Communication on these platforms is public, protected speech just as it was on your street corner. And commerce on these platforms should be protected in the same way as commerce on the street. Government is government and needs to be restrained in all of its forms or it will become a force of authoritarianism that either works on it's own or within the machinations of current government.
The EU is going the right direction with the Digital Markets Act. This act implicitly suggests that these gatekeepers have a special status though it does not outright call them what they are - governments. Speech protection should also be there as it is in all functional, modern governments. As should transparent legal process. Governments should have representation from their constituency.
Big tech is government.
We don't need any new law... we just need to apply existing legal principles and stop pussyfooting around it. Either they're Common Carriers or they're not. Either they're deserving of Section 230's protections or they're not. Pick one.
When do they do that?
What I agree with is that Big Tech is forming digital Public Spaces (rather than being a government) and as such there should be parity in rights and protections of being in a digital Public Space.
The distinction for me is that ones rights in a Public Space are different to those in a Commercial Communal Space (such as communal space in a Shopping Mall). I'd like to see a trend to open digital environments being treated as Public Spaces and away from Commercial Communal Space.
Edit: for correcting typos
Because they're not like the big governments with armies, they're like the smaller, local authorities issuing building permits and whatnot.
Less dangerous but more annoying and and should be limited as well.
This amplification used to be a privilege of the media, and there are upsides and downsides to everyone having a chance at such reach now, and a lot of questionable incentives bound to how such reach can be attained. Instead of one Overton window, we now have multiple, bound to their social media audiences. To properly disseminate all this information is a full-time job for a human brain and most people just seem to stick with what seems proper to them.
When can we have this conversation instead of the tired "social media censorship" debate.
And services rarely act alone, when they do decide to target someone, they usually act in unison to deplatform, whether justified or not.
In some ways big tech is far more powerful than governments.
https://ago.mo.gov/home/news/2022/09/29/attorney-general-sch...
This would be a form of compelled speech, which does raise 1st Amendment concerns. But in principle it's no different from forcing telephone companies to carry all voice traffic without active censorship.
https://www.npr.org/2021/04/05/984440891/justice-clarence-th...
These governments are not elected by the people and are primarily driven by profit. Inverted totalitarianism is when economics besets politics.
Likewise; large networks will happily grant access to governments in exchange for them staying off their back and keeping completion to a minimum.
There's a reason NCMEC (the agency social media sites are required to report CSAM to) is a private organization and not "the government"; it's to protect your privacy rights via the 4th Amendment.
Social media has been having problems enforcing censorship by different cultural standards for years. In America people are outraged if they see a nipple. In Europe, people are outraged when Facebook takes down a photo of a nursing mom. Let's not get started on political moderation in places like Russia, Iran or Saudi Arabia.
Instead of a bunch of silicon valley liberals pushing their perceived standards and values onto the rest of the world, build tools and delegate the task to the local authorities.
They don't like the content? They can spend the time to moderate and remove it themselves.
Everything else, give users the tools to moderate themselves.
I wish you could have "filter lists" you can just subscribe to like ad block. You don't want to see something? Subscribe to a filter list. Or a community. Don't want someone to say something that is legal? Too bad.
It’s that other people can see it.
Filter lists for one’s own experience are not the goal of that outrage. Keeping certain information from spreading to others (controlling what third parties can see) is the desire.
The censorship urge is not “I am offended by this”, but more “if my neighbors read things like this, I am afraid”.
I think it stems from a low-trust society and the assumption that the median members of society lack critical thinking skills.
Who decides what is normal or harming people? Facebook - on a page for users in Saudi Arabia - most definitely should not use US or EU or any other local law to decide what Saudi Arabian users should and should not see and what is or isn't harmful ("gosh, you can see her nipple!"). It is very clear in law in most countries that if a website is directed at users in X country then the laws of X country is what governs what is and isn't allowed. What you are arguing is that for example GDPR shouldn't govern Facebook. That is a standpoint, sure, but it isn't how courts see it.
In my experience it is often people in the US or EU that argue that laws they don't agree with (anti-gay laws of Saudi Arabia or Russia?) should not be upheld but if it is the other way around and their own laws are something they support (like maybe GDPR or showing a nipple) then it should be allowed. You can't have both.
Or in the US, Europe, Australia...
Let's give one prominent example that occurred recently that affected hundreds of millions of people. In Australia, and around the world, our government authorities told us repeatably that the covid vaccines stopped you catching the virus and thus giving it to others [1], or at least significantly reduced the likelihood of doing so. It then came to light that Pfizer never tested for this during the trials and thus the authorities had no scientific evidence to say that this actually was the case. Infection rates amoungst highly vaccinated countries has also proven their position to be incorrect.
Yet anything on social media going against the authorities message at the time was flagged, removed and users accounts in some cases were banned.
What is considered misinformation one day can become 'fact' the next.
We should be careful on allowing any authority to censor our speech.
[1] https://www.news.com.au/technology/science/human-body/yes-th...
It did reduce spread for pre-omicron strains. And since the data for omicron showed this doesn't appear to be the case anymore they have stopped saying that.
>It then came to light that Pfizer never tested for this during the trials and thus the authorities had no scientific evidence to say that this actually was the case.
Pfizer never claimed it did in their original clinical trial documentation, neither did any government. When the vaccines began to be rolled out to the general population is when that was found, that when they started saying that. And remember here in Australia we got the vaccines late, so that data was available when we did.
Ending lobbying, closing the revolving door, and setting up strong boundaries between governments and corporations will be the key issue of the 21st century, as corporations continue to grow in power.
The Gov gets information and control. The Corporations get immunity and continue to serve the wants and needs of Gov.
This relationship makes political chatter about regulating Big Tech a joke. Sure there might be some faux wrist slapping but neither benefits from biting the hand that feds it.
I don't think the separation of the Church and State in the US is particularly less than normal. The separation of Church and Politics in the US is probably less than normal, but that's an entirely separate matter, which - to the extent that is antidemocratic - can probably only be addressed by democratic reform.
Thomas Jefferson did not want to establish a state religion.
Many people use that to try and eliminate religion all together.
- You can be prosecuted for the effects of speech, e.g. inciting people to riot/commit crimes;
- Threats of violence are not protected;
- Misleading claims in advertisements are not protected;
You can still be sued in civil courts for libel/slander, or the effects of your speech.
And people have the right to shun you if they don't like what you say.
It does not mean that a publisher is obligated to publish your speech. A newspaper does not have to publish your letter, a blog can delete your comments, and Facebook or Twitter can delete your posts or even suspend your account.
>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.
The main question here is whether the government is abridging the freedom of speech.
If they are only requesting for removals and not doing it directly, that may not be against the letter of the law but it certainly goes against the spirit. N.B. I'm not a lawyer.
And I'm not going to go into the times that first amendment alone has been trampled, because life is short.
The question was: How does it fit in? Because the government is involving itself in actions of censorship, even if it is one step removed.
Similar to how I can still be accused and convicted of a crime, if the only thing I did was facilitating it? I'm not a lawyer, but I hope I'm getting my point across here.
For example in Norway the vaccine recommendations are quite different than the US in terms of children and covid.
https://www.regjeringen.no/en/aktuelt/vaccination-of-childre...
It’s fine to agree or disagree but content like this was routinely flagged as “misleading”.
Nothing misleading … other developed democratic nations have different viewpoints and different recommendations.
The withdrawal of Afghanistan was a disaster. DHS recommendation of flagging of material related to the withdrawal again is not healthy for a democracy.
Who watches the watchers? Who determines what content and topics need to flagged and removed?
Just my two cents (having worked in government for over a decade) way too much trust is given to this type of government activity.
We have seen where that path leads. Russia itself ran a VERY effective system of suppressing "misinformation" and "foreign propaganda" themselves, for the better part of a century. They suppressed all doubt in their system, but as a side effect they suppressed all actual faith in it as well. By the end, the entire system ran on the fumes of their grandparents' beliefs.
And now it's a mafia state, shocking in its nihilism. That's where the US is headed too, if it deals with its doubts in the same way.
Suppressing ideas of freedom and self reliance are key to achieving this.
Are there even any examples of topics that were "correctly/should have been" flagged?
Did the post only contain a link to the study and/or snippets? Did the person mispresent the results to push a different opinion? I'm not saying that happened but I'd like to see a post that was flagged.
EDIT: I also see you posted a link to the study not any censored comment? Why?
Having portals makes very good sense. In all Western countries and probably pretty much all over the world, the law requires FB, Twitter and others, small and large, to be able to take down content and/or help in investigations. Having a portal to submit requests makes it easier for the relevant teams at FB, Twitter, etc. to:
1. Check that the person submitting the request is indeed a LEO from the expected country.
2. Route the request to the relevant team to confirm that the request is legal in the country from which the request issues.
3. Route the request to the relevant team to actually take down content (or aid with investigation, etc.)
4. Ensure some degree of both auditability and confidentiality during the process.
5. Be sure that you respond to the same person who handed out the request (or at least someone with the same credentials).
The alternative being having LEO deliver subpoenas to the closest office and frantically looking for someone who can handle that subpoena. Or worse, somebody claiming to be a LEO requesting action through phone or e-mail, without any means to confirm identity.
Note that having a portal doesn't mean that the request gets carried out automatically. It just improves communication.
The dynamics are known, it is known to be stupid, but government fights itself and is not able to change obvious flaws. It would also be too stupid to regulate information. This is ridiculous.
This isn't about obvious cases like drug traffic or child pornography. This is already about slights against some officials. The believe government is the magical competent body is plainly false. And it would need every support it could get to actually fight private entities that gain too much influence but instead we have self-regulating agencies that follow their mission with a certain lack of self-reflection. This is government after all.
But it's not for that. These portals are specifically for the government to censor people and infringe on the first amendment. These portals are evil and I hope these people go to jail.
Absolutely.
And from there, comes another issue - who will moderate it? It’s already terrible on facebook/instagram, and it’s purely report-amount based (talking from my personal and acquaintances experience, from last ~3 years). I’ve personally had case, where I was replying to comment (direct translation, so excuse the french) „All fa*** should be hanged” - reporting it had no effect, yet my reply “want to do it yourself” was worth month-long ban, because it’s against their community guidelines.
The courts. They can be sued if they abuse it.
I don't want to live in the world you suggest.
This right here is why I am glad we have a constitution in the US and resist efforts to make it easier to change.
Context:
Recently I went through a very toxic workplace gig that caused a severe mental episode, of issues I’ve known and been working to treat, but it damn near killed me and definitely hurt my family a LOT. After consulting with attorneys, the only recourse would be fiscally stupid - it would cost more to use the courts than recoup. These were good attorneys who felt very bad for what I went through.
That’s when I had the epiphany that the MSA handcuffs don’t mean shit unless they can prove harm in court. At that point, they are wasting shareholder money and company time on a personal vendetta - as a private company, that can be their choice, but it’s objectively stupid.
I’m still on the fence about going full name and shame, but they denied my unemployment claim so I was able to inform the workforce commission about their payments for works performed were more than a week after the law mandates…so I’ll let the professionals look into my claims before I let the whole peanut gallery take a crack at it.
My point? There are probably fewer than 10 cases where this will have significant juice to be worth fighting. Those will be worth it. Your elephant ballet pr0n? Plenty of republican message boards that would probably love to be flooded with that content.
They might say they want you to stop, but don’t mind that nonsense.
So governments are going to agree to oversight of these requests then? Because that's what a paper trail is, if it's not public then it's not a paper trail. And if it is public that's true, then why do we only hear about it now?
Wait, what? The government asked somebody to censor something and instead they made a copy of what was censored and made that available? If so, I'm totally fine with that and will make that my feed, but that's not how I read this - when the government asks for something to be censored, it's unavailable for anybody to see what it was or that it ever existed (that's the point of censorship after all).
In the USA context, if the government has a portal to prevent your speech without regard to the courts. That's a tremendous violation of your rights and would be an actual harm.
The problem is the blame has been on twitter. As if twitter itself has been the one responsible for shutting down the speech. The harmed person can't do anything because twitter is protected by the government.
Fundamentally the anti-republican speech reality may or may not have been ordered by the government. Rather than just twitter itself.
The big "nightmare" of elon's twitter is the government may be revealed as the one who has been illegally curbing speech. This has been vaguely confirmed by Jack Dorsey.
What happens when elon simply reveals this reality? Afterall why continue damaging the reputation of twitter? The reality is that the US government will have a large quantity of 1984 lawsuits paying out to republicans.
I work for a Billionaire/Businessman/Philanthropist and he's currently taking FB to court over the fact they are running adverts featuring him advertising shit like bitcoin scams and obviously multiple fake accounts.
FB can do better, and should be held accountable (in particular for taking money to advertise bitcoin scams)
Taking money for an obvious scam, that obviously misrepresents the person in the advert... not to mention the obviously fake accounts pretending to be that person.
Do you really think this situation is "ok" ?
Or all of them?!
And what about foreign nations? Can they access these portals as well?
That portal is just to smooth things out when many requests are coming in and avoid confusion. This leak is about DHS, but every law enforcement agency in the US (including local sheriffs) has access to a secure interface to ask for certain things — access to the account of a missing teenager is a classic case for local LEO. Company lawyers use that portal to push back against excessive requests.
It’s just more secure than email accounts that are the best tech too many police departments have and that were spoofed a couple of years ago as part of a wider security scandal.
A very insidious form of censorship.
The people who control Twitter should be free to decide what standards they enforce. The problem with Twitter's censorship was that the standards were stupid and hypocritical, bound to make embarrassing mistakes (there were a lot through COVID) and alienate around 20-30% of the population of the earth. But if they want to sink their own platform that is acceptable.
But the problem with a special government portal is that it is corruption of genuinely important free speech principles. They shouldn't have a special portal. They should have multiple layers of indirection dampening their influence.
Since U.S. intelligence is completely out of control, it's practically guaranteed that they wouldn't comply with any laws passed by Congress to shut this program down; they'd just shift it to another agency, and fund it from black budgets, the same way they deal with other intelligence programs like PRISM. That's the real threat. People who support reasonable government regulation shouldn't be fooled into lumping in this "fight against disinformation" along with FDA rules or other normal government processes. You really want spooks being able to label things as "foreign disinformation"?
It seems like it’d require a clandestine set of employees within the companies. These repos wouldn’t be visible to the regular engineering employees. The infrastructure still needs to access the company’s production services. It seems to me like if one looked in the right places there would be evidence of something that looked a lot like a vulnerability.
Here in Denmark we've had a silly amount of "scandals" going back to echelon, where our government works with the US government to share danish citizen data in a way where our PET and FE (police and defence secret services) also benefit from it. In fact we're currently in the middle of a scandal where the former head of FE is possibly being charged with espionage because he may have told his mother about the US getting raw access to all Danish internet data at some family dinner. I say possibly and may because it's so locked down that we basically only know about it because he was arrested and things got leaked. But we do know that our secret police called every editor of every major news paper in for a little "talk" where they tried to scare our editors into not printing the story.
Like I mentioned, it goes way back, back to before echelon really, and the Internet is fundamentally autocratic because we all need an ISP to get on it. I don't think there is really a big difference between the ISP and other "monopoly" companies in the sense that they all work with the governments in the areas in which they operate.
It's obviously a dance of diplomacy, law and business. As you can see with the GDPR and how the EU is dealing with US tech companies, or how Facebook complies with autocracies around the world. It's no different in western countries, I mean, why do you think Condoleezza Rice got on the board of directors of Dropbox?
In a post Snowden world it's not even tinfoil anymore, but most of us just don't really care.
But maybe Twitter fractionating into a dozen sites like BlueSky and Mastodon and completely independent networks is the best thing to happen, everyone runs their own brain-fart message site just like their own blog.
These tools shouldn't exist.
In fact Twitter is one of the most aggressive platforms at spending their own money to protect your rights by fighting subpoenas. The people who most need their rights protected don't appreciate this and have mostly been complaining they get banned too often.
