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.
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?