As always with him, the proof is in the projection: he's accusing others of interfering in the election (states expanding mail in voting, Twitter, etc.) while he's actively doing it himself.
To be specific, here you can only use mail-in ballots as an exception if you live outside the border of Sweden, and you can only make a request to use the mail-in ballot if you visit an embassy first or use the digital identity system through one of the Swedish banks, which then operate similar to the embassy in its role in identification processing.
Naturally using less security does not mean fraud has happened in the past, but it should be relevant to the question if fraud may happen in the future. If we have factually evidence it won't happen then Sweden should change it rules to make it easier for people to vote and reduce costs to embassies. If we are uncertain, well, then the question is a fair game to ask what is good enough security and what isn't.
We don't know that the mail-in ballot system here in California is absolutely, with 100% certainty, immune to abuse. We do have reasonably good circumstantial evidence at this point that it does not appear to increase the chance for voter fraud, and furthermore, we have reasonably good evidence, based on multiple studies conducted over many years that anyone can easily find if they care to, that there are very, very few fraudulent ballots cast in American elections. There is, however, also reasonably good evidence that American elections have a history of efforts to prevent eligible voters from casting votes at all, and that this is far and away the kind of "voter fraud" that we need to be concerned about.
As a general axiom, therefore, in American elections, campaigns that have as their goal making it more difficult for eligible voters to vote in the name of "reducing fraud" should be viewed with, well, a high degree of suspicion.
The fact that there's a new conservative talking point about the dangers of voting by mail (and no other aspects of voting security) shows that this message is bullshit.
The reality is that the conservative party actively works to curtail voting because they are in the minority and it's the only way for them to stay in power.
Free speech means you have the right to express yourself. It does not mean a private company is at all required to give you a platform... They can moderate content as they choose.
As far as tagging an individual user account in this way, I'm sure there are provisions for that in the TOS that Trump agreed to in order to use the site.
On a legal level, I can't imagine anything has been done wrong. On an ethical level, the only problem I see so far might be that Twitter is taking it upon themselves to be fact checkers, and personally I don't mind so far, I think the public benefit probably far outweighs any negatives.
The below is just a snapshot. Just a teensy-weensy bit of research will give you hundreds of articles like the below.
Report from Government Accountability Institute: http://www.g-a-i.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Voter-Fraud-...
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/2018/07/11/voter-fraud-inves...
https://eu.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/oakland-county/2...
https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-skid-row-voter-...
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/central-figur...
https://www.dothaneagle.com/news/crime_court/fourth-person-c...
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/2018/07/11/voter-fraud-inves...
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-08-09/duplicat...
wait, 938 convictions over what looks like is over two decades? Just in the presidential election years that's something like 625 million votes. That's very little fraud.
(and there's some nonsense in there if it's trying to present itself as voter fraud...like the California cases of candidates misrepresenting their home address. What does that have to do with any voters?)
You must love philosophy. Is this really the first you have heard someone use a hypothetical in an ethical argument?
Let’s see fact checks on diet claims, exercise, claims about social solutions, claims about the economy, etc., etc. Let’s see fact checks on their own advertisers.
There are tons of edge cases with free speech, but we almost certainly want the free market to experiment with potential solutions. It would be great if there were attempts at a free speech Twitter, a free of hate Twitter, free of disinformation Twitter, etc. and let the chips fall where they may.
As long as their terms of service is applied equally and consistently it should be legal as far as I know. Maybe you could make the argument that their rules are discriminatory and aren't being (or can't be) enforced equally, but that's different from telling a company that they have to accept any type of content without restriction.
FB, YT, Reddit, Twitter, etc. have been removing posts and banning users for years. So, the act isn't new, but the fact that it's being applied to the President is new.
And it seems the market have already chosen that a slightly moderated but not too heavily model seems to retain and attract the most users.
Twitter I don't think is putting in place these moderation mechanism for fun or through their own personal CEO's own moral and ethics. They do what they think will be best for business.
IANAL but an example could be:
Someone posts a pirate ebook on their facebook profile. They can hide behind the "yeah but it was the user" harbor.
vs.
Someone posts a pirate ebook on a facebook profile, facebook staff thinks it's cool and puts it on a special themed section called "Pirate picks from today". They will be in trouble.
they didn't edit anything; it was very clear what he posted and it was his exact words as written. there weren't even any dark ui patterns to make it look like the fact check was part of what he said.
2. Twitter already automatically adds posts to special themed sections called "What's happening", so even if you were right there is no added liability.
3. Adding fact checking is not adding things to special themed sections, so this is off topic.
What would NOT be lawful would be Trump to close them down because they did what they did. That is full stop illegal if he did it. Not sure how legal it even is to threaten it this way.
At this point, Twitter might as well even close Trump's account. Still legal, still within their rights.
> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider" (47 U.S.C. § 230)
To sum up: If the platform becomes the "information content provider", defined as "any person or entity that is responsible, in whole or in part, for the creation or development of information", then they loose the protection. The statute also excepts federal criminal liability and intellectual property claims.
Creation or development of information can exclusively be moderation, as has been shown in copyright cases. Cutting (deciding what to show and what not to show), re-arrange or changing the context can create new original work, which would make the creator an information content provider for that. At the same time, doing either of those does not automatically cause the moderator to become a creator of original work.
As lawyers like to say, it all depends on the details of the specific case. To take a extreme example outside of this twitter discussion, taking an video interview and cutting it to create a new narrative would make the editor responsible for that whole new version.
Be a bit more tolerant of other people's point of view.
Anyway, I think you are misinterpreting the intention of that sentence. It basically means that, in principle, the behavior of being a "provider or user of an interactive computer service" does not imply that it is "the publisher or speaker of any information provided [...]". But that does not exempt them from potentially being the actual publisher, and all the rights/obligations that go with it.
Trivial example: Someone publishing its work on the web (hence becoming a "user of an interactive computer service") does not imply that they lose copyright; even though they "shall [not] be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided [...]".
Again, IANAL, but I read a lot of copyright, safe harbor law, DCMAs, etc... and it goes like that.
now if they want to use limited public goods, well then there's a role for the FCC or something like it...
Could that be a 'limited public good'? Due to the network effects, it seems like only one website at a time would hold this status.
Yes it is, it just involves adding an html element below it
> Will they get into the business of fact checking everyone over certain number of followers
Their choice, because of the first amendment they can do it to anyone or noone at their leisure or based on whatever criteria they like and as arbitrarily as they like.
> Will they do it impartially world-wide
Their choice, because of the first amendment they can choose to be as impartial or as partial as they like as locally or globally as they like.
> How can they even be impartial world wide given the different contradictory points of view, valid from both sides
The simplest solution is to not be impartial, but that's a decision that is wholly up to them and whatever they decide is protected by the first amendment
See how simple it is? They do whatever they feel like and the government is obligated to not interfere. The end.
(Other governments might object to some of these decisions, the US government most certainly has no legal power to)
An evolved, but still incorrect view is that a private entity is legally or constitutionally obligated to apply their policy about hosting speech consistently across all users.
From a free speech perspective, it's straightforward, private parties can choose to relay (or not) whatever viewpoints they want, and can choose to relay those viewpoints with or without commentary.
From a “what’s an ideal policy” perspective, maybe it's not, but “your policy is not ideal” isn't an exception to free speech justifying government intervention.
> How can they even be impartial
Private actors aren't required to be impartial. In fact, the whole premise of the marketplace of ideas is that private parties will be partial in choosing which ideas to present and how to present them.
The issue is that a few giant corporations have got a cartel going. It's really an antitrust problem which is only a speech problem because the market is the marketplace of ideas.
But whether or not you like the feature, the idea that the president of the United States would threaten “shutting down” Twitter because he doesn’t like a feature is beyond the pale, full stop.
