that the plaintiff complains about. If the gov't isn't currently misbehaving, then the injunction is a No-Op: the government's claimed current state of doing nothing wrong will just continue as is (putatively) already is.
The argument being pushed is "The government didn't do those things and it's a good thing that it did." Makes perfect sense to me, in the correct context about the ideology of those pushing it.
Free speech for citizens is important to me and I'm on no political side. This seems like a great thing to me. I don't want the government doing what they're been doing or doing it again in the future, regardless of who that government is. Ideally, these losers would have enough morals to police themselves or not do this in the first place, but here we are. Might not be a perfect ruling, but in spirit it's against gov. censorship, which I'm also against so I hope it or something like it sticks around.
If the government says vaccine misinformation is killing thousands of people on air on the evening news and Facebook agrees and starts banning people posting it and those folks have to share their misinformation on their own sites rather than Facebook how has your freedom been infringed?
Likewise if the communique takes place via a memo.
You have a right to communicate what you please you don't have a right to have your thoughts carried by a particular site any more than you have a right to have them posted in the New York Times or relayed on Fox News.
The government has no authority to decide for me whether something is misinformation. They can share their opinions and I'll be the judge of what I trust. If Facebook reaches the same conclusion independently, without being coerced by the government, I'd react according to how I feel about the specific issue. Maybe I'd stop using the platform. I'm not claiming NYT or FB needs to publish my views, I don't expect that at all. What I don't want is the government telling them what they can and can't publish.
Yeah that works great up until the people who distribute memos act like Facebook, and then the people who sell you ink, and then the phone companies, and then ....
Really why is this so hard to understand. There's nothing special about tech firms in this story except the naivety of their executives, who have ended up looking like utter tools in this whole sorry charade. These idiots systematically suppressed discussion of the lab leak hypothesis for over a year and then once the Biden admin started taking it seriously decided, whoops, maybe it wasn't misinformation after all and stopped banning it. Twitter was systematically banning stuff even whilst expressing serious reservations internally because they knew the claims were true. Yet these firms are nonetheless still doing better than Google, at least Facebook and Twitter realized they were wrong in the end.
This thread seems to be full of FAANG employees desperately trying to come up with some reason why their employers are not in fact easily duped rubes who would sew the mouths of their own mothers shut if a 100% conflicted mid-level nobody at the CDC suggested it.
I think it’s very, very generous to excuse this behavior as that of naive rubes. These people are simply currying favor with those in power hoping for something in return.
You must be right that there's an element of that, but I still think most of it especially at the lower levels of the orgs is that these people genuinely have adopted the "if a civil servant says it, it must be true" way of thinking.
I agree for the most part, but the only thing that keeps me wholesale from this is the idea that all social media posts are US citizens.
What if, and I'm not suggesting it is, 100% of the posts in question where from foreign actors looking to disrupt the US? Is the government in no way allowed to step in? Is that even censorship?
In my view that's to be expected and I'd want no intervention from the government at all. I would view that as censorship. Gov. is not there to decide for me which ideas are disruptive, I don't want them or anyone in that role. To those in power, any dissent could be spun as disruption to their agenda.
So your fine with a foreign power using bullying tactics to silence your fellow citizens, undermining thier right to free speech?
Because that's what you're actually arguing for.... And if you still support that position despite being informed of this fact, then I have to question exactly who You are working for....
Goal posts moved. I don't know anything about bullying - if that’s going on, prosecute that for what it is. Sounds like a possible law enforcement issue that needs to be investigated. I’ve worked at enough tech companies to know I don't want them trying to handle it. Freedom of speech is about protecting ideas you may hate and find utterly horrible.
And a big middle finger to you for that last dig there. My family fought in the American Revolution - worked for ourselves then and still do now.
They are engaged in active disinformation and harrassment campaigns funded directly by government.
Or are you being willfully daft?
And I then there's the Israeli and Iranian efforts, let alone the hundred other government funded agencies with thousands of agents whose sole purpose is to bully and intimidate.
There are plenty of authoritarian nanny states that agree with you that government censorship is the answer to these problems. For now, in the US, that's still illegal and we'll continue to oppose you on this til the end.
... did you really not even take a moment to try to comprehend what was being raised, or did you actively choose to ignore it?
The issue is the need to silence those bad actors, not citizens of one's own nation. There needs to be mechanisms in place.
We can dither on the particulars, with my belief the same as yours regarding domestic censorship of good faith actors, but there definitely should be action taken to minimize the harms externally funded or situated bad actors cause.
Do you really not agree with that? Because then you may as well start waving one of the foreign flags now...
By foreign actors do you just mean foreign people in general or something more specific. Because using the word "actors" give what you say an ominous overtone, but I can't figure out how it's not that you believe in some generic but wide ranging conspiracy of non-Americans to disrupt America with .... opinions. Those things that Americans are famously lacking and reluctant to espouse.
No. I don't trust a government trying to prevent me from seeing information outside our borders for my "safety". Banning receiving foreign broadcasts is a staple of authoritarian governments (I'm not saying it's a sufficient condition, but a non-authoritarian government would have no need or desire to)
> A supporter of free speech should be horrified by this ruling. If you’re not, imagine an injunction of similar scope where the political sides were reversed.
Governments don't get free speech. They get all sorts of restrictions on them that citizens don't.
It’s a blatantly illegal prior restraint on speech, completely at odds with the values the plaintiffs and judge claim to hold.
Free speech cuts both ways. If you’re pleased when a judge bans any and all communication among millions of citizens, you don’t actually value the first amendment, you’re just cheering a partisan victory.
You have completely miss understood the purpose of the Constitution and the 1st amendment, the Constitution is the States and the People limiting the power and role of the federal government.
The 1st amendment DOES NOT bestow or grant the US Government any freedom of speech, in fact it specifically limits the US Governments freedom / power in many ways by baring it from actions and activities that curb the speech of the people of these united states.
To proclaim this ruling is "violating the rights of the government" is a complete and utter inversion of the how the constitution works, and the direction of power.
We are all "the people" even when acting in our official capacity as government employees. It also doesn't bestow shit. It says our rights are self evident and forbids the government, which includes the judiciary, from stomping on them.
Yeah, no this just ain't so. You may in your personal devotion believe that Jesus Christ is Lord. If you say that in your private life, no problem. That's your freedom of speech and freedom of religion.
Now let's say you clock in to your job as Attorney General and you make it known that you think Christianity is the best and other religions are sad and misguided. Then we have a problem.
You have rights as an individual and you have official duties acting as the government but the government does not also receive your rights by proxy.
You have a right to speak freely, duties you agree to abide by as an employee, laws you must follow, and an obligation to respect the constitution and the rights of citizens. The fact that you can't in your official capacity promote Jeebus means your conduct must not infringe on the rights of others not that you have no rights at all.
It is that infringement of the rights of others which is the very issue at hand here! The government undertook actions which caused people to be unable to express their opinions.
That the government was "just expressing their opinion that's totally nonbinding except of course I can exert selective regulatory scrutiny if I feel like it" is not a get-out-of-jail-free card.
The government notifying Facebook that someone posted content contrary to Facebook's TOS doesn't violate the rights of the person violating said TOS. You never had a right to post content that violates the TOS you agreed to in the first place.
You do have a right to share that same content on your own website and the government would have no right to make you take it down.
In no cases were people unable to express their opinions. They were unable to create posts or comments contrary to the terms of service of the site they were using to share said opinions. Much like neither of US may herein violate the terms of Hacker News.
I think you can see how a court might look at that as laundering unconstitutional actions through a private entity and hold the government to a higher standard than that.
You're really mixed up here. This is the text of the 1st Amendment:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
When a person who works for the government is acting in their official capacity, they are the government. In that case the 1st Amendment prohibits them from abridging a private citizen's freedom of speech.
When that same person is acting as a private citizen, they are protected from their speech being abridged by the government.
People at work in their government jobs, using government equipment and email addresses, with government signatures are 100% the government, not private citizens.
They don't cease to be people nor to have rights. How did you think all those cases go where a government employee sues the government for infringing on your rights. Judge: Sorry you aren't a person again until you clock out neeeext!.
I mean, I don't agree with the top level comment here, but this isn't a reverse-free-speech issue. Courts are absolutely free to restrain what public officials can say.
E.g., a regulator cannot say "if you don't burn this book, we'll tax you out of existence" while a person could say "if you don't burn this book, I'll vote to have you taxed out of existence"
A narrowly tailored prohibition on specific speech aimed at specific government officials may be permissable in some cases. This injunction is carelessly worded to apply to millions of people and to preclude essentially all communications related to "protected free speech". The breadth and vagueness is specifically what I'm objecting to.
There's a 5 part test laid out by the 9th circuit in Gibson v. Office of Attorney Gen related to speech rights of government employees. The government has broad latitude to restrict the speech that occurs in the course of a government employee's job, SCOTUS laid this out in Garcetti v. Ceballos. Moreover, this is an injunction related to the pending trial, and while judges can sometimes be a bit too aggressive for my taste there seems to be a compelling reason here.
You seem to be under a misapprehension of how free speech works for the government: it doesn't. The government has no rights. It has powers. People have rights, including the right to freedom of speech. If the government is barred from doing something directly, they can't then try to do it indirectly by telling a third party to do it for them.
> If you’re pleased when a judge bans any and all communication among millions of citizens, you don’t actually value the first amendment, you’re just cheering a partisan victory.
Except, that's not what's happening? The judge ordered the government not to contact a handful of companies, because it was coercing them into censoring speech it didn't like. A restraining order on a harasser is not a violation of the first amendment. This ruling is like putting a restraining order on an executive branch that was harassing companies into censoring speech.
> If you’re pleased when a judge bans any and all communication among millions of citizens, you don’t actually value the first amendment, you’re just cheering a partisan victory.
What? You seem very misinformed. Here's the ruling:
It is very strange that this PDF omits pages 2-4. The full list of prohibited activities, plus additional context, was given on the Reason article posted here in Tuesday:
The targets of the injunction are the following agencies. The wording makes clear that all members of said agencies are in scope of the injunction:
HHS: 80,000
NIAID: 18,000
CDC: 11,000
Census Bureau: 5,000
FBI: 40,000 (double counted under DOJ)
DOJ: 115,000
CISA: 3000
DHS: 260,000
State Department: 14,000
Among the actions prohibited are communicating with "social media companies", defined in the injunction as including:
"Facebook/Meta, Twitter, YouTube/Google, WhatsApp, Instagram, WeChat,TikTok, Sina Weibo, QQ, Telegram, Snapchat, Kuaishou, Qzone, Pinterest, Reddit, LinkedIn, Quora, Discord, Twitch, Tumblr, Mastodon, and like companies."
That list, especially given the "like companies" part, includes easily several million people.
Also "Election Integrity Partnership, the Virality Project, the Stanford Internet Observatory, or any like project or group".
What makes a group "like" those orgs?
The prohibited topics and purposes of communication are incredibly vague, basically anything contrary to "protected free speech", which has no definition in the injunction and is famously tricky to define in US law.
This amounts to a blanket ban from where I'm sitting.
If I were a low level staffer at DHS this would arguably prohibit me from expressing opinions on this matter to a friend or spouse working at a social media company, for fear of, for example, "encouraging reduction of content posted with social-media companies containing protected free speech". The fact that that example is silly is precisely my point. Injunctions must be narrowly tailored to address the specific conduct at issue. This is so broad as to make a joke of the process and in doing so harms the free speech and rule of law that are at issue in this case.
It's really strange that the PDF you've linked to omits pages 2-4. Half of the list of prohibited activities, as well as some context, are missing from it.
Given your example of a DHS staffer expressing opinions to a friend or family members who is employed at a social media company, there are many regulated industries like government and social media, where employees must disclose conflicts of interest. If rules reflecting this injunction were to be adopted, then disclosing relationships with social media employees would be quite reasonable. DHS staffers, who already go through extensive background checks, would not be significantly more burdened by this than any of the other disclosures that are already required.
> The prohibited topics and purposes of communication are incredibly vague, basically anything contrary to "protected free speech", which has no definition in the injunction and is famously tricky to define in US law.
By "incredibly vague" you mean "specified with a detailed 10 point list over 1.5 pages with an additional page of specific exclusions"
The American elite's novel definition of "free speech" is that the bedrock foundation is the FBI's freedom to instruct social media conglomerates to delete the speech posted by US citizens and ban their accounts. If the government doesn't even have the freedom to tell trillion dollar companies who should be allowed to voice what opinions, the first amendment is dead paper.
It basically says the govt cannot suppress protected free speech but it can suppress unprotected free speech.
Without ever explaining why the particular speech argued about by the plaintiffs is protected.
Maybe that’s fine for an injunction, but anyone drawing any conclusions about whether the govt suppressed protected free speech from this ruling is highly mistaken.
Speech is similar to our criminal system. When you're accused of a crime, you're innocent until proven guilty. And anything you say is "protected" unless it falls into one of an extremely narrow range of exceptions. And those exceptions are actual crimes, not just 'silently censor and move on' type stuff. So the injunction basically comes down to 'stop doing unconstitutional things' while offering a list of things that are obviously unconstitutional, and a list of things that are obviously fine.
So e.g. "urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner social-media companies to change their guidelines for removing, deleting, suppressing, or reducing content containing protected free speech" is obviously unconstitutional. By contrast, "informing social-media companies of postings involving criminal activity or criminal conspiracies" is obviously perfectly constitutional.
I mean I've seen gun grabbers try and argue that the second amendment was meant to guarantee the right of the government to field an army, so it's certainly possible.
There are a lot of parallels there - people with a very pro-state bent try to invert what is meant by “the people” in the Constitution. It truly is a phenomenon in the gun rights debate. For decades we’ve heard that “the people” in 2A does not refer to individuals but the collective people, i.e. the government, despite such reasoning contradicting how the term is understood literally in every other amendment that uses it. But here we are watching the same rhetoric being applied to 1A. A misc. poster says this injunction infringes on the “rights” of the federal government because they’re people too. It takes a lot of chutzpah to turn this injunction into an argument that the Judiciary is suppressing the rights of the Executive. The humanity!
> It amounts to “no one from these 8 government agencies may communicate with anyone working at these three non profits, 20 social media companies or any similar organization”
That's plain false. From middle of page 5 there's the list of things explicitly not banned, it starts with "IT IS FURTHER ORDERED that the following actions are NOT prohibited by this Preliminary Injunction:".
As I said throughout this thread, the injunction prohibits any communications based on a vague and subjective content or motive between a group of approx. 500,000 citizens who are US government employees and several million individuals worldwide who are employed by any of the named social media companies, nonprofits, or similar organizations.
This is not ok. If restrictions on speech are ever justified they have to be narrowly tailored in terms of content and substance, neither of which is true here.
Your claim summary is false, the ban is by no mean general.
Which of the following do you believe to be vague and subjective content, and which clause specifically are you opposed to? All of them?
[...] ARE HEREBY ENJOINED AND RESTRAINED from taking the following actions as to social-media companies:
(1) meeting with social-media companies for the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech posted on social-media platforms;
(2) specifically flagging content or posts on social-media platforms and/or forwarding
such to social-media companies urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner for
removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech;
(3) urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner social-media
companies to change their guidelines for removing, deleting, suppressing, or reducing content
containing protected free speech;
(4) emailing, calling, sending letters, texting, or engaging in any communication of any
kind with social-media companies urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner for
removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech;
(5) collaborating, coordinating, partnering, switchboarding, and/or jointly working
with the Election Integrity Partnership, the Virality Project, the Stanford Internet Observatory, or
any like project or group for the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any
manner removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content posted with social-media
companies containing protected free speech;
(6) threatening, pressuring, or coercing social-media companies in any manner to
remove, delete, suppress, or reduce posted content of postings containing protected free speech;
(7) taking any action such as urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any
manner social-media companies to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce posted content protected
by the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution;
(8) following up with social-media companies to determine whether the social-media
companies removed, deleted, suppressed, or reduced previous social-media postings containing
protected free speech;
(9) requesting content reports from social-media companies detailing actions taken to
remove, delete, suppress, or reduce content containing protected free speech; and
(10) notifying social-media companies to Be on The Lookout (“BOLO”) for postings
containing protected free speech.
The list of individuals who work for the government are "hereby enjoined and restrained from taking the following actions a to social-media companies:....
(3)urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner social-media
companies to change their guidelines for removing, deleting, suppressing, or reducing content
containing protected free speech;
(4) emailing, calling, sending letters, texting, or engaging in any communication of any
kind with social-media companies urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner for
removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech;"
Yes, this is a victory for free speech. The aforementioned government officials don't need free speech; we, the taxpayers, do. The government officials have proven they cannot be trusted due to their maligning interests to collude with Big Tech to shill for Big Pharma products. I'm so grateful for some of these federal judges.
This is not a direct ruling, it is an order to cease the current behavior (the gov't telling social media companies to censor speech) until it can be ascertained whether or not this is a harmful thing which is happening.
You're acting as if this injunction creates a law or sets some sort of precedent. It truly does not.
I know very well what an injunction is and does. You seem to be mistaken on what “law” is. It is by no means limited to statutory text or even final judicial opinions.
The fact that contempt of court is the only real penalty available for violating this injunction is exactly why it’s harmful. Making ludicrously broad and unenforceable injunctions like this inevitably corrodes the rule of law and damages the overall system.
As the person that whipped Electronic Art's ass in court over the Spore DRM, no, I'm pretty well-aware of what 'law' is. And re-reading your post, again, you're still giving off the impression that this is some bad thing. It isn't.
It's literally the gov't telling the gov't to quit being a twerp while the courts actually figure out wtf is going on.
I would be even more be supportive if the political sides were reversed. Imagine a Trump White House was threatening social media companies, and pressuring them to restrict posts on climate change, civil rights, or some other progressive cause. Why wouldn't I support it if the political sides were reversed?
The First Amendment doesn't just protect people from being imprisoned by the government for their speech. It also prohibits the government from pressuring or coercing private individuals and companies into censoring content. Otherwise, the government could just pressure private entities into doing whatever censorship they want. This isn't a ban on speech, this is a ban on government coercion.
> It amounts to “no one from these 8 government agencies may communicate with anyone working at these three non profits, 20 social media companies or any similar organization”
It's definitely overreach by an activist MAGA judge. It will be overturned within the next week or two, I'm sure that the judges in this circuit are shocked that one of their own would be guilty of such poor interpretation of the situation and trying to invoke absolute authority over the executive branch.
Do blanket bans on speech usually have a large group of exceptions? Not to mention the government can use their official accounts to communicate whatever they want, they just need to refrain from asking companies to take down things (that aren't a threat to national security, etc) until this case in adjudicated.
The 1A grants the right to free speech to the people —people who do not have the force or threat of violence to coerce. It does not speak to the freedom a government has to communicate.
Besides, the government has its own organs at its disposal to communicate with the people.
Government agencies secretly communicating with people is not a free speech, There are many more cases when government employee can't talk about work with other people, so i don't see a reason to be horrified.
What was the justification for the ban on the hunter Biden stories? Why not just issue a statement- the White House has a press office that could just deny things. They went around their messaging in an unusual way.
There was no ban. The links from the “Twitter files” they the WH asked to be removed were all dick pics (you can confirm this via archive.org) which were a violation of the Twitter TOS.
You said in your other post that the vaccine was gene therapy and that cheap treatments were effective. I'm presuming you either mean Hydroxychloroquine or horse paste. None of those statements are true and because of them countless people died. The statements are worthy of head shaking now. During the pandemic they constituted shouting fire in a crowded theater. They are fundamentally unworthy of protection.
"Shouting fire in a crowded theater" is a popular analogy for speech or actions whose principal purpose is to create panic, and in particular for speech or actions which may for that reason be thought to be outside the scope of free speech protections.
It was first used against a man in 1917 for giving an anti-war speech in Canton, Ohio. It was later popularized to charge people handing out anti-war flyers opposing the WWI draft with sedition.
It was later overturned in 1969, in which the Supreme Court held that "the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action."
The fact that people still cite this analogy to argue for the abridgment of free speech 100 years later is truly disturbing.
I'm not ignorant of the history I merely disagree.
I think promoting what every educated person knows are provable falsehoods liable to cause the death of thousands during a public emergency ought to fall outside of free speech. There isn't some controversy about whether covid vaccines change your DNA or whether horse paste is an effective treatment that obviates the need to vaccinate. These are lies and every promoter of such lies has heard them denounced as such a hundred times thus it is willfully promoting what they reasonably ought to know are lies that they reasonably ought to know will lead to deaths. If they were promoting it during the pandemic they were doing so during a public health emergency.
That said the government isn't trying to prosecute they are trying to advise social media companies to stop boosting lies and hosting it. Let the dissenters get a mastodon if they want to share such.
Vaccines aren't gene therapy because MRNA involves chucking components at your cell for it to post process into stuff not permanently writing changes to the blueprints of the cells themselves. It neither makes any change to the cells themselves nor persists beyond the material being processed out of your system.
Gene therapy involves making modifications to cells. Presenting MRNA as gene therapy makes people afraid to use it because they erroneously believe it will permanently alter their DNA.
The balance of evidence is that horse paste is between useless and harmful depending on dosage. The average patient will discover their doctor/pharmacist wont provide it and getting it yourself from the internet is even more harmful than clinical administration because of a users inability to obtain or administer a less than disastrous dose.
A high risk patient who has say a 3% chance of mortality without a vaccine will likely die or experience painful and harmful consequences if they avoid a vaccine extremely unlikely to do them harm in favor of a "cure" that doesn't work.
I know you have heard all this. Years later if you are still spreading this then you are willfully spreading lies and its not OK.
The fact that some understandings change, are clarified, or are in doubt doesn't imply there aren't provable lies. Statements can be said to be on a spectrum of provable truth to provable lie say from 2+2=4 to 2+2=17 and on a spectrum from neutral to harmful.
If I say ziptechnologies is Michael Jackson living in hiding with the mom of one of the neverland kids I'm provably lying. There is no legitimate doubt as to his death and no reason to believe that is your actual identity. If I say you are a drug dealer and invite the police to raid your home I have crossed over from neutral to harmful.
The fact that many statements can't be evaluated so simply doesn't mean there aren't obvious lines that many statements clearly cross articulable objective standards.
What I find of great concern is that the US used to have a strong dissident faction that was against government suppression of basic rights such as free speech.
Now, we have two cheerleading factions.
I feel the division in the country has stoked authoritarian sentiment on both sides as they desperately grasp for measures to suppress each other.
Now do this for everything. Don't allow the government to 'request' the information they have on you. You want information, get a warrant. The two must go together. Either it's coercion by the government to ask a corporation to do XZY or it's not.
The government wasn’t found to be suppressing information, it is just an injunction. The government claims to simply be engaging in dialog about areas they find concerning from a variety of angles including salient public health in a declared emergency, what is considered to be dangerous medical advice, participation in conspiracy and sedition, influence of elections, etc. The injunction, as the article describes, doesn’t prevent the agencies from engaging on a lot of these topics and the topic set is somewhat narrow. The government generally has been allowed to constrain speech that’s a clear danger or interferes with either the goals emergency operations or the safe conduct of emergency operations, as well as public health and safety. This has been upheld in case law and by the Supreme Court for over 200 years.
I’d note that a Trump appointed judge in Louisiana giving a preliminary injunction on something uniquely ideologically aligned by those dimensions and is noted in the article as out of step with precedent isn’t the end of the line.
What if the party that receives that ask knows that legally they can reject it with a "hah, no" note and the government can't do anything about it? Free speech is thoroughly protected in the US.
Are there any carveouts about how even government employees are private citizens when they don't work in government capacity. Can Amy from the DMV ask to have revenge porn taken down? Can Tim from the IRS tell his wife who works at Twitter that he thinks Elon is a liar and grifter?
It's quite ironic that you're castigating commenters for not reading the article as you confidently proclaim false information that reading the article would remedy you of.
> A court found that the government abused its power and infringes on people’s first amendment rights by using its intimidation power to coerce social media to censor free speech of citizens.
False. I think you should edit your comment to remove the false information or acknowledge that you are wrong.
Suddenly a Louisiana plant judge cares about the effects of the White House on free speech? If you need to make an announcement about fairness, it's in bad-faith if you ignore how it's 100% politically motivated maneuvers made-up by GOP thinktanks to neuter democrat power.
You betcha they'll ignore that law or destroy it once they're back.
100 years ago, I would totally agree that the govt stopping citizens from spreading false information would be a violation of the first amendment. But we now live in a world where the generation of misinformation is automated. Controlling communication on social media does not necessarily imply stifling the speech of a human.
It's very possible that we currently live with an internet where more than half of accounts represent entirely fabricated personas created specifically to generate malicious propaganda. And they know that if they can get a judge to defend their antics as "Free Speech" they will be free to manipulate the general population however they want.
I agree that we need to be careful about protecting free speech online, but if we act like every character that goes over a wire is protected speech, we are digging our own grave.
I was listening to Ray Dalio the other day and the thing that caught my attention was when he talked about the WWII era during the Nazi reign: he said that it's the centrists (people holding center and more reasonable views) are the ones that got hanged.
When society polarizes, it seems that people will stick blindly to their side. Maybe the rational behind that, is that a non-polarized side won't get you as many protections.
HN seems to be non-immune to that. Many people here would like to think that they are smarter than the rest. It does seem from the many discussions here that it's the same homunculus everywhere.
First off, I think all of us have learned the unfortunate downsides to a libertarian approach to free speech over the past 20 years. Any free speech purist would do well to remember what their legal recourse would be if somebody made elaborate false-allegations about you that harmed your career and marriage - we have many legal tools that protect us from harmful lies. It is not remarkable that there are people who believe in "free speech" but do not consider disinformation about more nebulous bodies that don't have standing for a lawsuit (eg defaming vaccines in general, epidemiology, democracy, ethnicity, climate science, trans people, etc) to be something that should fall under that protection, any more than threats or perjury fall under that protection.
Why is it actionable when you make dangerous public lies that hurt somebody's pocketbook, but not public health?
Secondly, the US constitution says "shall make no law". What law was made here? What legal action was taken? There wasn't even a threat of legal action.
Government workers should be free to contact private organizations and speak to them freely and make requests of them. "The government would like this content taken down for public good" is not making a law, it's making a request. It's making their opinion known, and government functionaries are allowed to have professional opinions. Something like "In my professional opinion as a public health worker, this content is dangerous advice that will get people killed, and in the interest of public safety it would be best if readers were protected from it." That is a reasonable thing for a government-employed professional to do and say.
That said, I think they crossed the line here when it became a demand instead of a request. When the government starts ordering people around instead of just making the public interest known, it can easily be argued there's implied threats there.
IANAL, but I'm assuming in the end that's where this will land during the appeals - that sweeping injunctions against various government bodies communicating with social media companies will be lifted, but the court will find against the government on this case.
-> Government workers should be free to contact private organizations and speak to them freely and make requests of them. "The government would like this content taken down for public good" is not making a law, it's making a request. It's making their opinion known, and government functionaries are allowed to have professional opinions. Something like "In my professional opinion as a public health worker, this content is dangerous advice that will get people killed, and in the interest of public safety it would be best if readers were protected from it." That is a reasonable thing for a government-employed professional to do and say.
A fair point, and I don't disagree at all with this. I only wish to share with you my opinion as a fellow citizen:
I'd just as much prefer to use a social media platform that doesn't bend the knee to the government. Let the people decide for themselves what is useful information or not. We live in a representative democracy - this form of government is itself a safeguard against an ill-informed populace.
Tangentially, not a small part of the problem may be the government's proclivity to lie to the people. "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me..."
EDIT: It might be a useful exercise to consider /why/ we are interested in the freedom of speech issue at a foundational level. I think that due to the speed of modern communication, in a crisis like COVID-19 where people are debating what /must/ be done and there are disagreements, we find that the common road is a hard one to walk and we run out of ways to rationalize a compromise. Maybe this leads us to want a fast fix, limit personal responsibilities so the government has the space to make things nice again.
> I'd just as much prefer to use a social media platform that doesn't bend the knee to the government. Let the people decide for themselves what is useful information or not. We live in a representative democracy - this form of government is itself a safeguard against an ill-informed populace.
Over the past decade or two with social media we have increasingly seen people are NOT good at deciding what information is useful. A large percentage of the population believes wild folklore, conspiracy theories, etc. We used to live in a truth based society (with occasional issues when lies were presented as truth). We now have a post-truth society where alternative facts are invented at will and displace reality. Worse many of the peddlers of misinformation are just not harmlessly misinformed but know they are lying.
In times of extreme crisis, we do need a quick fix. There simply isn’t time to waste placating people who think injecting bleach will protect them from an airborne illness in a pandemic. We could have spent a decade giving everyone a Master’s in Microbiology and Epidemiology and still not convinced antivaxxers, because they aren’t swayed by facts but by beliefs that feel truthy to them.
The entire point of representative democracy is to avoid the pitfalls of direct democracy which prevents expert analysis and decisions.
Modern society is complex enough it has to be guided by subject matter experts. Can you imagine if the simple majority of users of your software got to decide every product decision from now on? Or worse, you had to get approval from the 5% of users that are mad the app doesn’t display Sasquatch’s location?
Personal responsibility has never alone been adequate to deal with the externalities government is uniquely able to fix - war, natural disaster, famine, and pandemics. Collective action is required for these challenges (and more mundane ones like pollution and other externalities). Any society has to be able to balance between the rights of individuals such that a tiny vocal minority can’t overly endanger the continued existence of society. Doing that well, so that nobody is run roughshod over and everyone gets a voice is important. But in extremis we don’t care to compromise with people who are endangering the herd. Humans never have had much tolerance for that.
I say all this knowing authoritarian governments are often able to do their worst abuse in times of crisis. But politely asking Facebook to take down or spread-limit some misinformation that statistically will lead to death isn’t tyranny.
> Any free speech purist would do well to remember what their legal recourse would be if somebody made elaborate false-allegations about you that harmed your career and marriage
This is a total straw man. Free speech absolutists almost universally acknowledge that fraud, defamation, libel, and narrowly defined incitement are special cases that don't qualify for protection.
With respect to "disinformation", I would challenge you to come up with a strict definition and a framework for applying that designation and see how you might feel about giving that tool to your political opponents.
I'm quite aware of that, and you'll notice if you read my comment again that I specifically said "are special cases that don't qualify for protection", not that they should be a crime. Civil cases are actually a great way to address defamation.
If you're going to lawyer every word here, I'll be more precise. I mean immune from legal redress, not "protected" per 1a. Dealing with defamation via civil suit is perfectly consistent with a free speech absolutist position, which is my original point.
This is an incredibly tedious exchange, it seems like you're going to pains to find the least charitable interpretation of what I'm saying.
Okay, let’s dig into that one. The tweet quotes the court ruling, which says “Psaki publicly reminded Facebook and other social-media platforms of the threat of ‘legal consequences’ if they do not censor misinformation more aggressively.”
But that quote isn’t accurate. The second direct quote in the ruling is there; “legal consequences” is not[1].
I read the whole thing. I don’t think she came close to threatening legal action at any point. So what are we to make of this? I can’t come to any conclusion other than that the judge’s political bias led him to be sloppy about the evidence and misquote government officials in order to bolster his case.
Being a government employee carries a threat with it. I don't want those people making 'requests' to suppress others points of view in any situation, that's not reasonable to me at all. I'd rather they have their own press conference or whatever and counter whatever it is they disagree with and let me decide who I want to trust.
I don't trust anyone to decide what is misinformation or disinformation - that's also something I want to decide for myself.
-> There is legal precedent regarding chilling effects and government action.
Please provide citation, I'd like to know more
-> If you're not American you can't be expected to know that level of detail. If you are American, your highschool civics teacher was terrible.
Please be kind, or avoid discussing politics. There are other opinions than our own, and though we may disagree we need to respect each other, I hope all civics teachers would agree on that.
In the same article see the section "Exceptions include voting misinformation" - does it really baffle you that people think public health is as important as elections?
Something tells me the people here arguing that Flaherty wasn't coercive or threatening would be arguing just the opposite if this was the Trump administration.
Apparently it's about time for our collective citizenry to relearn some generational lessons from history, preferably not the hard way.
> Something tells me the people here arguing that Flaherty wasn't coercive or threatening would be arguing just the opposite if this was the Trump administration.
The Trump administration was doing the same thing.
> When the White House called up Twitter in the early morning hours of September 9, 2019, officials had what they believed was a serious issue to report: Famous model Chrissy Teigen had just called President Donald Trump “a pussy ass bitch” on Twitter — and the White House wanted the tweet to come down.
> “It was strange to me when all of these investigations were announced because it was all about the exact same stuff that we had done [when Donald Trump was in office],” one former top aide to a senior Trump administration official tells Rolling Stone. “It was normal.”
Horse shit. Even people who swear up and down that they don't like Trump pretend he has done nothing wrong and the only negative press about him is a smear campaign by the wokestream media.
He's very likely going to get the Republican Nomination again.
I haven't seen any outcry from Hardcore trumpists. There is an outcry for anything Biden does. Is it possible you want them not to support Trump doing that, even though they might do?
So much writing. So little explanation of your view or specific critique of the person you're responding to. You could have just typed "Wrong. Do your research."
Because freedom of speech isn't absolute, and whether "the government did a bad thing" is the very question being asked, to which reasonable people may disagree.
With over a million COVID deaths in the US, there's a very valid question to be raised as to when emergency public health requirements take precedence over a right to spread misinformation/disinformation.
Freedom of speech isn't of much use when you're dead.
I'm not arguing which side was right, but I am saying it shouldn't baffle anyone, because it's a complex question with real tradeoffs on both sides. It's not simple black-and-white in the way you're presenting it.
It’s been well established by this point that Americans do not believe their government should lie to them and that when it does, it damages the long-term effectiveness of the government at leading the people. This was a short-sighted move that ultimately damaged public health.
It’s one thing to officially commandeer media outlets during an emergency. That’s in-bounds. That’s not what happened here and therefore not what the debate is about.
Governments spreading information or halting disinformation exists on a spectrum. This is precisely about where it exists on the spectrum and about balancing rights against harms.
Maybe we're talking past each other - the government did not commandeer or nationalize these companies as part of its emergency declaration, and so the government's ability to direct actions at an organization in those circumstances is not what the issue is about.
The issue (and apparently we may agree on this(?)) is where the line is for the government to compel action in a private organization short of officially commandeering it. This will inevitably lead us to debating how "voluntary" the actions of a company are when law enforcement is asking it "nicely", and how nicely they were really asking for that cooperation.
You seem to be framing this as an interest balancing test. The courts may see it that way. It doesn't seem like the whole story to me though, principally because none of the actions on the part of the government were done through regulatory policy or legislation, but through "conversation", side-channel influence, etc. To me, that's fundamental to this discussion. Interest balancing would make sense if we were debating the legality of regulation saying the government can direct Internet platforms to hide the non-criminal commentary of users that is not in alignment with the official government position. Instead, we're talking about actions of law-enforcement and their NGOs influencing organizations outside of any official regulatory commission to do so. It's hard to see the public accepting regulatory policy that allowed this. It's hard for me to see how this behavior of the federal government is allowable when nobody wants to make it official policy.
Now, my biases having interacted with the FBI on behalf of organizations in past lives, I think all interaction with them is highly delicate, and never blind to potential consequences of getting on their bad side. Consider the background of this particular injunction - most of these substantial conversations with law enforcement personnel will be off the record (over coffee), broad statements are being made about criminal liability from public figures in the press. Is it possible for a multibillion-dollar American company to not feel any pressure to "cooperate"? If there's pressure, it's coercive. It may or may not be effective, it may or may not be the deciding factor. But there's also the scale - do we believe all these companies happened to voluntarily go along with the government program of censorship out of friendly cooperation sans subtext of ending up on the "wrong" side of the Justice dept?
I think all of us we need to be considering if that's how we want our federal law enforcement to operate. Again, if the gov. feels it has the political capital to commandeer companies in an emergency, go for it. Do it above the board and let the political consequences (if any) work themselves out. Or if it feels it has the support for censorship as a regulatory matter, try it. Just be up front about it. Yes, the specific method certainly is at issue here.
Same reason counties fall to communism. Free speech and open debate get in the way of bureaucrats trying to control peoples lives.
Example. There is a highly experimental vaccine, which is really gene therapy. People are questioning it. Including Mark Zuckerberg, who told all those people not to take it.
But then censored anyone online that wanted to have a discussion about it.
People are reporting severe injuries “including my own wife!” let’s block and ban them too. Big Pharmacy’s got millions to make.
Oh cheap already available treatments seem to work? Let’s ban discussion about those those too. No one can know that possible alternatives exist.
> Example. There is a highly experimental vaccine, which is really gene therapy. People are questioning it. Including Mark Zuckerberg, who told all those people not to take it.
My good, that sounds horrible! Can you share some information? You should go to the media with this. A hidden gene therapy, wow... Which genes are they trying to change in what way?
The large majority of what the government is alleged to have done sounds entirely appropriate to me. The CDC, Surgeon General, and NIAID are responsible for publishing health guidance. This means they will say some things are true and some things are false. They have no power to censor third-party sources and I don't see evidence of even informal pressure. Yet third parties believed this information and used it to determine what posts are true, which sounds to me like these agencies did their job by publishing trustworthy guidance.
Some of the things this court said were factually incorrect. For instance,
>Dr. Francis Collins, in an email to Dr. Fauci told Fauci there needed to be a “quick and devastating take down” of the GBD—the result was exactly that
Yet in context, you find that the "take down" in question was a published rebuttal, not censorship. This is a lie, plain and simple.
> The FBI’s failure to alert social-media companies that the Hunter Biden laptop story was real, and not mere Russian disinformation, is particularly troubling.
The "story" is that Hunter Biden owned a laptop. The "Hunter Biden laptop story" was very much fake. None of the supposed evidence of corruption existed.
> Doughty said that one Flaherty [White House director of digital strategy] message in February 2021 accused Facebook "of causing 'political violence' by failing to censor false COVID-19 claims." Flaherty also wrote in a July 2021 email to Facebook, "Are you guys fucking serious? I want an answer on what happened here and I want it today."
Sure sounds like a relationship where the power only goes one direction and the Flaherty was very comfortable demanding whatever he wanted.
Worth noting that this is a something of a misrepresentation of Flaherty's email[0] by the judge. Flaherty said
> All, especially given the Journal's reporting on your internal work on political violence spurred by Facebook groups, I am also curious about the new rules as part of the "overhaul."
Referring to this[1] WSJ article that details explicit calls to violence on FB. He then specifically quotes part of FB's response in his question
> I am seeing that you will no longer promote civic and health related groups, but I am wondering if the reforms here extend further?
So Flaherty was absolutely not accusing Facebook "of causing 'political violence' by failing to censor false COVID-19 claims", he was accusing FB of hosting actual calls to violence.
But Flaherty specifically didn’t get what he wanted (that’s why he was mad!) so I think it’s misleading to say the power only goes from government to Facebook. If anything this example shows the exact opposite with Flaherty sending indignant anger in the other direction.
Yes but what you don’t see is the many many requests in the same tone that come into social media (and traditional media!) companies from corporations, celebrities, even regular old citizens who are mad their drunk driving arrest got reported (for example).
The idea that an imperious tone somehow proves a power imbalance is hilarious to anyone who has ever been on the receiving end of these requests from regular people. “I demand an answer right now” is what angry diners say when a restaurant runs of the special. It’s the tone that people adopt to imply power when they don’t actually have power, but want to seem like they do. Which is a common, and legal, mode of speaking in everyday life.
The government has power. Craig the office drone asking for "misinformation" to be taken down at behest of his boss does not have the power "The government" does.
Or am I now supposed to believe that if you anger Sheila at the DMV the IRS will audit you?
> The government has power. Craig the office drone asking for "misinformation" to be taken down at behest of his boss does not have the power "The government" does.
Or am I now supposed to believe that if you anger Sheila at the DMV the IRS will audit you?
Craig's boss is the highest executive power in the country. Most of their work is handled by aides and subordinates like Craig, with authority delegated from their office. The boss only directly makes the important decisions. You are being disingenuous by claiming Craig is a innocent, powerless trigger-happy drone. And if you have lived in small towns, expect to receive worse service or discrimination from Sheila in future. The highest power in the country cannot be held to the same standard as a county clerk (and frankly speaking, most DMV employees need more training in customer service and have their compensation tied to overall productivity and performance, lots of fat to be trimmed there, both literal and metaphorical).
I invite you to have a conversation with my six year old child and then reflect upon the difference between power dynamics as they exist and as they are vocalised.
You make a good point. The United States Government is more like a demanding toddler throwing a tantrum than a 6 year old throwing a tantrum. The difference is the 6 year old is potty trained.
You don't see a difference between a toddler being demanding with a parent and the federal government demanding something of a corporation? What kind of Republican's wet dream do you live in where those power dynamics are akin?
Is a demand not still inappropriate even if it's correctly rebuffed? If I ask for someone to violate policy at work and they refuse, I can still expect I might be investigated on the basis of the attempt
I mean, sure, in terms of jurisprudence here the lack of actual tort may indeed mean that there is no legal outcome, but evidence a desire to do something is a pretty good justification for investigating if there were cases where you did do it. And in the court of public opinion, it's very damning. I certainly won't be saying "no harm, no foul"
I don't see why one's judgment of the situation should depend on whether the government was successful in intimidating Facebook. What matters is that they tried.
Do implied threats count as coercion? Does a threatening tone? Does someone in a position of power making demands they don't actually have the power to enforce count as coercion? I don't know. The judge seems to think they do.
What implied threats, what threatening tone? What position of power?
If you read the examples cited, nothing even remotely comes close to a layperson interpretation of coercion, and I believe the legal definition is more rigorous, not less.
Therefore, the question is not what decision the social-media company would have made, but whether the Government “so involved itself in the private party’s conduct” that the decision is essentially that of the Government.
The government asking them to remove specific posts and accounts and demote others is pretty clearly that.
How coercive? If you're right, the government can still make a court case that takes a good part of a decade and costs you ten million dollars to win.
That's just the straightforward stuff. That's without the IRS deciding your corporate profit statements deserve extra scrutiny, and the FCC deciding to question whether you really qualify for section 230, and and and...
You can be right. They can still make your life very difficult if they decide to. And it will be very hard to prove that that's what they're doing. And even if you can, you probably aren't going to get the money back that the court cases cost, and you definitely aren't getting back the time and management attention it cost.
So, not legally coercive. But still kind of coercive, even though legally it has no force.
That would imply the person or group doing the asking somehow have unilateral control over those distinct agencies. At what point down the career ladder do you become just another drone who shouldn't be considered to have power over distinct government agencies? Surely Rachel in the Post office can't have you audited. But maybe the president can talk to enough people to encourage that to happen. So where is the limit?
Well, a "White House director of digital strategy" is presumably not Rachel in the post office. He's someone in the White House, which means he's in a position to have a quiet conversation with the president. "They're not playing ball" might be all it would take.
I mean, yes, you're right, the White House director of digital strategy, taken by himself, can go jump in the lake as far as Facebook or Twitter are concerned. Even given all the people under him, that's still true. The question is, to what degree is he speaking for the people over him? How many layers are there between him and the president? I'd guess somewhere from 0 to 2, though I admit that's a guess. Can he cause trouble on his own? No. But the one giving him orders may be able to give orders to others.
But if the president asks for something, you say no, and he sics the NSA or something onto you, how does this injunction protect you?
Basically this is arguing that the mere existence of government has a chilling effect, which it demonstrably does, but isn't really something you can make go away with an injunction. Hell, what's stopping the Biden admin from enacting this punishment scheme on these people for getting this injunction?
Well, it protects some. It makes the Biden administration somewhat less likely to ask, because there's a public rebuke from the courts, and if they keep doing it anyway, they are likely to lose any further court cases around it. So they have some deterrent - not perfect, but more than zero.
From the company's side, they have some indication that they are likely to be backed by the courts if it comes to that, so they have some more confidence in telling the administration to get lost - not perfect, but more than none. (They're not going to be less willing to say no after this court ruling.)
So, yes, the Biden administration could keep going. But that's unlikely to play well, either in the courts or in the press. The Biden administration is not a dictatorial regime; they face an election in 14 months. That gives them more incentive to "control the narrative", true, but it also gives them incentive to not be visibly seen as bullying the social media.
I was specifically responding to the OP's point that this demonstrates power flowing from government to Facebook. The fact that FB ignored the request and did not suffer consequences demonstrates that power does not in fact flow that way.
You're welcome to judge the appropriateness of the event as a whole however you want! I'm not over the moon about it either. I wasn't arguing that it's wonderful this interaction occurred.
I'd look at it the same as a police officer demanding things. It's not illegal for them to say whatever they want, and imply powers they don't have, but it's still coercive and an abuse of powers we've granted them.
Hopefully this ruling applies to more types of government speech.
I don't know that former government officials are the same level of problem that demands from (then) current government officials are.
For example:
> We released a list of 354 names Maine Senate Angus King wanted taken down for reasons like “Rand Paul visit excitement,” “followed by [former Republican opponent Eric] Brakey,” and my personal favorite, “mentions immigration.” For balance we also released a letter from a Republican official at the State Department, Mark Lenzi, who tells Twitter about 14 real Americans “you may want to look into and delete.”
Doesn't the First Amendment protect the right to say "I think this should be taken down"?
(Side note: The Angus King stuff is a misrepresentation. The screenshots are from a spreadsheet - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vS1PbfNEqDCK... - in which a column indicates how the account first came to the King campaign's attention, not the reason they think they warranted action.)
If you're a private citizen, yes. If you're a government employee, speaking in the course of your duties, then it's not your speech, it's government speech. The First Amendment doesn't protect the right of the government to speech, because the government doesn't have rights. What does that even mean, for the US Government to have a right to speak without fear of action being taken against it by the US Government?
If you prefer, it'd make a whole bunch of press conferences unconstitutional.
It's quite common for elected officials to criticize private citizens and businesses. To be concrete: Ted Cruz (and a bunch of others) publicly pressured the NFL over players kneeling at games, in a clear attempt to suppress First Amendment expression by said players, without any hint of consequences.
> What they can't do is order the political speech of citizens be censored.
Agreed. That doesn't appear to have happened. Even the worst examples the Twitter Files sort of reporting could dig up is some loud huffing and puffing followed by a :rolleyes: emoji and inaction from various social networks.
> That appears to be exactly what has been happening.
None of the Twitter Files involve a government order to censor speech.
There's begging, cajoling, suggesting, implying, etc., but they don't have the power to order in most of these cases, and that's evidenced by the fact that quite a bit of the time the social networks said no.
Do feel free to cite an actual order to suppress speech that we can specifically discuss.
> None of the Twitter Files involve a government order to censor speech.
Several of the Twitter Files have given concrete examples of Government officials providing lists of specific examples of speech and/or speakers that they want censored.
Again, here's an example that has already been provided in this sub-thread:
> We released a list of 354 names Maine Senate Angus King wanted taken down for reasons like “Rand Paul visit excitement,” “followed by [former Republican opponent Eric] Brakey,” and my personal favorite, “mentions immigration.” For balance we also released a letter from a Republican official at the State Department, Mark Lenzi, who tells Twitter about 14 real Americans “you may want to look into and delete.”
All of which were backed up by threats from both parties that if the platforms do not do more to censor speech the politicians will get rid of the legal immunity platforms have traditionally had (going back to the postal service, telegraph systems, and the phone company) that those platforms are not legally liable for the contents of the speech of others sent through their system.
Elected officials are not government employees. It is not, in fact, turtles all the way down. They may be paid by the government, but the government does not dictate when they get hired and fired. It's possible that someone may be both an elected official and a government employee, but that's fairly rare (something like: Congressman and member of the military reserve, in which case they're only a government employee while activated).
Elected officials set policies. Government employees implement those broad policies into action. You can change the policies your representative is pushing by changing the representative. I'm a little unclear on where exactly the FBI director falls (because he's appointed to his job with the advice and consent of the Senate, which makes a difference for these things, maybe). A FBI field office head chanting "locker up" in a press conference would be violation though, yes.
The IRS disagrees, but obviously different legal contexts have different definitions, but I am aware of none supporting the distinction you are trying to make.
Example: Hatch Act provides that persons below the policy-making level in the executive branch of the federal government must not only refrain from political practices that would be illegal for any citizen, but must abstain from "any active part" in political campaigns.
In Garcetti v. Ceballos, the Supreme Court held “that when public employees make statements pursuant to their official duties, the employees are not speaking as citizens for First Amendment purposes, and the Constitution does not insulate their communications from employer discipline.”
Obviously, speech and debate clause controls for Federal Congress members.
"you may want to look into and delete" isn't a demand.
Politicians demand censorship all the time, as is their right. They usually don't get what they want, as they don't typically have the right to enforce their desires.
> Rand Paul blasted Twitter on Tuesday for not immediately taking down Richard Marx’s tweet from Sunday in which he offered to buy drinks for the Kentucky neighbor who assaulted the Republican senator in 2017.
He can demand. They can say no. Both are First Amendment protected actions.
> Politicians demand censorship all the time, as is their right.
Sorry, but that just won't fly.
> A federal appeals court in Manhattan says President Trump cannot block critics from his Twitter account, calling it "unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination."
In a 29-page ruling on Tuesday, a three-judge panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously upheld a lower court's decision that found that Trump violated the First Amendment when he blocked certain Twitter users
Blocking isn't censorship; it does not prevent you from speaking.
Blocking wasn't permissible because it restricted access by citizens to official announcements; it's like banning someone from coming to a town hall meeting or visiting Congress's website.
That's not what the ruling said. Trumps actions weren't impermissible censorship, they were impermissible for other reasons. You can't just assume a court ruling was done for the reason you believe.
> Trumps actions weren't impermissible censorship, they were impermissible for other reasons.
They were impermissible as viewpoint-based censorship of a designated public forum in violation of the First Amendment, you are wrong that it was “for other reasons”.
>Trump may have wanted to silence criticism, but he didn't get away with it, even on his own personal account.
This is a misrepresentation of the facts. Trump was only using his "personal" twitter during his presidency so the court considered it his de-facto presidential account.
What is your theory in posting this? That people who work for the CIA must give up their right to free speech and future private employment? This just reads like unprincipled scare mongering to me.
That was because Trump often used his personal Twitter account for official Presidential stuff instead of using @POTUS or @WhiteHouse.
If Trump had done like other presidents and tried to keep official Presidential business off his personal Twitter account he would have been to block anyone he wanted to.
I'd look at it as some random government bureaucrat demanding it: the fact that the company felt comfortable ignoring said random bureaucrat when it suited them seems to indicate they didn't feel coerced at all
So if they did it to me, it's bad, but to Facebook it's OK? In some court cases the actual harm matters, and sometimes it's the principle that matters.
Laura at the DMV could tell me to disallow ISIS from buying stuff from my company and there's no way I could consider that an actionable threat of any kind.
if the random government bureaucrat "demanded" something of you you didn't want to do, and you laughed him or her out of the room, both actions are okay
it seems Facebook was more polite than that, instead just ignoring the random government bureaucrat when it suited them
also, in American courts, it is the actual harm that matters. No harm, no standing, no court case.
> also, in American courts, it is the actual harm that matters. No harm, no standing, no court case.
Traditionally, yes, although that didn't stop SCOTUS from ruling last week in a case in which the plaintiff experienced no harm (not to mention admitted to perjury).
> When Smith's suit was filed at the federal district court in 2016, she had not begun designing websites, nor had she received any requests to design a wedding website for a same-sex couple. In 2017, her lawyers ADF filed an affidavit from Smith stating that she had received such a request several days after the initial filing, and appended a copy of the request. Smith never responded to the request, and has stated that she feared she would violate Colorado's law if she were to do so. However, the name, email, and phone number on the online form belong to a man who has long been married to a woman, and who stated that he never submitted such a request, as reported by The New Republic on June 29, 2023, a day before the Supreme Court's decision was released.
> That narrative was thrown into question last week after The New Republic published an article on Stewart, who denied ever having reached out to Smith. It quoted him saying he was a web designer who has been married to a woman for years.
> “I wouldn’t want anybody to … make me a wedding website?” the man identified only as Stewart told the magazine. “I’m married, I have a child — I’m not really sure where that came from? But somebody’s using false information in a Supreme Court filing document.”
Perjury is probably a stretch, and it's unlikely to affect the ruling any.
> Perjury is probably a stretch, and it's unlikely to affect the ruling any.
Perjury is not a stretch. The case was revised before it reached SCOTUS, but her original court filing claimed that she had received a request from a specific named individual to design a website for his gay wedding.
Not only has that individual - who is a heterosexual man already married to a woman - denied ever making a request, but the plaintiff herself later claimed in court documents, under penalty of perjury, that she had not yet received a request to design a wedding website from a gay couple.
The case as presented to SCOTUS did not contain any perjurous claims, but the original case undeniably did.
I can't find evidence of that. From the NBC article, which calls the original request one asking for "pre-enforcement review":
> Smith sued in 2016 saying she wanted to design wedding websites but was concerned that the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act would force her to put together websites for same-sex weddings, as well. She said she wanted to post a statement on her website making clear her opposition to doing so.
The claim about the email is in a later filing as an update. Its existence doesn't seem to be in question; its provenance does, but that could happen without the plaintiff's involvement. You'd have to prove they knew it was bullshit.
> A Colorado web designer who the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Friday could refuse to make wedding websites for gay couples cited a request from a man who says he never asked to work with her.
A pre-emptive request backed up by a fake customer does not equal standing (in a sane court but SCOTUS left sanity behind a couple of justice appointments ago.)
Someone said, "I want to do this," and the government credibly responded, "Do that and we'll take action against you." This equals standing for pre-enforcement actions, because the government is threatening to do something. If the government had responded, "Go ahead, we don't care", then that someone would not have standing. You don't always have to wait for the government to actually take action against you to have standing, so long as you can prove the government would take action against you if you did the thing.
There are "criminal attempt" and "conspiracy" charges, so in general it's possible, but probably not in this case.
If I'm reading this right, the plaintiffs felt harmed because their information they might have received was effectively censored. Not all of the sources were, but enough of them were removed that would have been published without the government's intervention.
This is one of those times where I look at what someone says, and think, "Aren't you the same people who thought X about Y, and now, you think something that seems totally contradictory because Y' happens to support the opposite side?" Then, I realize all sides are comprised of heterogenous people with ideas that happen to have similar throughlines, and I'm comparing your statement to something I read from someone I perceived as being from the same side.
To this specific topic, could you clarify your position? Do you think the same is applicable to a police officer or an IRS agent?
The specific thing that made me think your statement was contradictory was police. The left was demanding police to be accountable seemingly five minutes ago. For most police departments, I think they went too far in saying the whole system was corrupt. I think there's at least an argument to be made about the extent of the Biden administration's involvement, but certainly you think the person doing the coercion should be punished, right?
It seems to me that any case of a "random bureaucrat" attempting to coerce a citizen or company outside of their civil mandate should be punished to the maximum extent of the law. If there isn't a criminal punishment already for this, one should be created and applied retroactively because it should be common sense.
if an IRS employee told you that you needed to delete a social media post, you'd obviously realize they have no authority to do so, just like a BLS employee for example, and you could tell either to go stuff themselves in as polite a fashion as you prefer
in the case of a police officer, our current society is one in which
police officers can and often do immediately assault and/or shoot and/or kill you for doing or being something they don't like, regardless of whether you're right or wrong, and they can do so with little question and no internal criticism or retribution or punishment, which is an entirely different issue in and of itself
the same is obviously not true of Steve who works at the IRS. Steve would be tried for murder. So would Flaherty.
> after all, it anyone can feel comfortable demanding anything, what matters is what they get
Not when that someone is the government or its representative. The act of asking can itself be a violation of your rights as there’s an implication that if you do not comply their may be some unknown ramifications.
Judges are savvy enough to know that threats need not be verbalized to be received.
Democrats have threatened it as well: "Democrats Want To Hold Social Media Companies Responsible For Health Misinformation"
Co-sponsored by Democratic Senators Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico, the Health Misinformation Act targets a provision in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects platforms from being held liable for what their users post in most cases.
S.5020 - A bill to repeal section 230 of the Communications Act of 1934.
Sponsor: Sen. Graham, Lindsey [R-SC]
you're now free to respond to the substance of the post you replied to: it was, in fact, a GOP controlled Senate which performed the action in question
Someone asked what the implied threat was to social media companies if they didn't comply with takedown request from the government. I said they (the government) threatened to revoke section 230. Someone replied with "well it was the GOP controlled congress," of which I replied that the Democrats also threatened revoking section 230.
Just to back this up, the ACLU also warned against the dismantlement of section 230 as a serious threat to freedom of speech, and I agree with them on this topic.
They here refers to the Biden administration, unless you're alleging the Biden administration conspired with a Republican Congress to coerce social networks into silencing posts that Republicans themselves were in favor of
it's laughable on its face that this is a plausible threat, and the fact that Facebook totally ignored the "demands" when it suited them indicates empirically that there was no such implied threat they felt pressured by
indeed, Facebook, with knowledge of US partisanship, and a hand in increasing it, was best suited to dismiss such a bipartisan conspiracy theory aimed at silencing such speech a Republican Congress would never dream of silencing
First you said articulated, not proof, so you're moving the goalposts to be argumentative and aren't discussing in good faith. Second, you seem to be under the impression that unless everyone caves to coercion 100% of the time, then it isn't coercion, which is obviously a fallacy. Just because someone doesn't pay when they are blackmailed doesn't mean they weren't blackmailed.
Both political parties threatened to rewrite section 230 on multiple occasions. This would effectively bankrupt most social media companies. The fact that you are unable or unwilling see this as coercion is your blind spot, not everyone else's.
You are the one claiming there was a credible threat, so it's upon you to show it.
Empirically, Facebook's denials when it suited them suggests they did not feel any such threat. The fact that they sometimes agreed is not an affirmative indication of such a threat, as they could have easily done so on the merits of the requests.
The fact that the proposed action would require Biden to collude with the GOP congress to censor speech the GOP congress supports most heavily and would never censor, combined with the knowledge of reality that such collusion would never happen, suggests that the threat could not exist even theoretically.
So, now's your chance to put forward an alternative case for there being a credible threat, rather than just an angry dude impotently swearing at social media with no actual power to repeal section 230 short of said implausible collusion. After all, Biden political appointee or not, he and I have exactly the same power to convince the GOP to censor the speech in question: None. Are my angry requests to Facebook similarly plausibly "threatening"? Obviously not.
Let me restate your position to make sure I have it:
1. Because Facebook didn't comply with every request, they never felt coerced and neither did any other social media company, therefore no social media company was coerced.
2. The Democrats who threatened to repeal or modify 230 and the Republicans who threatened to repeal or modify 230 would never repeal or modify 230 because of party politics, therefore this wasn't a realistic threat and therefore not form of coercion.
your argument was summarized above, and it simply doesn't present a plausible scenario:
the dude swearing at Facebook had no power to repeal section 230, no power to control the GOP Senate into doing so, and no plausible path to convincing the GOP to censor the sort of content in question (content the GOP itself supports, content they oppose censoring)
in short: the "threat" you described isn't realistic or plausible, least of all by Facebook, and a claim of coercion requires that the threat be plausible, not imaginary and contrived
You left a bit out here. He is a representative of the government demanding that a private company censor speech supporting policies it opposes and speech about the president's family among other things.
"A February 2021 message in which Flaherty asked Twitter to remove a parody account related to Hunter Biden's daughter said, 'Cannot stress the degree to which this needs to be resolved immediately. Please remove this account immediately.'"
he's actually not a representative at all, we elect those
he's a random government bureaucrat who didn't appear to have any actual power besides sending angry letters, and who Facebook felt totally comfortable ignoring
the article presented a great example proving me right here: even he admits facebook ignored his impotent wails when it didn't suit them to satisfy him
It's such an odd thing. I don't think I've ever heard people refusing to say Stalin or Hitler's names. Andrew Jackson isn't alluded to with euphemisms, despite being a piece of shit who perpetrated genocide among other crimes. Nixon doesn't get this for his crimes and shitty policies, nor Truman for the a-bombs or FDR for mass internment of American citizens.
It seems like an idea people got from Harry Potter refusing to say Voldemort.
Wait, you think that when a random official says something, it carries the weight of the US Government, but when _the president_ says it, it does not? I'm not sure that you've thought this through fully.
> When the White House called up Twitter in the early morning hours of September 9, 2019, officials had what they believed was a serious issue to report: Famous model Chrissy Teigen had just called President Donald Trump “a pussy ass bitch” on Twitter — and the White House wanted the tweet to come down.
> That exchange — revealed during Wednesday’s House Oversight Committee hearing on Twitter by Rep. Gerry Connolly — and others like it are nowhere to be found in Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files” releases, which have focused almost exclusively on requests from Democrats and the feds to the social media company.
> “It was strange to me when all of these investigations were announced because it was all about the exact same stuff that we had done [when Donald Trump was in office],” one former top aide to a senior Trump administration official tells Rolling Stone. “It was normal.”
It's like when a rightist explains that Donald was a great president because he didn't "drone strike people like Obama did." The doublethink is ridiculous.
What she did to national security is despicable. She should have relied on WhatsApp like normal people with security clearances use for secure communication.
Now imagine if the same words were used by the trump admin personnel! Left media would scream words like bullying. This gives complete justification and vindication of how the trump admin behaved! Untouchable.
This country’s reputation is built upon the idea of collaboration and compromise. Both administrations behaving with such obtuseness means this is a new chapter.
My comment was not about how they are being prosecuted. But just about the ethics of doing something like that. Especially when the prior admin are heavily perceived as bullies. And they were supposed to be different.
The fact that the Biden admin behaved the same way vindicates them from accusations that Trump admin behaved unjustly or they should be disciplined for such inappropriateness.
I don't think anybody called for the Trump admin to be disciplined for denigrating Facebook and Twitter, certainly not to the extent that we're seeing here.
I love HN legal threads because engineers have great (logical) legal analysis, but with a terrible (practical) understanding of the law. And every so often a someone with legal training chimes in like "wtf guys"
It's like watching a good software engineer try to build a circuit board without google: I see how you got there, but damn, that's... not gonna work great.
Engineers having poor legal analysis seems to stem from a common assumption that lawyers are the programmers, the law is the code, and the judge is the interpreter/compiler who just sort of runs the arguments the lawyers provide and outputs an answer. This leads them to over-weight “rules lawyering” and creative interpretations. It can be fixed by instead viewing lawyers as junior devs making competing PRs and the judge as the senior dev reviewing and approving/denying them: if you find a clever loophole that inverts the law , the judge will say “that is not intended, denied”.
Half the comments here are saber-rattling at the title of the article, without the understanding that the title itself is an egregious mischaracterization. Yeah, the court issued a rule, but the layman's interpretation of "that means they found actual wrong doing" is not correct. It's just a preliminary injunction, apparently based on some flawed misinterpretation of the actual communication that took place [1].
Headline is factually inaccurate; its a preliminary injunction which includes consideration of likelihood of success on the merits, not a ruling on the merits.
I wanted to point out several factual issues with this ruling, some of which I mentioned yesterday on another post. For starters, the judge severely misquotes an email:
>However, various emails show Plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits through evidence that the motivation of the NIAID Defendants was a “take down” of protected free speech. Dr. Francis Collins, in an email to Dr. Fauci told Fauci there needed to be a “quick and devastating take down” of the GBD—the result was exactly that.
In reality, the email[0] actually said this:
>There needs to be a quick and devastating published takedown of its premises. I don't see anything like that online yet - is it underway?
Notice how he removed the word "published" from his quote, making it seem like an instruction to a social media company rather than a published rebuttal. He also mischaracterizes a WH aide's email to FB, claiming that the aid accused FB "of causing 'political violence' by failing to censor false COVID-19 claims", when in actuality he was referring to a WSJ article that detailed actual calls to violence on the platform[1].
He also characterizes Twitter's removal of an account with the handle "AnthonyFauci_" as government-directed censorship of parody:
> NIAID and NIH staff sent several messages to social-media platforms asking them to remove content lampooning or criticizing Dr. Fauci . . . An HHS official then asked Twitter if it could “block” similar parody accounts...
But in reality, the contact was initiated by Twitter, who asked the CDC whether the account was real or fake[2]. Why were they confused about this? Because the account wasn't a parody at all; its name was "Dr. Anthony Fauci", its bio was "Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases #NIAID", and there was nothing parodic about its tweets[3][4], which purported to be giving out factual info; it was a straight up impersonation.
On the subject of Dr. Fauci, there's a particularly egregious section where the judge accuses him and other members of NIAID of 'censoring' the so-called Great Barrington Declaration. To support his claim that Reddit and Google censored the GBD at the government's behest, he cites an article[5] that describes how Reddit mods (not Reddit the company!) took down links to the GBD, and complains about the top Google search results for the GBD were all disparaging it, without providing any evidence that either NIAID instructed Google to change the results, or even any evidence that Google purposely changed the results at all. His accusation is that Fauci made public statements 'in collusion' with another employee
>Dr. Fauci testified “it’s possible that” he coordinated with Dr. Collins on his public statements attacking the GBD.
Disparaging the GBD, and that Google and these individual mods in turn took independent action against it. So I guess PSAs are censorship?
Needless to say, there's a lot of issues with this injunction, and from just the small sections I've looked at, it doesn't seem like the judge has applied the necessary rigor to justify a nationwide injunction restricting the government from nearly all contact with various companies and nonprofits. I kind of wish Ars Technics had done some of this scrutiny (which really didn't take that long) before publishing this article.
This new crop of politicians in robes seem to be worse than the rest. I’d expect this kind of malpractice from Fox News Channel, not the federal judiciary.
A reminder to others that Trump appointed HUNDREDS of hand picked judges all over, not just the supreme court. All while calling legal challenges to his actual crimes "Legislating from the bench"
Is it? Reading over pages 4 and 5 of the injunction[0], based on points 4, 5, 9, and 10, it seems government employees are now barred in any way from discussing any social media content or company policy protected by the 1st amendment with the companies or nonprofits.
> (4) emailing, calling, sending letters, texting, or engaging in any communication of any kind with social-media companies urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner for removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech;
> (5) collaborating, coordinating, partnering, switchboarding, and/or jointly working with the Election Integrity Partnership, the Virality Project, the Stanford Internet Observatory, or any like project or group for the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content posted with social-media companies containing protected free speech;
> (9) requesting content reports from social-media companies detailing actions taken to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce content containing protected free speech; and
> (10) notifying social-media companies to Be on The Lookout (“BOLO”) for postings containing protected free speech.
As you'll see from my above post, the judge has a curious idea of what 'inducing' censorship entails (among other things: making public statements that might be heard by Reddit mods, who in turn take it upon themselves to remove links to content).
> Reading over pages 4 and 5 of the injunction[0], it seems government employees are now barred in any way from discussing any social media content or company policy that isn't explicitly illegal with social media
Whether or not any involved content is “explicitly illegal”, they are explicitly permitted to discuss that content so long as it is related to threats to public safety and security of the US, content that may be misleading voters on voting processes, or about content that isn’t Constitutionally protected, among other exceptions; see the explicit exceptions on pp. 5-6. As framed, the exceptions are cumulative and trump the restrictions, so, e.g., a BOLO for content whose context was efforts to protect the public safety and security of the US would permissible under the injunction even if the content was itself Constitutionally protected free speech.
Lying about an election to mislead voters on election processes (i.e. time, place, and manner) is illegal.[0] "Threats that threaten the public safety or security of the United States" are also illegal. The judge lists several other things that are also illegal, such as malicious cyber activity and criminal conspiracy, so it doesn't seem like that section is intended to contains exceptions to section 8.
> Lying about an election to mislead voters is illegal
The big exception is, of course, the last, which covers any content that isn’t protected by the Free Speech Clause whether or not it is expressly illegal.
Ah, you're right; I think most of that speech (fighting words, obscenity, etc.) is already illegal anyway, but in case there's any that isn't, I will edit that to say speech that's "protected by the 1st amendment".
I don't yet see an ACLU statement on this, though it seems up their alley, and they have a more recent statement on a different case. https://www.aclu.org/press-releases.
(Incidentally, the Ars Technica favicon looks very similar to the ACLU's.)
The ACLU has become a run-of-the-mill left wing org.
For proper 1st amendment protection, you should look at FIRE. Like the EFF, they are willing do defend that which they find objectionable - the ACLU no longer does.
There’s a difference between freedom of speech and education. The government did a bad thing. Anyone should be allowed to speak their piece.
We need more people to speak up when those speaking the loudest are wrong, uneducated, and unqualified to speak on the topic they’re preaching.
I get the incentive here, but it’s not the governments place to decide what we do and don’t say.
Society as a whole needs to be better at calling out the lies with hard facts and data. Because right now, it feels like the people with the most effective voices are taking us in the wrong direction.
People shouldn't be allowed to speak their piece when that piece can be bright-line traced to people dying.
But fine, let's allow people to speak their piece because bright lines are hard to draw, starting with Twitter, who should be completely free to follow or not follow what the US government says, which is literally what happened here.
This will be overturned on appeal, because the bar for this kind of order is way higher than where the Biden admin was, and for the most part we still care about being consistent when applying the rule of law.
…someone might believe it enough to kill themselves or others.
Absolutism helps no one, and you already rely in the government to protect you in a number of “authoritarian” ways, so it’s not like you have a moral opposition to the idea.
> Society as a whole needs to be better at calling out the lies with hard facts and data.
It doesn’t work. In the time it takes to refute one lie with facts and data, the world has moved on and uncountable additional lies have been spread in the meantime.
Besides which. Both the people that produce the lies, and their supporters, are well aware of the fact that it’s not true. They just choose to ignore that. And any facts and data you are able to compile, will fall on deaf ears.
> It doesn’t work. In the time it takes to refute one lie with facts and data, the world has moved on and uncountable additional lies have been spread in the meantime.
Great point, free speech is bad. We should repeal the 1st Amendment. /s
Plus when people do take the time to thoroughly refute misinformation, it's getting easier and easier to drown out any signal that starts spreading with a cacophony of noise from bots.
> We need more people to speak up when those speaking the loudest are wrong, uneducated, and unqualified to speak on the topic they’re preaching.
How, though? It takes a lot more work to develop an educated opinion than an uneducated one. There will always be more educated speakers than uneducated speakers. And do you really think that, during a pandemic, the best use of an epidemiologist's time is wading into the trenches and fighting every single case of "wrong on the internet"?
The two big pieces that appear to be driving this coverage are, if true, the following:
"suppressing negative posts about the economy", "suppressing negative posts about President Biden" and, apparently, parodies
There are others, but you could technically claim there is some non-POTUS benefit there so it does not look self-serving.
All in all, so far it is pretty damning, but the private-public partnership has been hailed by some as the best thing since sliced bread ( I am absolutely not joking -- it was only a week since I listened to a Canadian official discussing how well it works for their organization ).
I am not a Trump supporter and I am glad, but I can't help but wonder how much of that is just laying groundwork for 2024 elections.
This'll come out in discovery, but I didn't see anything particularly crazy in the complaint.
I didn't see any examples of economic posts at issue, despite it being in the summary.
And the parody accounts seemed to be focused either on (1) non-public figures, like Biden's granddaughter or (2) have resulted in sincere confusion, such as when Twitter actually asked the CDC if a 'parody' account was Fauci's real handle.
<< This'll come out in discovery, but I didn't see anything particularly crazy in the complaint.
You are absolutely right the discovery part and I admit it will likely be something now I will follow more closely ( not completely unlike gems that came out of recent Microsoft/Sony deposition ) despite its political flavor.
<< I didn't see any examples of economic posts at issue, despite it being in the summary.
I disagree here, but I just dislike government overreaching so I also might be overreacting on principle ( and assuming the worst rarely steered me wrong in that realm ).
<< And the parody accounts seemed to be focused either on (1) non-public figures, like Biden's granddaughter or (2) have resulted in sincere confusion, such as when Twitter actually asked the CDC if a 'parody' account was Fauci's real handle.
A parody is a parody is a parody. The backstory is irrelevant for one reason and one reason only. The moment POTUS seemed to implicate himself and his administration in deciding what is kosher, he opened himself to, justifiable, scrutiny and, more importantly, likely eventual mistakes. It can be defended, but the more subtle point is that it should not have happened to begin with.
Not if you want to preserve the system that has even a semblance of pretending to adhere to the original founding principles of this nation.
The free speech misinformation directly led to deaths of citizens. It is no different from any other speech that causes mass panic and confusion. I don't understand why this decision was allowed to become detached from reality.
You mean misinformation like the Hunter laptop story, the Wuhan lab origin - both censored and true - or do you mean Russia gate (throughly discredited, but shoved down the electorate's throat for four years?
I don't understand how Missouri and Louisiana have any standing here.
1. They aren't the victims.
2. The individual posters were censored by Facebook et al, not the government, so even they might not have standing. The social networks obviously have standing, but have they complained?
"Facebook likes the President" isn't something you should be able to sue the President for.
The judgement itself is worth reading; it is not nearly as polemical as it being made out to be. It goes into detail on the question of how the states of Missouri and Louisiana have standing here; the “letter of the law” answer is that there is extensive precedent for determining whether states have standing in cases like this and the judge determined this case clearly passes the tests set by those precedents, while the “spirit of the law” answer (also given in the ruling) is that millions of citizens of Missouri and Louisiana have had their constitutional rights (both state and federal) interfered with by the plaintiffs, and as states are charged with upholding their citizens’ rights, they have standing to seek injunctions to protect those rights.
Again, I encourage you to read the ruling. It addresses this claim quite thoroughly:
> Traditionally, the First Amendment imposes limitations only on “state action, not action by private parties.” Lloyd Corp., Ltd. v. Tanner, 407 U.S. 551, 567 (1972).
> However, plaintiffs “may establish a First Amendment claim based on private conduct if that conduct ‘can fairly be seen as state action.'” Id. (quoting Rendell-Baker v. Kohn, 457 U.S. 830, 838 (1982)).
> the Court instructed that “[i]t is axiomatic that a state may not induce, encourage or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.” Id. (quoting Lee v. Macon Cnty. Bd. of Ed., 267 F.Supp. 458, 475-476 (M.D. Ala.), affd sub nom. Wallace v. U S, 389 U.S. 215 (1967)).
Essentially: yes, you do not have a right to post on Twitter, you cannot sue Twitter for violating your First Amendment rights. But the courts have repeatedly affirmed that this does not create a loophole for the government to launder unconstitutional acts through private parties.
The Hunter Biden laptop story was actively suppressed on Twitter and Facebook specifically because the FBI told them it was Russian information, despite the fact that the FBI had verified it was legit.
The link you’ve provided does not back up the assertion you’ve made.
> Twitter, along with Facebook, implemented measures to block its users from sharing links to the story, and Twitter further imposed a temporary lock on the accounts of the New York Post and White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany, citing violations of its rules against posting hacked content. The Washington Post reported that this was a result of the company's scenario-planning exercises to combat disinformation campaigns
> Musk tweeted that Twitter had acted "under orders from the government", though Taibbi reported that he found no evidence of government involvement in the laptop story,
> Musk tweeted that Twitter had acted "under orders from the government", though Taibbi reported that he found no evidence of government involvement in the laptop story, tweeting, "Although several sources recalled hearing about a 'general' warning from federal law enforcement that summer about possible foreign hacks, there's no evidence—that I've seen—of any government involvement in the laptop story."[22][27] His reporting seemed to undermine a key narrative promoted by Musk and Republicans that the FBI pressured social media companies to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop stories.[22][36]
It was stolen revenge-porn of the President's son. Come on, do you remember how bad "The Fappening" went for Reddit? How Hulk Hogan's stolen sex tape went for Gawker? Twitter didn't need FBI to tell them that they didn't want Hunter Biden's cock all over their site.
You're right, which is why it's insane Saudi Arabia handed $2 billion in investment funds to Jared Kushner months after he left the White House as a "Senior Advisor", against the advice of the fund's advisors.
> Jared Kushner Held Contacts With Foreign Officials He Did Not Officially Report Or Clear With The National Security Council. “H.R. McMaster, President Trump’s national security adviser, learned that Kushner had contacts with foreign officials that he did not coordinate through the National Security Council or officially report.” [Washington Post, 02/27/18]
> Jared Kushner’s Family Courted “State-Connected Investors” To Bail Out A Kushner Property In Regions In His Government Portfolio While Working In The White House. “And since Mr. Kushner entered the White House, his family has courted state-connected investors in China and the Middle East — both regions that were in Mr. Kushner’s government portfolio — to bail out the firm’s headquarters at 666 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.” [New York Times, 10/11/19]
I think it's despicable that Hunter Biden had a position on the board of a company heavily involved with a foreign government that US foreign policy affects, while having no qualifications and while his father was vice president. Even though Joe biden's actions as VP toward Ukraine were consistent with foreign policy of the US and its allies, it still smacks of influence peddling. I would love to see a federal law prohibiting federal judges and federal elected officials families from serving on the boards of foreign operated companies.
That said,
It is insanely frustrating that people like the person you responding to come out of the woodwork to complain about aspects of the Biden presidency that pale in comparison to the obvious treason in misbehavior of the Trump presidency and of his family. It shows just how partisan people's mindsets are.
That behavior didn't occur, as the Twitter Files themselves indicated. FBI gave a general warning prior to the election around hacked materials, Twitter (and many others) thought the laptop story might be one such example and reacted according to their own corporate policies/scenario planning. There is zero evidence that the government acted on the laptop story in any way, and even the Biden campaign/Biden family (private parties) only made requests specifically on posts sharing images of Hunter's penis, not on articles about the laptop itself.
James Baker was Deputy General Counsel at Twitter lol. His official job was to be involved in exactly these types of decisions. He left the FBI in 2018.
Raise complaints about the revolving door between govt and industry if you want, but this is cut-and-dry not about a government official pressuring a private company. It's about a private company hiring a former government official (years out of service) and then that person doing the job they were hired to do.
> former government official (years out of service) and then that person doing the job they were hired to do.
You honestly believe that “retired” Intelligence Community members just “retire,” so naive. I’m sure he was hired for his law qualifications and not his IC network, reach, or influence. Did he get read out of every program and give up his clearance upon leaving the FBI? Very doubtful.
FBI seems schizophrenic at times, confirming and denying based on politics. Remember the e-mail server in 2016? First advising against criminal charges, only to open an investigation months later. Epstein was covered up and considered a conspiracy theory until it wasn't a few years later. Everything is politics today and the people in charge seem to have difficulties navigating in this context, and it's only getting worse.
Not at all. Remember that FBI is also a political entity subject to the whims of congress and its willingness to appropriate funds for it. In other words, they are always walking a tightrope of expectations from opposing sides; there is always pressure.
I am not sure if you remember Comey saga, but remember how carefully some of the statements were worded to satisfy those various sides ( iirc, he wasn't supposed to say Clinton was a suspect and he didn't but instead said something that sounded close to it so press ran with it anyway -- and he could placate both sides saying he did their bidding ).
Its not schizophrenic when you understand how much of a political capital is spent there.
The problem i believe we are coming to is that all secular governance eventually replaces the role once taken by church and religious philosophy.
It starts to become the arbiter of moral truth and with out any real moral center it can only but fail spectacularly. The second and third political theories of racial and social idealogies more rapidly succumb to this due to a more overt desire to place the state at this moral centre. But I feel liberalism is ultimately doomed to the same fate, just more by accident.
No matter how individual everyone seems to think they are they still seem to want some sort of collective morality. Maybe because we mostly need to live some sort of relational existence and in the absence of anything else a collective morality will fill that void, but when that reality is so grounded in human will it can get quite corrupted quite quickly.
People can most certainly believe in a collective moral code that is, at times, at odds with the laws of their country, and simultaneously not dictated by a central religious authority.
Desiring the state to more closely model one's personal moral code isn't a signifier that people are placing the state at the "moral center", it's an indicator that they want those with a monopoly on violence to act in accord with what they believe is right.
I do believe the collective moral codes are drifting from those dictated by religions, but I hardly think that is a bad thing, given the rigidity and absolutism of many religions.
i think this is a strong point, and it's underscored by how little anyone is willing to center the discussion on something quite fundamental: is the behavior from the individuals in question acceptable even if it were legal? My answer to that is no, it is not and could not be acceptable human activity even if the laws protected it.
We've largely lost the ability to talk about the things themselves, preferring instead to look at things through the tremendously artificial lens of "what do the lawyers say?"
The other poster is correct that this an incorrect secular talking point. “Secular” regimes have murdered tens of millions of people in this past century alone
Nevertheless, the assertion that religious regimes are somehow advantaged is off base. Religious morality is not some constant force, it's a malleable, flexible construct that has less to do with actual scripture and more to do with what religious leaders of the time say it is.
I'd beg to disagree. The track record of secularism from the French revolution, to empire and idealogy had quite a lot of blood on it's hands. The body count is most certainly not skewed to religion by any stretch.
You seem to be inferring an argument in GP that they didn't make - that secularism is has no blood on it's hands. Of course it does.
This does not mean that religion is innocent. That is a fallacy. They are not mutually exclusive. People can do terrible things when guided by religious faith, or when guided by a secular "faith." Both are bad and should be called out.
We now live in the most peaceful time in human history.
And just to be clear, we're contrasting this time of unprecedented peace with entities that have killed in spasms of violence with no apparent public casus belli than "my book is better than your book and it told me to do so?"
Spasms that, in one set of instances, led to the deaths of a significant fraction of the global population?
“Estimates of the number of people killed in the Crusades begin at 1 million (Wertham…) and go as high as 9 million (Robertson…) passing through 3 million (Garrison…) and 5 million (Elson…) along the way. I took the low middle (Garrison’s estimate) as my estimate. The geometric means of the extremes is 3 million.” Matthew White, The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History’s 100 Worst Atrocities (2012), p. 576 (see f.n. 1 under The Crusades).
Or, the religiously affirmed divine right fascists felt during WW2 to rule others as decreed by their holy men?
NAZI 'DIVINE RIGHT' TO RULE ASSERTED; Dr. Ley Says Reich's 'Mission' to Dominate Other Nations Is Among War Aims WOULD WIPE OUT BRITAIN 'Annihilation' of Obstacle to German Destiny Demanded by Labor Front Head
The only way to end the cycle of violence is by embracing the scientific method, rationality, and empathy. Anything else is a step to madness. Voltaire said it best,
There have been people who once said, you believe incomprehensible, contradictory, impossible things, because we have ordered you to do so; therefore do unjust things because we order you to do so. These people reasoned wonderfully. Certainly, whoever has the right to make you absurd has the right to make you unjust.
Or, more succinctly, as Desmond MacCarthy put it via a fictional Voltaire,
Ah, my child, as long as people continue to believe absurdities they will continue to commit atrocities!
We must fight irrational lunacy and ensure that the light of enlightenment doesn't die out.
> We now live in the most peaceful time in human history.
I would say we live in the most widespread Uneasy Peace in human history. And unlike religious peace which had occasional conflicts, a break in the peace now would mean annihilation. Is general peace, risk of annihilation better than occasional petty wars without annihilation?
> And just to be clear, we're contrasting this time of unprecedented peace with entities that have killed in spasms of violence with no apparent public casus belli than "my book is better than your book and it told me to do so?"
I quoted The Washington Post's opinion, which is hardly the number most favorable to religious causes. Plus, older books had higher numbers than newer scholarship.
> NAZI 'DIVINE RIGHT' TO RULE ASSERTED; Dr. Ley Says Reich's 'Mission' to Dominate Other Nations Is Among War Aims WOULD WIPE OUT BRITAIN 'Annihilation' of Obstacle to German Destiny Demanded by Labor Front Head
Well, considering that they murdered priests and pastors in their camps, were they really friendly to religion? Particularly Catholic Priests, who represented 94% of the clergy they executed.
> Or, doctrines like "Manifest Destiny" that were religious in origin and preached in church?
Let's not confuse Protestant fundamentalism motivated by political ends with religion in general.
> The only way to end the cycle of violence is by embracing the scientific method, rationality, and empathy. Anything else is a step to madness.
So said the French Revolution. They did everything they could to break away from religion - they even invented a new calendar starting at year 0 because... anyway. Didn't go so well, there were a few smaller revolutions afterward to get to modern France.
> Let's not confuse Protestant fundamentalism motivated by political ends with religion in general.
This is the rule, not the exception. Throughout history, instances where religious war was waged or religious atrocities occurred, there was often an underlying political logic to them. Religion has less to do with the underlying morality of the scripture and more to do with what religious leaders of the time say it is, and their interpretation can be...flexible.
> So said the French Revolution.
What followed the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars was one of the most peaceful 99 years on the European continent since Pax Romana.
> What followed the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars was one of the most peaceful 99 years on the European continent since Pax Romana.
This was the period when the Austro-Hungarian empire was dissolved, the Ottoman possessions in Europe were lost, the Prussian empire formed, the Italian nation formed, and many European monarchies fell during the liberal revolutions. Amongst the conflicts between the leading European powers, there was the Franco-Prussian War, the Boer War, the Anglo-Russian war in the Crimea. And then, just after your carefully-chosen 99 years, the Great War, and Russian Revolution. Hardly peaceful.
Hey, I'm not the one who coined "Pax Britanica." People can read for themselves why this period of history is called that, and why it compares favorably to Pax Americana and Pax Romana as opposed to the rest of history on the continent, instead of relying on what you or I say. :)
I don't think you understand what the term Pax Romana means (or the other derivative terms you cited). It's a period of unnatural political calm, after every instance of rebellion has been crushed by overwhelming force, and the "rebels" put to torture or death. It has nothing to do with peace, and doesn't really contribute much to your argument.
> What followed the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars was one of the most peaceful 99 years on the European continent since Pax Romana.
Yeah... on the continent. They were merciless to indigenous populations across the globe during that century. Big improvement there - instead of fighting each other, we'll invade everyone else with the full takeover of India in 1858, and the New Imperialism of the 1870s which added 8.8 million square miles of land to European possession.
> This is the rule, not the exception. Throughout history, instances where religious war was waged or religious atrocities occurred, there was often an underlying political logic to them. Religion has less to do with the underlying morality of the scripture and more to do with what religious leaders of the time say it is, and their interpretation can be...flexible.
Nah, ask a historian. The history of Europe over the last 1500 years or so is long, but you can only name a few incidents and examples. And even then, you can't show of a change where one thing was widely unacceptable and became acceptable to this day. The Catholic Church, for example, still condemns premarital sex and always has.
I did. They call it "Pax Britanica," and there's loads of things you can read about that outline why historians put this period of history in the same category as Pax Americana and Pax Romana.
You answered the wrong question. I said to ask a historian regarding the unfounded assertion that "Religion has less to do with the underlying morality of the scripture and more to do with what religious leaders of the time say it is, and their interpretation can be...flexible."
Prove that. You can name a few examples where there was a widespread spirit in the air (Crusades, Spanish Inquisition [even though the death count was only about 14 executions per year]), but you can't show an example where Christians ever believed premarital sex was OK, or Muslims ever believing you could eat pork one morning. You can show plenty of flexibility of Protestantism though, but that's unique to that religion which rejects centralized authority or the importance of traditional views for scriptural interpretation.
My assertion isn't that the moral justification isn't there, it's that whatever moral justification that is in vogue at the time just so happens to dovetail with personal gain and/or political expediency.
Before I begin, I believe that everyone has the right to believe and (if they choose to do so) worship and pray as they want.
The reason why I wrote the above language, quite explicitly, is because religions, in the long-term, do not agree with such co-existence. Eventually, there's a reversion to the mean, or a splintering that spreads fundamentalism and decries other groups.
> I would say we live in the most widespread Uneasy Peace in human history. And unlike religious peace which had occasional conflicts, a break in the peace now would mean annihilation. Is general peace, risk of annihilation better than occasional petty wars without annihilation?
When was this religious peace? Here's a graph of human history, could you kindly tell me when you think this religious peace lies in this graph? https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EGL9VKKXkAAVhwB.jpg
As far as I can tell, this peace we experience is truly un-precedented in the original sense of the word, i.e. there is no prior precedent.
> Well, considering that they murdered priests and pastors in their camps, were they really friendly to religion? Particularly Catholic Priests, who represented 94% of the clergy they executed.
They believed that they were the true chosen people of god and everyone else was less. Their persecution of jewish people was (partly, not completely) driven by the belief that they were the ones who killed god.
Expanding on this, with the following statement,
> Let's not confuse Protestant fundamentalism motivated by political ends with religion in general.
That's the problem. Whose book and under what interpretation and rules?
You can't just say, "these events wouldn't occur under my doctrine. My religion is the only religion and the others aren't."
When you create rules by fiat, "X is Y because I/holy book/prophet said so." Then is it surprising that others will make rules by fiat as well? What makes their rules more valid than yours? You believe that you have god's mandate. Well, so do they. They're both equally absurd claims with equal validity to an outside observer.
The point of the enlightenment is to look towards something more concrete; ideals that have been honed via debate and examination of history. Ideals that are subject to change as we learn more. Ideals that are more real, because they become real in their execution.
You may say, well, that's religion as well, but I am not aware of any religion where things are subject to true debate (can you even question the existence of the deity?), or religious groups that are open to changes in their fundamental philosophies.
Mandatory reminder that many of the "but the Crusades" arguments are also misleading. Sure, ~1.0-1.7 million people died in the Crusades according to modern scholarship. However, the Crusades were an extremely diverse set of conflicts that spanned a 196-year period, with both sides having their own atrocities.
The last 196-years of secular government has killed, let's just say, way more than ~1.0-1.7 million people. Even the nice ones like France, which killed ~1.5 million Algerians from 1954 to 1962, so small by comparison to other atrocities you probably didn't even hear about it. That's before even considering the Reign of Terror, Communist Governments of all kinds, US Forced Sterilization in the name of science for decades, and on and on.
And as for the Spanish Inquisition, despite the horrible memory, modern estimates now show the total death count was about 3,000-5,000 people over a 350 year time span. At worst, 14 executions per year. Secular courts were far less forgiving. Even Wikipedia has updated their numbers accordingly.
The last 196 years of secular government took place in wake of the industrial revolution and the unprecedented population growth which those advances enabled.
If "secular governance" includes mega corporations I'd fully agree.
Social media is just the latest of them. For example, relatively traditional companies like credit card companies have disproportionate power in deciding whether transactions are allowed or not, regardless whether they're legal. Often they refuse to process transactions for industries apparently out of "moral" reasons.
Governments are actually becoming less influential because laws don't reach beyond their borders. Yet multinational companies often have monopolistic power and influence over many important aspects of people's lives.
This is survivorship bias, literally. Religion displays a seemingly higher cohesiveness of a moral and ethical philosophy partly because many who disagreed were actually killed. In more modern times they are merely excommunicated, shunned. Now that we can't just kill our political dissidents, we are left with less cohesion.
I am currently reading The Brothers Karamazov and recorded a couple quotes from the chapter I'm currently in (Book V: Pro and Contra, Chapter 5: The Grand Inquisitor) about freedom and religion, which seem too poignant to pass up right now. Not that I think religion is the answer to the problem. Here's one of my favorites:
"So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship. But man seeks to worship what is established beyond dispute, so that all men would agree at once to worship it...what is essential is that all may be together in it. This craving for community of worship is the chief misery of every man individually and all of humanity from the beginning of time."
This just tells me that there is no solution to this foible of human nature and that we are doomed to a future of dissatisfaction, and we'll invent endless ways to keep fighting.
I'm not saying we should do nothing. I'm just so tired, it seems so obvious, yet the path is not clear at all.
Interesting point, and one that's difficult to dispute. Belief in the supernatural or divine is baked into human nature. There's significant research showing that human capacity for faith is genetic. So, as we're building a secular society, it's worth asking: what happens to that need for the divine? Failing to account for basic human nature drove vast amounts of suffering in the 20th century, I fear that making a similar mistake will do the same.
There is a concept that we can only BE in relation to something else, indeed even the most basic idea of true and false, 1 and 0 are in and of themselves relations. It permeates everything, a sort of cosmic dichotomy.
In the mundane it's our relation to ourselves and the world, but they are very fluid and chaotic. The believe in the metaphysical provides a means to ground a relation outside the chaotic uncertain reality, which can be very comforting and liberating.
This rings true to me, but it reinforces my existing beliefs, so my awareness of the dangers of confirmation bias demands that I not trust it without some due diligence.
Does anybody have any citations to backup this point?
Make no mistake: the old arbiters of morality can also fail spectacularly. Christendom did centuries of crusades with no better justification than "Our god says that land is ours."
The problem is the challenge of scalable applied philosophy. What name we affix to that challenge is less relevant than the challenge itself.
Yes, trying to have a "secular state" just means that traditional religions are going to be replaced by something that doesn't read as such, like "human rights", "liberal democracy" which we are happy to spread by the sword with disastrous consequences (afghanistan, iraq etc), DEI, ESG...
>But Judge Terry Doughty, a Trump nominee at US District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, granted the plaintiffs' request for a preliminary injunction imposing limits...
1. Him being a trump nominee makes me suspicious, but also sad that that is the effect and that papers need to list who nominated a judge.
2. Granting a preliminary injunction is a long way from winning a case.
3. There is pressure and there is pressure. "Social media companies should suppress X" is fine. "if they don't I will audit the fuck out of their taxes" is not. The "bully pulpit" has long been used for this purpose and is the president's only real power beyond bombing things and vetoing stuff...
4. How does this affect executive actions pressuring 101 other companies to do things that are MUCH more questionable (everything from giving the NSA access to private data to bullying companies into censoring movies)?
Edit:
5. Plenty of Senators have gone on record demanding platforms make changes or face some or other legislative punishment. I wonder how/if this affects that?
To points 1 and 2 this particular judge, amongst others, has been known to issue overly broad injunctions that reek of political bias.
The injunction is almost more the point of these cases.
If someone goes forum shopping, they have a decent chance of shutting down whatever Democratic policy they want until the injunction can be appealed. Or worse, a narrow injunction can conflict with a national injunction, which puts an administration in the position of choosing which binding injunction to follow. This recently occurred with an abortion drug [0].
If this a jury trial, or will the same judge makes the final trial ruling?
The cited behavior is egregious, with Flaherty issuing orders and requesting specific takedowns, and doing so in an unprofessional and threatening manner that shows he is unfit for office. It's clear overreach beyond broadcasting the Executive's concerns about public health and requesting that companies do their part to help.
The injunction may go too far in the other direction (but it is temporary), in the final ruling maybe less limiting to the Administration, but behavior like Flaherty's should be reined in.
To a first approximation, the appellate system is the only real mechanism for oversight of federal judges not engaging in outright misconduct. This is why packing the federal judiciary with intemperate partisans is so dangerous.
I would disagree with that. Courts in the last 100 years have been more than happy to let government come to private arrangements where they "self" censor in exchange for not being targeted. Just look at things like TV networks refusing to show married couples in the same bed or recent treatment of Pornhub in some states.
Maybe it's true for individual speech in the limited sense of them just speaking (not broadcasting)?
The courts have long upheld the government's right to request action from private entities and for those private entities to comply or not to comply per their preference. That's all that happened here, just as what happened when the Trump Admin (and every administration prior) requested action from private entities.
> Him being a trump nominee makes me suspicious, but also sad that that is the effect and that papers need to list who nominated a judge.
They don't, they just choose to do so. It's the same way pundits, authors, and broadcasters often get labeled "right-wing" or "conservative" while similarly left-wing ones don't get labeled. It's an editorial choice to call the reader's attention to it and imply relevance.
Beyond that, I think this is unique relative to the normal "bully pulpit" pressure in that:
* It's being used in order to suppress speech and opposition to the administration's policies, and
* It was being done in secret, not exposed until later, and has otherwise shown no signs of stopping
That makes it a bit different from, say, publicly pressuring lawmakers to reduce tariffs on sugar.
After the Senate ran a party-line unpresidented and unconstitutional multi-year campaign to block Obama's nominations from entering office without even a hearing, and then packed the courts with their own judges, it absolutely is relevant who appointed a judge.
In what way was that unconstitutional? It was democrats who changed the rules so they could block judges with a simple majority, not republicans. They did so assuming they’d be the ones in power.
"unprecedented", and you're right, up until the point of relevance.
It's only relevant to this story to imply that its causal, i.e., an impartial judge might not have made the ruling. Or to your point, "this wouldn't have happened if Obama's appointee were there." It's openly questioning the judge's ability to be neutral.
Regardless, though, I'm OK with it as long as it's labeled every time a Clinton, Obama, or Biden-appointed judge makes a decision that could be framed as political. That doesn't happen, though.
How is it unconstitutional? Article II Section 2 of the Constitution says that the President shall nominate, with the advice and consent of the Senate […] judges. The Senate did not consent, so Merrick Garland was not given a confirmation hearing.
> In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he's the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land.
The US isn’t an abstract ‘democracy’, it’s a functioning democracy with a specific set of rules.
I don’t agree with Mitch McConnell’s decision to refuse to have a hearing for Merrick Garland. I’m just saying it’s not against the Constitution as it is written. If the Obama Administration thought they had a legal right to force a hearing on Merrick Garland in the Senate, they would’ve filed a lawsuit to force the issue. The fact that they didn’t tells me that what McConnell and the GOP did wasn't illegal. It may have arguably been immoral and unethical, but it wasn’t illegal, and that was the point of my post that you responded to.
> The US isn’t an abstract ‘democracy’, it’s a functioning democracy with a specific set of rules.
Democracy isn't something you "are," democracy is something you do. Democracy is the sum of beliefs, actions, and understanding of the people in a "democratic" society.
So you cannot talk about us being a democracy without respect to the idea that democracy is a spectrum. You used the word "functioning" democracy which implies that democracy is a spectrum. In your spectrum you at least have [non-democracy, non-functioning democracy, functioning democracy, abstract democracy]. It is even more grey than that. Every 18 year old that doesn't vote means society is 1/N less democratic. Every time gerrymandering happens, society is 3 districts less democratic. Every time you get a politician who would choose party over country, or who chooses loyalty over values, you 1/5xx less democratic. Every time you get a supreme court judge who takes bribes, you are 1/9th less democratic.
I hope you find that persuasive.
You can say a judge has the authority to exercise discretion, and when they make a ruling they are justified by their position and the process that got them there, but that ignores the greater context of the reasoning behind their rulings. A judge that takes a bribe is ruling from a place of corruption. A judge that rules based on loyalty to a party rather than loyalty to a set of ideals is what separates cargo cult justice, from justice.
It is the ideals and adherence to them that separates cargo cult justice from justice, or cargo cult democracy from democracy.
"functioning" democracy is a judgement call on a spectrum. Your range of "functioning" is not the same as my range of "functioning." I do not believe we are functioning. I believe we are declining. We have supreme court judges openly taking bribes without consequences and a grid locked congress that is incapable of resolving the situation or creating consequences. We have a president who attempted a coup and he is being legally threatened for things that they think they can win, rather than the thing that is the most dangerous and criminal. He isn't being prosecuted for the coup, he's being prosecuted because of the coup. That should be terrifying.
The gridlock doesn't justify the lack of consequences.
> The fact that they didn’t tells me that what McConnell and the GOP did wasn't illegal. It may have arguably been immoral and unethical, but it wasn’t illegal, and that was the point of my post that you responded to.
Obama was the first black president and didn't rock the boat. The GOP declared war on America and the democratic party was and is in denial about it. You can be in shock or denial, or be confronted with a new situation you don't know how to handle and that explains what happened without the explanation being "it was justified because there was no action." Trump is clearly criminal and it's taken what, 6 years to see the potential for any consequences at all?
I don't find "they didn't do anything, so it's all justified" compelling.
> You can say a judge has the authority to exercise discretion, and when they make a ruling they are justified by their position and the process that got them there, but that ignores the greater context of the reasoning behind their rulings. A judge that takes a bribe is ruling from a place of corruption. A judge that rules based on loyalty to a party rather than loyalty to a set of ideals is what separates cargo cult justice, from justice.
I think the Federalist Society is one of the most dangerous organizations in the US. I’m with you on this.
> We have a president who attempted a coup and he is being legally threatened for things that they think they can win, rather than the thing that is the most dangerous and criminal. He isn't being prosecuted for the coup, he's being prosecuted because of the coup. That should be terrifying.
You’re preaching to the choir. It is terrifying, 1/6 was the scariest day in US history in my lifetime and I was alive for 9/11.
> Obama was the first black president and didn't rock the boat. The GOP declared war on America and the democratic party was and is in denial about it. You can be in shock or denial, or be confronted with a new situation you don't know how to handle and that explains what happened without the explanation being "it was justified because there was no action." Trump is clearly criminal and it's taken what, 6 years to see the potential for any consequences at all?
You keep saying ‘justified’ when all I was claiming is that it was ‘not illegal’. There’s a distinction there that you aren’t acknowledging. All I’m claiming is that it was within the letter of the law.
Again, the Obama administration was highly aware of how important getting Merrick Garland seated was, if they thought they had a legal right to force a hearing, they certainly would have. It was his last year in office, no re-election to worry about. They didn’t pursue legal remedies because what the GOP did was legal. It’s patronizing to Obama to claim he didn’t pursue it because he was the first black president.
> They don't, they just choose to do so. It's the same way pundits, authors, and broadcasters often get labeled "right-wing" or "conservative" while similarly left-wing ones don't get labeled.
Which is even weirder when we consider that being "right wing" is considered bad but "left wing" is not. When in reality during the 20th century, far left wing political organizations have been responsible for the deaths of 10's of millions more than far right parties. Being a Nazi is bad but being a Communist is far worse if history is any indicator. But you'd never know it by how much of the media frames things.
The left wing individuals responsible for the 10s of millions of deaths you're citing here sound more like Donald Trump in their rhetoric than any "leftist" rhetoric you'll find today in the USA. After all, it was Stalin who, like Trump, called the media the "enemy of the people"
“Stalin originated the concept ‘enemy of the people’. This term automatically made it unnecessary that the ideological errors of a man be proven,” Khrushchev said in his secret address to the Communist party’s inner circle.
“It made possible the use of the cruellest repression, against anyone who in any way disagreed with Stalin, against those who were only suspected of hostile intent, against those who had bad reputations.”
That's how the right behaves today, which is why the right is dangerous. Communism vs. capitalism doesn't mean a thing if the person in charge is a deranged, power-hungry, narcissistic dictator.
The Trump administration lost any benefit of the doubt with their judicial appointments when they outraged the legal establishment (eg American Bar Association) by frequently ignoring the most qualified candidates for judicial appointments in favor of ideologically Republican ones.
Neither you or are the Bar Association have any right to tell the president who is most qualified for a role he appoints. Maybe you don’t like it or it’s “wrong,” but the Bar Association is a bunch bureaucrats not an arbiter of platonic truth or good.
Obviously it's his prerogative to choose who he and the Senate want, but then nobody should be outraged when the impartiality of his appointed judges is questioned.
edit: I'm rate-limited so can't reply, so here's my reply below:
It's a matter of degrees. For example, when Biden made it clear that he was hiring Ketanji Brown Jackson in part because she was a progressive black woman, she still had a massive amount of relevant experience and professional reputation. There's the understanding that while she obviously has a political bias, she's still a good judge. She had worked in district court, appeals court, she'd even worked as a public defender. She had an exceptionally long list of cases and legal opinions she could point to for her experience.
Meanwhile, contrast to Amy Coney Barrett, who had never been a judge before Trump appointed her into the Court of Appeals as a fast-track to the Supreme Court. She'd never tried a case all the way to verdict. She'd never argued an appeal. Her background was purely in academia.
All judges are picked for their political bias, that's how it works. Democrats pick judges who are more left leaning, conservatives pick justices that are more right leaning. To pretend it's just one way is incorrect.
...and before Trump both Republicans and Democrats when picking their nominees would pick a candidate that leaned their way and that the the other side could agree was well qualified and experienced enough to do the job well even if they didn't like the candidates politics.
In October, the American Bar Association rated Barrett "well qualified" for the Supreme Court opening, its highest rating.[115] The ABA confines its evaluation to the qualities of "integrity, professional competence, and judicial temperament
The ABA rated her as well qualified. I'm doing to defer to them. I do understand your point that she had never had a judgeship before her appeals appointment in 2017, of which she served a little over 3 years in that position.
I think looking back at the alacrity with which she was appointed, the speed at which Roe was subsequently overturned, not to mention the stated rationale of the POTUS at the time, we can all be confident that the true reason for her appointment wasn't her qualifications as a jurist.
>we can all be confident that the true reason for her appointment wasn't her qualifications as a jurist.
Of course that's true. All judges are picked for their political bias. If you want to argue that she's unqualified, I refer you to the ABA assessment which disagrees.
My point is that discussing her qualifications is irrelevant. If she were there to be a judge, then her qualifications as a jurist might matter. But she's not there to be a judge, she's there to be a political operative. I know it, you know it, Senate Republicans know it, the plaintiffs pleading cases before her know it, and (most importantly) she knows it. So why the hell is anyone talking about her qualifications as a jurist? In her role on the Supreme Court, her only role that matters, she's a political operative, and she behaves as such. Accordingly, that's the only lens under which she should be analyzed. The ABA has nothing relevant to say about her.
Institutional ethics are a counter force to tyranny.
In a democracy a professional organization does have a right to check power as does every individual citizen.
Where do you think checks and balances come from? A two party state defeats a traditional notion of checks and balances. Our founding fathers warned against it.
I am not sure it is legislators job to censor free speech?
And if they passed such a law and it was somehow constitutional, it would then be the president's job to enforce it, so they are very much in the same boat wouldn't they?
The current movie (and TV and music) censorship regimes are all based on an agreement between producers that they will not produce/distribute etc material that is legal but "bad" and in exchange the government will take no action against them like tax hikes etc.
This is how the US has handled all sorts of "censorship that's not technically censorship" since day 1. The actions here seem to be basically the same thing but in our era it's social media not rap music or sitcoms.
> sad that that is the effect and that papers need to list who nominated a judge.
It matters because Trump appointed, and the GOP Senate confirmed, a batch of federal judges who the bar association determined were Not Qualified, because they were found to be lacking in "integrity, professional competence or judicial temperament."
The past two GOP presidents have eschewed bar association recommendations entirely and instead had their judicial appointments selected by the right-wing Federalist Society.
>It matters because Trump appointed, and the GOP Senate confirmed
Minor nitpick - Judge Terry Doughty's confirmation was bi-partisan. There were 98 votes in favor, no votes against, and only 2 abstaining. Even Bernie Sanders voted in favor of the confirmation.
I’m definitely not a fan of Trump and I was also suspicious. But after reading the article, I don’t see anything objectionable with it especially with the carve outs.
But censorship pressure very much happened on “both sides”.
I don't think the injunction is an issue either. If we were in the run up to an election or the middle of a pandemic then maybe? But now is actually a good time to answer this question imho...
> 1. Him being a trump nominee makes me suspicious, but also sad that that is the effect and that papers need to list who nominated a judge.
See for example another nominee:
> On December 1, the Eleventh Circuit ordered the case to be dismissed because Cannon "improperly exercised equitable jurisdiction" over it.[64][65][66][67][68] The Eleventh Circuit stated that Trump needed to show that the case met all four criteria under the Richey test for equitable jurisdiction over lawsuits for seized materials, but failed to do so for any criteria.[69][70][71] The Eleventh Circuit found that under Cannon, "the district court stepped in with its own reasoning" multiple times to argue in favor of Trump, sometimes even taking positions that Trump would not argue before the appeals court.[72][73][74] The Eleventh Circuit also found that when Trump did not explain what materials he still needed returned, or why, the "district court was undeterred by this lack of information".[69][75][76]
Classic case of false equivalence: they both appointed judges therefore their actions must be equivalent, right?
Did Obama ever nominate a judge that’s never tried a case in front of a court and failed to disclose his marriage to the White House counsel’s chief of staff?
> I didn’t realize that was the judge who wrote this opinion!
If that's the criteria why did you bring up "Obama judges" and "judges nominated by Trump"? They clearly didn't write the opinion either. You don't get to broaden the scope of discussion then scold someone for responding within that scope.
As usual, I think the term that applies here is projection. A vast amount of politicians and Trump in particular have taken to heart a particular realpolitick tactic for dealing with the loyal opposition, of never wasting a chance to accuse the other side of exactly what you're doing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accusation_in_a_mirror
And further, Trump's actions were fairly wild & chaotic & needed restraint.
I am a limey brit, and was no great fan of Obama but... I don't think his judges ever overthrew precedent the way Trump judges have. Ironically the main place they have done this is Abortion, which Trump didn't seem to give a damn about, so really they should be called Republican or Christian Right judges rather than Trump judges maybe? Who knows...
Yes, of course, the same dude extorting a foreign country, committing an insurrection, and selling classified information would never appoint judges on any basis other than their individual merits. Every corrupt individual keeps the corruption pretty compartmentalized away from whatever judicial appointments they are doing.
Attitude aside, this is a very good point. Everything trump did should be reviewed at this point. It's sad that plenty of civil servants / folks who have made careers for themselves and worked to improve this country are likely to be viewed dimly because trump appointed them to positions of power. But the reality is everything he did should be viewed with suspicion.
This goes beyond the President using his “bully pulpit” to urge a social action. From the article:
>Several of the messages came from Rob Flaherty, former deputy assistant to the president and director of digital strategy, who criticized Facebook over its handling of COVID misinformation.
>Doughty said that one Flaherty message in February 2021 accused Facebook "of causing 'political violence' by failing to censor false COVID-19 claims." Flaherty also wrote in a July 2021 email to Facebook, "Are you guys fucking serious? I want an answer on what happened here and I want it today."
>A February 2021 message in which Flaherty asked Twitter to remove a parody account related to Hunter Biden's daughter said, "Cannot stress the degree to which this needs to be resolved immediately. Please remove this account immediately."
In my opinion there is a big difference between the President saying in a speech that social media should do something versus what is revealed here.
Good news, now if we can just get rid of all the domestic spying and police overreach, we might resemble a semblance of a free society rather than an analog of it.
Given Apple and Google have the ability to record every word you say(maybe not store it for 300M people, but they can certainly filter it for specific words that could begin recording once triggered... "Hey Google/Siri/Alexa/Cortana"), the issue is that we don't want the US government doing it, but private companies can? Heck if you buy any IOT device with a mic, you should give up any idea you have privacy.
I'm over this illusion of privacy.
If you are asking if we should spend less on spying, sure, but that could be my ignorant teens when I was an anarchist talking.
>Given Apple and Google have the ability to record every word you say(maybe not store it for 300M people, but they can certainly filter it for specific words that could begin recording once triggered... "Hey Google/Siri/Alexa/Cortana"), the issue is that we don't want the US government doing it, but private companies can? Heck if you buy any IOT device with a mic, you should give up any idea you have privacy.
Isn't all that optional though? If I don't use gmail or apple's services, I'm essentially opting out. Also to this sibling reply, when was the last time Apple broke down someone's door, threatened to kill them, threw them on the ground, beat them up and tased them?
>If you are asking if we should spend less on spying, sure, but that could be my ignorant teens when I was an anarchist talking.
You're deeming the desire for privacy as anarchism? What a warped sense of perspective that is. When I was in my teens, we actually had privacy, because that time period was before 9/11. Perhaps you're just accustomed to being spied on and you're experiencing Stockholm syndrome.
HN isn't really a 'platform'. The reach for a post on HN is tiny. There needs to be a critical mass of people before something can really be called a platform.
And HN posts are moderated, both by the mod team using their tools, and by the users using flagging and votes. It's quite far from being 'free'. You can say anything you want in theory by it won't remain visible for very long.
It has nothing to do with the amount of time Dang spends working. It's because the HN userbase is tiny compared to the social media giants.
There are many small forums that spread misinformation because they enjoy trolling. The moderators even encourage it. The DOJ and White House do not care about these forums because they collectively have less than 0.1% of Facebook's DAU.
Every politicized topic gathers dozens of comments from lunatics who are deliberately ignoring reality. This very week someone on HN told me black people are disproportionately not accepted to colleges because of "genetics." Perhaps HN is on its way.
The mods have a heavy hand, stuff gets loudly or silently removed all of the time. Dang seems to work full time at it, and I suspect he’s not the only one on the team doing so
It's very heavy in terms of tone, less in content. Definitely workable for nazis if they're careful. You can advocate eugenics and genocide-lite if you're polite and abstract enough.
You're more likely to get in trouble for calling someone a nazi than you are for promoting nazi policies, as long as you don't use any slurs.
Could you clarify the term "nazis"? Presumably, you don't mean a member of the German National Socialist party, which was dissolved in 1945. But if you mean "people whose views I disagree with", then perhaps you could be a little more specific.
You notice there how I was specific about "nazi policies" right? It's to avoid a discussion like this one. I don't care about party affiliation per se, I am talking about advocating specific policies and worldviews.
Things like ethnonationism, eugenics, categorizing certain minorities as inherently criminal, white natalism: things that, if you could present them to a 1945-style straw nazi they'd say "yup that's us."
And all that aside, you know that people still self identify as nazis right? It's not preposterous that they show up here. They have jobs and kids and hobbies and professional aspirations, and if a chance to talk about the degeneracy of society re: immigration comes on the tech forum, hey, they know also how to slide into that conversation without saying anything too crass.
And yes, you could elide all that as "people I disagree with" if you're devoted to being particularly sloppy. Because I do disagree with them, and don't want them here? Is that not the case for you?
> And yes, you could elide all that as "people I disagree with" if you're devoted to being particularly sloppy. Because I do disagree with them, and don't want them here? Is that not the case for you?
No. I see no value in debating with people who agree with me. Neither party will learn anything new. So I welcome disagreement, as long as there is genuine openness to debate.
> Because I do disagree with them, and don't want them here? Is that not the case for you
So you would prefer that they congregate in their own private echo chambers, rather than come to a place with differing ideals where their own convictions could be challenged? How can we ever bridge the gap if we push people into their own bubbles?
Yes! Holy shit yes! They are not a project for you to work on they are a force to be stopped.
Debating nazi policies in public forums is already a win for the nazis. You don't debate people out of these views you prevent them accomplishing them. Bridging the gap is some liberal bullshit. If they want to repent and rejoin polite society the path is well established.
These people will kill you if you stand in their way. The fact that you don't perceive that as a real threat means you are not standing in their way. Debating their talking points in their venue of choice is not standing in their way; you tell because they're happy to do it.
I think you take it for granted that people are so set in their ways without realizing that all ideology is on a spectrum. Can you convince the most hardcore ideological adherent? Likely not—but someone on the fence can be swayed. And before you cast aspersions on fence-sitters, remember that Nazis were regular German citizens first.
Racists aren't born, they are molded. I don't anticipate I'll change your mind but I think it's worth stating nonetheless.
The GP didn't ask for examples of libertarian social media. The GP asked for examples of forums/platforms from a "free society" that had not turned into a cesspool.
On the contrary, Nazis were very aggressive about suppression of speech they didn’t like.
Furthermore, it was one of, possibly the very most, free-speaking societies in the world that played a key role—first economically, then militarily—in stopping them.
Maybe your slice of Twitter isn't. My take is that we can't actually say whether Twitter is, or isn't, a Nazi hellscape, because of the darn algorithm. It's in the way. Since everyone gets a personalized view, there's no coherent "Twitter" to analyze as to how much fascist content is on it. There's a billion bot posts, but who actually sees them?
It's certainly possible to get stuck in a recommendation-algorithm Nazi hellscape, where it's a very weird far-right bubble. (I got some interesting recommendations on both Twitter and Youtube after a few posts and videos about that guy making the UFO claims. Quite suddenly the feed became dark, conspiratorial, and with lots references to "globalists".)
It's also, of course, possible to get stuck by the recommendation algorithm in some weird far-left universe, also quite out of step with the mainstream.
Nothing wrong with being out of step with the mainstream in itself; the problem is when you don't know that you are. Some of the people in these social media bubbles don't know they're in those bubbles. As far as they're concerned, everyone else agrees with them and they're getting more and more re-enforcement.
I think that a growing general ineptitude and inexperience with dealing with the fact that some people have radically different worldviews, social beliefs, and political attitudes, probably explains some of the contemporary derangement. If they're literally the only example of disagreement you run into, then obviously they're insane and/or stupid and/or evil, (Surely they know what you know?! We tend to assume that even when it can't be true.) Maybe related to why we seem to be particularly prone to portraying the political opposition as evil, insane, or stupid these days. The viciousness of the in-group towards the dissenters makes all the sense in the world if they're just evil, insane and stupid. And since we can't comprehend their worldview since we never see the world as they see it, (thanks to the algorithm), it just becomes re-enforcing.
How exactly? That's quite an unfounded overreaction and exaggeration as typically found here on HN. Close to conspiracy level. Surely you meant Meta who actually profited from an actual genocide [0].
But other than that, finally there is a real alternative to Twitter but again owned by Meta. It just means the town-hall and outrage will move to on large social network linked to Instagram and Meta.
It will degrade into a Nazi hellscape anyway. Just like Facebook once did.
The thing is, Nazis are really unpopular, so if we have a free market, Nazi hellscapes will be unpopular, too.
This is a case where the free market is good at solving a problem, we know this because Nazis have been writing books for nearly a century, yet you probably haven't heard of any of them other than Mein Kampf.
Whether we have a free market in social media is up for debate, certainly the dominant platforms enjoy network effects and go to great lengths to keep their users locked in, even when they have Nazis running around on them and the users don't want to see Nazis. We even have evidence that some platforms will show more Nazis to you if Nazis trigger you and make you want to fight with them! But I think a landscape with more platforms is a good way to try and deal with this. If anything in the Mastodon world you have the exact opposite problem, platforms defederate each other for very small offenses, being a full blown Nazi is definitely not required.
And whether people use the Nazi hellscape argument genuinely or as a straw man/proxy for "things I don't like" is an open question as well.
This is the absolute wildest take I’ve seen in a while. How can any sort of free market ideas apply? Fascists operate by force. A tiny minority of fascists can take control over a much larger population through violence. Source: history
> Nazis have been writing books for nearly a century
Small, basement-run printing press? Sort of like nazi zines?
I remember seeing copies of "Soldier of Fortune" in the 1970's (US) but it was relegated to the one weird military-collectible-store-that-also-sold-Avalon-Hill-games. Extreme ideologies need buy-in from a printer, publisher, and distribution network — combined they create quite a series of hurdles, act as gatekeepers of a sort. I suspect that was enough to keep The John Birch Society and others in relative obscurity.
Letters to the editor in the local newspaper were of course heavily moderated.
The free internet with near zero-cost to print/publish/distribute due to social networks, site comments sections make the fringe voices just as loud as the mainstream ones.
Add bots into the equation and possibly determined state actors and it only gets worse.
Also algorithms that signal boost controversial/inflammatory content as well as unearth more of whatever the user has signaled what they believe in/enjoy/etc, not to mention artificial signal boosts via things like Twitter Blue… with all of this, with social media the extreme fringe can be made to appear popular. It’s like viewing the world through a funhouse mirror.
These are private platforms. They can censor whatever speech they want. They decide whether to listen to big bad government with an axe over its head or simply get their head cut off, right? I mean, they could have just chosen to be crushed with legal battles from the government, right? Free speech and free will in America, right?
I'd rather the platforms be treated as common carriers - unable to censor by themselves. Corporations having the right to censor is no better than the government. It would fix a lot of misalignment in terms of advertiser spend, too.
In a common carrier world, the government censoring private individuals would go against our first amendment rights. Pretty clear cut.
Ideally we eventually reach p2p social networking protocols. I don't want my interest or attention graph dictated or influenced by a third party. I want to be able to (de)weight and (de)prioritize based off of my own personal preferences.
I'd rather the platforms be treated as common carriers
That's called the internet.
Corporations having the right to censor is no better than the government.
Yes it is, there are lots of corporations and anyone can start one. There is only one government that applies to someone at any one time and they have a monopoly on violence.
In a common carrier world, the government censoring private individuals would go against our first amendment rights. Pretty clear cut.
It's clear cut that the internet does that already and corporations do not have to broadcast what they don't want to.
If you hate censorship so much why are you on hacker news? This is one of the most censored sites on the internet. Comments are not just deleted and removed but there is no record when they are.
There are plenty of sites that let anyone post whatever they want and they turn into people spamming nazi propaganda. You can find these sites and see if you like them better than the mainstream sites of the internet.
> Yes it is, there are lots of corporations and anyone can start one.
Please tell me how to start a Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, or Twitter and reach their scale and engagement. Preferably up and running with billions of users by tomorrow.
Your suggestion is implausible and denies the reality that these entities are entrenched and more or less here to stay.
> If you hate censorship so much why are you on hacker news?
You want me to leave because I hate censorship? Same argument as "If you don't like America, then leave." Systems can be improved. Just because we don't like the status quo doesn't mean we want to throw everything out. This is a shallow dismissal of the free speech argument.
> There are plenty of sites that let anyone post whatever they want and they turn into people spamming nazi propaganda. You can find these sites and see if you like them better than the mainstream sites of the internet.
Again, clearly not what I'm advocating for here. Not all discourse turns to "Nazism" (as liberals say) or "kiddie diddling" (as conservatives say). I operated forums back in their 2000-2010 heydey that had a free speech policy. People behaved, and we all learned a lot. The only reason corporations have the market share now is that they blitzscaled to critical mass.
My argument stands. The ideal social media system is a p2p protocol that nobody can exert undue control or influence over. That everyone can tailor as they so please.
Please tell me how to start a Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, or Twitter
You can start a site and say what you want. You aren't entitled to have a wide audience. If no one wants to broadcast or read what you say, too bad.
You want me to leave because I hate censorship?
Read what I wrote again and pay closer attention, I don't care what you do, the question is if you care about the censorship on the site you are posting on now.
"If you don't like America, then leave."
I never said that, I asked why you were using a heavily censored site while being against censorship.
Not all discourse turns to "Nazism"
I also never said this, read again. You can look at voat, slashdot, zero hedge and 4chan knockoffs, and there is tons of nazi spam along with other terrible stuff that people don't want to read and sites don't want to broadcast.
If people don't want to broadcast it and other people don't want to ever see it, but you allow it anyway, that drives away users. No one is going to allow that on a site they control. You can go make your own site but you aren't entitled to an audience.
The ideal social media system is a p2p protocol that nobody can exert undue control or influence over.
That's been done and it gets over run with spam if people can message other people without explicitly connecting first.
My argument stands.
You didn't actually make an argument and you didn't back anything up with evidence at all. You just said you wanted big sites to not have any moderation.
Again, nobody is going to visit a website without critical mass. There is a huge cost to do this. That's why platforms should be common carriers in absence of social media being turned into a set of protocols.
> You aren't entitled to have a wide audience.
What does "entitlement" have to do with anything? You're making these arguments personal.
There's a science to virality. There's a cost to exploring state space and connecting ideas together. To matchmaking like thinkers. It's all just math.
I don't care if people choose to mute me. What I don't want is a platform muting other people on my behalf, or muting me when my messages may have an audience.
I was banned from /r/atlanta for complaining about crime on one occasion. My comment was entirely benign and apolitical, but it was against the rule of the mods to speak up about it. Now I can't post about events or ask questions. It's one of the biggest forums for my city, and I've been cut off at the knees. It's absurd. Like 1984, but we're doing it to each other.
Remember all of the censorship during Covid? Masks good -> censored, masks bad -> censored, lab leak -> censored. We lost our collective minds and started treating everyone like cattle, and that's just over one issue. This slide into darkness is going to get worse.
> If no one wants to broadcast or read what you say, too bad.
Again, your arguments are deeply personal.
One can learn how to say valuable or viral things. No one should have their finger on a trigger that can silence a voice for hundreds of viewers, let alone hundreds of millions. We're giving a few people the ability to un-person others. Technology is so central to our existence now that we need to revisit the first amendment to square up our rights and make sure they're still being respected.
> Read what I wrote again and pay closer attention, I don't care what you do, the question is if you care about the censorship on the site you are posting on now.
I don't like the censorship on HN. I don't like censorship anywhere.
We don't need to brainwash people into agreeing with us or hellban those we disagree with.
Signal to noise ratio is an engineering problem.
Do you have any remaining questions about my position? It should be pretty clear.
> I never said that, I asked why you were using a heavily censored site while being against censorship.
""If you don't like America, then leave.""
This is a perfectly salient analogy.
I will not leave because you don't like my opinion.
I will not leave because you may or may not want me to go.
I will not leave because this isn't my ideal communication platform.
There are lots of ways in which the world and technology could be better. I'll make do with what I have, and I'll strive for something better.
> You can look at voat, slashdot, zero hedge and 4chan knockoffs, and there is tons of nazi spam along with other terrible stuff that people don't want to read and sites don't want to broadcast.
Anecdotal.
Turning social media in a protocol would give everyone the lever to control their own intake. If that were built, you needn't worry about stuff you "don't want to read".
You shouldn't ever concern yourself with other people's business or determining what they should or shouldn't read. That's authoritarian.
> You can go make your own site but you aren't entitled to an audience.
I know I'm taking some liberty here, but this reads as, "leave me alone and go do [impossible thing]. You don't deserve to be heard and nobody wants to listen to you."
There's an audience for just about anything. The platforms we have today are suboptimal means of connecting interest graphs together. They have other people and objective criteria meddling in the middle.
I see your argument as potentially being one of desiring power over others. To control what one side can read or say. Have you ever wondered what would happen if the power dynamics reversed? Because that's one of my chief concerns. Free speech is so important that anyone should have access regardless of the institutions in power. Institutions that are fickle and subject to change.
Would you give me the ability to unilaterally censor or choose what you consume? Would you trust anyone other than yourself?
You shouldn't control what liberals or conservatives can see. Neither party should have control over the other. Everyone should be left alone.
The ideal stack would be pure p2p communication. Nobody sticking their nose in anyone else's business.
> You didn't actually make an argument and you didn't back anything up with evidence at all. You just said you wanted big sites to not have any moderation.
Let me clarify: websites with over 100M DAU should be public squares. We can't possibly agree on the right level of censorship to apply or which subjects are forbidden. Any influence thus exerted is a relative form of positional brainwashing and silencing. You cannot possibly get it right.
Illegal content can be removed - that's a pretty well defined line.
NSFW content can be tagged and users can (probably by default) filter it out. I'm even fine when platforms prohibit this outright, though you can easily get into debates about classification - "female presenting nipples" and other minutiae.
Political or controversial content can be annotated and filtered at the discretion of end users. This is where technology can and should be leveraged. The platform moderators should have no say.
Direct harassment can be muted. Every platform has a "mute" button and a "block user" button. A p2p platform could make these block lists shareable (another reason why p2p social media would be fantastic).
nobody is going to visit a website without critical mass.
Too bad. Also there are plenty of 'free speech' websites out there already and they are cesspools.
What does "entitlement" have to do with anything
You can't stop mixing something being technically possible with what you actually want, which is to broadcast something people don't want to see to a large audience. It doesn't work that way.
What I don't want is a platform muting other people on my behalf,
So use those websites. Go to voat or 8chan. Maybe you will like it better.
Sounds like you have lots of ideas for your perfect message board. Go ahead an make it and see what happens. By your own rules it will probably be a disaster until people implement their own filters, but most people won't do that and will go somewhere that is already cleaned up. People don't want to go to a site and see swastikas spammed and then have to figure out how to not see that before they can use the site. That is basically slashdot if you turn the filtering down.
You probably haven't realized this yet, but the next thing you will get upset with is the filters. Once there is filtering and you realize that you aren't able to spew whatever you want to people that don't want to see it you get mad that you are being filtered and you will call that censorship.
The Supreme Court said in Norwood v. Harrison (1973):
Racial discrimination in state-operated schools is barred by the Constitution and "[i]t is also axiomatic that a state may not induce, encourage or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish." Lee v. Macon County Board of Education, 267 F. Supp. 458, 475-476 (MD Ala. 1967).
Does this mean I can yell fire in a crowded theater again? Apparently not limiting my free speech is more important than the impact of my disinformation.
You're going to have to do better than linking to a verified Twitter user if you want most people to take you seriously. Just the fact you get your news from Twitter makes me think you're just spouting what you heard in your echo chamber.
On Reddit/Facebook it just gets banned. I regularly read /r/Covid19 to see the fraudulent studies they push so I can counter them with my own studies. Like the Twitter guy says it’s their side that doesn’t want debate.
The “fire in a crowded theater” metaphor, in addition to being more a legal myth than a legal principle, is not quite the right perspective to understand this ruling. That said, if we try to use that metaphor to understand this ruling, it is sort of like “a judge has ruled that the federal firefighting organization is no longer allowed to pressure movie theaters to bar entry to moviegoers whom the firefighters suspect will shout fire in the theater”. In this metaphor, the bulk of the ruling is an extensive documentation of the many instances of firefighters and government organizations with names like “Conflagration Interdiction Committee” sending names of specific people to major theaters with comments like “this person regularly posts charts of the flammability of upholstery, do something about it” and then that person gets barred from that theater days later.
There's a really fun, and deeply relevant, historical tidbit on the history of 'yelling fire in a crowded theater.' That statement didn't actually come from any court case along those lines. Instead it was first used by Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in the case Schenck vs the United States, as a metaphor. [1]
So, what was the egregious offense, endangering all of society by words alone, uttered by by Schenck? This "yelling fire in a crowded theater"? Charles Schenck was a member of the local Socialist party, and was distributing fliers urging draft age men to oppose the draft (for World War 1) on the grounds that it entailed involuntary servitude, outlawed by the 13th amendment.
So there's your "yelling fire in a crowded theater" when you concede your right of free speech to the government.
The meta-lesson I've learned from these types of examples is that language is a slippery construct: the more you wander away from concrete words and specific meanings, in the direction of metaphors and abstractions, the easier it is to convince of yourself of stupid things. It's on the back of my mind a lot when worrying about LLM's. The power to convince, and the power to reason, are very different things.
In my years of arguing with people online (#xkcd386), I notice that those who resort to metaphors and analogies often have the least convincing arguments. Metaphors are great when you're explaining a difficult concept (of which you've attained a satisfactory level of understanding) to a willing listener, but it's really easy to enter the slippery slope you mentioned if the correctness of something is in dispute.
These days when I see a argument based on metaphor, I just ... disengage.
Who gets to decide what information is "disinformation" and what is the right information?
Any view that you do not approve of is not disinformation.
Also, you are smart enough to recognize disinformation.. but you think everyone else around you is too gullible and would fall prey to "disinformation"
But disinformation isn't just incorrect information. Disinformation is false information seeded with an intent to mislead the population. The person who "gets to decide" what is disinformation is effectively the person who is planting the disinformation.
Once the disinformation starts to propagate then the downstream propagandists may believe they are spreading legitimate truths, but ultimately by definition the disinformation can be traced to a source that intended to deliberately disinform.
Also, not everyone around us needs to be gullible for disinformation to work. In the US for example we live in a country where national elections are routinely decided on razor thin margins, where just a couple of percent or less can flip the results. We also live in a nation where 32% of people believe in ghosts [0]. So there are enough gullible people for the type of disinformation that wouldn't persuade a reasonable person to still yield powerful results.
If the concept of ghosts are disinformation, who's the person that intentionally planted this seed? Even if that's the case, you'd have to go back thousands of years at least.
You seem to be convinced that ghosts don't exist. Why is that? Note that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Among the millions of potentially fraudulent claims from people reporting to have seen ghosts, just one legit claim would suffice to contradict your premise. I don't know how good those odds are, but I'm guessing they're probably not as bad as you seem to believe.
On the contrary, the claim that "ghosts don't exist" seems to be a prime candidate for being disinformation. Pretty useful thing for secular institutions to have the population believe (regardless of its truth value) if only to wrestle power away from religious and spiritual institutions.
There's an argument that some pieces of the disinformation has some truth to it and thus not being able to say it cause more harm then censoring it. (So which side actually is analogous to yelling fire, the censorship side or the non censorship side.)
Content from .gov sites was labeled disinformation. One could consider the censorship at the time an act of disinformation. Remember the lab leak? Fauci with his smug smile behind Trump knowing full well the NIH sponsored gain-of-function research on Coronavirues in Wuhan of all places. Now that the dust has settled it's no longer a conspiracy theory but the most likely origin. CNN claims them not covering it at the time was "because Trump".
What is even disinformation in this climate other than a comfort blanket for those unable to form an actual argument?
There are a lot of replies that either didn’t read the article (or even the headline) that seem to be government apologists, or arguing that a particular email isn’t coercive enough, etc.
A court found that the government abused its power and infringes on people’s first amendment rights by using its intimidation power to coerce social media to censor free speech of citizens.
Freedom of speech is literally the first thing in the Bill of Rights. The government did a bad thing. Why defend them?